Demo Pages

Welcome to Audio Learning from Assemble You.

All of us are bombarded with too many articles to read and too many videos to watch. Your audience – and by that, we mean readers, watchers and listeners – make the decision to follow or reject you in a microsecond. But what would it be like if you understood how they chose? This track focuses on the three factors an audience wants from a speaker. Once you know them, you’re guaranteed a bigger and more loyal audience for all your hard work.

Further info:
Reading List

What is Demo Pages?

Collection of tracks for demonstrations

How To Connect With Your Audience
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It's time to work on YOU. So sit back and listen to practical, actionable advice to accelerate your progress.
All of us are bombarded with too many articles to read and too many videos to watch. Your audience – and by that, we mean readers, watchers and listeners – make the decision to follow or reject you in a microsecond. But what would it be like if you understood how they chose? This track focuses on the three factors an audience wants from a speaker. Once you know them, you’re guaranteed a bigger and more loyal audience for all your hard work.
We have three specific aims for you. We want you to
Establish your personal credibility
Bond emotionally with your audience, and
Convince people with facts and storytelling structure
Our guide today is Aristotle, whose ideas have always inspired the world’s best communicators. The fact that we’re still following his modes of persuasion some 2,400 years after they were first written down proves he’s the greatest ever expert in this field.
This isn’t a module about moving slickly around Powerpoint. Instead, it’s about how you can connect with the people you want to influence. Aristotle’s ideas apply as much to PR releases and corporate messages as they do to speeches, but we’re going to focus on live, stand-up presentations. There are three words Aristotle uses that you need to know:
Ethos, which is all about the speaker’s personal credibility
Pathos, which is about the connection between the speaker and the audience
Logos, which is how the speech is organised.
Let’s begin by covering practical examples and what has been found to work.
First, we’ll cover how Ethos establishes your personal credibility. Your credentials and experience are vital. Before listening to any presentation, we ask ourselves, ‘What gives the speaker the right to talk to us about this?’ An audience wants to listen to people who have achieved success and broken through barriers.
Here’s Andreas Loizou, who is an expert in training people to give speeches. [This isn’t the place for meaningless job titles, nor the time for fake humility. The audience wants people who have achieved greatness, and you need to tell them what you’ve done. Real status comes from your success as a subject expert, a business leader or a recognized authority. Sometimes being a good human being in a bad world is sufficient.]
We follow people who we perceive as trustworthy and experienced. If they show credibility in their everyday lives, we tend to believe them when they get on the speaker’s podium.
Next, take note that knowledge keeps people listening. You don’t have to be the cleverest person in the room, but you have to be the absolute expert in the topic. Now’s the time to mention your master’s degree in the subject and that internship at a competitor last year. Tell people about where you have worked and what you’ve done.
David Attenborough is a wonderful example of ethos. He graduated from Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences, and he’s been a regular on TV wildlife programmes since 1954. He’s spent his whole adult life trying to save the world and its animals. Every time we see him on the screen, we see a man of integrity.
So, what can you do? You can grow your ethos. Take courses online or in person. Read widely and spend time with genuine people who have good ideas. When you demonstrate that you’re a person of value, your credibility increases. And that always leads to a bigger audience.
Sometimes you’ll hear great presentations that appear to be spontaneous and off-the-cuff. They very rarely are. People can only improvise successfully if they have a solid base of knowledge. It takes an audience very little time to tell which speaker is unprepared and which possesses integrity and relevant knowledge.
We can summarise Ethos with a very well-known quote from Aristotle. We are what we do repeatedly. Excellence, then, is a habit, not an action.
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Moving on, let’s look at how Pathos connects you emotionally to your audience. Pathos – the root of words such as ‘empathy’ and ‘passion’ – occurs when our audience feels exactly what we want them to feel. Here’s Andreas Loizou, who helps many speakers find their audience. Successful presentations change the audience’s emotions. Ten minutes ago they were unconnected, uninterested, uninvolved. Now they are angry, sad, inspired, frustrated, happy, ready to surrender or eager to fight. We’ve all used the phrase ‘a moving speech’, but how many of us have ever considered what it took to move us?
