Friday, April 21, 2023

Grab and Hold Attention: Neil Gordon

What is the silver bullet of opening your presentation? Advice from Neil Gordon in his interview on the podcast, Your Intended Message. https://youtu.be/FwArGzr063c To connect with your audience, they must realize that you understand them and care Neil Gordon reveals the Silver Bullet of speaking. ----- We explore: The problem that experts and knowledgeable speakers face Why and how to take the focus off you and focus on your audience How to make that emotional connection How to distill that complicated message into a silver bullet The power of one idea Valuing the listener more than the speaker The fallacy about information ----- Outline 00:00 Introduction 02:12 Distill your message 03:43 What if you leave something out? 06:21 How to get more speaking requests when you speak 09:47 How to connect with your audience 11:16 How do we transfix the audience? 15:10 How to package a complicated message 18:48 Cause and effect 22:35 To win baseball, buy runs 26:10 Who is Neil Gordon and how to find him 27:38 Advice for a business leader ----- Listen to this conversation with Neil Gordon https://yourintendedmessage.com/episodes/speak-from-the-emotional-perspective-of-the-audience-neil-gordon-181 ----- Neil Gordon is a former editor at Penguin Book where he worked with New York Times bestselling authors. Neil helps speakers transform their audiences into audiences that are attentive, transfixed, hungry and empowered. Neil wasn't a natural with words. For most of his first 20 years, he abhorred reading. Then a switch flipped and he pursed writing and speaking with a vengeance. ----- Excerpts from this conversation with Neil Gordon 02:31 One of the things that so many speakers struggle with George is that they know a lot, a lot, a lot of information, they have a lot of knowledge, they've been developing their expertise for often decades. But the larger issue they face is that they basically have forgotten what it's like not to know something. And then they go out on stage, or they give a virtual presentation, and they do what we call the show up and throw up. They just vomit out all of their information. They cram. If they have 45 minutes to talk, they cram as much of their content into that 45 minutes as they can. But for a person who doesn't know what they know, right, who is a newbie who is a beginner at whatever their subject matter expertise is, they might find value in all of that content. But because learning is so metabolically expensive, it can be overwhelming. And then the friction comes when they don't actually look like they don't actually make anything actionable. Once the talk is over and saying, Oh, that was really good. And then they move on, they really forgotten about it. I know that I've been in an audience member like that many times over where I appreciated the value that they had to share. But I just couldn't sort it out in my own mind. And I couldn't make it actionable. Or at least I didn't, an expert not to. And so so that's the larger issue. ----- But effective communication values the recipient over the sender and the focus on the audience and they're fulfilling their needs winds up leading to all the amazing things like seeming like an authority and getting paid to speak and doing all the things that one wants to have in their life, but it's in service of the audience that leads to generally lead service service of themselves. And so so that winds up being a very important distinction there. And so people are thinking to themselves, Oh, but I want to seem like I know what I'm talking about when I'm on stage. They're already undermining their authority, it's a, it's a really kind of a funny paradox is that if they're focused on seeming like an expert, then they're going to degrade their capacity to seem like an expert, because people might think, oh, this person really knows their stuff, but they're not going to be inspired and compelled to act on it,