How do you come across?

First impressions really do count. Perhaps they shouldn’t, perhaps it is shallow, but we have to live in the world that exists, and the reality of our world is that people make instant judgements about us all. They then notice any evidence they can that reinforces that judgement. It will take a vast weight of contradictory evidence to change their mind.

So the best thing you can do is to lead me to a positive assessment of you from the start. You need to make a strong impression on me that makes me think of you as sound. There are many factors that can contribute to this, but foremost in a persuader’s toolbox are the following:

• Appropriate clothing that will be seen by your audience as ‘just right’: this usually means broadly matching their style of dress, with a similar level of formality or casualness. Ideally, you should dress half a notch ‘above’ your audience in status – while we like people who are like ourselves, we look up to and respect people who are as we would like to be.
• An upright and open posture will send a message of confidence, honesty and authority: your poise and bearing should say that you are relaxed but not so laid back that you do not appear to care.
• Add to this a smile and making good eye contact with audience members, and you will start to come across as having charisma – that indefinable confidence and magnetism that draws people towards you. Take a moment to pause and scan the room, making eye contact with audience members. Do not be in a hurry to start. This ‘power pause’ will give your audience the sense that you feel in control and are waiting for them to pay attention before you start.
• Your pause also contributes to the second important component of your impact: gravitas. Stillness and a willingness to take your time will give weight to what you say. Emphasise this by deliberately slowing and quietening your voice at the most important parts of your speech or presentation. If you can also learn to be comfortable with silence, you will find this is one of your greatest assets.

An additional tip – that will lend you both charisma and gravitas – is not to introduce yourself. Rather, get someone else to introduce you. That way they will be the one who establishes your credibility by lending you their endorsement. Thank them for their introduction, shake their hand, take centre stage and then pause. Scan the room, make eye contact and wait for everyone to give you their attention. Now they are ready to be persuaded.

Are you trustworthy?

The next thing people need to know about you before deciding whether to be persuaded by you is whether they can trust you. If you have been lucky enough to secure an introduction by someone your audience already trusts, you don’t need to do much more. But if you do need to establish your trustworthiness, the best way to do so is to demonstrate to your audience that you are on their side or, better still, that you are one of them: part of their tribe.

The easiest way to do this, early on, is to make an observation or tell a story that will resonate strongly with their experience. You might, for example, observe something commonplace and then draw a conclusion from it. Or you could identify a trend that will make people think: ‘Yes, that’s right: that’s what I thought.’ Another approach could be to tell a story from your past, which will make a large number think: ‘Yes, that happened to me, too.’

How credible are you?

Credibility, like trustworthiness, is an essential criterion for your audience to take your ideas or suggestions seriously. Again, the ideal situation is to be introduced, with your credentials presented by someone else. It never hurts to prepare a short introductory script for your host to use. They may have their own, but if they don’t, it will make them feel more confident and will ensure that they cover what you consider to be the most important aspects of your track record or the basis of your authority.

If you need to establish your authority, there are two basic approaches: the up-front and the incidental.

Get their attention

We saw the ‘power pause’ in the previous section on how you come across. This is a valuable way to get the attention of your audience. Three other things will help you to get their attention and start to build a relationship with them: the way you smile, how you greet them, and how you open your talk, presentation or comments.

Hold their attention

Holding the attention of your audience is a matter of creating rapport – a level of mutual empathy where you feel comfortable with one another. This is relatively easy when you are speaking with one or two people. The social conventions of turn-taking, adopting similar postures, nodding and responding, and eye contact all come naturally. But how can you create rapport with a larger audience, maybe even several hundred people?

The secret is to build rapport with individuals first and let your whole audience feel a part of that two-way relationship. You cannot use the usual rapport-building techniques of matching body language, vocal style and use of language, because the situation is distinctly asymmetric, with you in control, at the front, doing most of the speaking.

So, there are three things to get right: the pace, rhythm and timing of your talk, your connection with your audience, and how you address the concerns of audience members.

Build their attention

You can build attention further by actively involving your audience. In a one-to-one or small group conversation, this happens automatically. When it does, what do you do? You listen, and you reciprocate periods of contributing and periods of giving your attention back.

