Episode 316: Inspire Your Audience

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.

Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.

What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview.

The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.

You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk.

I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don’t just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence.

There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe.

Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.

You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them.

So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.