Aristotle said that there are 3 ways to really engage and persuade your audience. The first is logos—the use of logic and facts. The second is ethos—the use of credibility and charisma. The third is pathos—the use of emotional appeals. While all 3 work together to create a balanced presentation, today we’ll be zooming in on pathos. We strongly believe that increasing your emotional intelligence and vocabulary will make you a better speaker.
Why Emotions Are So Important
When you use emotional appeals in your presentation, you tap into the power of pathos. Emotions are the connective threads that tie us together. So if you include a story about someone who your listeners relate to in your presentation, it will impact them in ways that statistics can’t.
Emotions also help to highlight what’s important. A large body of scientific research has proven that we remember information that is connected to emotional responses. The memories you have are usually highlighted not because they are particularly interesting or informative, but because they made you feel a certain way.
Emotions also keep your audience engaged and entertained. The most boring presentations out there are those are jam-packed with logos. Audience members need emotions to break up, cushion, and enhance the learning process.
Increasing Your Emotional Vocabulary
One of the easiest and quickest ways to become more emotionally intelligent is to increase your emotional vocabulary. We not only need to talk more often about emotions; we also need to talk more skillfully about them. So I want to introduce you to a tool that can help us do just that.
The Gottman Institute has been a leader in relational research for a long time. But their resources expand beyond creating happy, healthy relationships. Their research can help us become better humans, and in turn, better public speakers. Their feeling wheel can help us dig into emotions and can give us better labels for naming them. Check it out.
On the inner circle, you see the emotional labels we normally use: words like “sad” and “mad.” But then each of these terms is broken down into 12 more related emotions that might give us more accurate descriptions of what we are feeling, like “jealous” or “hurt.”
3 Benefits of Emotional Intelligence
The benefits of having a better emotional vocabulary are endless. But we want to highlight just a couple that have to do with presenting.
1. Personal Benefits: When you have feelings that come up before, during, or after your presentations, you’ll be better able to label them. And this helps you to better understand them. For example, if you finish a presentation and feel good about how you performed, you can use the wheel to help clarify what you are feeling. Instead of just saying, “I feel good about how my presentation went,” you can say, “I felt confident, important, and respected after my presentation.”
2. Relational Benefits: Once you are better able to understand your own emotions, you’ll be better able to understand others’ emotional responses too. If you can help others begin to understand and name what they are feeling, it will increase your emotional bond with them, leading to stronger relationships.
3. Professional Benefits: When you are presenting, you can demonstrate your emotional intelligence by highlighting the complex nature of human emotions. You can use a strong emotional vocabulary. When you do, it will allow the audience to identify more closely with the specific emotions you address and the information you present.
Using Your Emotional Intelligence in a Presentation
Say, for example, you have to give a presentation that covers a new company policy for personal time off. The facts and guidelines are going to be pretty cut and dry. They’d be easy to communicate without any reference to emotion. However, it benefits everyone involved if you are honest and open in addressing the inevitable emotions this policy change will evoke. This is where the feeling wheel comes into play. Before your presentation, look at all the emotional labels and see if you can identify how many of them your audience might be feeling. Then, reference them during your presentation. You might say, “I know some of you might feel frustrated or confused about this change. Let me address those feelings as best I can.”
Using emotions in your presentations doesn’t mean you turn your message into sappy mush. It just means you present the human experience more fully and more accurately. And in doing so, you give better, more emotionally intelligent presentations.
At Ethos3, we help people just like you develop, design, and deliver great presentations. Find out more now.
