May 1, 2013
Make an Emotional Connection
Make An Emotional Connection
I get asked the question time and again from my clients: “What is the magic formula for creating an emotional connection with an audience? Is simply telling a story enough?”
When stories are properly constructed and performed, they contain the key elements needed to create an emotional connection, but it’s the speaker / storyteller who makes the emotional connection. If you are a bad, or even an average, storyteller, and you don’t know how to present your story with inflection, tempo and emotion, your story will fall as flat as a boring PowerPoint slide. The most powerful thing you can do to make your stories more effective is to slow down and feel what you’re saying. Many presenters speed through the most painful or emotional moments in their stories because they get uncomfortable sharing emotion. When they speed through those powerful moments, their story loses its impact. The potential to connect with people emotionally is lost.
Feel the Emotion of the Moment
Take a moment to recall a movie that you’ve seen lately. Visualize an emotional scene from that movie. More than likely, the scene that came to mind contains moments of reflection, reaction and conflict. It probably contains anger, passion, sadness, fear, or some other strong emotion. These moments are often performed without words in a close-up shot.
Actors take their time. They fill the spaces between the lines with emotion. A lot of acting is reacting. During silent reactions, the actors think thoughts and feel feelings. In order to do this, they have to slow down. They have to feel the emotion of the moment.
Pick a Story to Work On
Pick one of your stories to work on with me as you read this article. Take a moment to visualize the time and place that your story took place. Do that now.
Now visualize the moment in your story where you encountered an obstacle or challenge. It’s the moment when something that wasn’t supposed to happen, happened. Go ahead and recall that moment. Close your eyes and see yourself reacting.
Now pretend that you’re telling that story in front of an audience. If your goal is to make an emotional connection with your audience, this is the moment where you do it. Rather than communicating that moment verbally by explaining your reaction, show it. Feel it. Simply take a moment to re-live it. While this may feel uncomfortable for you at first, it’s what your audience is used to, and actually craving, at that moment in a story.
Your Audience Wants to Feel It with You
They want to feel what you felt; they want to see how you reacted. If you take just a few seconds to re-live that experience, to portray the moment rather than talk about it, the emotion that you felt at that moment will come back. It won’t come back as strong as it did at the time it originally happened, but it will come back strongly enough to create an emotional trigger for you and your audience.
Moments like that take time to portray. They are silent moments filled with emotion. They don’t have to be big moments; they just have to be honest and congruent to the moment being portrayed. The key here is: you’ve got to slow down and feel the emotion of the moment.
What’s Your Hurry?
Now, let’s take this concept of slowing down beyond your stories, and apply it to your entire speech or presentation. From the first word out of your mouth to the end, slow down. What’s your hurry? Do you think if you go fast you won’t forget anything? That’s an illusion!
Early on in my speaking career, a woman come up to me at the end of my keynote speech. She said she loved my energy and enthusiasm, but she wished I would have slowed down a bit. She said she felt like she missed some of my content because while I was speeding off to my next idea, she was still pondering my last idea.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that I presented too fast. I knew I was going too fast because I kept stumbling and fumbling on my words. When I did slow down, I didn’t stumble on my words.
I realized that I was afraid to feel the tender emotions that my stories contained because they made me uncomfortable. As an actor however, I was taught to feel the emotions because they were congruent with the moment my character was portraying in the play. What if I applied the same skills to speaking?
Over time, I learned to slow down, and the shift to a slower pace had a dramatic effect, not only for me, but also for the emotional connection I could create with my audience. I realized that I often packed too much content into my presentations, which made me talk real fast to get it all in. So, I cut out a portion of my material to give myself, and my audience, room to breathe.
Give Yourself Time to Think and Feel On Your Feet
Slowing down also gave me time to think during my speech. I can still remember the first time I allowed myself to stop talking for a few seconds in front of a large keynote audience. I had just finished a segment of my speech and paused to decide where I wanted to go next. I don’t think I had ever done that so comfortably before. I knew that something profound has just happened.
I was calm. There was no panic. I was just having a conversation with my audience instead of giving a speech. I wasn’t performing or doing some kind of “schtick”. I was thinking and feeling and doing all of my content, and there was absolutely no stress.
What triggered this shift for me was simply slowing down. The next time you’re giving a speech or presentation, try it. Slow down. Let yourself stop talking.
When you slow down, in your stories and in your whole presentation, you are able to make an emotional connection with yourself, and an emotional connection with your audience. Slow down!
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Doug Stevenson is president of Story Theater International, a speaking, training and consulting organization based in Tucson, AZ. He is the author of Doug Stevenson’s Story Theater Method, and is the creator of The Story Theater Method for strategic storytelling in business, and the How to Write and Deliver a Dynamite Speech System. He can be reached at 1-719-310-8586. Find out more, and sign up for the free Next Level Storytelling Newsletter at www.storytelling-in-business.com.
Copyright, Doug Stevenson, 2013. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
