Don’t Drag your audience through the coal Chute
Whether you are speaking to a group or just one individual, you are responsible for some form of an audience. Even if you are not formally delivering presentations on the regular, you are sharing your ideas to others through the day. In doing so, do you ever…
notice if you start to lose your audience?
feel like you have so much information to share, you find yourself rushing to get through it all?
find yourself providing too much detail, wishing you could more easily get to the point?
These situations (and others) signify an area of improvement in communicating with more influence by focusing less on you and more on them! This type of focus is one of the most commons mistakes I see when working with clients to communicate more successfully.
It is like taking your audience down the coal chute.
After learning of this story from The Handbook of Decision Analysis (as cited by Michaelson, 2018), it becomes clear why changing the focus of your messaging can drastically improve your effectiveness (and likely the outcome).
Imagine this…
A man inherits a dilapidated family vacation home. Upon visiting it, he realizes that all the doors and windows are boarded shut. In trying to gain access, he soon discovered an old, vertical entrance on the side of the house, that led straight to the basement…a coal chute. (This was how coal was easily delivered back in Victorian era homes, as a source of heat in colder climates.) This man enters the coal chute and must traverse up the basement stairs, to the first floor of the home while looking at the neglected shape of this home. Over the course of the next year, the man rehabs the home, specifically putting effort into the grand staircase at the front of the house with a beautiful chandelier hanging over the front foyer. He is proud of his hard work and attention to detail in each room, turning this once abandoned home into a beautiful fresh-looking home! It then comes time to show his friends all of the work he put into the house. And as they are about to enter the home, he walks past the front entrance, to the coal chute, where they proceed to enter the house. He wanted his friends to appreciate his tedious journey of his hard work. However, one may gather that what they were most interested in, was really in the grand foyer entrance, instead of an old, dirty coal chute in the basement!
Your audience does not want to enter through the coal chute. They are not as interested in the details of your journey as much as they are about what matters most to them. Do the work in preparing to learn what matters most. What is your audience’s grand foyer entrance? Start there. What is going to matter the most to them?
Make your messaging, be it in front of a group or just one individual, impactful by not boring your audience by schlepping them through the coal chute but giving the satisfaction of a grand reveal of which, they truly desire! This is how you keep the attention of an audience, place priority on the information they desire, focus on the exact messaging your audience needs and do not show off your journey, by bringing them through the coal chute.
This article is not an excerpt from Meg’s new book, “Put Your Big Girl Pants On…and other power moves to increase influence” but luckily that book has plenty of other tips to help you communicate with more influence! Available on Amazon or through her book publisher. Check it out or set up a virtual coffee to brainstorm ways to work with Meg! She promises not to drag you through the coal chute! :-)
