Adding Spice to Your Talk

In the last of our over-the-shoulder (OTS) series, we looked at your audience’s logical journey, which involved determining a starting point and ending point for where you want your audience’s understanding of your topic.

In today’s newsletter, we are looking to add some spice to that narrative. This is the Emotional Journey you are taking your audience on.

Why is this Important?

It doesn’t matter how academic your topic is. There must be an emotional component to your talk for it to be satisfying and memorable to your audience. Of course, every talk is different, and some will lean more heavily on emotion than others, but all talks must include an emotional journey for your audience.

I have found it most effective in my coaching to split the logical and emotional journeys up and address them one at a time, with the logical journey first. Everyone will have their own preference. Some will feel more comfortable with logic and some with the emotional content. I have found that by taking two passes at the journey, focusing on one and then the other, we get the most consistent result regardless of the speakers’ preferences.

In the logical journey, we have laid out the information we need to get across to our audience to achieve our outcomes regarding the topic. This resulted in us identifying a series of ‘objection gates’ that we need to navigate with the stories, anecdotes, and FAQs - what I term ‘chunks’.

At this stage, we want to determine the emotional journey that our audience will take. Again, we want to determine the audience's starting point from an emotional point of view. Often, this will be a neutral position, but sometimes, you will know that the audience has a specific emotional state, depending on the occasion, previous speakers, or current events. To begin with, you must meet the audience where they are.

If you speak at a funeral, you may want to leave them feeling uplifted, but you can’t start there. You need to meet them where they are at. So you start sombrely, and then through your stories, you take them on the journey to the inspiration that you want them to experience.

We also need to determine where we want our audience to be at the end of our talk. Often you will see people who want to stoke fear in order to move an audience into action. More often, my clients will be looking to leave people feeling inspired, motivated or hopeful.

Contrast

This does not happen in a straight line, however.

It is important to realise that emotion depends on contrast to be effective. If you want someone to really feel happy, it helps if you can make them feel a little sad first. If you want someone to feel excited at the end of a 20-minute film, then you can’t just be excited for 20 minutes. It becomes incredibly boring and tedious for the audience.

So you need to plot some emotional points. In a 20-minute talk where you want people to leave inspired and assume that they are starting at an emotionally neutral point, then you may decide the first waypoint is hopeful or exciting.

The next waypoint must be in contrast to that, so reality hits, and you want to hit a despondent or frustrated emotion. Then, your next waypoint may be relief or renewed hope. Followed by crushing defeat and the pit of despair. Ending on your high point of feeling inspired.

When you think of pretty much any film you have watched, you will see that this sort of emotional contrast is layered throughout the film.

You will also see that the contrast builds as you go through the movie. The first contrasts are not so big, but the latter ones are much greater in contrast. Again this is all relative to your topic and the outcome you ware wanting to achieve.

That is great, Chris, but how does this work?

Well, if you recall, you have several stories that you have put in place to navigate your logical journey. Each of these stories will have a variety of emotional points that you can lean into and use to meet the needs of your emotional journey.

Sometimes, certain stories will lend themselves to certain emotional states. You may have the ultimate ‘pit of despair’ story, so that may need to be moved to the appropriate point in your talk. And that ultimately inspiring story you have may need to be your final story to hit your final emotion.

This means you must be willing to play with the order of the stories you are telling through your talk while still meeting your logical journey objectives.

You Can Do This!

But how do you have your audience feel those emotions?

You have to feel it yourself. You have to express it through your choice of words, your delivery of those words, in tone, pitch and speed, and your body language. This goes beyond what I can share in this article, but one of the best things you can do is to watch a number of talks online, which hit some of the emotional waypoints you would like to hit, and study what the speaker is doing to hit those points.

Some of it will not feel comfortable or applicable to you, but even those will give you some different ideas of how to approach it. Again, there is no right or wrong way, just better or worse ways, so try a few different approaches. Record them (ideally on video), watch them yourself but also get others to watch them. Watch them while they watch that part of your talk. You will see first-hand whether it lands or not.

Don’t expect it to be comfortable at first when trying this. It will feel uncomfortable like anything does the first time that you are doing it. But when you get something that seems to be working, commit yourself to practising that part of your talk, that story or scene several times until it feels more comfortable.

Eventually, you will be able to do it unselfconsciously, getting the emotion across in an authentic manner, effectively in a consistent manner. This is the goal. You want to be able to jump into that story with that level of emotion at a moment’s notice. You will not believe how impactful this can be to you in several situations in the future. -It is worth putting the time in.

I hope this has given you some ideas of how the emotional journey works when creating your talk. Obviously, it is different for everyone and every topic, so the coaching around this will vary greatly. However, I am considering a small workshop for people who want to do a workshop on one or two emotional aspects of their talk. If you are interested in this, let me know in the comments.

One final word.

It is entirely normal that we are more comfortable with one end of the emotional spectrum or the other. We may be confident with either the sad or the happy and struggle with the other. This is completely normal and just takes some practice. The fact that you can portray one well is proof that you can effectively portray both given practice.

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

One of the things I listened to and wrote in my journal over the past couple of weeks was Sam Parr’s statement that “Writing is Re-writing”. In fact, this is not a statement unique to Sam, and I have heard it many times in the past. But it hit me at the time as I was thinking about this newsletter.

I realise that my workflow was not allowing me to do enough ‘re-writing’ and that if I want to up my game I need to change my workflow to maximise my opportunities to re-write my content.

I thought I would add this in the snippets because it is precisely what I envisage this section to be. Those little phrases or bits of knowledge triggering something much bigger. This might not trigger something for you like it did for me. But hopefully one of these snippets will at some stage.

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 many things to unpack in this quote, and I could spend time on one of several angles. But I will focus on the main one. If you speak at a conference or networking event about your business, you may be saying to yourself that this quote does not apply to you.

I disagree.

Is your audience made up of humans? Until your audience is made up of a majority of AI, you need to know how to ‘exercise the emotions’ of your audience to fully engage them. No matter how professional you are, a talk devoid of emotion or humour will fall flat.

I often speak to my coaching clients about seeing their talk, pitch or presentation as a performance. Not unlike a musician taking the stage to play a set. Having this mental model helps you to understand the need to practice and balance your talk with stories (analogous to songs) that move the audience in a coordinated way.

As mentioned in the main piece in this week’s newsletter, the first line of the quote highlights the need to contrast emotions in order to create impact. This contrast does not happen by accident. It is carefully considered and built into your presentation.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

This last week, I had a number of Zoom meetings with entrepreneurs around the world. Some great insights and opportunities for cross-promotion.

Recreationally:

The Misty Flicks Challenge is Live!
https://www.mistyflicks.co.nz/the-challenge-24/

What I am reading:

For fun, I read Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman over the weekend. Very entertaining! I think it would appeal to people who like Terry Pratchett’s books, although it is quite different from them.

What I am watching:

I have recently been watching a YouTube channel, @reallifelore which gives some great in-depth analysis of current geo-political events.