You can do the same with a large audience, by posing questions, or inviting questions or comment from your audience. When you do this, you must listen well and ensure that your whole audience is engaged in the question.

One way to start this off is to ensure that you repeat the question or comment – as it was asked or stated – to the audience to ensure that everyone has heard it. You can ask the audience if this is a question that others have too, or if the comment represents a thought that others share. You can invite a dialogue from the audience before you respond, turning a one-to-one conversation with an audience listening into a wider experience.

As the speaker at the front, you can feel under pressure to respond quickly to a question or point that is made. Your strongest connection with the audience often comes from simply acknowledging the value of what has been said. The chances are that the one person who said it is not the only person who has thought it. Take your time: listen with care and think about your response before speaking.

A silence after a question or a comment does not say to your audience (as we often assume it does): ‘I don’t know, I am stupid, oh no…I need to say something quickly.’ Instead, a silence says: ‘That was a good point, I need to think about it before I answer. And, because I am thinking about it carefully, it will be a good response, worth listening to.’

In fact, a quick response is often one that says to your audience: ‘Hey, that’s easy. I didn’t even have to think about it: your point was obvious, your question was easy, what fools you are.’ You would never say that out loud, so why would you risk giving that impression?

Evidence

Your audience will need to know what your source of evidence is, how you have verified its validity, and that it is reasonably objective and free of bias or self-interest.

In making an argument, the most powerful approach is to present only your best evidence, and to ignore weaker corroborating evidence. The more reasons you give, the weaker each successive one will seem, diluting the impact of your message.

However, this does not mean that you should ignore conflicting evidence. In complex decisions, it is the conflicting evidence – even when minor – that holds the subtleties that can lead to valuable insights. You will get the most robust decisions from your audience when you allow them to consider all of the conflicting evidence.

Anticipating the objections your audience will have is a great way to help you persuade them: ‘Here are three reasons why we should not do what I am recommending: let me address them one at a time.’

Interpretation

Evidence means nothing on its own: everything depends on how you – and your audience – interpret it. Test out your interpretation against alternatives and allow your audience to understand why you have chosen the interpretation that you have. Invite them to consider different interpretations and show the consequences of those. If your audience feels in any way that you have manipulated them by selectively presenting or improperly interpreting the evidence, they will not only not be persuaded by you, they may never trust you again.

Testing consequences

If you want me to consider your ideas or suggestions, I will want to know the ‘so what?’. The consequences can be both positive and negative and your audience will be interested in both.

The positive consequences will help propel them towards the decision you want. Audiences tend to think at three broad levels here:

1. Consequences for themselves – the WAM factor: ‘what about me?’
2. Consequences for people and things they care about – ‘what about us?’
3. Wider consequences for organisations, society or the environment, for example – ‘what about them?’

Be sure to address all of these levels, rather than assume that everybody is motivated simply by the WAM factor.

People are smart: they will also spot if there are any adverse consequences. If you do not bring them up, audience members will be forced to challenge you with them, undermining your credibility. Your best strategy is always to anticipate objections by identifying the weaknesses in your case and the potential threats arising from your suggestions. If you do this, you can show how those threats can be mitigated and therefore further strengthen your case.

Reason

Reason is the component of persuasion that most of us feel most comfortable with. We are taught how to use it throughout our formal education, and continue to hone our skills in the world of work. Its power is not in question – the mistake that too many people make is to assume that reason is enough. It never is.

The way to use reason is to pull together a rational case, based on solid evidence, and to present it in a straightforward way that your audience will find easy to understand. Avoid the temptation to showcase your intelligence by focusing on the complexity, by using sophisticated language and terminology, and by assuming background knowledge that not all of your audience will have. These tactics actually undermine your credibility. They raise suspicions in the minds of your audience that, if they don’t understand you, then maybe you don’t understand it yourself. Instead, make your audience feel smart by simplifying the complex, using words they understand and reminding them of knowledge they may not recall.

Place a lot of emphasis in your preparation on developing a logical flow of ideas that takes your audience from understanding one point onto the next topic. They should feel like saying: ‘I’ve got it, I understand that, thank you. And now you are addressing the next question that came to my mind, thank you.’

Emotion

Reason alone can never convince an audience. Few of us ever make a decision based solely on the facts and the logic. What we mostly do is base our decision on the way we feel about the subject. Then we use the facts and the logic to justify our decision.

