Integrate!

We often invest a huge amount of time and effort in planning our message. We want it to be clear and strong and motivating and bullet proof. We argue and support, find more evidence, and rehearse. We work hard to make the message as strong as it could possibly be. And when we fail to be heard as we want to be heard, we blame ourselves for delivering it the wrong way. This makes it harder the next time we have to walk into a conversation or a presentation and deliver a strong, clear message. What if our delivery was fine and the problem was that the audience was not ready to hear us? The most powerful messages all begin with the same thing: the speaker finds a way to say to the audience, "I see you." © Can Stock Photo / ueuaphoto The one thing that you can be sure every audience wants is a mirror. Before they care about how you see your subject matter, they want to know how you see them. When you reflect what you see in your audience, you do two things: 1) help them...

Do you meet people at events and wonder "so what's their story?" You might even ask. What you expect in return is not a fairy tale. It's not a presentation. It's an account of what matters to them and why it matters. "What's your story?" is how we say: "We see you have an emotional investment in something here. What matters to you and why?" Do you know how to answer the question. You can just tell people: "I'm here because this matters to me because. . ."  You might even say out loud "this matters to me and I think it should matter to you, too." But you might not. Because we want to be invested but we also want to be cool. We want to be passionate, but we also want to be inoffensive. It's hard to tell your story without caring about what the other person is thinking. That's the brilliance of telling a story instead of giving a speech. If you answer the question (real or implied) with a story ...

What's the difference between a concept and a formula?  Between a strategy and a blueprint? Between a hypothetical and an example? In each of these pairs, the first one is impossible for most people to imagine. They know what the word means, but it is not attached to any sensory representation.  The second one is equally "business-like," but it's something a reader or listener could imagine using their senses. They could see or hear or feel something that would tell them more than the word itself about what you wanted to communicate. © Can Stock Photo / Konstanttin Artists regularly turn concepts into images. Good speakers and writers do the same thing: they evoke the senses so that people have something easier to observe and remember than abstractions are. This doesn't mean being choosing more descriptive words: it means imagining what you want to communicate as something you can see, hear and feel and then stripping your language down to match what you ar...