The Bullseye Principle

Chapter 1Hit Your MarkUtilizing Intention to Maximize Message Impact

Every objective must carry in itself the germs of action.

—CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI

If you are a leader in the corporate arena, your role will not only require you to influence the thoughts and feelings of stakeholders inside and outside of your organization, but also to motivate their actions through your vision and ideas. This is no small feat, and it will likely happen on a daily basis, sometimes with high stakes in the balance. Great leadership is practiced one conversation at a time, and someone communicating a message must understand how they want their audience to react before being able to deliver it with impact. Actors are masters of verbal and nonverbal communication; experts at driving their messages home with intent. In this chapter, we will detail our three-step process for influential communication as well as the concepts of intention and objective (the effective communicator's secret weapon), to allow you to engage others by influencing emotions and motivating action.

The Legend of Phil Davison

As of this writing, if you enter the words “worst speech of all time” into Google's search engine it will bring up over 18 million results. But the very first entry on the very first page of results is a video of a man named Phil Davison. Additionally, if you do a Google search for “worst speaker of all time” it is Phil Davison who once again comes up on the first page of results. (We will pause here ...