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Being Meaningful to Your Prospects’ Brains
March 19, 2010 by Lizabeth Phelps
Have you ever attempted to walk or ride your bike through
uncharted woods? You push your way through brambles, knock
aside branches, cross over fallen trees, mounds of twigs and pine
needles. How far do you get, ultimately? Unless you’re a diehard
explorer with intense motivation, you would typically give up
and turn around for more familiar ground.
This is what your prospects and audiences do when your articulation
about your business’s value, or your delivery of your material in
a presentation, is vague, confusing and meaningless. Their
brains attempt to furrow through your words, but quickly give up
because it’s too much work.
The brain is always looking to match stimuli coming in with
information that it already has stored in its neuronal circuits.
(This is called “pattern recognition”.) These “paths” in the brain
are checking out sensory stimuli to see if they’re familiar. If they
are, a match occurs, and we say, “Oh! That makes sense!” That
incoming stimuli has meaning to us. It’s akin to seeing a solid path
in the woods after going round and round in circles, aimlessly.
“Meaning” is the key factor in influencing whether the brain’s
attention is sustained or not.
What if there’s no match? The brain will attend to the meaning-
less information for a short time because of what I wrote in Monday’s
post (novelty grabs attention), but if it can’t make sense of it, the
brain will turn around and give up. It will not process that stimuli
anymore.
That’s when you see the eyes of your audience or prospect
glaze over. Sustained attention on something we can’t figure out
is boring and virtually impossible. Just like trying to plod your
way through a mess of trees and branches. And yet, this is what
presenters do to their audiences on a regular basis—and businesses
do in their communications. They lure their listeners into a mean-
ingless forest and ask them to work too hard to get their way out.
The brain can’t reconstruct or reactivate a neural circuit if it was
never activated in the first place. You can’t run fast and effortlessly
through that forest if there isn’t a path there. You can’t expect someone
to understand you if they have no previous experience with what you’re
saying.
So how do you create meaning for your audiences or cus-
tomers? You need to know what paths are in their brain currently,
and activate those. Don’t start talking about things they’ve never
heard of or using jargon. I remember years and years ago, a friend
of mine kept referring to his weekly sessions with his “coach.” I had
no neuronal pathways already laid down in my brain for “coach.”
Or anything like “coach.” The word was meaningless and there-
fore, so was everything else he said about it. I couldn’t attend to his
comments, or process them. So, draw analogies to what you’re
presenting, or to your new business concept, that activate familiar
territory in the brains of your listeners.
I always tell my clients to use words that “bring pictures” to the
mind. When you’re speaking vaguely, using airy, ungrounded
descriptions of what you do, putting forth concepts that bring no
pictures to mind, the brain is in the same situation: having to
work too hard to find pictures it already has and fitting them with
your wispy lanuguage. That’s when they turn around and go home.
Our species has not survived by attending to and storing meaning-
less information. Make everything out of your mouth clear, visual
and most of all familiar to the person listening. Know your audience,
and parallel your new information to whatever they already know.
This requires “empathy”—stepping into the neuronal circuits inside
their brain and walking a mile or two in them before you open your mouth.
LOALoveCoach says: HI LIz,
LOVE this new blog and I am fascinated by the information about the brain.
It is amazing how a simple change in wording will cause a prospect to lean in for more information.
Thanks for your blog and I will be back!
Cheers!
Catherine
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