One of the strongest reasons to use stories – which, as we saw in an earlier section, are a great way to get your audience’s attention – is to set the reasons within an emotional framework. Stories let us see the world through someone else’s eyes and hence empathise with their emotions.

Political parties, charities and advertisers love to present us with mini narratives that show people in uncomfortable situations that can be made more comfortable by their policies, by your donations, or by their products or services, respectively.

As a speaker, the emotions you are most likely to want to tap into are compassion, anger, frustration, loyalty, anticipation or fear.

Values

Our values dictate what is important to us and therefore what choices we will make. If a choice conflicts with our values, then we are likely to reject it, or, if we do make it, we will usually come to regret it. In making a persuasive case for your ideas or suggestions, you need to understand the values of your audience and show them how your proposals align with them.

Think about the context in which you are speaking and focus on the values that are relevant to your topic. Sometimes you will discover that your recommendations may conflict with some of the values you know will be important to your audience – for example, if you are proposing a course of action that will need a large investment when your audience values economy.

The solution lies in the wider landscape of values that we all have. Consider how different values can themselves conflict, making a solution that appears unsatisfactory align well to other values: economy versus quality, or timeliness, or safety, or sustainability.

Often your audience wants to make the right choice – what you need to give them are the rational, emotional and intuitive reasons to make it.

Simplicity

Keep everything as simple as possible, but not more simple. People who are able to explain things in simple terms are usually perceived as having a deep understanding. Use common, easy-to-understand language, short sentences and suitable analogies, metaphors or images to help you explain things.

Break your information into small chunks and cover them one at a time. Numbering off lists or showing a sequence of steps makes it easy for your audience to understand, as long as the number of items or steps is not too great. Take five as a working maximum, three as an ideal and seven as an absolute top limit.

Where you need to use technical language, start off by introducing the concept in everyday terms and then let your audience know what the technical word is – unless you can reasonably expect that most of them will know the technical term, in which case use it and then immediately explain what it means for any who aren’t familiar with it.

The best communicators – and therefore the most persuasive ones – are able to represent complex ideas using simple analogies or metaphors that relate something unfamiliar to something commonplace: ‘a persuasive speech is like a good meal’, for example. You can then draw three or four points of similarity, which highlight the essential ideas that you want to convey. You can make a further point especially powerfully by then describing one essential difference.

Like a good meal, a persuasive speech has three courses – in this case you must establish your character, make your argument and appeal to your audience’s values and emotions.

Like a good meal, a persuasive speech must not be fussy and over-complicated – the quality of the ingredients must be evident.

Like a good meal, a persuasive speech must grab the diner’s attention and hold it, offering more interest with each course.

But while a great meal can linger in the memory for years, a great speech can do more: it can change the world.

Clarity

Clarity goes beyond simplicity: it is not just about leaving your audience feeling as if they understand you; it is about ensuring that what they understand is precisely what you mean them to understand. The challenge is to choose your words and your metaphors with such care that they are not just simple but exactly right in the information and mood that they convey.

Of course, that is why professions, trades and technical disciplines evolve jargon, or technical language. It is precise, with each word having a finely honed meaning. Everyday language is much more generalised in its meaning. Clarity comes when you are able to create two things: connections and distinctions.

1. Connections: these link ideas together. People gain deeper insights when you can lead them to connect your ideas to ideas they already understand (which is why analogies work well), or when you can help them to link up two ideas that are familiar but were unconnected in their minds until you highlighted the link.
2. Distinctions: when you can distinguish between two seemingly similar things, that too creates clarity and understanding.

It is not enough to introduce new ideas and suggestions. If you want your audience to understand them fully, you need to help them to make connections or distinctions.

Easy to follow

The way you sequence your ideas will make them easy or difficult to follow, and some sequences seem hard-wired into the way our brains work. Using them effectively will make your audience feel comfortable in following your train of thinking.

Three simple examples will help illustrate this and also provide you with templates to structure short contributions to a discussion or long presentations.

