Leader, you have a lot to say, and it’s important. Is anyone listening? Most of time it feels like they're not. How do you get people to listen and respond to you?
It’s easy… all you need is salt, a cookie sheet, and a guitar amp.
“Resonance occurs when an object’s natural vibration frequency responds to an external stimulus of the same frequency.”
Nancy Duarte describes that below in a beautiful visualization of resonance.
My son poured salt onto a metal plate, then hooked up to an amplifier so that the sound waves traveled through the plate. As the frequency was raised, the sound waves tightened and the grains of salt jiggled, popped, and then moved to a new place, organizing themselves into beautiful patterns as though they knew where they “belonged.”
Wouldn’t it be great if people heard you and self-organized to respond in meaningful ways just like these grains of salt, and self-created movements of unity and purpose? They can. It's physics.
“If you adjust to the frequency of your audience so that the message resonates deeply, they, too, will display self-organizing behavior. Your listeners will see the place where they are to move to create something collectively beautiful. A groundswell.” - Nancy Duarte
Your listeners don’t need to tune themselves to you – you need to tune your message to them. Meaningful communication that resonates requires that you understand your listeners hearts and minds and develop a message to meet them. If you do, your listeners will be moved; they will move to act, to organize, to engage because it means something to them. Crafting messages that resonate with your people will result in beautiful new movements that THEY will undertake.
Leaders- listen first. Find your audiences’ hopes, dreams, fears, desires and motivators. Then speak deeply into their hearts and experience so they can find their way to move in response in a dance to towards a shared future. Let's Resonate.
Kristin Wiersma | The Joshua Group | kristin@thejoshua-group.com