PDF Summary:Amplify Your Influence, by René Rodriguez

Do you want to improve your communication skills and positively affect others’ actions? Do you want to become a more persuasive presenter? If so, you may benefit from the communication strategies René Rodriguez offers in Amplify Your Influence. Rodriguez explores numerous ways you can connect with people, help them reach their goals, and help them change their behavior for the better. He argues that we’re all capable of guiding and shaping others’ actions, as long as we have the right tools.

In this guide, we’ll cover Rodriguez’s basics of persuasion, including how to use four of Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals to connect with any audience and how to apply the author’s three essential steps for effective communication. Then, we’ll dive deeper into Rodriguez’s strategies for one type of communication: presenting successfully. In our commentary, we’ll touch on communication strategies from other voices in the field and further explore ways you can apply the author’s advice to your everyday communication.

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(Shortform note: Some research supports Rodriguez’s assertion that the stress response we experience when feeling unsafe hinders our ability to absorb information. In addition to activating your hypothalamus, this state also affects the amygdala’s ability to send and receive input to and from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that consciously directs our decisions and actions based on reflective thought. This means that when we’re in this state, our brains can’t turn sensory input into memory. Additionally, we’re no longer in control of our behavioral responses.)

Instead of letting this restrict you as a speaker, guide audience members’ perception of your main idea by creating context at the beginning of your communication. Specifically, addressing your audience members’ fears and concerns primes them to be open and receptive. For example, contextualize your main idea using pathos by telling a story that helps your audience members empathize with you.

(Shortform note: In The Pyramid Principle, Barbara Minto offers three steps for writing an introduction that contextualizes your main idea, as Rogriguez recommends. First, provide your audience with a familiar context—this helps them see that what you’ll be sharing is relevant to them, which will make them more receptive to your ideas. For instance, share a story (as Rogriguez proposes), but make sure it’s a story that’s relevant to their lives. (Introducing familiarity may also soothe any fears the audience has about your idea.) Then, pose a relevant question that will pique your audience member’s curiosity and make them want to keep listening. Finally, share your main idea as an answer to this question.)

Shortform Example: Contextualizing a Meditation Workshop

Say you’re facilitating a meditation workshop for a group of businesspeople. Your main idea is that meditation can be a valuable tool to manage work stress and create a healthy lifestyle, and your delivery of that idea includes a meditation exercise for the audience to participate in.

You sent a survey out before the workshop, so you already know some of your audience’s personal contexts surrounding meditation: Many of them wrote that they’ve either never tried it, or they’ve tried it and found it difficult. These personal contexts indicate some aversion or trepidation about meditation. Therefore, if you were to begin the workshop with your meditation exercise, the audience members would likely get little out of it. Their hypothalami would shut down the learning part of their brains, and they’d be unable to absorb any benefits from the exercise.

However, say you begin by addressing their concerns instead, thus changing their context. You start the workshop with some information about what meditation is and isn’t: It’s primarily about paying attention to the present moment, so anyone can do it, with no experience required. It’s an ongoing practice, so it’s okay if they don’t notice immediate effects the first few times they do it. To tap into the audience’s pathos, you might tell a personal story about how it’s helped you. Finally, you state that everyone’s experience is different, and the most important thing is to tune into themselves and acknowledge any feelings and sensations that arise.

By offering all of this context at the beginning of your presentation, you’ve covered the audience’s points of aversion toward the exercise. You’ve given them permission to experience whatever they experience and let go of their expectations. This will make them more receptive to your ideas and make it easier for you to change their behavior—meaning they’ll be more likely to try meditation again.

Step #2: Deliver Your Main Idea

After you contextualize your main idea, it’s time to deliver it. This is the main part of your communication, where you state and explain your central points. Rodriguez states that your delivery of your main idea, including any actions you want your audience to take, should be clear and thorough. The audience shouldn’t have to speculate about your meaning or fill in knowledge gaps themselves. When in doubt, explain more thoroughly than you think you need to.

