Adam Markel gives a brief speaker tip about harmonizing intellect (head) and emotion (heart) when communicating. He argues that extremes—speaking only from logic or only from passion—both fail to connect; effective speakers modulate between feeling and reason and he offers practical prompts (e.g., place a hand on your heart, add a logical point) to do so.
Chapters
Hey, everybody, it's Adam, and I've got a speaker tip for you. So the most important thing that I've learned after speaking for more than 10 years to hundreds of thousands of people all around the globe, is that we have to be able to harmonize our head and our hearts. When you speak, are you coming from just your intellect? Is your thinking mind really the thing that's governing how you communicate? For many people, that's the case, and for others, they come strictly from the heart. You can always tell somebody that speaks from their heart. They're very passionate, and sometimes they get a little out of control, even. And either extreme is the challenge. Meaning if you're heavily weighted on the heart side and you've got very little logic behind what you're saying, you're going to lose people just the same. If you're strictly logic, strictly coming from your head, you're also not going to be able to connect with people at the emotional level. So the goal in truly effective and impactful communication, speaking of any kind, whether it's virtual or it's in person, is to be able to appeal to both sides, to harmonize within yourself both your feelings and your logic, the headspace and the heart space. So get out there and try to modulate just a little bit today when you communicate. If you're a little bit more weighted to the head space and you know that you're a bit of a thinker, put your hand on your heart. Activate what's going on in here. Activate your feeling. Share something that you're feeling in the moment, like maybe even something you're grateful for. And if you're totally coming from the heart, you're just so filled with passion. Think about one thing today that you could do to just sort of intellectually or logically present some information and include that, include that with your passion. Harmonize those two things together, and you'll see that you'll be able to connect with people at an even deeper level and keep them, keep them connected for a longer period of time. Hope this helps.
