Welcome back. And thank you so much for deciding to learn more about this topic. In this lesson, we're going to cover off the most important principles you need to consider for your next presentation. The first principle of presenting is to focus on your audience. making a presentation is not about you believe it or not, it's about your audience and their needs. The more your presentation meets their needs, the more effective your presentation will be.

First and foremost, you need to know who your audience is. And secondly, make sure that you have an outcome in mind of what you'd like your audience to do after listening to your presentation. For instance, I'm often asked to speak about strategic management. I had a public accounting firm recently asked me to speak at their annual conference on the subject. How does this change by standard slide deck on strategic management, which typically gets presented to industry participants, well First of all, having been in public practice myself for many years, I know public accountants rarely get the opportunity to talk about strategy with their clients. So I've got an audience that needs an introduction to strategic management principles.

Secondly, why should this topic even matter to a public accountant? Well, my idea is to position strategic management as an opportunity to help them add value and develop a closer relationship with their clients. So the desired outcome I had for this presentation was to make my audience more comfortable with talking strategy with their clients. Let's move on and talk about the principles of persuasion. Because at its Crux, in making any presentation, we're attempting to persuade an audience to see the world as we do. This is an area that has been studied to death as well as everyone has their own variations of these principles.

Let me just share and summarize the foundation off which everyone else has formulated these ideas. It all started with our buddy Aristotle around 300 BC, Aristotle was the first to note that there were three essential elements we need to consider before we would persuade others. He called these ethos, logos, and pathos. ethos is your credibility, you can establish credibility in a number of ways. Sometimes your reputation will precede you. Other times, somebody may introduce you and yet others, you'll introduce it yourself.

But more importantly, in building credibility, you must come across to your audience as an authority on the topic you're presenting. You can do this in a number of equally important ways. First, control the content stick to areas of strength, backup your analysis with credible sources other than yourself to validate your positions, then speak with confidence, speak with conviction. That's how you build a level of trust with your audience. Logos is a logical validity of your content. Logos is built from a Understanding.

It's a very left brained activity. So if you're presenting a technical concept to your audience, you may need to chunk it up a little bit into logical steps. If you're building a business case, you may want to look at the opportunity from different dimensions to show how he creates value and limits downside. In general finance people are very good at logos. Our tendency is in fact to go overboard with data and analysis to support our position. So the challenge here is to find ways to simplify our logic, boil it down to its essential points, and if the audience needs backup, deal with it in an appendix or a q&a session.

Finally, we've got passos, which speaks to your emotional mind, the right side of your brain. Emotions are extremely powerful, as we instinctively know but rarely consider in the context of making a business presentation. What you'll learn in the lessons to come is that path closes every bit as as important, if not more so than ethos and logos. Why? Well, it's because of how our brain makes decisions. decision making is our right brain activity.

Your first instinct comes from the right side of your brain, and then the left side of your brain. Your logos confirms your hunch. pathos is engaged when you incorporate images example stories, humor, imagination, color, sound, touch, or rapport with your audience. So when making your next presentation, consider whether you've included all three of these elements. Let's look at one more idea when it comes to making persuasive presentations. And this one's called the four P's of persuasion, which you may confuse with other four P's.

But whatever the four P's are leavers for persuasion by appealing to one of our four basic human desires, profit, pleasure, power, or prestige. It appeal to our desire for profit, our presence contagion will persuade our audience by suggesting that adopting our ideas will make or save money. Many business cases are configured around this idea of growing earnings and growing stock price to enrich ourselves and our shareholders. In our appeal to desire for pleasure, our presentation will persuade our audience by suggesting that adopting our ideas will allow them to do more with less, make their life easier, or give them something more rewarding. In an appeal to our desire for power, our presentation will persuade our audience by suggesting that adopting our ideas will help them achieve status, perhaps to own a market or dominate the competition or increase control their function. This is a strong message about how this will help them win and be the best.

In an appeal for our desire for prestige. Our presentation will persuade our audience that adopting your ideas will allow them to achieve a higher level of distinction and standing with important stakeholders. Maybe you'll be seen as an expert after seeing this presentation. Maybe this presentation will allow you to take action to become a member of a very exclusive club. By identifying the human desire to which your presentation most appeals, you will adapt your content accordingly to focus on one of these four piece how path hosts indeed. In this lesson, we covered three really important ideas about the principles of persuasion.

First, knowing who your audience is, and what they want is the key to delivering a presentation that meets their needs first, and your needs Second. Second, your presentation needs to incorporate a blend of ethos, logos, and pathos. Don't forget the path though, says this is the most important of the bunch for triggering action. And third, consider the four P's of persuasion, profit, pleasure, power and prestige to help you achieve the ideal outcome. Come aligning your message to meet one of those desires for your audience. The key to presenting powerful and persuasive presentations is to know about human psychology and then cater to our natural tendencies.

In our next lesson, we're going to talk about planning, the perfect presentation. Until then, I'm Blair cook.