How to Improve Your Convincing Presentation Skills (Using Pathos)
How can you triple your convincing power — even from your comfy couch? If you want to improve your convincing presentation skills, clear content alone is not enough. You need to move your audience.
What is Pathos and Why It Matters
One of the most powerful ways to do that is by using pathos — a concept that goes back over 2,500 years to Aristotle. Pathos is about making your message tangible, concrete and emotionally engaging. In other words: it needs to touch your audience. It needs to come close, become vivid and truly move people.
There are several ways to do that, but a common way of doing it, is to include and describe the situation/problem in a way that it appeals to the senses. The audience can feel and see and understand that this is something that needs to be solved.
Method 1: Painting the Problem
Instead of saying I am going to talk about the alternatives of anti-biotics and then immediately jump into the subject matter. You are more convincing if you include the WHY of the topic and explain and describe the problem and its consequences.
Building the problem layer by layer
So, “painting the problem”, layer by layer.
Do you know that anti-biotics within 10 years will no longer work? That we will go back to the level of 1939 in this respect. That is 80 years back in development. Not to mention the diseases that we will no longer be able to cure anymore.
That is why today I want to talk about alternatives. New promising ways that will prove….
So, you build the problem step by step, making the consequences clear, until you can reveal your topic in one decisive moment — like a magician pulling away the cloth in one go.
With first talking about the WHY, you figuratively speaking put what you want to talk about on a silver platter and hold it up in front of your audience.
Method 2: Starting with Desire
Another way to add PATHOS is using the other angle. Cause, as you know a coin has got two sides. So, I could also do it the other way round.
I could say, I want to talk about the new software program, called Invention II and then immediately jump into the subject matter.
Or I could start with:
Inviting your audience to imagine
Imagine or how would it be if within one year we would have christal clear budgeting reports. That with one push on the button we would know our stock, we would know our cash flow.
Can you imagine what that would mean for our flexibility as a company and how quickly we could react on particular situations like….? Today I want to present to you the software system Invention II and why I believe this is the right system and reveal to you what it could mean for us as a company.
So, now I do not describe the problem and its consequences, but what could be, the desire, the longing as a start and its positive consequences.
Notice, that with the way I start, “Imagine” (seeing it) or “How would it be” (feeling it), I invite the audience actively to use their senses and go with me into this “future reality”, namely, to see and feel it.
Two Ways to Move and Convince Your Audience
All in all, two good ways to MOVE your audience and CONVINCE them.
Want to Learn More?
If you want to take your convincing presentation skills further and learn how to truly move an audience, you can read more about my trainings here.
If you want to take your convincing presentation skills further and learn how to truly move an audience, you can read more about my trainings here.