Emotion makes people remember your message

At the end of my presentation skills courses, I always ask the participants to list at least three insights from the course and three actions they’re going to take.

In a course last week, around seventy percent of the group said that the main insight for them was the importance of including some emotional appeal in their presentations to make the audience remember a message.

What might surprise you is that the group I was training were all software engineers, usually a rationally-minded type of profile, but they all made a commitment to give serious consideration to how they were going to get more emotion into their presentations in future.

Here are some things to think about.

When we’re presenting we can show emotion and we can speak emotion.

To show emotion think about the following:

Use body language – if presenting face to face, move closer to the audience at different moments of your presentation and use lots of gestures.

Vary the tone of your voice and speak with conviction and passion. At the same time, make sure you use a variety of facial expressions – smiles, slight frowns, surprise etc.

To speak emotion, consider:

Top of the list has to be a story, and if it’s a personal story about a challenge you faced and overcame, even better. Use visually engaging and dynamic language to tell your story. My group last week ended up being sold on the power of a good story as they experienced the impact that their colleagues’ presentation stories had on them.

Where can you include a photo in your slide deck to evoke emotion? Can you find a photo of people doing something related to your presentation topic/theme with facial expressions that match the feeling that you as the presenter are trying to convey in that moment of your presentation?

And we can’t forget about humour or wit. I’m not talking about telling jokes here, that’s too risky. But is there a moment in your presentation where you can be light-hearted? Or where you can introduce some self-deprecating humour without damaging your reputation? For example, commenting on how bad your procrastination can be (we can all relate to that one!)

Remember, your audience, whatever role or position they occupy, are human beings made up of emotions. But appealing to emotions, however subtly, often gets overlooked in business presentations. That’s a mistake.

At the end of the day, to get an audience to act on your presentation message, they have to REMEMBER that message first. And there’s nothing like touching people’s emotions to create memorability.

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