Inspiring Action with Effective Communication Skills

SpeakingOfWealth.comAt some point in your personal or professional life, there’s a good chance you’ll be called upon to motivate or inspire either a specific person or a team to accomplish a goal. As speakers, writers, and publishers, we focus on effective communication skills, but to what end? Our communication should have a goal of producing action on the part of the message’s recipient. The topic might seem nebulous at first. Where does communication begin and where does it end? Here’s a five step way of thinking about effective communication intended to motivate a response.

Get their attention
Without the attention of the audience, you might as well be speaking gibberish. There are tried and true ways to go about it. We suggest you refrain from bopping them in the head with a ruler until you’ve tried such alternate approaches like humor, a story, a shocking statistic. Pretty much anything short of physical violence works to get the intended audience to sit up and take notice.

Establish need
You’ve got their attention, now what? To keep them listening, you must establish that there is a problem. A problem that affects them personally. Don’t blow past this stage and straight into problem-solving mode. Take a moment to make them uncomfortable with a detailed description of how bad their lives will be if the problem is allowed to continue.

Solution time
Your audience should now feel like the world is coming to an end if this insurmountable state of existence continues a single second longer. Luckily, you’ve got a solution and now is the time to present it. Be ready for objections and have appropriate rebuttals handy. Insure everyone is keeping up frequently summarizing.

Visualize the future
You have three methods of going about this step: positive, negative, and contrast. A positive visualization describes what life will be like if your solution is adopted and the problem disappears. A negative visualization takes the opposite approach, providing a stark portrayal of the unwanted results if the solution is not implemented. A contrast approach first describes the negative, then proceeds to the positive.

At that point, if you’ve done your job of effective communication, all that’s left is to leave the audience with a specific action or set of actions to do. That’s it. See how simple it really is?

The Speaking of Wealth Team

SpeakingOfWealth.com

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