Lesson 7: Persuasion With PassionThe Psychology of PersuasionTo persuade your audience, you have to believe in yourself and believe in your topic. The following suggestions are taken from Michael and Suzanne Osborn’s book Public Speaking. Let’s discuss each one in detail.
Arouse attention with an effective introductionAgain we must look at the introduction as a grabber. You need to use questions, quotes, humor, or enticing statements that will make your audience think. Also, you must consider the audience and ask yourself, “Where do they stand on this issue right now?” And you might ask yourself, “Will the audience be divided? Is this a controversial subject? Is this a sensitive subject?” Involve listeners by relating your message to their interests and needsOne way to do this is by asking questions. For example, “How many of you favor paying taxes?” This will really capture their interest. Really, everyone pays taxes in one form or another, so you have related to everyone in the audience. Another question you could ask is, “How important is health insurance?” Because this is an open-ended question, it starts your audience thinking about how they see health insurance. Ensure understanding by defining complex terms, using concrete examples, and organizing your material clearlyFor example, if you were to use the word “deficit,” you should clarify the definition and the context. It is your responsibility to be very clear about what you are telling your listeners. Otherwise, you might be telling them to do something that you don’t really mean. Using caution with terminology adds integrity to your persuasion. Build your persuasive efforts on a base of solid informationNever use hearsay or anything that is vague. It does not sound credible to say, “Well, I heard somewhere. . .” You need to use real quotes, facts, figures, data, dates, and statistics. Be sure your listeners know how to carry out your proposalIf you are making a proposal to your audience and are enrolling them to do something, you must provide clarity. Giving only half of the information or half of the instructions is not honest. For example, someone persuades you that it is very easy to qualify for a home, and it will only cost you $400 a month. But in reality, this person hasn’t told you all of the information, namely that it also takes a down payment, closing costs, mortgage insurance, title insurance, and taxes to purchase a home. Integrity from the persuader means giving all the information needed to carry out your proposal. Help the audience remember your message by using vivid word pictures and a striking conclusionThe following word picture would make a great start to a speech about fire safety. Visualize this: You are driving a hunter green Ford Explorer down a mountain path with beautiful tall pines on either side and a crystal clear blue sky above. You can see a deer peering through the trees and squirrels scampering after acorns. You can hear a mountain stream as it flows down the canyon with you. Wanting to experience the outside air, you roll down the window. To your dismay, a strong smell of burning trees hits your nostrils. A good exercise to get you thinking in a visual sense is to sit down with a piece of paper and pencil and literally draw the content of your speech. If you are going to talk about a Ford Explorer and a forest fire, you can incorporate all of this in one picture. You could also draw the positive and the negative aspects of your speech content. A positive image would involve using water to put out the fire; a negative image would be watching the fire continue to burn out of control. It is your personal call as to where you want to take the image. This all has to do with how you feel at the moment. You may feel cynical, picked on, and mad at the world. You can use that intensity to your advantage by funneling it into something vivid and striking. But you must always have integrity—you cannot leave the audience in the negative. You must give them a resolution. Ask for a public commitment from your listenersGive them something to do that starts them on the path to change. For example, imagine that you are giving a speech on the detrimental effects of smoking on people’s health. If you convince your audience that smoking is bad for them, you have only taken the first step in truly effective persuasive speaking. If you send them home with a plan of action, including a twelve-step program that they can commit to before they leave the room, you have succeeded in persuading your audience to change. If you are speaking on investing money, give your listeners a way to look at all of their options in banks, credit unions, investment houses, real estate, and commodities. Have them commit to saving a certain percentage of their income. If you are speaking on the importance of spiritual growth, you cannot be vague. You must be focused on specific steps like reading, writing, meditating, and donating your time. Ensure enduring change by stirring deep feelings and connecting them with powerful reasonsYou must give your audience compelling reasons to change their attitudes and above all to take the risks associated with taking action. You have already established to your audience the need for change (for example, the need to be in good health, to invest their money wisely, or to enhance their spiritual paths). Now this is where you use personal experience and testimony to validate your strong belief of taking action. You must use personal experience to really connect with your audience; if you don’t, it will only be hearsay. If you can show how your experience has made a personal impact, it will empower the audience for change. If you state that it happened to someone else, then the audience will say, “Good for her. Why isn’t she the one talking to us?” They want to hear things from a first-hand source. Everyone has the right to express his or her opinions. This holds true regardless of how unpopular the topic may be. The audience has a responsibility to hear the persuasion and make a choice. As a speech instructor, I feel very strongly that if a controversial topic is presented, the audience should show respect to the speaker through open body position—in other words, arms unfolded, legs uncrossed, and eye contact with the speaker. Next the audience has a responsibility to listen instead of simply filtering out the things they don’t want to hear. A disrespectful audience creates a feeling of chaos and commotion in the room, and the speaker feels that he or she has lost the audience and cannot recover them. How sad that an experience like this can affect a person’s desire to be involved in public forums, or even to give public opinion. Because persuasive speaking involves emotions, it carries a heavy ethical burden and is therefore different from informative speaking. |