How To Connect With Your Audience

Connecting with people is critical for selling, persuading or getting the point across. And one of the ways we connect with people is to tell them stories about ourselves.

I was at a business workshop recently, and the stories that were most effective (by acclamation of the attendees) were ones where the person let down his/her guard, and revealed something personal. This is one of the reasons storytelling is more effective than reciting a list of benefits to a prospect. In addition to being interesting and easy to understand, it also helps create a personal bond with the audience. It means that you may want, in your ministry storytelling, to reveal anxieties, fears and feelings. In other words, to give the audience your confidence.

How To Make A Point Effectively

We often grapple with the question of why and how leaders should go about making a point through their messages. In otherwords get people to understand the message when they hear it, they remember it, and they change their behavior because of it.

Messages that make a point or “sticky” messages have certain distinctives - unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional.



Read More on my other blog.

Learning to Preach Like Jesus

Demographers indicate that 350,000 sermons are preached in the USA every Sunday. But no-one has done any reliable surveys to discover how many people sleep during those sermons. Statistics from an earlier assessment have shown that if all the people who sleep in church were laid side be side in a long line … they would be a lot more comfortable!

For generations preachers have fought the battle on how to keep people awake during their sermons. Many methods have been proposed and some even aggressively instituted.

Not all preachers are gifted communicators. Billy Graham preached his first four sermons, sequentially, in one meeting, in only eight minutes. Many preachers do worse than that, except they take longer.

Communicating through the medium of preaching presents special challenges. And Ralph Lewis, in his book: “Learning to Preach Like Jesus” investigates the methodology that Jesus used.

When God wanted to communicate with people, it seems to me that He would choose the most effective method possible. That seems logical to me, since He knows the very essence of our make-up. And what tools did Jesus use to communicate in his sermons? Parables.

In his book, Ralph looks at the Greek and the Hebrew approaches and methodology of sermonizing. He analyzes the ‘right brain’, ‘left brain’ ways of learning. He researches the uniqueness in personal processing of data and he enlightens us on the ‘triple brain’ challenge. He does a fabulous job in discovering the ‘what’ of communication.

Then he dissects Jesus’ sermons and parables. Jesus was a storyteller.

But … there is one element that Ralph leaves out in his book ... the ‘HOW’ to tell stories. This element of ‘how’ is what we teach at the Leadership Matters Course! The ‘modular approach’ to storytelling, ‘STORY’ and the ‘Dutchman’ are distinctives of LMC!

Not forgetting what we learned! … John