Connect with Audiences in an Authentic Way

As NFL teams settle into training camps and another season fast approaches, I find myself looking back, not at the highlights or the broadcasts, but the moments, the moments that linger so many years later.

On the wall in my loft is a photograph that captured one of those moments forty years ago. I was a young reporter for a TV station in Miami covering the Dolphins. My dad was a 60-year-old, veteran offensive line coach. And my mom was in the hospital, dying of cancer. The old black and white photo captured my dad and me sitting on the bench at the Orange Bowl a few hours before the Dolphins played the Jets.

It was our ritual. Before pre-game warmups began and the pace of game day kicked in, my dad and I would sit on the bench, just the two of us and catch up, sometimes we would talk about our week. Sometimes we would talk about our jobs. He was excited to see me beginning my career in broadcasting and would ask me what I learned that week, what I was struggling with, what I was enjoying. We talked about our worries about Mom. I would visit her in the late morning before I went to work. He would visit her at night after work. We would compare notes and observations.

The doctors hadn’t told my dad she had cancer yet, but I could tell he suspected the worst when he stopped sharing his observations with me. I’m sure he didn’t want to add to my concerns.

As I look back on that photo now, I see my dad sitting looking off in the distance, his big arms folded across his chest. A look of worry lingers behind his glasses. I’m sitting next to him, also staring off in the distance. Sometimes we would just sit there together, not saying a word, not having to say a word.

What strikes me is I am now older than my father was in that photo. Only now do I fully see the man in that picture. He was carrying the weight of the world on his massive shoulders, and he wanted to limit my exposure to the pain he knew was heading our way.

A month after that photo was taken my mom would die and I would see my father cry for only the second time in my life. He cried when my brother died. He cried when my mother died. The rest he carried inside, not because he preferred to but because he didn’t want his pain to add to mine. I used to think of his strength as physical—after all, we called him Big John. But I see now how much of his strength was emotional. I see now how amazingly unselfish he was.

A few years later my dad would remarry. I would move away, and the brief intersection of his career and my career would slip behind us. But to this day, before every game I broadcast, I walk on the field, look at the bench and think about sitting there with my dad and how special that time was.

We can’t fully appreciate the power in other people until we learn to see life through their eyes and from their perspective. And when we make the effort to do that it invariably changes what we see through our eyes as it reshapes our perspective.

I’ve shared that story with different audiences over the years and every time I do, people will come up to me afterward and share with me special rituals they had with their dad. At first, I didn’t fully understand the power of what was happening, but now I do.

When we share a story, especially a story that puts us in a vulnerable position, it connects with the audience members because they relate to a similar feeling that they have had in their lives.

Not everyone will understand the nuances of what you do for a living. Not everyone can relate to what you do for a living or who they think you are. But everyone you talk to; everyone you make a presentation to has or has had a father and a mother (even if they didn’t know them).

When you tell people a story about your dad, like I did, others start to think about their dad, and that creates a powerful connection between you and your audience, a point of emotional commonality.

I call it the emotional superhighway. Once you make an emotional connection, your audience will volunteer to follow you to whatever intellectual information or skill set you want to share with them. The key is making the emotional connection first.

PowerPoint can’t do that (and I’m not anti-PowerPoint). Data and facts alone can’t do that (and data and facts play an important role in presentations). Only storytelling can do that.

Storytelling is the key that unlocks how people see each other and brings them together so they can have greater influence with each other. I call that Invisible Influence. Now that I’m older than my father was in that picture, I’ve seen enough of life to realize Invisible Influence is the best kind because it creates a connection first before we ever try to get people to learn something from us, so something for us, or take advice from us.

If you would like to learn how to take the unique experiences of your life and bring them to life in a way that will massively increase your influence over audiences of all sizes, feel free to check out our storytelling seminar called Invisible Influence.

You’ll find the link here: https://www.sanduskygroup.com/Invisible_Influence

And whether you check out that link or not, I hope you’ll take a minute today to think about an experience you shared with your dad or mom and how that experience continues to shape who you are and who you are becoming.

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