If you fail to deliver your main idea clearly and thoroughly, you could create misunderstandings and your audience might make assumptions that lead to further problems. For example, in business, poor communication can cause mistakes, hampered efficiency, and financial losses.

Rodriguez also recommends considering the best format for delivering your main idea. Carefully decide whether you should communicate something over the phone, in person, through email, and so on, as the wrong format can make it hard for people to hear, understand, and appreciate your main idea. For example, face-to-face communication is probably better for addressing a sensitive issue than email.

Further Advice for Ensuring People Hear Your Main Idea

Clear communication can be especially important in a business setting: It fosters a sense of purpose, accountability, and transparency in a company’s culture. By contrast, unclear communication can lead to tension, decreased productivity, poor collaboration, negative interactions with clients and customers, and financial losses.

For your communication to be effective, some experts argue that you must balance thoroughness (for the purpose of clarity) with brevity. In Talk Like TED, Carmine Gallo suggests limiting your presentations to 18 minutes—the length of a TED talk—whenever possible, for three reasons:

1) It prevents your audience from getting too tired to listen to you. The brain uses glucose for energy as it absorbs information, the supply of which is limited. Therefore, if you talk for too long, your audience will use up their energy partway through, and they won’t have enough left to hear your ideas in full.

2) It reduces pressure on your listeners. Studies show that the longer a speaker talks, the more anxious the audience becomes as they realize how much information they must absorb. As Rodriguez states, anxiety can leave an audience unable to hear your ideas.

3) It encourages discipline as you decide what information to include. If you give yourself a limited time to talk, you’ll be more likely to cut out the fluff and get to the core ideas of your presentation.

Further, according to other communication experts, you should consider the following criteria before deciding what communication method will work best for your ideas:

• Your relationship with the audience. Think about which methods of communication are appropriate for your level of acquaintanceship. For example, a phone call or an email would be more appropriate than a text message for communicating with a person you don’t know very well.

• The communication method your audience likes best. For example, if you know a certain client prefers speaking in person to talking on the phone, your communication will likely be better received if you set up a face-to-face meeting.

• The urgency of the message. If you need someone to hear your main idea right away, choose a method of communication that allows you to reach your audience quickly and reliably.

Step #3: Explain Why Your Main Idea Is Important to the Audience

According to Rodriguez, the final step for ensuring people understand and remember your main idea is tying it back to their specific needs and interests. How will your idea help them reach their specific aspirations? How will it benefit them to know and act on this information?

Connecting your main idea to your audience’s distinct interests ensures that it stands out among the countless other pieces of information they encounter every day. The human brain is constantly exposed to stimuli in the form of emails, text messages, television, colors, sounds, smells, and so on, so it has to quickly determine what’s important enough to be retained.

To effectively state your idea’s value, understanding your audience is key—listen to their wants and concerns and ask questions that help you get to know them and their interests. In this part of your communication, also clearly express what you want your audience to do with the information you’ve given them.

Shortform Example: Explaining the Value of Meditation

For example, consider the scenario of the meditation workshop—if your main idea is that meditation can be a helpful wellness tool, and your audience is a group of office workers, you’d need to demonstrate what specific benefits meditation would hold for people with their job. Therefore, you might finish by talking about how meditation can be an effective method of stress management, which is an important part of handling any demanding job. You may also explain how meditation can increase energy and focus, making it a possible alternative to caffeine.

Finally, you must explain how the audience can apply the information. You might suggest they practice for 10 minutes a day or offer some resources for guided meditation. This clearly shows what action you expect them to take and what kind of behavior change you’re trying to trigger.

Approaches for Connecting With Your Audience’s Needs and Interests

If you want more specific guidance for using questions to gauge an audience’s interests, some public speaking experts suggest using a call-and-response technique at the beginning of a presentation. Ask questions that will prompt responses indicating how much your audience knows about your topic and what their general mood is. You can then adjust your approach to fit their needs, including tailoring your main idea to them at the end of your presentation.