1. Past, present, future: or what was, is now and will be. The oldest structure in our story-telling toolkit is that of a chronological sequence: ‘Our company was a dominant force in our marketplace. Now, newer rivals mean we are struggling to maintain even some of our most loyal customers. If we do not adopt new approaches, we could find ourselves declining year on year, towards a slow corporate death.’
2. Attention, interest, desire, action: or oy! what, why and how? This is a structure widely used by advertisers that starts by saying, ‘Here’s something important’ and then offering something of value. Then trigger an emotional response, before showing how you can get the result you want. For example: ‘Germs are everywhere. New Germocutor will kill germs fast. If you care about your family, you care about cleanliness. Available from leading retailers.’
3. Context, complication, choices, call to action: or what you know, what you need to know, what you could do and what you should do. This is great for presenting your analysis of a tricky situation. You set out what everyone knows, but then introduce the complication that makes it dangerous, uncertain or complex. Now you can present the viable options for handling it, before advocating your point of view: ‘The roads have been busy and overcrowded for many years. With the construction of the planned trading estates and housing to the north of the town, gridlock is inevitable during peak times. We can build a relief road from the east, widen the existing road to three lanes, or limit the types of business we allow to take units. I recommend the relief road for the following reasons…’

Asking questions

If I tell you something, a suggestion, an idea or a recommendation, there is always the chance that you will react against it. Questions, however, offer only one plausible response: an answer. So questions are a great way to avoid resistance.

A good sequence of questions leads your audience along a path, it encourages discovery and it breaks down resistance. Take the most obvious example: you ask questions and let your audience answer them. In this case, you have not given any ideas – your audience have discovered them for themselves. You have offered nothing for them to resist.

And even if you ask questions and then offer your own answers, at each stage your audience can evaluate: ‘Is this the right question? And if it is, do I agree with the answer?’ Question and answer structure helps you to build a case and deal with resistance incrementally, at each stage, so that by the time you (or your audience) articulate your proposal, it is almost a done deal.

Pacing experience

What if your audience has already had your idea? What if they already know what your suggestion is? What if they already know that your recommendation is the right thing to do? You won’t have to persuade.

Some persuaders are consummate in demonstrating that their proposal is so obviously right, their audience knew it all along. ‘You may have noticed that…’ they will say and their audience is thinking: ‘Oh yes, I didn’t realise I had, but now you mention it…’

And then they say something like: ‘Like me, it has probably crossed your mind that…’

‘Well, it has now,’ think the audience. ‘And, as you know…’ says the speaker.

‘If I didn’t, I do now. Thank you for reminding me,’ think the audience. ‘So we have probably all reached a similar conclusion…’

Does this always work? Of course not. But done artfully, where the assumptions are realistic and the leaps are small and reasonable, this can really shortcut the process of winning agreement. Done badly, however, you risk triggering a response like this: ‘What do you know about what I am thinking? As it happens that isn’t what I think. Are you just trying to manipulate me?’ Make sure the answer is no. Don’t use this approach as a way to manipulate, use it as a way to highlight common ground. It is safest, therefore, not to adopt a whole series of these statements, as above, but rather to use one or two, to establish some common ground with your audience.

Appeals to authority

Even the most persuasive speakers sometimes need some help in making their case. When they do, they can make an appeal to an authority and there are broadly three categories:

1. The authority of experts
2. The authority of celebrities
3. The authority of the crowd.

We will take a look at each in turn.

Repetitions and threes

Whenever we repeat a word, it gives it emphasis. Your repeats can be direct: ‘This makes me angry; angry I say’ or indirect: ‘This makes me angry, and you won’t like me when I’m angry.’

If a repeat creates emphasis, a double repeat, that uses the same word three times, has even more power, as when Tony Blair described his party’s priorities for government as: ‘education, education, education.’

But threes have a power all of their own. There is something about the rhythm of three items that feels right and comfortable. So much so that when Winston Churchill declared he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, we remember only three of them: blood, sweat and tears’.

Alliteration and assonance

So why did Churchill include toil if he knew (and he did) the power of threes? Well, setting aside that he was genuinely offering toil too, perhaps he also felt that the sound of toil next to tears would be memorable. The two words start with the same sound, which is called alliteration.

Alliteration often produces pleasing word combinations, from social security to slippery slope, or from rock ‘n’ roll to down and dirty. If you do it well, alliteration creates a truly memorable phrase, but if you overdo it, it just sounds like a silly, superficial sentence.

