Connections - September 2009 - 23

She recalls all of the details of that fateful day. She recounts how she “climbed into the sky that morning.” The audience is led through a range of emotions from “the laughter that echoed the cabin,” to the heralding moment when she realized the plane was “engulfed by a storm.” Listeners suffer with her by living vicariously through her turmoil as she was at the tempest’s mercy. They can imagine what it must feel like to be “tossed about the sky like an inner tube on a stormy sea.” Her audience is hit on a gut level, because they understand “ever ything was scarier under the veil of darkness.” She opens up, and tells them she was “so paralyzed by fear [she] could not breathe.” The words are filled with life. “Describing the sounds, smells and colors help people experience what I’m attempting to express,” said Barnhill. She’s descriptive with her language, and therefore, her audience is able to imagine the sounds and sense the experience. She has a fascinating story, but you can too. The trick to enliven your lis- teners is to tap into their emotions and then, if necessary move onto any fact-based data. “I work first to appeal to the right side of their brain before making left side comments,” said Barnhill. The right side of the brain processes emotion, intuition and creative processes whereas the left side is analytical and logical. “Use stories and metaphors first because most people are turned off by numbers unless they first understand why numbers are relevant.” Great orators have tapped into this rhetorical strategy for a long time with enormous impact. Look at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His famous fireside chats were a series of personable and direct monologues delivered into American homes via the radio during the Great Depression. He addressed the America people simply with “my friends.” These words tapped into the instinctive desire that we all have: we want to relate. Listen to a fireside chat here or read the full online archive here. Barnhill and Roosevelt use similar strategies: they both

Connections - September 2009

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