Generating Action from Your Talk

If you want people to take action from your presentation, pitch or talk, then you absolutely must have your audience feel something from your words.

Action comes from emotion. If all you do is close the knowledge gap with information, you may get some people to take the action you want, but to make a difference, you must add some emotion to your communications.

All too often, people think of communication as information void of emotion. That is one-dimensional communication and has limited effectiveness. To be impactful and compelling, your message must be wrapped in a suitable emotion to drive people to action.

The Audience Promise

We start our coaching with TEDxRuakura speakers with a simple exercise called the Audience Promise, which you can do right now.

Imagine you have just finished giving your Pitch, Presentation or Talk, and the audience is on their feet applauding. Then, the MC comes on and advises that there is a 20-minute break. As the audience collect their things and head to the foyer to grab a coffee, imagine:

1. What are they thinking? What have they learned from you that they didn’t know before the talk?

2. What are they feeling? What is the feeling you have left them with?

3. How will they act? What are they going to do now as a result of your talk that they would not have done otherwise?

Note that this Audience Promise is not an explicit thing. This is not something you are going to tell your audience. Rather, it is a commitment you are making to yourself about the outcome you will provide to your audience.

This Audience Promise exercise seems simple. So simple you are tempted to gloss over it, but that would be a mistake.

The truth is that if taken seriously, there is a lot of complexity within a simple structure. Because the real value is not in the answer to the three questions, but in the interaction those three questions have on each other.

Question one: What are they thinking? -Deals directly with the knowledge gap, which we talked about in the last issue.

Question two: What are they feeling? -Deals with the Emotional aspect of this issue.

Question three: How will they act? -Is determined by a combination of the first two questions.

So, when answering this properly, you need to balance your answers as you would an equation. If the knowledge gap you are bridging and the Emotion you are instilling do not add up to the Action you want them to take, you will need to review your first two answers and change or expand them.

Choosing Emotion

In the last issue, I mentioned some simplified ideas about using emotion. Let me recap on that and then take it up a level.

What is the right emotion to use for your message?

There are many emotional angles from which you can approach any subject. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong approach; rather, there are more or less effective approaches.

If we take an example of a local charity kitchen, then we could opt to use one or more of the following:

• Guilt

• Outrage

• Compassion

• Hope

• Benevolence

Each of these has its own pros and cons.

Guilt is an easy lever to use. Many of us have been conditioned to respond to guilt by parents, spouses and others. So it is likely to be quite effective in the short term. But using guilt can create resentment, and if you want help again in the future, you are less likely to get it because people will consciously or subconsciously remember that you made them feel guilty. And they will try to avoid feeling that again.

Outrage is a powerful emotion which can be directed towards action. I would consider using this early in the message to get attention and arouse emotion, but I would prefer to have my call to action on a positive emotion rather than a negative one.

Depending on my audience, I would likely use Hope or Benevolence as the emotion to encapsulate my call to action. I would use benevolence for an audience who may already feel a sense of responsibility or guilt to wash any negative feelings away for them.

Hope would be used to show a vision of the future and bring the audience along as change makers to bring that vision to reality.

The Emotional Journey

As mentioned, the example above is very simplistic, with a limited range of emotions.

The truth is that if you have chosen an emotion for your Audience Promise, then that is not the emotion that you want to have throughout your talk. It is the emotion you want at the end of your talk.

To reach that emotion,
you need to take your audience on an emotional journey.

Emotion is Energised by Contrast.

I cannot express how important this is to understand. For example, you can generate emotion by sharing something that elicits empathy. But you can hugely ramp up that emotion by sharing the emotional feeling of the before and after states because the contrast energises it.

Therefore, if I want my Pitch, Presentation or Talk to end with inspiration, I don’t want to start my talk with the feeling of inspiration. I might want to start with Outrage or Anger. Then, progress through Hope and Determination. Getting thwarted and experiencing Doubt and Frustration until finally getting the breakthrough to Accomplishment and Inspiration for the future.

The stories you tell that generate these emotions must also fill the knowledge gaps you have identified in Question One of the Audience Promise. And together, the Audience’s Journey of Knowledge and the Audience’s Emotional Journey must inevitably lead to the action you have determined as your outcome.

