When you write a text or speak in front of an audience, as I am right now, there are key aspects that determine how your audience receives your message. In this video, I will highlight what you need to consider before you start communicating with your audience. I will take you back to ancient Greece and Rome and explore rhetorical methods used by philosophers and rhetoricians to persuade their audience. The methods survived the test of time and are still powerful tools for storytelling today. Let's start with the rhetorical pentagram. The model is created with inspiration from ancient Roman rhetorician Cicero. It has been interpreted in many ways, but the thought behind it is always the same - understanding the specific situation you're communicating in. It gives you an overview of the situation and helps you to zoom in on everything you need to do to make your pitch fit the situation perfectly. And in this video, we focus on pitching, but it can work with any utterance. All the elements of the pentagram are connected and affect one another. And I'll explain each element by asking a question that you can ask yourself. Purpose: what do you want with your utterance? To get funding for your startup? To gain new members? To convince someone that your solution is the best answer to a challenge or maybe to sell a product? Subject: What are you talking about? Overall, what is the subject of your utterance? Speaker: who are you as a speaker? Which role are you playing? What experience do you have and why should we listen to you? Audience: to whom are you talking? People who initially agree with you or who need a lot of persuasion? People who know a lot about the subject or people who need explanations. Circumstances: what's happening around you? How many people are listening? What time of the day is it? Are people tired or energetic? Are you the first or the last person to pitch and should you maybe address this? Do you have a microphone? How big is the room? Are you pitching online? Can people see or only hear you? Language: how should you talk to your audience in this situation? Look at the other elements and adapt your language to the audience. Are they younger, older, can you use slang? Can you incorporate humor? If so, how much? Think about what they know about the subject and if you should use more simple wordings or technical terms without any further explanations. Some of these are more givens than others, according to the situation. And as you can see, they all work together and affect each other. So if one is changed, the other will also change. And when you know your specific communication situation, it's a lot easier for you to adapt your script, voice and body to it and get the most out of your time. Then your pitch will feel like it's tailor- made for this specific occasion and not just a template used over and over. Now I 'll tell you a bit about the ancient modes of persuasion, and I'll start with a quote. This is a quote from the book Rhetoric written by Greek philosopher Aristotle. It contains all 3 modes of persuasion: ethos, logos and pathos. Back in ancient Greece, Aristotle systematised rhetoric as an adult skill and presented us with the 3 modes of persuasion, which, of course, can be used by anyone, not only those who identify as a man, as Aristotle wrote. These are still very useful and great to incorporate when building a story. First, ethos is appealing to the trust of the audience. How you present yourself. Show them how credible you are and why you are the best one to talk about this subject or product. Do you have some personal or professional experiences that makes you more trustworthy? You can appeal to ethos by showing goodwill. For example, saying 'thank you for having me', 'I've looked forward to talking to you' or 'what a great audience'. Showing knowledge: show that you have insight into the subject that you're talking about. And showing good character: show that you are sympathetic, have high moral, are trustworthy and have good intentions. You can also borrow ethos from experts or someone with more authority than you to help your case. Then there's pathos. This is appealing to the emotions and imagination of the audience. Tell stories, use details, paint a picture they can imagine to put them in a state of mind that makes them more receptive to your arguments. And logos, which is appealing to the common sense of the audience. Use facts and argumentation to make them think rationally. Incorporate statistics, latest research, etc., to show that there's truth in what you're saying, and that it is rational to agree with you. You can choose to use only some of them, but I recommend having a bit of all three. The best pitch usually features all of them to create balance and to make the best arguments. You don't have to use them equally, though. Your story might call for more pathos, or you might need to use time on establishing your ethos. Or maybe the presentation needs to focus on logos because your audience needs facts to show that this product will work. These three and the rhetorical pentagram are crucial to remember when you need to persuade someone to do something. Now, my colleague Jonas will show you how you can start structuring your story with some storytelling tools. While helped you capture your audience's attention. I'm here to help you make sure the audience remembers you. I'm going to introduce you to two models of storytelling, The Golden Circle and the Hero's Journey that are relevant to building a great story for either yourself or your solution and project. And it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the Golden Circle. In Simon famous TED Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, he introduces the concept of the Golden Circle. If you haven't seen this talk yet, I strongly encourage you to check it out after this lecture. The model explains why some companies or individuals are more successful than others, despite having equal or fewer resources and networks. Simon Sinek intends for the model to be a leadership tool, but companies have later also often applied it as a storytelling model. If you follow this model, you'll start with why you're doing something. It is important to emphasize that your 'why' cannot be, for example, to save the world. That is too broad and generic. Your 'why' is something your listener or reader needs to be able to connect with. Your 'why' needs to, in combination with your 'how' and 'what', make sense in terms of ethos, pathos and logos. So preferably both be credible, emotional and rational. An example could be the Wright Brothers who are credited for inventing the airplane. The Wright Brothers later explained that they simply started their work to learn new truths as they found out other work was full of errors and poor data. Many of us will be able to connect to this emotional cost or purpose, their 'why'. Their 'how' was much more rational founded as they set out to make countless experiments, including constructing a wind tunnel? Finally their 'what' became very much a question of credibility. Their 'what' was simply to fly. According to the Theory of the Golden Circle, they could later have set out to solve other complex innovation challenges and we would still have believed in them and their different solutions. They can move into different 'whats' because we believe in their 'why' - their purpose in learning new truths. As mentioned, the Golden Circle can also be used in your storytelling. So you start with your 'why', your purpose, but remember that you also need a strong 'how' and a strong 'what'. Now, let us look at a very different approach to storytelling. We all know how fairy tales and myths go: the hero faces a problem, overcomes challenges and solves the problem and saves the world while being transformed as a person in the process. The story of the Wright Brothers is also a story we remember in this context. Joseph Campbell has made this quite complex model, what he calls the hero's journey. It illustrates how most myths are very similar in this structure and in the development the hero undergoes. Myths and fairy tales have been remembered for thousands of years in part because we find ourselves cheering and caring for the hero. Now you can apply the same technique to your story for sharing your process if you just simplify the model a bit to look like this instead. 'The world' where you are introduced to the problem as it is. 'The call' when you're feeling the need to act. 'The beginning' where you start to experiment with ways and meet challenges. 'The revelation', where you realize the solution or overcome the greatest challenge. 'The implementation', where you adapt the great learning idea to the world. 'The future' where you have returned and can see a new world. Can you imagine these steps in a development in your own life, or as a story of a new project? As mentioned, we can also see the story of the Wright Brothers invention in this model. Two brothers who get a toy helicopter from their father in a world where humans couldn't fly yet; though having ambitions to go to college, an injury set one brother back and instead they both became bicycle mechanics. They followed the growing development of airplanes and especially felt called to act when an engineer died in a crash. They requested data from the National Library only to find out that the data was flawed. They started to experiment themselves with a self- constructed wind tunnel and made countless experiments with crashes and mistakes with their lives at risk. They finally achieved flying and overcame the greatest challenge at the time. The public didn't believe their achievement and they traveled to Europe to make a number of airplane performances. Then we all know how the story of air planes went from there. All this is also a story you remember - not the details, but the feeling. In this cultural context, it fits well into the idea of the American dream. In other words, if you can share your process from start to an imagined end, we can follow you and believe in your development the same way you also find yourself cheering for the hero in the stories. I've told you about two ways to build a great story people remember. Are you right now considering which one is the best? Try them out. Experiment with them and see what people relate to the most.?
