Dr. Jim Anderson investigates how a speaker can persuade an audience to take action.
Dr. Anderson reveals the secrets that you can use during your next speech to get your audience to agree that there is a problem that they need to take action to fix.
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Speakers Need To Realize Their Audience May Be Different From Them (c) - 2008
When you think of the perfect speech in your mind, what do you see? Do you see yourself up on a stage giving a speech, reaching the end, and then having everyone stand up and applaud until their hands grow tired? Nice picture. However, all too often that doesn’t happen. There are lots of reasons for this, but one big one is because we don’t take the time to fully know our audience…
Why give a speech in the first place? There always has to be a reason for us to give a speech – are we there to entertain, inform, motivate, etc. We won’t be able to do this if we don’t connect with our audience. We won’t be able to connect with our audience if we don’t know who they are.
It’s way too easy for a speaker to make assumptions about the audiences that we are talking to. The biggest mistake is to assume that they see the world the way that we do. Craig Harrison points out that by presuming that the audience thinks the way that we do we risk offending them – perhaps without even realizing it.
The right way to go about getting an audience on your side is to tackle three big issues right off the bat in any speech that you are giving:
Giving a speech is a tough job. Giving a good speech is even tougher. You need to have your audience working with you, not against you if you want to have any hope of making an impact. The first step in accomplishing this is realizing that your audience is different from you.
Once you acknowledge this, then you need to work to include them and dispel any preconceived ideas that they may have about you. Learn to do this well and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.
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Have you ever heard the expression “one size fits all“? Something that too many public speakers don’t realize is that you need to create different speeches for different size audiences. There is no such thing as the one-size-fits-all speech.
Al Gore Knows How To Reach An Audience(c) - 2007
Interestingly enough, this post has nothing to do with global warming. I really don’t care which side of the “warming / not warming” argument you find yourself on right now. The one thing that I think that we can all agree on is that there is quite a debate going on right now – somebody has done a good job of talking this topic up!
Carl Duivenvoorden cares deeply about global warming issues and has spent time learning about how he can give speeches talking about this topic. If you want to be effective, you go to the source – in this case you go to Al Gore.
Al Gore wrote the book “An Inconvenient Truth“. He is a skilled and effective public speaker – after all, he’s a politician. Lately he has been going around teaching folks how to get the word out about global warming – this means teaching them how to effectively speak in public.
Al Gore teaches speakers to remember that when they take the stage, they start to spend from three different budgets at the same time. They need to accomplish the goal of their speech and get off the stage before they exceed any of their budgets. The three budgets are:
Just doing a great job of speaking often isn’t enough. Al Gore teaches that if you want to maximize the impact of your message, you’ve got to add three additional “extras” to your speech in order to make the whole thing work:
No matter what subject you are talking about, you are going to have to use emotion in order to make your message stick. Ultimately your goal is to reach out and touch your audience’s hearts. In order to do this you are going to have to use vocal tones to draw your audience to you and use your conviction and passion to connect with your audience. Learn to do this right and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.
How good of a job do you do managing the three budgets that Al Gore says you need to stay on top of? Which one is the most difficult for you to manage? Are you happy with the visuals that you use? What could be done to make them more effective? Leave me a comment and tell me what you are thinking.
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I would like to be allowed to see more PowerPoint slides. Ok, not really. In fact I could probably live the rest of my life without seeing another PowerPoint slide – I think that I’ve seen my limit! Since I probably can’t avoid seeing more slides, then perhaps at least we can talk about what we can do to make them more fun…
Speakers Who Can Persuade An Audience Are Powerful Indeed (C) - Jason Cross
Not all speeches are the same. Graduations, weddings, corporate pep-rally’s – those are all pretty straightforward. One of the most difficult types of speeches to give is one in which you have been brought in to convince an audience of something. As difficult as this type of speech is to give, if you can become good at doing it, you will seen as being a very valuable speaker indeed!
You can assume that the audience that you’ll be speaking to will be be made up of a mix of people who already support your position, who have not make up their minds yet, and who are dead set against whatever you are going to say. Good luck with that presenter!
Clearly the first step in winning any audience over is for you to do your homework BEFORE you are facing the audience. One key area to research is to find out what arguments “the other side” has made. If there is a person or a group that represents “the other side”, then this is pretty straightforward. If there is not a clear “other side”, then you’re going to have to spend some time researching the flip side of what you want to persuade your audience about – because some people will have decided that that is what they want to believe.
One sure-fire way to start to win your audience over to your way of thinking is by using something called strategic agreement. When you do this you agree with parts of the other side’s position. Automatically this will start to make the audience view you as a reasonable person. They may not completely agree with you, but they will start to warm to your view point.