The Call To Action (CTA)

You should always leave your audience with a Call to Action. It should always be explicit but may be a soft or hard request.

A soft request may be: “So next time you find yourself in this position, consider…”

Or it may be a hard request: “If this makes sense to you and you want to find out more, please email my team at…”

But I am going to leave Call to Action for the next issue.

Conclusion

If you want people to take action on whatever you are sharing from the stage, you must incorporate emotion into your stories. Emotion is energised by contrast, so telling emotional stories randomly will not have the effect you seek. Determine the emotion you want to leave your audience with and work backwards to create a contrasting emotional journey for your audience.

Snippets is a section where I take some interesting text I have come across in the previous week and comment on it.

For Snippets this week, I have a couple of pithy statements that a colleague brought back from a conference on Agile working methodologies.

As it happens, I had already decided on the Yoda Quote for this issue, so I don’t want to focus on the structure of these pithy statements, as this is covered in the Unpacking Wisdom Section. However, I want to delve into the communications impact of the content of these statements.

Scope doesn’t creep. Understanding grows.

We often talk about scope creep when doing a client project because we do a lot more work than we quoted for. The mindset is often that we feel they are trying to get something extra for nothing. This statement gives us another mental context where we realise that it is almost inevitable that as understanding grows, it will lead to more action to be taken.

How does this apply in a communications context? One example is that if you are answering a question, you must realise that the added information and the growth of understanding of the audience will result in further, more detailed questions.

For the most effective communication experience, you want to anticipate the follow on questions and address them appropriately in your answer or at least point to where they can find further answers that may arise.

Shared documents are not shared understanding.

This is a great example of the importance of effective communication. Often, we share information that we feel is important and simply assume that the other party will understand it’s importance. It is up to us to ensure we highlight the importance of this information so that they do read it.

This might be done with a concise summary that gives the overall outcome as well as the importance of the information.

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section where I dive into a famous (or not so famous) quote and explore how this can apply to the Compelling Communicator.

There are two levels on which I want to look at this quote.

Firstly, there is the genius of Yoda Quotes as a meme of their own: By making a consistent change in the syntax of the language, we can instantly recognise this as a “Yoda-ism”. But beyond the branding, this has another interesting impact. Because it is so unusual, we need to pay more attention to get the meaning of the quote.

This means we are more engaged, and the quote has more impact almost by accident because we have had to engage more resources to ‘decode’ it. If it had been written in plain English, it would not have needed decoding, and we would have glanced at it, understood the meaning and moved on to the next thing.

The lesson here is that when we make our audience work a little to decode the meaning of something, it has a greater impact. I talk about this in my Puzzle Theory of Structure, where I use Tarantino films as examples. The scenes cut back and forth in the timeline, and we, the audience, need to figure out what is happening.

This only works when each scene is compelling, and some consistencies lead us to believe we can resolve the puzzle. (In Tarantino’s films, the characters are usually consistent across timelines.)

How can you tease your audience more effectively to get them to do the work to put the puzzle together with the benefits of them paying more attention and feeling more ownership of that understanding because of the work they put in?

On the other level, I want to look at the substance of this quote briefly.

This might be written in English as: “If you are losing but haven’t made any mistakes, you should change the game.”

I often see someone writing using the content rules of their organisation but being frustrated that they are not getting the results they want.

Although this seems obvious when presented like this, when you are involved, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the rules were not created to achieve your outcome but to achieve another outcome altogether. -Usually to avoid criticism or controversy, which is quite different to encouraging engagement.

So I encourage you to take a couple of minutes today to step back, pause and consider where in your life you are not quite winning and think about whether there are rules of the game working against you. And how you can approach the problem from a different perspective.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

Investigating a podcast offering to businesses partnered with my podcast partner for the past eight years.

Recreationally:

Back into a regular exercise routine.

What I am reading:

Still going through Sam Rathling’s LinkedIn Outbound

What I am watching:

I started putting The Deadliest Catch on in the background while writing. It reminds me how good I have it!