Three ways to emotionally connect and influence your audience

Last week we talked about why it’s so important that all business professionals develop strong public speaking and presentation skills (The 3 ingredients of a good presentation).

As Patricia Fripp of Fripp & Associates cogently summed up: Outside the privacy of your own home, all speaking is public speaking.

Ms. Fripp, who made those comments during a recent radio interview I conducted with her, also had something to say about persuasion.

Naturally, anytime you do any type of public speaking you want to be persuasive. To do that, Fripp says, you must intellectually and emotionally connect with the audience.

Logic makes you think, emotion makes you act, she says. To emotionally connect requires three actions:

1. You have to make eye contact with the people you’re addressing.
2. You have to tell stories or examples or case histories. For instance, a salesperson or consultant should tell to tell a story about a satisfied client.
3. You have to speak from the audience’s point of view. It’s what Fripp calls having a high I-You ratio. So you don’t say to an audience, “I’m going to talk about this for the next 20 minutes.” You say, “In the next 20 minutes you will learn…”

“So if somebody says, ‘Patricia, what is your process of working with an executive?’ I’ll immediately turn it around and say, ‘Ron, I notice on your bio you’ve been outrageously successful in this area. How did you do that?’ ”

Fripp says, regardless of the size of the audience we’re facing, we must remember that the audience members are always more interested in themselves than they are in us.

They’re also more interested in their colleagues than in us, for that matter. As Fripp added, “The best motivational speeches include a hero story about some person in that company.”

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