What’s the best way to prepare people for change?  This question is one that we speakers often ask ourselves, more or less directly, as we develop a new talk.  We are in the change business, after all.  Whether we’re motivational speakers or expert speakers or brand ambassadors, our speeches are either explicit or implicit calls for change.  We bring attention to a topic, or an issue, or a cause and we want the audience to end up with new ways of thinking and behaving as a result of having heard us speak.

As I’ve noted before, the only reason to give a speech is to change the world.

So what’s the best preparation for that change?  If you want your audience to remember what you’ve said, then tell them a story.  Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that, but there is new research that found that when you tell an audience a story, they remember more of what they hear.  That’s true of both children and adults, by the way.

The statistics on memory, another recent study shows, are pretty depressing.  We only remember about a quarter of what we hear, but what we do remember, we do so with reasonable accuracy.  That’s consistent with long-term research results over many years showing that audiences recall 10 – 30 % of what they hear.  And it puts the pressure on us as speakers to tell good stories in order to push that low percentage up as high as we can.

Remembering what you hear is only the first step toward change, however.  You also need to be motivated to change as a result.  To get an audience to take that next step, then, you need to muster all the art and science you can – because we love our status quos.  We don’t like to change.  We can all too easily feel threatened by the call for change.

And yet, deep within our brains, we change ourselves all the time, reacting to new information, first creating new circuits and then reinforcing them as we repeat the new thoughts and behaviors.  How do we tap into that flexible part of the brain rather than the threat response that activates adrenaline and causes us to fight, flee, or freeze?

The key is to do what I’ve been doing throughout this blog post:  ask questions.  It turns out, according to a third new study, that questions, artfully posed around potential rewards, are the best way to get us recalcitrant humans to open up to the possibility of change.

So ask your audience (if you’re promoting physical fitness in the new year) “what are you doing to get into shape?”  Or, “how can we get our revenues up and our costs down in order to have healthy bonuses this year?” if you’re talking to the partners in your consulting firm about that happy subject.  Or, “how can we get the vaccines distributed as quickly as possible in order to allow people to resume their lives?” if you’re Dr. Fauci.

Telling stories and asking questions.  Successful speaking is based on a good psychological understanding of your audience and how it hears, remembers, and reacts to your expertise and passion.

Here’s to your speaking success in 2021.