Speak For Your Audience

There is an art to speaking as one person, but listening as another. It’s hard to do; not everyone gets it. But it’s the true secret to effective communication and engaging your audience. Whether it’s a one-on-one conversation, a sales pitch, or a keynote address, it’s an opportunity.

First, let’s assume for a moment that you realize that every time you speak, it should be with purpose. (And I’m using “speak” as shorthand for all communication, not just verbal speech.) If you’re just doing it to hear yourself talk, well… mission accomplished, I suppose. Plenty of people want to just be visible. They speak for their own status. This isn’t advice for that. If that’s your goal, I’m probably not much help.

Often, people don’t explicitly begin communicating with the singular goal of hearing their own echo, but they sure act like it. They start with the question, “What do I want to talk about,” and go from there. Once they’ve picked a topic, it’s on to, “What do I have to say about this topic,” and now you’re giving a great speech or writing an amazing newsletter for an audience of exactly yourself.

Understand these truths:

1. No one else necessarily cares about what you care about.
2. No one else has the same background or foundational knowledge as you.
3. No one else “lives in your context;” the information they get affects them differently than it affects you.
4. No one else shares your assumptions about language, style, or the value of your time spent speaking versus their time spent listening.
5. All of these things are your responsibility if you want to communicate.

The first question you need to ask is: “What do I want to happen as a result of this communication?”

If you’re a professor, for example, you should have several goals when you communicate. You have a goal of students absorbing information in a useful and applicable way. You have a goal of those students being able to communicate that information back in the form of whatever assignments and tests will certify that knowledge. And you want them to engage with an active learning process that advances the field as a whole over time.

Those are reasonable goals, so now we have to run those goals through the “Truths” from above. If my goal is for students to learn about economics in a way that enables them to retain knowledge, pass tests, and ultimately do economic work, I need to first understand that they don’t automatically care about that. Even if they’ve signed up for my class, that doesn’t guarantee it! That just means they needed the credits from Econ 101, or it was the only class available, or they mistakenly thought it would be easy, or a hundred other potential reasons. Their starting motivation is probably closer to “I just need to get through this class with at least a C so I can move on.”

And here’s the first major fail point for most communicators: they dismiss that whole point. They scoff and say something like “Well if they’re not showing up eager to learn in the first place, then why should I bother?” Look, no one’s telling you that you have to take responsibility for communicating well. But if you don’t, you own the results. Sometimes those results won’t matter to you directly – maybe this professor has tenure and they truly don’t care if people learn or not. But again, if you don’t care about communicating better, I’m not helping you. If you do, keep reading.

So you have a goal, and your audience’s initial motivation doesn’t align with that goal. You want the students to truly learn, retain, and practice. They want to get through to the other side of the class with a passing grade. If you want those two goals to align, it is on you to align them.

Speak to their goal. Start with an understanding of the realities, and communicate your understanding of them without being condescending or dismissive. “Welcome everyone to Econ 101. I know many of you are already trying to figure out if it’s not too late to switch classes, and a few of you are excited about the world of economics. No matter your level of excitement when you came in, I’m going to let you know that the same standards apply to everyone. If you want the surest way to leave this class with a passing grade and no more grey hairs than when you came in, I’m going to speak to that today. One thing I will promise you: I will not give lectures that you can largely snooze through, and then selectively draw nuggets from to pass multiple-choice tests. If you want to pass, you will do real work in this room, and the quality of that work will determine your success.”

There. You’ve started to align the goals. You’ve taken their incentive and attached it firmly to the thing you want to happen. You’ve spoken to their motivations, not yours. You didn’t assume they wanted to hear (and could retain!) all your advanced knowledge of economics starting from day one.

It’s the same all over. A CEO and ground-level employees don’t care about the same things, don’t have the same background context, don’t value their time the same way. No matter the context, the rule is simple: If you want people to listen, you have to speak for them, not to them.