Virtual Meeting / Presenting – Tip #6 – Control Their Emotions, Become More Persuasive
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The Power of a Good Story
By Joe Friedman, Zehren♦Friedman Associates, Ltd.
Welcome to our new world. As someone who has worked from home for the past 27 years, today is…Wednesday, just like any other one, unless I’m in a classroom.
Most of our business (pre-Covid-19) has been delivered in-person, 75% of which are two-day classes, the other 25% are one-day. Several years ago, we started experimenting with the various web-based platforms and created a concept we call the Virtual Classroom, and yes, it’s the next best thing to being there in-person. We do role plays, there are large and small group discussions, we white board; participants are talking, others are sending instant messages. I’m talking, typing and listening. (It also takes two people to deliver the class – I have a producer / co-facilitator helping me.)
We’ve had years to figure this out, and we’ve had a LOT of practice doing it. So now, you find yourself working at home, involved in virtual meetings and you think technology will “make it easy.” It won’t!
Each Virtual Presenting tip will come in a bite-sized chunk, so it can be implemented more easily. Plus, as this spills out of my brain, I’ll one day organize all of these tips into a book on the subject. (That was just a thought bubble, right?)
And one shamelessly salesy moment before I launch in…all of our classes (sales, presentation skills, negotiation skills and influence) can be delivered virtually!
You can contact Joe Friedman (love to speak of myself in the third person) by phone or email –
312-841-3364, jfriedman@zehrenfriedman.com. Zehren♦Friedman Associates website is www.zehrenfriedman.com.
Tip #6 – Control Their Emotions, Become More Persuasive The Power of a Good Story
I mentioned in a recent blog the two parts of the brain that process information: The neocortex, which is the data processing center, and the Limbic System where decisions get made. The limbic part of our brains is the emotion center. This reality, when presenting, translates into the need to capture people’s minds and hearts. How do you do that when we’re surrounded by data, and worse, when we’re convinced that only data “sells” an idea?
One answer is “tell a story.”
Let me start by giving you some guidance on how to tell a story. Although future blogs will feature “organizing content” for virtual presentations, there’s a simple blueprint you can follow:
Open
Body
Close
In other words, tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. Over the years, I’ve heard this attributed to the oratory guidance provided by Winston Churchill, and if anyone can show me some hard evidence, I’d appreciate it!
Following is how this blueprint can help you tell a story:
Open – What is the “message” you want people to take away
Body – Tell the story
Close – Explain how the story relates to message or take away
This can be particularly helpful when you’re trying to explain something that is technical to people whose knowledge is more general. Before we get to the story, let’s take a couple of minutes to get our heads wrapped around Standard Deviation!
Following are three ways to describe a technical concept (in this case, standard deviation):
Technical Definition and Formula
The standard deviation of a discrete random variable is the root-mean-square (RMS) deviation of its values from the mean.
If the random variable X takes on N values X1,…,XN (which are real numbers) with equal probability, then its standard deviation σ can be calculated
as follows:Find the mean, X of values
For each value Xi calculate its deviation Xi - X from the mean
Calculate the squares of these deviations
Find the mean of the square deviations. This quality is the variance σ2
Take the square root of the variance
This calculation is described by the following formula:
OK, we good? If you’re thinking “whaaaaaaaa,” here’s another approach:
2. The “Layman’s” Explanation:
In addition to knowing the mean or average for a group of elements or data points, it is also helpful to know the standard deviation.
The standard deviation indicates the extent to which the elements in the group are clustered near the mean.
The smaller the standard deviation, the closer the elements are to the mean; the larger the standard deviation, the farther the elements are dispersed or spread out from the mean.
Better?
3. Tell a Story – and use Open, Body, Close, but first, some background: This is a story my business partner David has told hundreds of times. His daughter (a French major in college) comes to him one afternoon. She is embarking on one of the math requirements of her school and that means a statistics class. She approaches her Dad and asks, “I know you’ve explained this in the past, but can you remind me what standard deviation is?”
Open – I’m going to tell you a story, and when I’m done, you’ll always remember what standard deviation is.
Body – Imagine you have been invited to a birthday party where there will be twenty other people, half of them male and half female, and their average age is twenty. Are you with me so far? I’m sure he heard, “Daaaaaaaaaaad!” On the top of the next page is, I am sure, the picture she had in her head.
She’s going to have two questions at this point: 1) Can I borrow the car? 2) When do I have to be home?
Imagine her shock when she goes to the party, and this is what she finds.
And, can you babysit?????
Got it?
3. Close – So, the standard deviation shows how tightly the data points are spread around the mean or average. A tight or dense distribution means a small level of deviation; a widely scattered distribution means a larger level of deviation.
Examples 2 and 3 above are aided by visual support. This is another component we can leverage when meeting / presenting virtually (guidance from tips 4 & 5).
Lesson? A story is an incredibly powerful tool to: 1) Make an idea more memorable, 2) Make technical information more easily understood and 3) Help “sell” your data to emotion driven humans!
Stay Safe!
And, if you have suggestions for future blogs on Virtual Meetings / Presentations, let me know!
Joe Friedman is co-founder of Zehren♦Friedman Associates, Ltd, which sells and delivers sales, presentation, negotiation and influence training. Joe spends over 100 days a year in the classroom (virtually and in-person).
You can call Joe directly at 312-841-3364 or email to jfriedman@zehrenfriedmam.com.
