The Power of Leveraged One-to-One

There is a way to structure your message so that every person who hears it, feels as though you are speaking directly to them. You do this by constructing your message, and speaking as though there is only one person in your audience. This applies even when you are speaking to 2, 20 or 200 people. It doesn’t matter how many people are in your audience, speak as though you are only talking to one of them.

We speak leveraging one-to-one because the audience is in the different communication paradigm than the speaker. When a person is at the front of the room speaking, they are in a one-to-many relationship – there is one person speaking and many people listening. So from the speakers perspective, it kind of makes sense that we say, “How many people in this room would like to have more influence?” This then becomes a question being addressed to many people.

However, if we look at the communication relationship from the audience’s perspective, they are in a one-to-one relationship – that is, they are sitting in the audience as one person listening to one person at the front of the room speak. The speaker is in a one-to-many relationship.

So that we can tap into the audience members’ world more quickly, and with greater ease, we need to speak as though we are in a one-to-one relationship. The question that we had of “How many of you would like to have more influence” gets reworded to “Would you like to have more influence?”. This has a major impact on how close the audience member feels to your message. When the audience member feels that your message is directed to them, they have a greater chance of taking action based on your message.

You can start using this technique today. This technique will work in emails, it will work on the phone, it will work in team meeting where there might be 10 to 15 people, it will work when you’re talking to 10,000 people in a room.

Structure your message as though there is only one person in your audience. Ask questions of that one person. Each person in your audience will then feel as though you are talking directly to them.

When you apply this technique, your audience feels connected to your message, and will see you as someone who should be listened to, and as a direct result, you will have greater influence.

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