The Power Of Persuasion

What will it take to persuade your next audience?
What will it take to persuade your next audience?
Image Credit: wayne mah

The reason that we give speeches is because we want to change the world — that’s what the importance of public speaking is all about. No, we may not end up changing it in some big way, but we’d at least like to change the way that the audience that we’re talking to views their world. If we can do this than yes, we will have created change just by giving a speech. Now the big question comes: how are we going to go about doing this? The answer is simple: persuasion.

Five Ways To Work Persuasion Into Your Next Speech

Persuasion is something that we would all like to be able to do with our next audience. The big question is just exactly how we should go about making this happen. The good news is that the steps that we need to take are fairly well known. Here are five things that you can do during your next speech in order to persuade your audience:

  • Have A Purpose: Every speech that you give must have a purpose. A speech that rambles or wanders with no clear meaning will never persuade an audience. Make sure that you are able to clearly communicate the objective of your speech to your audience early on in your speech.
  • Find Your Passion: If you don’t believe in what you are talking about, it will quickly become clear to your audience. You need to make sure that you make your speech come alive so that it can be remembered by your audience. The key is to remember to always speak from the heart.
  • Position Your Speech Correctly: What type of speech are you giving? Your audience can’t be persuaded if they don’t know if you are giving a keynote speech, a how-to speech, etc. Let them know what they’ll be listening to and you’ll find that it’s easier to persuade them to your way of thinking.
  • Package It Up: Even before you start to speak you’ll want to start the persuading process. One of the best ways to go about doing this is to give your speech a good title. Make sure that the title identifies what you’ll be talking about in your speech while at the same time generating interest in the speech.
  • Make It Interesting: You’ll never be able to persuade an audience if you can’t capture their attention. This means that you need to quickly grab their attention and you can’t let it go. Once you have their attention, then you can start to persuade them.

What All Of This Means For You

As we pull together PowerPoint or Keynote slides and spend our time practicing our speech in order to get our words to come out just right, it can be all too easy to forget just exactly why we are going to the effort to deliver a speech. It turns out that one of the benefits of public speaking is that we’d like to be able to change the world each time we give a speech and in order to do that, we’re going to have to master the art of persuasion.

Persuasion is the art of getting our audience to see the world the way that we do. In order to sway their view, we need to do five very specific things. The first is to make sure that our speech has a purpose. Next we must be sure that we care about the topic that we’ll be talking on. We have to take the time to position our message in order to make it stand out. Packaging our speech using a clever title will also help. Finally, we need to find a way to make our audience be interested in what we’ll be talking about.

None of these things are impossible to do. However, the secret lies in remembering that they all have to be done. This is possible once you know that you need to do them. Take the time to think through how you’d like to persuade your next audience and see which one of these items can help you the best.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that a long title or a short title is better for your speech?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As a speaker you have ideas that you want to share with your next audience – this is what the importance of public speaking is all about. Your reason for wanting to do this is because you want to influence them. You want to plant new ideas in their heads, change the way that they think, or even get them to get up and go out and take action. In order to make this happen you are going to have to be able to do three things: make promises, create a premise, and use points.