You Are the Persuader by Justin S. Kahn

Some say passion persuades. However, passion is but one element of persuasion. You must believe passionately in what you are saying. The audience must feel and see your passion. In a live presentation, that means they must see as well as hear you.

So many people are tempted to put their talk into an outline and present (or worse read) that outline to the audience slide by slide. You must work hard to eliminate the slide sirens that call you to read the words. It is seductive because it feels easier to you to simply press a button, look at your screen and read the text to the audience. A bad thing happens when you read…The audience does not look at you, they look at the screen. A connection is broken. An opportunity to persuade your passion is lost. The audience simply has a narrator reading what they see. The audience needs to be engaged in order to get the feeling of a powerful presentation.

The hard work for you is to choose the simple images and words to put on the screen. These should focus or highlight what you are saying, not simply outline what you are saying.

The aha moment for me came when I saw a particular blog post about 4 years ago. Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic. (I later bought the book Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and it changed the way I present.)

Presenting well takes planning and practice. Planning what you want to say and how you want to mix images with the words you speak. When you practice, standing up as if you are presenting, including going through the slides at the right moment while talking aloud, you will see that certain things you say do not work with the images you are presenting. You will learn to tweak and change what you say and the order of presentation. As you practice, you will get comfortable.

You must get comfortable so that you will not be afraid to have a blank screen up while you are talking. During those blank screen moments, the audience will focus on you and what you are saying. You will have an opportunity to connect in ways that a slide simply cannot do.

Steve Jobs.

If you try to compete with the slide, your persuasion will get lost. The audience must try to determine if it should pay attention to you or the slide. While that is going on, they are not listening. You become disconnected from the audience.

Bill Gates.

Compare the two images. Steve Jobs is talking to the audience and not competing with the background. Bill Gates may be saying something important but you cannot possibly focus on both him and the slide information.

When Steve Jobs talks with a slide, it is easy to understand. The mind is not required to think so hard that it becomes distracted by the speaker.

Quite simply, when you speak with the screen blank and then put up an image, it will be for emphasis. The images and you will dance in a rhythm that will not be noticed because it seems natural. It is at that point that you can begin to convey the passion you have about what you are presenting and begin better persuasion.

Active Audience Mind – Context and Accessibility by Justin S. Kahn

Thes  of Presenting

During every moment of your presentation the receiver’s mind is active and unconsciously thinking…”Compared to what?” or “What’s it mean?”  Even if the receiver is sitting there, the mind is actively making comparisons and analyzing the information presented within the context of the presentation and with what information is accessible.  As the presenter, you need to be aware of this active and invisible process.  To convince, you need to provide context and make critical information easily accessible.

When you do this correctly, the receiver’s mind fills in the blank without you having to say anything or even being aware that a blank was filled in.  The receiver get’s the feeling that they came up with the idea.  Because it’s their idea, it’s more credible.

Just like the handwritten characters above…you did not even hesitate to believe that what you saw was the first three letters of the alphabet.  The process of coming to that conclusion was invisible to your conscious mind.  You were unaware of the fact that your mind was actually analyzing the drawing and looking at that picture in the context presented.  Your mind was analyzing material made easily accessible to it.

If I asked you what do you see below?  Without having seen the above, you would quickly say, without any perceived hesitation, “12 13 14.”

In reality, the middle character of both sets of characters is exactly the same.  But, when presented with the information in front of and behind it, in the context presented and with the accessible information available, the mind came to the conclusion that the middle character was part of a series of similar characters.

Here are the characters directly above and below each other.

Just because the image or thought may be obvious to you does not mean you can assume it is for the receiver.  For example, assume you wanted to make the point A 13 C or 12 B 14, the point would have been obvious to you, but the receiver would have been actively creating their own idea about what was seen.

You must look at the information as it is unpacked and think to yourself, with the information I have made available, is the receiver going to jump to the wrong conclusion?  If so, you need to unpack the information differently (another order, more slowly, smaller pieces, etc.) so that the receiver’s own conclusion is the goal you were trying to score.

According to Daniel Kahneman, “an ambiguous stimulus that is perceived as a letter in a context of letters is seen as a number in a context of numbers. The figure also illustrates another point: The ambiguity is suppressed in perception. This aspect of the demonstration is spoiled for the reader who sees the two versions in close proximity, but when the two lines are shown separately, observers do not spontaneously become aware of the alternative interpretation. They “see” the interpretation that is the most likely in its context but have no subjective indication that it could be seen differently…perception is a choice of which people are not aware, and people perceive what has been chosen.”  A Perspective on Judgment and Choice, American Psychologist, September 2003.

Simply stated, once one perceives a certain way, one sees that way.  ”Believing is seeing.”

In order to persuade, you must work to unpack the information in an order such that the receiver understands the point without you having to state the conclusion.  For the receiver / perceiver, your presentation needs to be as easy as…