3 Secrets To Connect With Your Audience’s Hearts

Written by: Jasmin Haley, Executive Contributor

Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.

Speaking on stage can fill the room with electricity when you and your audience are in sync. The exhilaration you feel when your story resonates with your listeners is one of the gifts of professional speaking, but sharing your message doesn’t guarantee you will reach your audience’s hearts.

If you don’t take strategic action to engage your audience and cultivate a connection, listeners can quickly disengage and lose the thread of your story.

As speakers, we want to captivate our audience every time we present so that they remember our message and move forward with our brand when we walk off stage.

After years of transformative keynotes & courses on stages across the country, I want to share my three tips to reach your audience’s heart so that you can connect deeply every time you speak and grow your speaking business to new levels.

Let Your Passion & Emotion Ignite Your Audience

How can you reliably reach the heart of your audience every time you speak?

Your first step is to choose a subject that moves you!

Just as companies need to have a powerful mission statement behind their brand, speakers should have a strong why driving their presentations.

Audiences want to feel the excitement and get inspired when they watch speakers.

They want to leave presentations motivated and transformed.

If your topic and message don’t light you up, it will show in your presentation, and your listeners will likely disengage. In comparison, when you have a potent driving force behind your message and share it with audiences, you can quickly spark a roomful of heart connections.

As you design your next keynote, course, or workshop, try to warm up the room with energizing music, sprinkle emotional power words throughout your speech, and use confident body postures to increase the emotional volume in the room.

Get Naked On Stage

Success on stage is about connecting with people through the power of your voice.

As humans, we evolved to engage through our senses and learn through storytelling which is why your voice is a potent marketing tool. Your voice is designed to start a conversation and connect with your audience in a way that other marketing channels like print, email newsletters, and digital advertisements can’t.

What is the fastest way to harness that immense power and reach your listeners instantly?

Get vulnerable on stage!

Being authentically yourself on stage lets the audience know that you are just like them.

It allows your listeners to view you as relatable and to see themselves in your story, which is a massive step towards a heart connection and a future client.

When you are preparing to share your message, keep in mind that by revealing your humanity and bearing your imperfections, your listeners are far more likely to connect with you.

Leverage Your Story

Storytelling is one of the most potent tools speakers have to evoke heart connections because a story allows you to draw your audience in and move beyond logical thinking.

Storytelling is so potent that during effective communication, the listeners' and speakers' brains sync up spatially and temporarily.

In other words, your audience's brains mirror yours with a slight delay when you successfully communicate with them.

Wild, right?!

It’s fantastic proof of something successful speakers have known for a long time.

You can change the energy and mood of a room and bring your listeners to your energy level through how you communicate with them.

You can feel it in rooms where powerhouses and changemakers like Les Brown, Iyanla Vanzant, and Dr. Brene’ Brown speak.

However, creating your story arc and weaving it into a transformational presentation is not an overnight process.

It takes time to build and refine your story by pulling out the salient details, removing the unnecessary pieces, and finding the right emotional arc.

Remember when designing your presentation that you need to take your audience on a journey to where you and they ultimately want to go.

Create Lasting Relationships Through Your Words

We can touch the hearts of our audiences as speakers because we are all fundamentally the same.

This is why I can come from Jamaica, Queens, and New York, and connect with a roomful of individuals who grew up in rural Oklahoma or the sunny beaches of California.

Reaching the hearts of an audience by revealing who you are and connecting with their humanity through emotion and story is at the core of successful communication and creating a speaking career that flourishes.

When we touch the hearts of our audiences, we can experience profound results in our business because emotion is what causes people to act and make purchases or initiate a relationship with your brand.

Next time you’re at the mic, remember that you are having a conversation with a roomful of people who want to be seen, heard, and understood.

Your goal is to captivate and touch their hearts with your words.

Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!

Read more from Jasmin!

Jasmin Haley, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine

As seen in Time and NextAdvisor, nationally awarded speaker and workshop facilitator Jasmin Haley, MS, is the CEO of a consulting firm that creates transformative speakers, strengthens presentation skills & designs speaker assets.

Jasmin has been featured or spoken for in national media outlets such as Crest, Colgate, CE Zoom, Con Edison, The University of Maryland School of Medicine, the American Dental Hygienists’ Association, and RDH Magazine.

She has traveled the country as a sought-after speaker on overcoming burnout, diversity & inclusion for healthcare providers, and how to create presentations that reach the HEARTs of audiences.