Broad Spectrum Appeal

Do you struggle with fear, doubt and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmeads.

Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast Broad Spectrum Appeal. You want this broad spectrum appeal? Broad spectrum appeal is defined as you walking in to do an event and the vast majority of the audience enjoying your presentation and getting value from it, even if the information wasn't that well targeted at them. And this is a very important thing to understand because you will at times be invited to go and speak at a conference where your information is very poignant and it's very, very on point for a certain segment of the population, but kind of not that useful for other people. And what you don't want is for those other people to get up and leave the room. It just establishes a horrible energy and it breaks the pattern of what's going on. So what you want to do is develop something called broad spectrum Appeal. Now, I'll give you a great example of this. Many years ago, I was asked by a large event promoter to do an event in Stockholm. And it was a business entrepreneurship and investing portfolio event. They were all talking about stock trading and bonds, and they were talking about entrepreneurship and property investing. And frankly, a lot of the content was pretty dry. Now, I was asked to come in and speak about health. You got to imagine that's not the most exciting topic for these guys, is it? It's not the most exciting topic for this audience. They weren't that impressed with the idea. But I want to appeal to as many of them as I can. Even the people who think they're already healthy, even the people who don't really care about their health. And so what did I do? Well, here are some of the mechanisms I used. First, I made a big fat claim. That is, I made a promise early on in my presentation that appealed to everyone in there. I said, my talk is about to share with you the number one strategy for financial success and the number one strategy for enjoying your financial success. And then I left a pause. I let them think about that. The number one strategy for financial success, the number one strategy for enjoying our financial success. What is that? What could it be? And then I turned the conversation toward health. And I explained to them that if you want to be truly successful, you need to have the energy, you need to have the cognition. You can't be missing days off sick you can't be foggy headed. They got it. Then I said, and by the way, why work so hard only to find yourself dying shortly after retirement? You're going to make all this money. You want to be young enough to use it. And by the end of that, I had their attention. Then what are the other mechanisms I use to make sure I maintain my broad spectrum appeal for a topic that wasn't their primary interest? Storytelling. Engaging stories. I want to tell stories that are so good that they forget that they're at a presentation, that they forget that their bladder's full. They're there, they're sitting at the edge of their chair. They forget that they have a cell phone. I want to tell a story. And how am I going to do that? I am going to use voice modulation. I'm going to tell a story with details. I'm going to bring it right out of my memory. It's like I'm going to create a holodeck around them of the story experience. My job is not simply to tell a story, it's to give them an experience. So if you make a big fat claim that might appeal to everyone in the audience, and then you deliver the content with energy, with spark, with voice modulation and great storytelling, you will establish broad spectrum appeal. And then when they survey everybody after and they say, should we have the speaker back? You're gonna get a lot of yeses.

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