Persuasion Atrophy (Part 3): Connecting With Your Audience
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
In Part 2 of Persuasion Atrophy, I did a deep dive on the importance of choreographing your content and delivery. Professionals now and in the future need to be intentional about how they build and exercise what I call the persuasion muscle. This will ensure the skill of persuasion doesn’t give way to equating persuasion to shaming—and thinking critical copy/pasting is in and of itself persuasive.
Continuing to use The 4 C’s of Compelling Presentations as the roadmap for exercising the persuasion muscle and avoid persuasion atrophy, my focus is now on connecting with your audience.
In my freshman year of college, I took a class on giving speeches. Aside from helping me meet core requirements, I also thought it would be an interesting class. The instructor was opinionated, potty-mouthed, and yelled at the students if they did something he didn’t agree with. It was required that we prepare and present two speeches to him and the entire class. The class would provide feedback, then he was supposed to provide his feedback.
The purpose of my first speech was to educate the audience on a topic of my choice. I decided to do the speech about musical notes using a pie as an illustration. The entire pie equated to a whole note. I sliced the pie in half to create half notes, then sliced each half to create four quarter notes, then sliced each quarter to …
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"No Sane man will dance." - Cicero |