You can ensure your ideas stand out throughout your presentation by presenting kinesthetically: using the space around you and your physical presence to communicate nonverbally as well as verbally. A kinesthetic speaker adjusts their posture, movements, and gestures to create a memorable sensory experience—for instance, they may walk toward the audience at important points of a speech, or spread their arms wide to indicate openness. Research suggests that audience members are more likely to adopt and apply the ideas of a speaker if they present ideas kinesthetically.

How to Present Successfully

In the previous section, we discussed Rodriguez’s three steps for effective communication. Now, we’ll dive deeper into a specific kind of communication: presenting in front of a group of people. We’ll examine Rodriguez’s tips for things you should do before and during your presentation.

Tip #1: Study Recordings of Yourself Presenting

Rodriguez argues that preparing for presentations should be an ongoing process of improvement. Therefore, take a video of yourself any time you’re presenting and review it before your next presentation. Pay attention to the points you discussed and how you delivered them. Which parts seemed to work for the audience, and which didn’t?

Watching recordings also reveals unhelpful quirks in your body language that you may not otherwise realize you have. Your body language has a significant effect on how your ideas will be received by your audience, so it’s important to understand how you look when presenting. If your body language contradicts the main idea you’re attempting to communicate, your audience may lose interest and trust.

For example, if you’re a motivational speaker, and you shift back and forth on your feet whenever you present, your audience likely won’t look to you as a source of motivation or inspiration. Shifting your feet suggests discomfort and nervousness, not the confidence and groundedness better suited to the purpose of your presentation.

(Shortform note: Though many agree with Rodriguez that this technique can help you improve your public speaking skills, a lot of people struggle to watch recordings of themselves. This aversion may come from a lack of confidence or feelings of embarrassment. If you experience this struggle, you can make the process easier by pretending the speaker isn’t you: Think about how you would feel watching yourself as an audience member. By acting as if you’re an outside observer, you can more easily and objectively assess your performance.)

How to Rehearse for More Natural Body Language

If you watch a video of yourself presenting and notice a lot of quirks in your body language, you may think that rehearsing specific poses or actions will make you look more polished and professional. However, that kind of preparation typically makes body language look less natural to audiences—it’ll make you look stiff and contrived.

Instead, rehearse your body language based on four more general key goals that represent qualities of a successful presentation: to show passion, to display openness, to connect, and to listen. Practice your presentation four different times, keeping a different goal in mind each round. Instead of thinking about the goal, try to feel it—if you focus on the feeling, your body language will naturally represent the goal authentically.

Tip #2: Get Outside Feedback

Rodriguez also suggests getting external feedback on your presentations. Hearing other people’s honest responses and comments is an important part of growth—we often overestimate our own skills, so outside feedback can be a valuable reality check.

(Shortform note: In psychology, the tendency to overestimate our knowledge, skills, and abilities is called overconfidence bias. This bias can have small consequences (such as missing a project’s deadline because we assume it will take less time than it actually requires) or serious consequences (such as a doctor assuming their diagnoses are always correct). In addition to getting feedback from others, you can combat overconfidence bias around presenting by doing a “premortem” for presentations. This means thinking about things that could go wrong while you’re presenting and working backward to imagine how they might happen. That way, you can anticipate and avoid potential failure.)

Tip #3: Take Steps to Minimize Your Anxiety

According to Rodriguez, to be successful, you must proactively manage any anxiety and stress you have about your presentation. If you’re unable to do this, none of his other strategies will offer much benefit.

(Shortform note: Research suggests that Rodriguez’s emphasis on managing presentation stress is relevant to many people: Public speaking is the most common phobia, beating out other common fears such as the fear of death, the fear of heights, and the fear of spiders. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that about 40% of the population experiences public speaking anxiety.)

Rodriguez explains that stress makes it impossible for you to execute cognitively demanding tasks—including presentations—at your best. When you’re stressed, your autonomic nervous system (the part of your nervous system responsible for automatic body processes like breathing, digestion, and your heartbeat) activates. Its job is to protect you from danger, so when it perceives something as a threat (like a presentation), it sends you into the fight-or-flight response.

