How to Influence Anyone, Anywhere, Every Time

CHAPTER 16VISUAL AIDS

We are so consumed by screens in our lives that we are always looking for visual support for what we are hearing. In a work context, your most powerful tools of influence are the words you say and how you use them. Adding visual support to your words, ideas and information aids the comprehension and understanding of your content, message or ideas.

In the last 25 years, it seems that visual communication has become the primary means of representing content. The role of the presenter now is to explain what people are looking at. This is not effective.

The most important visual aid is imagination. When your words create scenes, images and scenarios inside the heads of the people listening to you, you are connecting. You are genuinely communicating.

Showing stuff on a slide, and then adding some spoken words to their reading, changes the communication dynamic. As they read or look at the data, the charts or graphics, the audience will process the information they are reading first before tuning into what you are saying.

How often have you sat in a meeting where someone starts going through slides, then a question is asked about information on the slide that the presenter has not covered yet, and suddenly we are out where the buses don't go? The flow of logic is derailed, and at some point, the person operating the slides is forced to get people back on track. Time is wasted. The thread has to be picked up again, and then we are onto the next slide. The pattern ...