Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences

Ideas are not really alive if they are confined to only one person’s mind.

The audience does not need to tune themselves to you—you need to tune your message to them. Skilled presenting requires you to understand their hearts and minds and create a message to resonate with what’s already there.

The enemy of persuasion is obscurity.

Your ability to shape your future depends on how well you communicate where you want to be when you get there.

Gussying up slides that have meaningless content is like putting lipstick in a pig.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” George Bernard Shaw

Getting ahead of the next curve requires courage and communication: Courage to determine the next bold move, and communication to keep the troops committed to the value of moving forward. Rallying stakeholders to move together in a common course of action is all part of the innovation and survival process. Leaders at every level in an organization need to be skillful at creating resonance if that organization is to control its own destiny.

Your presentation proposes an idea, and you’re asking the audience to adopt and shepherd that idea to positive outcomes. Your idea might be to reshape an organization for the future or to show customers how your product will fill a need they have.

You are not the hero who will save the audience; the audience is your hero.

Currently, emotion is a powerful driver of consumer behavior, but it didn’t used to be. Before the 1900s, people rarely expressed emotion publicly; it was not socially acceptable to discuss feelings or desires. Products developed were solely marketed as items of necessity, not items of desire. As PR and advertising became prevalent, companies began to compete based on consumer desire and not necessarily consumer need. Suddenly, irrelevant objects became powerful symbols of status. Today, appealing to emotion is commonplace. Ads can make us laugh or cry, feel sexy or feel guilty. A full range of emotions can be felt during one thirty-minute television show.

Don’t blend in; instead, clash with your environment. Stand out. Be uniquely different. That’s what will draw attention to your ideas.

It’s the presenter’s job to know and tune into the audience’s frequency. Your message should resonate with what’s already inside them.

We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.

It has been said that ‘without hope the people perish.’ And without hearing powerful and timely words of encouragement, the people may never find cause for hope.

Mentors are selfless and think of themselves in the context of others.

Personal values will ultimately drive their behavior, so ideally you should identify and align with existing values.