Here’s why it’s important to know your audience when you’re presenting: expertise without empathy is just noise. Wise words from Matt Church.
In this post, I’m going to share a zero-prep way to know your audience. No needs assessment required, no surveys, no focus groups, no effort.
What I Learned from 10 Years of Presenting
Over the last 10 years, I’ve given over a thousand presentations to groups. For the first about 10,000 people I spoke to, I used to send out a needs assessment so that I could properly know my audience.
The needs assessment had two questions.
Two Questions to Understand Your Audience
- In one word or phrase, “what is a work-related challenge or problem that keeps you up at night?”
- Then the second question in the survey tool that I would use took their answer to question number one and asked, “What is the root underlying cause of blank?”
I would take their responses to number one and turn them into a word cloud. It was all over the place.
Then I would take the responses to question number two, “What is the root underlying cause of this problem?” and turn that into a word cloud.
Every single word cloud, no matter what group or what industry, had one word that showed up the largest. It was the word lack.
The Common Root Cause: “Lack”
The root of their challenges were: a lack of time, a lack of resources, a lack of accountability, a lack of communication, a lack of respect. Lack, lack, lack, lack, lack.
When you look up the root of the word lack, it has connotations around blame. To blame. So a lack of respect? It wasn’t them disrespecting, right? It was somebody else.
It’s always somebody else’s fault.
Why This Matters for Icebreakers for Meetings and Presentations
Why does all this matter?
Here’s how to empathize with your audience and relate to them with no prep, no effort, and without sending out any needs assessments. Just know that every single group has one word showing up the biggest for them as far as the root core of their challenge or problem, and that word is lack.
If you can speak to that and relate to it, you immediately gain this empathy with people.
Expertise Without Empathy Is Rude
I would take Matt Church’s words a little further, and I would say that expertise without empathy is actually rude.
If you go in and you’re giving your five ideas to fix whatever, but you have no deeply spoken empathy for all of the lack, the lack of respect, the lack of communication, the lack of funds, the lack of time that people are up against, you’re not going to reach them.
Turn a One-Way Presentation Into a Conversation
Now, if you really want to take your empathy to the next level, the art to master is turning every one-way presentation into this dynamic back-and-forth conversation, where you’re not only empathizing with an audience beforehand, you’re empathizing with them all the way along while you’re with them.
The method that I use to do that when I walk into any room, I call The Contribution Method.
If you’re wanting to move toward more dynamic presentations that also happen to cut your prep in half and double your impact, you can download this free field guide that I created. It’s a really robust, step-by-step process for how you would design a presentation to have maximum empathy so your expertise can actually reach people. You can grab it along with other free resources by just registering your interest in The Contribution Method.
I’m Chad Littlefield. I get the weird job of doing this for a living. Have an awesome day.
Don’t want to wait for The Contribution Method Masterclass in the spring? Join me at the Connectors Summit which I host online every December.