To prepare your body to face or flee the perceived danger, this response shuts down higher-level thinking, making it difficult to present effectively. Therefore, you must use techniques that help you calm the stress response.

(Shortform note: Along with breathing techniques (which we’ll discuss below), you can use many different methods to calm your body’s stress response and refocus your mind. First, studies show that chewing gum can reduce stress and anxiety, increase focus, and improve short-term memory. Some researchers attribute these cognitive benefits to the increased blood flow to the brain that results from chewing. Second, laughing can make you feel calmer—it raises then lowers your blood pressure and heart rate, assuaging the stress response and leaving you feeling relaxed. Therefore, if you need to break out of fight-or-flight mode and calm your nervous system, try watching a funny video or talking to someone who makes you laugh.)

Strategy: Stress-Relieving Breathing Technique

Breathing techniques can be a great way to relieve stress. For example, Rodriguez suggests box breathing. To use this technique, breathe in for four counts and pause for four counts. Then, breathe out for four counts and pause again for four counts. Repeat this cycle of breath for as long as you need to feel more centered and calm.

(Shortform note: One aspect of box breathing that calms you down is the act of counting—your brain becomes occupied with keeping track of the counts, distracting you from your worries. Keeping the number of counts and steps to four means the pattern is easier to learn and remember, making it a useful tool when you’re already stressed and likely to forget a more complicated exercise. The technique gets its name from its four-count pattern and four-step cycle, since a box has four sides.)

Tip #4: Maintain the Audience’s Attention Using Variety

Rodriguez states that once you have your audience’s attention, you need to maintain it throughout your presentation. If your presentation is unengaging, then your audience will lose interest, and they won’t hear your main idea. You can keep them engaged by employing various stimuli to introduce variation and creativity into your presentation.

(Shortform note: One way to engage your audience is to pay close attention to your voice: Simply Said author Jay Sullivan says to monitor the speed, volume, and tone of your speech. First, many people talk too quickly out of nervousness, so practice talking at a pace that’s easily understandable and allows time for the audience to process your words. Second, practice projecting your voice so the person who’s farthest away from you can hear you clearly (especially if you won’t be using a microphone). Third, avoid presenting in a monotone voice. To keep your audience’s attention, your voice should be dynamic and energetic—this arguably introduces the variation Rodriguez emphasizes.)

Variation is important to include in a presentation because of how our brains work. Our cerebral cortex—the part of our brain that’s responsible for learning and creativity—thrives off of stimulation from new ideas and innovation. When we’re first introduced to a new stimulus, it captures the attention of our cerebral cortex. However, if the stimulus stays the same, after a while, our brain will lose interest.

(Shortform note: In Talk Like TED, Gallo suggests using a “shocking moment” to introduce novelty into your presentation: an event your audience doesn’t expect that deeply surprises, impresses, or moves them. You can create a shocking moment by giving a demonstration, including startling statistics, or displaying a shocking photo or video. Gallo argues that they’re effective because their unexpectedness grabs the audience’s attention (as Rodriguez suggests), making the audience members more focused on and thus more likely to absorb your ideas. Additionally, they prompt people to tell others about your ideas because people want to talk about the exciting thing they witnessed.)

For example, if you create a PowerPoint presentation to present information using simple text on the same background for every slide, your audience is likely to quickly lose interest. If you create slides that incorporate visuals and break up the presentation with stories and videos, you’ll be able to maintain your audience’s attention much more easily.

(Shortform note: Chris Anderson, author of TED Talks, states that not all presentations require a visual aid (such as slides). For example, humor and emotion in stories can evoke enough interest in an audience that a visual element isn’t necessary to engage meaningfully with them. However, a visual presentation can be helpful if something is easier to show than describe, or if you’re discussing a visual topic, such as art. If you choose to make slides, use an easy-to-read font like Arial or Helvetica, use high-quality images and credit them subtly on the same slide, and keep videos under 30 seconds.)