Well, maybe that’s putting it just a little bit too harshly. How about if we say that you need to show up ready to address your audience’s objections. Whatever you have been asked to convince them about, there will be objections to it. Before you give your speech, you need to once again do your homework. In your speech you need to make sure that you address these each of these objections.
Sometimes we like to shy away from sticky arguments that we don’t feel that we have a good response to. However, you must be careful to not do this. It turns out that if you don’t address an objection, then your audience will assume that it is a valid objection because you didn’t talk about it.
I am probably more guilty of dumping than anyone else that I know. When I’m giving a persuasive speech, I want to make sure that I get my point across. This means that I’ll do a lot of research and, if I’m not careful, I’ll “dump” all of that research on my audience during my presentation. This is a bad idea.
Instead, you want to do the research, pick out the points that are going to be the most important to your audience, and then cover just these few points in detail.
You would think that we’d all know this by now, but when I’m coaching speakers I keep discovering that they know WHAT they want to say to make their point, but they don’t know HOW to say it. It turns out that there is a simple formula that allows you to create a complete argument in order to support your position:
There is no doubt about it – winning people over to your way of thinking is just about the hardest type of speech to give. Ask any politician. However, it can be done. What it requires is that you do a lot of homework in order to prepare your arguments with an understanding of the facts and what your audience is currently thinking.
Public speaking is never an easy thing to do. Developing the skills that are needed in order to rally a crowd behind a new idea, a change in policy, or bold new idea is time well spent for a speaker. If you can do this, then you’ll have a powerful new speaking tool and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.
Have you ever had to give a speech where you had to persuade the audience? Did you do enough homework to prepare for the speech? Did you find out what the audience was thinking before you gave your speech? How did it turn out? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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If you are going to go to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, doesn’t it make sense that you’d want to be able to reach your audience and somehow appeal to them? No matter if you are trying to persuade them or educate them, ultimately the goal is find a way to successfully appeal to them. Good news – how to do this has been known for the past 2,500 years!
Persuading Your Audience Requires More Planning Than Yelling At Them
If you think about it, there are a lot of different types of speeches that we can give: humorous, informative, motivational, and of course, ones that are designed to get your audience to start thinking a particular way. Oh yeah, this last type just may be the hardest type of speech to give…
At it’s very heart, persuasion is the art of getting your audience to see the world the same way that you do. As all of us speakers know, no matter if you are talking to a graduation or a business gathering, an audience is not a single entity – it’s a lot of different people sitting out there who all have different opinions on any given topic. Your job as a speaker is to win over as many of them to your side as possible.
John Coleman is an author and a former U.S. national speech champion who knows a thing or two about how to build a speech that can persuade. Coleman points out that before you can have any hope of persuading an audience, both of you need to agree that there is a problem in the first place.
As obvious as this may seem, you could talk until you are blue in the face and it would all be for naught if your audience didn’t agree with you that there is a problem. In order to get your audience to agree that there is a problem that needs to be solved, you need to do three things:
Have you ever heard that phrase “You can’t boil the ocean”? When it comes to persuading an audience it applies – you need to make sure that you pick a problem that you can actually do something about. Scope down a bigger problem (“world hunger”) to something that your audience can do something about (“hunger in our town”).
Well, don’t run but you do want to convince your audience that they need to take action. Just talking about a problem isn’t enough to cause your audience to actually agree to DO anything. Somehow you are going to have to lite a fire underneath them so that they will end up taking some action (that’s why it’s called “persuasion”!).
Assuming that you’ve been able to convince your audience that there is a problem, your next step is to make sure that you bring it home – you’ve got to relate the problem to their lives. This is going to require that you have an understanding of who your audience is so that you can describe to them how this problem is going to affect them in terms that will motivate them to take action.
Speeches that persuade are not easy speeches to give. However, as with so many things in life – it’s the ability to do the hard things that make us more valuable. If you take the time to understand how to prepare to give an effective persuasive speech, then you’ll have a powerful new speaking tool and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.
Have you ever had to give a persuasive speech? Was the problem too big, too small, or just the right size? How did you convey that the problem was urgent? Did your audience come away believing that the problem related to their lives? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
Not all speeches are the same. Graduations, weddings, corporate pep-rally’s – those are all pretty straightforward. One of the most difficult types of speeches to give is one in which you have been brought in to convince an audience of something. As difficult as this type of speech is to give, if you can become good at doing it, you will seen as being a very valuable speaker indeed!
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