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You must show how your idea contrasts with existing expectations, beliefs, feelings, or attitudes if you want to gain the audience’s rapt attention.
A great way to stand out is to be real. Presentations tend to be stripped of all humanness—despite the fact that humans make up the entire audience!
Facts Alone Fall Short You can have piles of facts and still fail to resonate. It’s not the information itself that’s important but the emotional impact of that information. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon facts entirely. Use plenty of facts, but accompany them with emotional appeal. There’s a difference between being convinced with logic and believing with personal conviction.
People rarely act by reason alone. You need to tap into other deeply seated desires and beliefs in order to be persuasive. You need a small thorn that is sharper than fact to prick their hearts. That thorn is emotion.
Screenwriter Chad Hodge points out in Harvard Business Review that we should “[help] people to see themselves as the hero of the story, whether the plot involves beating the bad guys or achieving some great business objective. Everyone wants to be a star, or at least to feel that the story is talking to or about him personally.”7
