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The Formula: Bring Your Message Home

by Sherry Prindle

 You have great content that can really help your audience; you deliver it with finesse and variety, you build in specific, written action steps. This happens all day, but when you see their feedback, it is clear they don’t get it.

I trained a corporate efficiency expert who took her message from company to company only to get a response that she was impractical, that they couldn’t implement what she said, and that it wasn’t relevant to them.

She did the logical thing and worked to improve her content to address those issues. It was indeed relevant, practical, and easy to implement—but they still weren’t getting it.

At Fred Pryor Seminars where I train all the new speakers through their Professional Speaker Certification program Lynn, a talented and ambitious speaker came to re-certify. Her problem was similar—she felt she was giving her audiences great content, but they accused her of being an “infomercial.” She kept beefing up her content; she hired a coach to observe her classes and help her determine what was missing—he found nothing and agreed she had abundant, useful content.

When she showed up at my class we did an exercise where we take a point and ask “So What” until we get to the point where it is really relevant to the listener. The exercise simply pairs people up and has one trying to “sell” the other an item in their immediate vicinity. The listener simply says “So What” until the seller says something that is truly meaningful. It takes a long time to get to something meaningful, and the people in the seller role realize how much they are speaking from their point of view and how ineffective that is. It is much like differentiating features and benefits in sales. This exercise gave Lynn her epiphany: “I’m not giving them the ‘So What’!” Realizing how important this point was and how often it was happening, I expanded the “So What” message into the exact steps needed to create practical impact.

Having a natural talent for finding the common thread, I pooled the notes I had taken at hundreds of workshops and identified a formula that was common to all successful speakers. I have been teaching this formula for three years to the delight of speakers who were not sure what they are missing. The formula is as follows: 

1.  Identify a Need

2.  Deepen into Pain

3.  Offer Permission (not to struggle)

4.  Get Commitment (or at least investment)

5.  Meet the Need (teaching point or solution)

6.  Anticipate Impact (So What?)

7.  Call to Larger Action

Formula Application – Have multiple ways of conveying each idea so this formula is undetected

1.     Identify the need or pain (What they struggle with)

 If a question comes up, that is a great opportunity to implement step one by asking the whole audience how many of them have had the same struggle. You can easily ask questions like, “How many of you have . . .” or “Have you ever . . .” Sometimes you want an answer, sometimes you are being rhetorical, but make sure and give more than one example to make sure the whole audience can relate. 

2.     Deepen the pain (How does that make you feel?)

Humans are infinitely adaptable. We cannot stay uncomfortable for too long; we adapt and build mechanisms for feeling comfortable even in horrendous situations. So many people are sleeping on a bed of nails and do not realize it. 

3.     Offer Permission (Not to keep struggling)

We are conditioned to be “tough,” so a little pain is not enough to motivate us to action. Helping people see they don’t need to struggle and getting them to imagine what life would be like without the struggle is an important step in the motivation process. 

4.     Get Commitment or Investment (Effort/Sacrifice)

Information does not produce results. The information has to be backed up by motivation, which comes from two things: pain and pleasure. Humans are motivated to move away from pain and toward pleasure. Until the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of change, we tend to stay the same. Getting commitment means they are asked to consider what they would be willing to do to make the solution happen. “If I showed you how to. . . . would you be willing to . . . to put it into practice?” “Is that something that would help?” (gets them begging for the information) 

5.     Meet the Need (Teaching point/Solution)

This is the content you set out to give them. 

6.     Impact/Benefit(Get the “so what”) How will that help you . . .?”

7.         Call to Larger Action (This is great but only the beginning)

Here you bring home why you wanted to share this in the first place or take the opportunity to solicit actions like sales of books and resources or recommending future business.

April Fool’s Day Tricks You Can Play Using Microsoft Office

Dollars and cents, classes I’ve taught, beers, songs heard or sung, friends, fights, footsteps, tears? Do I measure life in days, relationships, blog posts, or trivia games? Like the cliche, is it breaths or moments that take our breath away? TV shows, cups of coffee, pounds gained or lost are things we tend to measure along with completed tasks, life achievements, and possessions.

Tomorrow, try to measure the things that make up life. Make a checklist, tally, or pie chart. Look at it at the end of the day, and see if it paints an adequate or accurate picture–then respond–what do you measure life in?

Why do we walk all over the nice people and give difficult people their way? I would love to hear your stories about difficult people.

I attended a difficult people seminar today taught by a top trainer. The woman next to me wanted to know what to do about an apathetic co-worker. The problem is that if there are no consequences for their actions, the behavior is enabled. I am collecting stories for an upcoming book. Please post your experiences where slackers are getting away with it.

Well, it is cold but nice here. They rented me a Smart Car! The hotel overlooks the river and I have 10 people registered to become life and executive coaches through the Certified Coaches Federation. The restaurant on the roof rotates, so I can see the lovely city, and I met the chef at a different restrurant last night where Amaratto DiSaronno was giving away drinks.

The Five Love Languages Gary Chapman identifies in his book of the same name are: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch.

In my failed relationship, my love language was Acts of Service (doing all the things that would make the week easier) while his was Quality Time (I traveled for my work and was only home on weekends). The scenario would have played out better if we had understood this. In retrospect, I realize he wanted me to put the mail and the groceries down and sit with him. I wanted him to change the oil in my car and take care of a few things while I was gone. We interpreted one another’s actions as a lack of love. We both were showing love the best we knew how, we just weren’t doing it in a language the other could understand.