The way an audience feels towards a speaker will influence their judgement. Princess Diana was an expert on using pathos. With a shift in tone and a tilt of her head, she provoked pity, anger, sorrow and even love in her audiences. Watch her presentations to see how good she was at pathos. And then watch the actresses in Diana: The Musical or Princess in Love to see how they get it wrong.
Here are three ways to boost your pathos while you’re presenting
Use storytelling skills. The ups and downs of your path to success create an emotional bond between you and your listeners. They feel what you feel. A story where everything comes easy isn’t a story at all. Be like Oprah Winfrey and tell people how you’ve had to struggle. Be like Taylor Swift and tell people how you’ve been attacked. Notice how people warm to you when you tell them about how you learned from your mistakes.
Link to people with your choice of words. A pompous speaker tries to hide a lack of knowledge by talking down to an audience. A popular speaker changes their vocabulary, so the audience feels that they are in this together. They avoid jargon terms, buzz words and business cliches. Next time you speak, say shop instead of retail outlet. You’ll notice the audience is on your side.
Body language helps you connect. Make eye contact with your listeners to keep them focused. An open stance suggests that you’re open-minded. Use your body to act out the emotions you want them to have - laugh for happiness, tighten your fists to show frustration. This is especially true online, where we often display tense and inflexible body language.
Do you want to see Pathos and Ethos in action? Watch a famous scene from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator that you’ll find in the attached reading list. In it, The Roman general Maximus, played by Russel Crowe, must rally his troops. Maximus is a battle-hardened veteran, venerated by his soldiers and feared by his enemies. He’s Ethos personified. But he also has the skills to whip up his exhausted army for one more battle. Here’s the killer line - What we do in life echoes in eternity.
Maximus’s ability to generate pathos means his troops will follow him into the hell of battle. And note how you, the person in the seat with the popcorn on your lap, are immediately rooting for Maximus as well.
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Now let’s look at Logos. It’s about your structure and your facts. Logos is the ancient Greek for ‘word’, and it’s the root of ‘logic’. Pathos was mostly about emotions, while logos is mostly concerned with reason.
Make sure to sprinkle evidence throughout your presentation. This is where you use data, facts you’ve learned and stats to make an impact. Economists use logos all the time – for example, inflation is up to 11%, growth has never been lower. Well-chosen evidence will back up your emotional connection, but be careful not to bore your audience to death with too many figures.
It’s important to take your listener on a journey. We all love a logical structure, one that makes us feel we are learning as we listen. Make sure every new step in your presentation connects with the step before. When you reach the end, your listeners must feel that no other conclusion was possible.
Here’s Andreas Loizou on the benefits of a logical structure. If your structure is strong the audience will get to your conclusion before you do. They’ll feel intellectually empowered, and that’s a great way to get them on your side.
Remember to cite authorities. You’ll benefit from the halo effect when you refer to experts who back up your claims. “The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character”. Use authorities’ quotations to support your point of view and you’ll gain through the association.
Now let’s summarise exactly what we’ve covered. You’ve got to be aware of your audience’s needs at all times. Focus on ethos, pathos and logos to have as much impact as possible.
Ethos establishes your personal credibility in the eyes of the audience. You boost it by referring to your real lived experience and your academic qualifications. We choose to listen to experts, not bluffers.
Pathos bonds you and your audience together. It’s about sharing the emotions of your journey – good and bad, up and down – so they empathise with you. Open body language, the right vocabulary and owning your mistakes all grow empathy.
Logos is how you convince people of the ‘rightness’ of your message. Now’s the time to use evidence - facts, data, relevant examples - and your storytelling skills to move your audience.
Here’s something for you to try this week.
Change your LinkedIn profile to reflect ethos, pathos and logos. Can you come up with an example of each that attracts people? If so, change a lacklustre profile into something that people actually want to read!