Children love alliteration and rhyme of all sorts and assonance is the widest form of rhyme, where two words contain the same vowel sound – maybe at the end, or maybe inside the word. Importantly, assonance does not need to rhyme in the sense of having the same ending to the word, so, for example, ‘the rain in Spain’ is a rhyme, while ‘she came from Spain’ is assonance – the same ‘a’ sound but a different ending.

Opposites and contrasts

When John F. Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ he was doing more than repeating the same words, he was turning them around too. Mae West’s famous quote, ‘It’s not the men in my life that counts – it’s the life in my men’, is another example.

That is hard to do, which is why Kennedy’s speech is justly praised, and Mae West’s aphorisms are widely re-used. But what is easier is to simply contrast two elements in a single phrase: ‘We don’t want to be the best-selling brand on the market, we want to be the most profitable brand on the market.’

Visuals and graphics

The most common tool for visual aids is presentation software such as PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress or Prezzi. These are all excellent, highly developed tools that can have the unintended consequence of constraining debate and stifling creativity. A polished slide presentation looks so smart and ‘finished’ that audiences often accept what is there uncritically, not challenging what is there and not questioning what is not there.

If your role is to present ideas and suggestions, and convince your audience of their value, these tools can be immensely powerful, when used well. But the phrase ‘death by PowerPoint’ is so familiar that we all know of the dangers of using them poorly – as memory aids for the speaker that do nothing but present endless text-based bullet points.

The best graphics grab the audience’s attention and present them with an image that will either:

• stick in their mind and create a lasting association between the image and the idea, or
• provide a graphical explanation of something that some audience members will find easier to assimilate visually than verbally.

To do this well, you need to apply the rules of good design to the preparation of your slides, and while this module is not about that topic (and there are plenty of resources that are), a few simple rules will help.

Models and demonstrations

Models and demonstrations are a three-dimensional extension of a graphic on a slide or display board. Their physical solidity, however, gives them a greater mental weight. Many people will remember Steve Jobs removing the first MacBook Air from a thin brown internal-mail envelope. The audience collectively drew in their breath… then applauded.

Your ability to handle an object on stage activates sympathetic ‘mirror neurons’ in your audience that create a powerful sense of shared experience. The fact that they cannot directly experience the feel of the object can also create a sense of eagerness, desire, or even envy. You have the alternative of letting the audience hold the object themselves, by passing it around, but be aware of where their attention is going and do not try to compete.

A third alternative is to build expectation by promising to allow your audience to interact with the model once you finish speaking.

Demonstrations take a model and move it into a fourth, time dimension. The mistake most presenters make is to believe: ‘I know this piece of kit well, I don’t have to rehearse.’ How can I say this nicely? It is wrong, stupid and dangerous. If you intend to do a demonstration as a part of a speech or presentation – whether to one person or a thousand – practise your demo at least three times. Practise it fully, in real time, with you speaking. If you need an assistant from the audience, get a helper for your rehearsals and ask them to pretend they know nothing about the equipment and to do exactly what you tell them to. Increase your rehearsal number to a minimum of five, ideally with five different trial assistants.

Nothing looks as bad as a demonstration gone wrong. And nothing goes wrong as often for amateur speakers as a demonstration.

Gadgets and gimmicks

If demonstrations can go wrong easily, gadgets and gimmicks are a recipe for disaster for the unprepared speaker. At least when a demo goes wrong, your audience can see why you were trying it; the nature of gimmicks is that the purpose is not obvious to your audience, so if it fails, they wonder what on earth you were up to.

However, a well-chosen gimmick, performed expertly, can grab attention and make your point subtly but with great elegance. For example, untangling an impossible knot can leave your audience thinking that their impossible challenge may just have a simple solution, if they can find it. A card discovery trick may remind people that the truth is often hidden in plain sight. Or a floating ball pen could simply grab your audience’s attention and make them want to hear what you have to say.

When planning what gimmick or gadget to use, start with the end in mind – what do you want to achieve with your audience? Then find the right gimmick. You must not only rehearse the performance of your trick, you must also rehearse its place in what you are saying and the words you use to link it to the ideas or suggestions you want to communicate.