There can be several ways an audience might make you uncomfortable and distract you: it can be unresponsive, restless or even angry. However, there are ways to deal with those kind of audiences. You should always be calm and consider, that the reasons for the audiences’ behavior probably don’t lie in your person, but in things like the subject of the speak or even banal things like to much heat or bad air in the room.
Audience at Humanities Theatre © by batmoo
If your audience does not respond in the way you expected them to (e.g. after jokes or point you think are of special importance) you should not try to pause you speech. Instead you can try to slow down a bit. In many cases speakers speak to fast to let the audience follow. In other cases the audience loses its concentration because the speech is to long or it is one of many speeches they have heard on that day. If this is the case, there is not much you can do about it instead of being aware that it is not your fault.
If your audience seems restless or are disturbed by people coming late are leaving early it might be a good idea to make short pauses in your presentation. This will help your audience not to miss vital parts of you speech and keeps them from losing interest after that.
If your audience is angry because it disagrees with you it is usually best to finish your speech and debate the topic afterward. If you always let yourself be interrupted by questions you probably won’t be able to present your point. Only if nothing else is possible you might turn your speech into a debate. However, this demands that you can improvise and alter your speech. It also means that you need to compromise, because you will have to drop some parts of your speech.
