But by the time we have heard the destination and start paying attention we have missed the important information (there are always multiple flights to destinations). This makes it harder for people to act.

If you want to influence, first speak the message your audience will hear, then share your message. Good marketers have been doing just that for years.

As always I’d like your thoughts on this here.

Cheers,

Darren

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It’s much harder to build someone up, but the rewards are immense. It creates connection and this drives influence.

As always I’d love your thoughts on this here.

Cheers,

Darren

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As always I’d love your thoughts on this here.
Cheers,

Darren

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When Joe Hockey said that poor people don’t have cars and don’t drive as far he was technically correct. But that doesn’t mean he will win the argument.

The way you structure your message to market will determine if you are successful or not. Joe leaves out the most important element and therefore will never win. This is important in any public speaking situation, and even in one-on-one communication situations.

See what he does wrong and how you can avoid it in your marketplace. Full details below…

Transcript

G’day! Darren from executivespeaking.com.au.

Joe Hockey is on a hiding to nothing when he pushes his line, “Rich people will pay more through the fuel excise tax than poor people because poor people don’t have cars and they don’t drive very far.” The reason he is going to lose has massive implications for you trying to get your message out to your marketplace or through to your staff to motivate them on to your way of thinking. It’s important if you want to be a great public speaker.

If you’re not familiar with the statement that the Federal Treasurer of Australia made, have a look at this short bit of footage.

Joe Hockey:         They say you’ve got to have wealthier people or middle-income people pay more. Well, the change to the fuel excise does exactly that – the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases.

There’s three elements you need when you want to persuade and influence an audience. As I mentioned, this is important in any public speaking or presentation situation. The first is what’s known as your stance – your authority, who are you and what are you trying to push across. Being the Federal Treasurer of Australia, he has great authority to speak from where he’s coming from.

The second area is logic. You need logic to push your argument forward so people can follow what it is you’re trying to put across.

The third area though – and this is where Joe Hockey is massively falling down, and why he will never win this argument – is pathos, appeal to the emotions. If you want to persuade an audience, you have to appeal to an emotion within that audience. And Joe Hockey simply is not doing that. By putting forward the logic “rich people will pay more in fuel excise because they have more cars and drive further” – that is true – but the logic of pushing that argument introduces the class warfare, which is emotion, of “low people, well, they don’t have cars.” When you start introducing negative emotions, you’re never going to win an argument.

How does this affect your business? Well, with your business, what’s the personality and stance of your business? Are you a professional outfit? Are you seen well in the market? What is the logic, the logic of the message that you’re putting across? And finally, how are you emotionally engaging your customer base, your database, so they want to be part of your message? This is where things – simple things such as being able to deliver your message in a professional and concise manner – mean so much to your marketplace. If you’re thinking, “We’ve got a great product, yes, that’s awesome, we don’t need to have the message sold really well,” well, that’s going to tear at your authority. If you’re not engaging your audience through emotions and what’s possible to solve their issues when you’re speaking, well, that’s appealing to emotion. And if you don’t have the authority because you don’t look the part and you’re not emotionally engaging them, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, it doesn’t matter how good your message is – your audience won’t buy into it, and they won’t buy your product.

That’s what I teach my clients how to do – how do you sell yourself, position yourself so your audience want to buy your message in any public speaking or private conversation setting? If you’re having trouble getting cut-through in your marketplace, give me a call, send me an email. When done correctly, public speaking allows you to position yourself as a leader. Have the logic, and then finally, emotionally engage them. And then you will see a lift in your sales.

Give me a call, send me an email, and I can show you how to do it.

The post Joe Hockey and Poor People: Why He Can’t Win! – Public Speaking Tip appeared first on Executive Speaking.

In general, people believe they are ‘rational’ and that they make decisions based on facts, which will lead to effective solutions. However this is simply not the case. We are all prone to making decisions that are far from rational. Knowing how this affects your client, staff and boss can help you influence them. Further, it can help you question if you are introducing any bias into your own decision making.

This is super important for any public speaking situation.

Cognitive bias is one of the reasons why we don’t always make the best decisions. Cognitive bias comes in many forms and can be characterised by the tendency to make a decision and take action on insufficient information, overconfidence or reliance on past experience.

In business this can be a mistake. The wrong decision can cost your business financially and compromise your market position. An awareness of the types of bias that exist can help you overcome them.

Here are three of the most common cognitive biases prevalent in the business world: 

The Gamblers Fallacy

This bias can be summed up as someone believing that if there is a certain chance of an event happening over the long period, the results will mirror those chances. A good example of this would be a coin being flipped. If a coin has landed on heads nine times in a row, individuals are likely to conclude that it will land on tails the next time. This is because over the long period, half the flips should be heads, half should be tails.

