Develop Ideas for Communication

Persuasive communication is any message that shapes, reinforces or changes the responses of another or others.

We are much more aware today of persuasion techniques and spin. When used inappropriately, persuasion could be getting people to do or buy things they do not really need. But most people quite quickly realise that this was not the best outcome for them. When they have this insight, trust is lost.

Do the people targeted trust you or want to buy from you again? In marketing terms, this feeling of being taken advantage of and not trusting the person who persuaded you is called buyer's remorse.

The preferred approach is to take the time to reduce any uncertainty before encouraging others to act or decide. When this approach of inclusion and listening is taken, you can use persuasion techniques in an open way without breaking trust and creating buyer’s remorse.

Persuasion

• True persuasion is a win-win approach that helps others see different views and perspectives so they come to a different point of view or decision. It is not about win-lose, spin, forcing or using deceptive tactics.

Persuasive communication gets people’s attention and engagement. It sends an effective message to them, and they become interested in participating in the communication. Effective persuasive communication addresses the audience’s needs, values, desires and goals. So, to be persuasive, you must be able to listen so that the other person feels heard. It is much more difficult to be persuasive if the other person(s) believe you do not listen to their view.

Persuasion and influence go hand-in-hand. As described by communication advisor Nicole DeFalco, ‘If persuasion is the hammer, you pull out the moment you see a nail, influence is the apprenticeship and training you go through long before you attempt to build a house.’

As you build and nurture relationships, your influence grows. The end result of building relationships and displaying actions, behaviours, and intentions that add value is trust. Persuasion is using an approach or technique that encourages a person(s) to an action or decision.

People who are most open to persuasion are the people who have trust in the persuader. As DeFalco explains, ‘When trust is present, influence increases and persuasion is positive’.

Highly Persuasive Professionals

1. Listen actively
2. Asks effective questions
3. Encourage others to talk
4. Connect with others
5. Show passion
6. Genuine
7. Invest in others
8. Use clear and concise communication
9. Leave a good first impression
10. Use positive body language

Persuasive Communication: Techniques

Consider the following techniques to improve your persuasive communication:

Read

The following research by Lin et al. highlights some interesting findings about the impact of oxytocin on the influence of public service advertisements: ‘Oxytocin Increases the Influence of Public Service Advertisements’

Oxytocin Increases the Influence of Public Service Advertisements | PLOS ONE

Persuasion Tips

Use the following tips to further enhance your persuasive communication abilities:

• Be brief
• Pause for emphasis and invite approval or applause through a slight delay
• Use contrasting pairs (compare one thing to another)
• Use passages that are similar in length and grammatical structure
• Avoid reading from a script or notes
• Use humour when appropriate
• Use simple, declarative statements.

The specific context, communication method and topic of your idea will impact the persuasion and influence techniques you will use. A 20-minute presentation at a leadership meeting is a very different situation to a two-month community consultation process. So, depending on your situation, you will need to adjust which and how you use these techniques to advocate your idea.

To persuade and influence, you first need to engage with others. A clear sign of engagement is getting input from your audience.

If you are not getting any responses from your audience, it is a sign you have lost their attention and you are not articulating clearly or influencing.

Techniques to provoke and encourage responses include:

• Ask direct questions
• Provide both your view and an opposing point of view, to encourage a response
• Run activities to draw out opinions
• Give a specific example of a situation and get participants to discuss perspectives and possibilities
• Ask a member(s) of the group to share their thoughts
• Provide a question-and-answer session or online survey

It is important to listen and acknowledge everyone who does respond and contributes. The most effective way to get more responses is to show you value the input.

Listen intently and summarise what you heard. Ask clarifying questions and thank the person for their contribution. You then must explain and show how you have or will consider their input regarding the topic and purpose.

When you have time, it is more effective to say you want to think through the responses you received to give them the full attention they deserve.

This works better than giving quick answers on the spot. Quick answers can come across as dismissive. When you are perceived as dismissive, people will view your communication as less articulate.

There are many ways that people communicate and even more ways to miscommunicate a key message.

Challenges to clearly articulating your message and being able to answer questions or debate different perspectives can usually be categorised in one of four areas: Delivery, Content, Emotional and Physical.

There will always be challenges to advocating, presenting and debating your idea. A major part of being effective with your communication is identifying what the challenges will be and planning how you reduce the impact or overcome the challenges. Below is an outline of challenges and how you can approach mitigating them.

Delivery

How you deliver the message makes a bigger difference than the actual words you use. When communicating in person or on video, body language has a big impact on engagement, understanding and trust.

Here are some aspects to consider:

• Lack of eye contact—may raise doubts in listeners; loses their attention
• Standing completely still like a statue—feels robotic and not genuine
• Moving fast and constantly—distracting, perceived as nervous or not genuine
• Looking down—perceived as lacking confidence in your idea

Tone

Tone of voice can make a big difference in how your message is received:

• Same mono-tone—makes it very hard to keep listening and to know what is important
• Talking very slowly—hard to listen to; seen as lacking belief in your idea
• Talking fast all through—hard to understand; appears as nervous or not genuine
• Talking softly—difficult to listen to; seen as lacking belief in your idea
• Talking loudly— all through can feel like your idea is being forced on them.

Further, reading from a script, notes or PowerPoint slides can lead to the audience feeling bored and feeling uncertain if you know the topic. Not knowing relevant facts comes from lack of preparation and they will not believe you. If you talk too much when answering questions, you cannot listen to questions and discussions in the room properly; this will you hinder your efforts to persuade the audience.

Also keep in mind that if you try too hard to persuade, you may seem desperate. Trying or pushing too hard feels like manipulation and turns people off. Conversely, if you lack enthusiasm and do not believe in your position, product, service or topic, the audience will not believe in it either.

