Use Emotion to Persuade Your Listeners

This week, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published an amazing piece about a recent discovery in human brain activity. The findings contain information that anyone who gives speeches and presentations had better pay attention to.

Scientists have recorded "the gentle flicker of activity that lights up the brain" when we form our first impressions of someone. Volunteers underwent brain scans while forming opinions of people, and activity was recorded in two specific regions: the amygdala and posterior cingulate cortex. The scientific labels aren't important. But the findings are highly significant with regard to public speaking. They remind us that audiences make judgments about us within the first 30 seconds of our presentations. And those judgments attach not only to us, but to our message and the people and organization we represent as well.

"Okay," I hear you saying, "so ancient brain circuits in our listeners light up when we give a speech. So what?" It may sound like news from the Cro-Magnon equivalent of Twitter, yet it has enormous implications for how we persuade our listeners.

We all know that human beings make critical decisions at a gut level, then justify those decisions with logic. "Gut level" equals emotions. That means that unless we're speaking to audiences in emotional as well as intellectual terms, our persuasiveness will have a great gaping hole in the middle.

To understand why, let's take another look at the human brain. The earliest part of the brain to evolve was the brain stem, where basic functions like breathing and heart rate reside. Next came the limbic system--the seat of our emotions. Last to develop in evolutionary terms was the prefrontal cortex, the region in our brains where complex logical thinking occurs. Think about that (and feel its power): our emotional brain came first--followed by our thinking brain.

The emotional brain and the thinking brain not only share beliefs, judgments, and feelings, then--there are actually anatomical links between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. So the thought that "business is business," and we shouldn't get all emotional about it, is exactly the wrong kind of thinking if persuasion is your ultimate goal.

To put all of this most simply: audiences use their emotions to receive what we say, to judge whether it's true, and critically, to decide about how to respond to it. The conclusion is inescapable: We had better give emotions a front seat when we're driving our essential messages home.

Do so, and your listeners will judge you all the more positively--not only for the honest self you're showing them, but for the emotional and entirely human approach you're sharing with them.