Sally ZimneyFounder & CEO, Be Moved by Sally Z

How to connect with your audience as a speaker

15 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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In this short segment, speaker Sally Koering Zimney stresses that empathy is the cornerstone of audience connection. She explains that deeply knowing your audience allows you to feel with them, making your storytelling feel natural and effortless. By listening to audience stories, you can recognize shared experiences—often reflecting an earlier version of yourself—enabling you to craft meaning that resonates. The overall message is that empathy, audience insight, and personal storytelling together create a powerful, authentic bond between speaker and listeners.

Chapters

Empathy is required for you to connect your meaning to your audience, to take your story and make meaning out of it. The more you know your audience, the more you feel with them and that you empathize with them and you are connected to them in a really natural way, all of this becomes super easy because you'll know, you'll say, oh my gosh, yes. And I've heard enough stories from my audience to understand really where they're at. And chances are where they're at is where you have been at, because we tend to serve ourselves, but like an earlier version of ourselves.