Physical challenges to communication

• Remote working
  • People working from home or from many different locations or offices. You maybe be able to use video conferencing like Zoom, which is better than a phone conference because you can see people in a limited view, but less effective than in person.
• Time zones
  • People may be in different time zones, which may impact on how well they are able to concentrate depending on the time and location. 2. Develop Ideas for Communication BSBCRT412 Articulate, present and debate ideas 21
• Background noise
  • This is very distracting and will make it much more difficult to be persuasive. Plan and prepare where and how you will communicate to avoid all possible background noise.
• Poor or malfunctioning equipment
  • Test, test and test again to make sure that equipment such as microphones and speakers or software such as video conferencing applications are operational.

Further, you or some of your audience may have impaired hearing or eyesight, or speech impediments. Consider how this might impact others and develop an approach to minimise the impact.

Emotions and Communication

Our emotions have a strong impact on our behaviour and communication. Most people are nervous about presenting to others. Some are very anxious.

This may happen when doing any presentation, or it may be worse depending on the audience, such as high-level management. Reflect on how you feel in different presentation situations. Make sure you have several techniques and tools to manage your emotions before and during the presentation.

Simple yet effective techniques include slow breathing, pausing and asking a question (to give you time to think or breathe).

The audience may ask you difficult questions. It is important to stay calm and show respect to the audience, no matter what they are doing or saying. 

It is natural to feel defensive when someone challenges us or is unfair. Be aware of this so you stay respectful. If you show signs of being defensive or aggressive, your audience will mirror these reactions.

Respond Rather than React

Sometimes we are faced with situations where we react negatively, and that can cause a domino effect with the other people involved. It is a natural human repose to attempt to defend yourself and for the others to defend themselves. There may also be a loss trust or respect for you. When your emotions take over and you react before really thinking, it often makes matters worse.

When any situation occurs that gets you worked up and creates intense emotions, aim to recognise your emotions are heightened as quickly as possible.

• Then take some time-out: Take a few deep breaths, go for a walk and slowly think through the situation.
• See it from the other person’s perspective, put yourself in their shoes and seek to understand what they said or did.
• Reflect on the medium that they used to communicate—text messages or emails and can easily be misinterpreted.

When you take some time to reflect rather than reacting immediately, you can help diffuse a situation and ensure it is less likely to escalate.

Content

Make sure the content is clearly about the topic and relevant to achieving the purpose.

You should:

• State the purpose to check that everybody understands what you are all aiming to achieve
• Be specific with details and examples • Use stories and anecdotes that paint a picture so anyone in the audience can understand
• Avoid using slang or jargon and do not assume the audience will understand your organisation’s or industry terminology
• Avoid giving too much information; overwhelming them with details may lead to a perception you are avoiding a particular topic.

Communication Styles

Everyone wants to be treated fairly, yet people do not want to be treated the same. Everyone has their own identity and is unique in their own way. People want what suits them best in their specific situation, and circumstances and for their personality and experience.

Therefore, working with a mix of personalities and communication styles requires understanding others and adapting to suit their style.

It is important to ensure that everyone feels they are treated fairly. The best way to find out a person’s communication style is to listen to them. Like in any relationship, it takes time.

When you make an effort to get to know someone, then you can pick up on their individual cues that give you a greater understanding of them and what they are truly saying.

Using a personality profile tool such as DISC or Myers Briggs (MBTI) can make it much easier to identify the different styles. Observing how people react and respond, especially in a professional environment, can help guide your communication.

Assuming Your Message is Understood

There is a lot going on in your head and in the head of the people you are communicating with. It can be easy for a message to be misinterpreted when you assume that everyone understands what you are talking about.

Often these assumptions happen without us realising it. Body language is another key aspect of how people will interpret (or misinterpret) what you are saying. Your tone or expressions could leave them feeling stressed or confused, possibly bringing tension to the workplace.

Alternatively, your body language—such as a soft voice, looking down and stooped shoulders—could inadvertently convey that your message is not important.

Improve your self-awareness about how your message is being received by learning about your personal communication style. Seek to understand how it relates to and impacts others. Practice a presentation in front of a supportive friend or colleague and get them to ask questions or clarify certain points and give you feedback.

You have an idea. You have an audience. You have assessed the challenges of advocating your idea. Now it is time to create the final version of the content. Here are some of the main steps to create your content.

Outline the scope of the presentation or communication:

• Brainstorm the topic or scope with relevant people
• Research and collect specific data, evidence, examples and stories
• Draft a structure for the presentation or communication.

Determine a structure, based on the purpose of the presentation:

• Determine key messages and required sections
• Draft key points for each section
• Suggest ideas for images, videos and stories
• Prepare a high-level outline for review and input.

Presentation structure

• Greet the audience and introduce yourself
• State the purpose of the presentation
• Outline the issue or challenge that your idea addresses and give a little teaser information about your idea to make the audience curious
• Paint a picture of the outcome when the idea has been implemented
• Use specific examples and stories to support what you have been saying
• Monitor your audience—use eye contact to check
• Call to action—something straightforward you want the audience to do that will help the solution
• Summarise and conclude.

To really enhance your preparation and take your presentation to the next level:

• Practice telling stories—in front of a mirror; to friends
• Practice the presentation so it comes as naturally as a conversation with a friend
• Practice the presentation so the timing is perfect
• Research the audience and find out what is most likely to connect with the audience— make the story relatable
• Research what the right amount of detail is and ways that you can provide more detail if some of the audience wants it.

Watch

Here is a short video by Jason Costa that is an example of a persuasive presentation with tips throughout on the topic of smoking and cancer: ‘Sample Persuasive Presentation’

Quiz