How do you want the audience to feel?

This may seem like an odd topic. After all, you can’t control what your audience will feel at the end of your talk. And, of course, you are right. Communication doesn’t guarantee successful outcomes. It increases the probability that people might hear what you have to say. The only way to increase the probability is to be deliberate about your choices. I've talked about the need to be deliberate about your storytelling genre here. How you want the audience to feel is another part of engaging in deliberate communication that increases the chance of success.

How do you want them to feel? Hopeful? Inspired? Angry? Curious? Shame?

You can't know how to get there until you know where you want to go. You're taking your audience somewhere. Where is it? Now, think about the emotions it may take to get them there. Maybe they need to feel frustrated with you about a problem, then that frustration leads to curiosity about how to solve it, which leads to hope things can change, ending your talk with inspiration that they are part of the change. Notice the emotional journey you’re taking with your audience: frustration/anger to curiosity to hope to inspiration.

Become of a student of emotions. For example, there are basic and complex emotions. Basic emotions, identified by Paul Ekman, are things like sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Complex emotions are layered between and among the basic emotions and are often when two emotions are felt simultaneously.

If you are new to thinking about emotions it's always helpful to start out with a comprehensive list. Next, think about how emotions tend to overlap and interact with each other. I've found this resource invaluable. Of course, to really take a deep dive into emotion and how we interact with the world, read everything Brene Brown has written.

Being able to identify these emotions doesn’t change what you say, the stories and evidence you use, but it changes how you say what you say. And that will make all the difference to increasing the probability that your story will be taken seriously.

What about reason?

I get this question a lot: So, you’re saying emotion is REALLY important. What about reason?

That’s a great question and, thanks to Aristotle, I know that emotion drives reason. When someone gives us a reason/rationale for something, emotions are driving it. When someone wants to put speed bumps in their neighborhood because people drive too fast, the emotion is fear that someone in the neighborhood will get hurt by this recklessness. Emotion drives our reason, always.

Typically, anyone who wants to elevate the role of reason is completely clueless that emotion is invisibly pushing their rational thinking along. Take a moment to consider something using a reason/rational approach. Do you have something in mind. Maybe it's something that people have questioned. Why do you fold clothes the way you do? Why do you put your coffee in the cup before the cream and sugar? Why do you have a hard time trusting people?

You can explain why you do things the way you do. This may come from your past experience. That's reasonable. Yet it fails to recognize that you're doing something differently because you were hurt, someone told you that idea is stupid so you don't want to feel shame. There are a multitude of emotions behind our reasons for why we do things. To ignore what drives why we do what we do (reasons), we will have a hard time understanding that reason is just as subjective and changeable as our emotions.

In communications, ignore emotions at your own peril. Why? Because feeling things is a fundamental part of the human experience and communication is a primary way we feel them.