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Excerpt
Sean:
I’m cheating a little bit when I ask you this question because this is a hypothetical one. I want to ask you what is more important, leaving a lasting emotion to your audience or a lasting actionable lesson? Now, I know both are important, but if you were to choose one of them, lasting emotion or lasting actionable lesson, what would it be?
Brenden:
My thinking is definitely the emotion. Let me explain why. At the end of the day, as a speaker, whether you’re speaking for a day, like in a workshop, whether you’re speaking for an hour, 30 minutes, two hours, whatever the length is, you cannot teach them everything. That’s just the reality of the situation. Not because you don’t add value, not because you stink, but because you don’t have enough time.
So how do you get them to do the work? The only way to get them to do the work is to make sure that they felt something from listening to you. It goes back to the whole content versus delivery. A lot of people ask me that and the answers for sure delivery, but it’s not even close. And I’ll explain why, think about all of your high school teachers, think of all of your college teachers. They’re all really smart people. How much do we actually remember from their presentations?
At the end of the day. Best case scenario. If you’re the best speaker in the world, best speakers like the top 1%, people are going to remember one, maybe two things. So if they remember the emotion – how you made them feel in that presentation. They will follow up with you. They’ll buy your programs, they’ll buy your services. They’ll watch your consulting, they’ll watch your free YouTube videos. They will follow up. And if you suck, they won’t. So I would focus a lot more on the emotion than the action because if they feel the emotion, they’ll ask you what the action is. They’ll go, Sean. You’re awesome. What’s the action? And the same way with me.
A lot of my competitors are really dry with communication. They go, “Oh, focus on silence”. As I’m saying, I’m like, I know. That’s not what’s going to get people to take action. What gets people to take action is by bringing that emotion, that drive, that passion, what we do, explaining why we do it, how we do it, and more importantly, giving them that small, quick win that convinces them how to speak and why they should speak.
Let me add a bit more layer there – never focus on the emotion at the beginning. If you’re a beginner speaker, why am I saying that? Because if you’ve only practiced your talk two or three times, the emotion will never come out. Let me explain why. The reason is because you still haven’t mastered your content. Let’s say you have a teacher presenting a subject. They’re not really thinking about how to make this better for their audience. It just stalemates. You can’t like put a joke in there and expect it’s going to change.
What happens is you transition from logic to emotion. I realized that it wasn’t about accomplishments. It was about selling the emotion . And then I transferred, but you need to present the same presentation to transfer from logic to emotion, or you’ll never get there.