However the events are completely independent and this line of thinking can cause a huge risk in your management. If you are assuming an event will occur because it has not before, you need to ensure that the events are not independent of each other. If they are, you cannot guarantee what the result will be so you will need to seek further information before committing to a decision.

A classic example of this is the sales manager who says, “It’s a numbers game.” No it’s not. Sales is a game of skill – understanding the client, presenting information and closing the deal. It doesn’t matter how many clients you call if you don’t have the skill to close the deal.

The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect is where a perception of ‘goodness’ is assigned to an entity due to some other factor. A classic example if using the assumption, “He must be a great bloke. After all, he follows the Swans!” As crazy as this sounds, it happens. People are assigned a level of skill based on the University they graduated from, the religion they follow or even what part of town they live in.

This can have an effect on your brand.

It can also influence your decisions when it comes to the recruitment of staff. Studies have shown that those who are attractive benefit from a ‘halo’ effect – their skills are assumed to be higher.

We need to be careful not to judge individuals or a business by their appearance and associations with external factors. Study the facts.

This halo effect is seen all the time with public speaking skills. People attribute someone ability to understand a concept with their ability to to stand and speak about it in public. This is seen at University (and in the corporate world) all the time. You have professors who are very knowledgeable, but are really bad at public speaking. Just because you are smart does not mean you are a great public speaker. (The reverse is also true; Just because you have great public speaking skills does not mean you have something worth listening to. You need both knowledge and public speaking skills.)

Negative Information Bias

We retain and use negative memories more than the positive ones. If we have to make a decision in a situation, which might not have gone right on a previous occasion, we often justify our actions based on the negative rather than any other previous positive experiences.

This bias causes us to avoid the action, which may place us in an undesirable position again. It is a reaction that is driven by the need to be safe and avoid the pain of the earlier occasion.

Avoiding Bias

One of the best ways to avoid bias is to understand that it is present within your business and that your decisions can be influenced. If you are aware bias will occur you will be better able to consider the scenarios in your business and the facts which surround them.

By looking at the whole picture you can make better informed decisions which can help lead you to greater financial reward and success.

If you struggle to challenge your preconceptions, then it could be useful to talk to someone who can offer an external perspective. But be warned that they too will have the same processes going on in there!

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With ever-increasing ways to communicate – social media, online videos, snap-chats – the more powerful face-to-face communication has become.

We want to be able to look people in the eye, ask them the tough questions and see how they react. People who master this interaction will be the ones that dominate the market.

When we meet face-to-face, three things happen.

1. We form a relationship that go beyond commercial aspects – this solidifies business
2. We create Gurus who solve problems – adding value to the marketplace and organisations
3. We create social experiences that are remembered – people remember coming together more than reading e-mails.

Add to this the fact that our B.S. detector works best when we look others in the eye and you can see why face-to-face communication is so powerful.

It’s the Town Hall experience of coming together to be part of a community.

The one that can speak as the leader in this community becomes the leader of the community. It is no different in business. This is why we will always have meetings and companies will always have sales reps on the road. Coming together is part of our DNA.

People come together today at short notice or with little practical time to prepare. As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. You need skills that allow you to be ready ‘right now’.

That’s why I created the Right Now Presentation Skills course.

The Right Now Presentation Skills training is designed to give staff at every level the skills they need to communicate internally and externally so they can be more effective when they come together at short notice.

This program is face-to-face, on-site and tailored to your market needs.

It will equip your staff with new ways of thinking about communication, leadership and how others perceive them.

This program has had major successes in the mining, banking, farming, real estate, IT, quantity surveying sectors. It has achieved success in the medical industry, the A-League, aged care, legal practices and many more.

For those in sales it will:

• Show them how to structure their message in a way the client wants to hear
• Give them the confidence to speak as the industry experts they are
• Give them insight into their clients that they did not previously have
• Get them away from boring PowerPoint presentations
• Start them selling the story of their product and company so clients want to become involved.

For those who manage people it will:

• Develop in them the confidence to go beyond managing and start leading their teams.
• Give them the confidence to step up and be the leader you know they can be
• Give them courage to hold their position
• Show them how to communicate so others understand
• Give them techniques to understand individual members of their team for greater one-on-one communication effectiveness

For those in senior management it will:

• Give them the confidence to share their vision
• Help them accept the position of leadership that others are expecting from them
• Show them how to emotionally engage their audience so they will buy into their vision.
• How to handle the pressure of speaking under tough situations
• Learn how to think on their feet so they are never caught out

If your team needs to sell more, manage more effectively or sell their vision so others take action, the Right Now Presentation Skills training will give them the skills they need to achieve those goals.

Simply hit reply to this message or call me today on 0422 670 659 and I will work with you to identify what your team needs to develop to become more effective. We will identify those that need the training and the level of training they need. We will develop a program that will get you the results you need.

