Hi, well how do you use emotion to captivate an audience? I’m Michael, part of The Presentation Maestro.
Now this is a big question, and there’s many many views on it and we could take forever talking about how to use emotions in a talk, but I’m going to boil it down to a couple of points:
Number one, I think it’s easier to let your real emotions come out if you have a decent structure underneath supporting all your thoughts and your thinking and a decent and useful way of installing everything you want to say into your head so it comes out in the right order and you don’t have to remember it, memorise it – it’s just natural, it’s like a titanium steel safety net and that’s what we teach in our Masterclasses and our coaching and it’s in my book Blow Your Own Horn.
But let’s look at a couple of other things, number one I think the emotion should be natural whatever you are wishing to portray whether it’s sadness or outrage or enthusiasm but let it be natural. There’s nothing more repellant I think than bogus emotions. And that comes to another point – I was working – if I can just share a little story – I was working a few years ago with a guy, lovely guy, in a branding agency and he was getting really worked up in his talk and I said “what are you doing?” and he said ‘I’m being passionate about my brand.’ And the brand he was talking about was a can of carbonated drink and I said ‘well a couple of things: number one it’s not your brand it belongs to somebody else; secondly, you drink enough of this stuff it’ll kill you; thirdly you can’t be passionate about some s*it like this! enthusiastic, yes, but passion – real passion is reserved for art, for food, for sex, for love for passion’ and I think it was misplaced in this case – and I think I’ve seen an awful lot of people and I hope you have too, not hope you have, but I think you might have as well who get over passionate about things that really are not deserving of passion. Enthusiasm yes, passion no. And I’m not being frightfully British about this, I can be as passionate and over the top as the next man, but I think it’s reserved for the right things.
And above all, one wants to be, I think, natural. And it’s when one’s being natural and mostly authentic that’s when people connect and engage with us and want to hear more.
Hope you found that useful, see you on the next one.
