How to Stop Presenting and Start Persuading

The hidden art to expressing ideas

SPONSOREDUpdated 11:11AM • 03/23/16

An exponential increase in meetings multiplied by a doubling of responsibility can mean only one thing – it’s time to prepare a PowerPoint deck and give a presentation. We’re addicted to decks, but amid the chaos, you still need to produce results. But there has to be a better way.

At least, I’d like to think so. But it requires you to slow down and boil down ideas to their very core in order to strike a cord of empathy with your audience. We’ve been doing it for decades in one form or another. Historically, it was done around the campfire, but in today’s modern world it’s done in the boardroom. But the one constant no matter the setting has always been the ability to tell a good story. A good story changes, reinforces or plants a completely new idea in your audience. It can have drama, comedy or suspense, but it should always deliver a real sense of place combined with feelings.

You must take the time to think through who your audience is and reach an understanding of what they’ll learn about you. To truly know your audience, think about what it’s like to walk in their shoes. How are they wired to potentially resist your message? Far too often, we prepare content rushed by the pace of our own lives, which ultimately narrows our perspective. By flipping this to a more audience-centric approach, you’ll uncover insights and unearth motivations, needs and anxieties that should be addressed.

You must also understand your role in a presentation. The speaker needs an audience more than the audience needs a speaker. You need to boil down complex ideas into a format anyone can understand and wrap them in a story, because that creates momentum and the movement needed for an idea to spread. For hundreds of thousands of years, we have been doing just that - crafting stories into a narrative that inspires others to act.

But it doesn’t matter if you’re encouraging a tribe to hunt migrating mammoths or leading the charge towards multi-unit franchisee ownership – you need to marry your ideas to attention grabbing visuals to cement belief in the minds of an audience. From ancient cave paintings to prolific PowerPoint presentations, purposeful persuasion has always been delivered through memorable interactivity.

No matter the setting, delivering a message with passion, persuasion and compassion will provide you with the opportunity to influence change. People can never change if they do not know where that change is taking them. Don’t ever be afraid to have a conversation and create the moment.