Once we have the date you team can reap the benefits of developing their communication skills.

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There are three books I highly recommend to help you open your mind and get to the next level of communication. The information in these books will help lay the groundwork for effective speaking skills; so you can get your message across in a way that is informative, entertaining and influential.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck

This entertaining book, by American brothers Chip and Dan Heath, provides six simple steps that will help you create a powerful presentation and help your audience buy your message. Used effectively, it can turn the average pitch into a story that goes viral.

The key is making your message sticky. The Heath brothers believe a message is sticky when it grabs people’s attention in an easy to understand format that makes them want to share it with others. They use well-known, but often forgotten techniques they call – SUCCESs principles.

1. Simplicity – Base your presentation on a single important idea that anyone can understand. Dumb down your story if it will help people remember it.
2. Unexpected surprises – If you don’t have twists and turns, create mystery that builds until you reveal the answer. This builds anticipation and commands attention.
3. Concrete context – Use common experiences and goals that your audience can relate to, especially with complex subjects. Think about the lowest common denominator, the same method used when strangers chat about the weather.
4. Credibility – Convincing details and authoritative experts can give your audience a reason to believe your message.
5. Emotions – Create empathy and stir passions that connect with your audience.
6. Stories as simulation – Give your audience specific examples to tell people how they should act on your message.

The Heath’s book uses dozens of examples to showcase the difference between messages that take hold, and those that fall over. The successful ones all have a common trait – excellent storytelling.

Consider the urban myth about the traveler at a hotel bar that meets an attractive woman and goes back to her room for a drink. The traveler suddenly wakes up in a bathtub full of ice with tubes sticking out of his back and a sign that says “Call the doctor, we’ve harvested your kidneys.” That’s the condensed version, but everyone who has heard this story remembers it. Even though it’s not true, the story contains just enough mystery to compel people to share it with friends

Good storytelling goes back to our earliest ancestors and is still used for entertainment. Unfortunately, it is a bit foreign in the corporate world.  That is too bad, because effective storytelling techniques can help you get your message across and get your audience to take action.

The Elements Of Persuasion: Use Storytelling To Pitch Better, Sell Faster and Win More Business

Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman combine their experience writing movie/ TV scripts and teaching executive coaching to deliver an easy methodology to persuasive speaking. This process can help you be more influential, without being overbearing.

The authors will teach you how to turn your message into a story that people will want to hear, a story that will motive the masses, and a story that will inspire them to act.

Maxwell and Dickman say that to be successful, every one of your stories must have these five basic components:

1. Passion in the way you tell your story and deliver your message must come from within and it must be convincing.
2. An imperfect hero that can explain the message while bringing people together for shared experiences and achieving goals.
3. An Antagonist or obstacle that gets the audience to become emotionally committed to support the hero.
4. A moment of awareness for the hero which clues the audience into a secret and lets the hero of the story succeed.
5. Transformation in the hero which will teach your audience a lesson and let them know they will be happier once they also make the transformation.

This book also contains invaluable information on how to create a message that flies under the radar. It explains how you can be persuasive without your audience ever realising that they are buying into your message. Storytelling is an essential career skill for anyone in business that is looking to communicate better and get ahead.

You Need This Book To Get What It Is That You Want

That’s not my advice, that’s the actual name of the book. The authors, Mark Palmer and Scott Solder, really understand how people think, and they use this skill to help readers be more persuasive and influential. This book touches not only on negotiations in the corporate world, but in your personal life as well.

The key to understanding this book, and really getting value from it, is to keep an open mind. If you fly through it without taking time to contemplate how the ideas can really help you, then you will be missing the point.

On the surface, acting like a CEO to befriend with the head of your company doesn’t seem like great advice. But break it down: What drives a CEO? What language does a CEO use? What creates stressors for a CEO? If you learn those things, then you can learn to better communicate with a CEO and work on building a friendship.

The authors lay out a simple, step-by-step guide to increase your chances of persuading others to do what you want, by simply understanding what they really want. Here are some of the lessons:

• Understand the other person’s world
• Communicate on the other person’s level
• Learn what words to use and ways to use them
• Recognise when someone is trying to persuade you

Palmer and Solder’s work can be used like a textbook; you can read just the chapters that interest you. It is also self-referencing, with techniques and examples that make specific references to previous pages. That allows you to pick the book up as you need it, without fear of getting lost.

I found these three books helpful in teaching others to communicate more effectively in their business and personal lives. They can help you too. If you stay open to the ideas these books can help you create a more effective presentation, connect better with clients and inspire customers to take action.

When you learn their techniques and start applying their lessons, your audience will be more attentive, they will get on board with you and you will find it easier to get the right message across.

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