In our first lesson, we're gonna look at the elements of persuasive communication. Many of us mistakenly believe that it's what we say that forms the crux of our message. The reality is communications are much more complex than that simple belief. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to form a persuasive message. now recognize that we are all pitchers of ideas, even those of us in finance. Now, we don't present information for information sake.

However, we're not all equal when it comes to this art of communicating. Having the ability to pitch your thoughts and your ideas makes you a persuasive executive. It makes you influential, and ultimately, it makes you an executive communicator. What you say is important. However, when you have executive presence, you know that it's more about how you say it. The messages that we convey through verbal language and unwritten body language helped to form the perceptions of our listeners and perception.

More so than intent and content, so often dictate the outcome of the pitches that we make. So the key to a successful communication is to first anticipate the perceptions, the perspectives of your audience, because your pitch is first and foremost about your audience and the effect it's going to have on their lives, not yours, not your shareholders, their lives. And so when the messages are crafted from the audience's perspective, and not yours, you're more likely to influence the actions that they take after listening to you. So let's spend a moment doing that kind of a historical reflection, if you will allow me 3000 years ago, Aristotle first identified the three elements to every persuasive communication. And ever since these elements have been showing up, referenced, regurgitated, reformulated and recast by a host of experts in the field of communication. We're going to actually use the original source in this course because personally speaking I find these three ideas easier to remember.

First of all we have the idea of ethos and ethos is your credibility, you must be credible with your audience and your message must be credible before your audience will listen and more importantly, act path. Those is the emotional connection that you make with your audience. They have to like you before they will listen to you and act on the message. And logos is the logical argument. This is the message itself. It's the what of what you're telling people.

So of the three elements, you might think that this one might be the most important However, in fact, it is actually the least, because logos messages get processed by the left side of our brains, which works more slowly and deliberately. Then our faster, more intuitive right side of our brains. And it would be a mistake to emphasize substance over form because when it comes to communication, the form is every bit as important or sometimes even more important than the substance of the message itself. So let's look at these in a little bit more detail. So when we talk about ethos, ethos not only speaks to your own credentials, your professional designation, the paper you've written, the previous experience you've had, but it also speaks to how you, you convey your message how you speak. When you speak with confidence, people sit up and listen.

So in other words, you come across as more trustworthy. People will not listen or believe your message if they don't trust you first. This is your ethos. patos tends to have the most powerful persuasive effects when it comes to influencing others. When you connect with your audience, and you see their world and they see yours You speak from their frame of reference. This makes you very influential.

You can make an emotional appeal to them. You can tap into to their emotional feelings, and allow them to feel your message as opposed to remember the context and the substance of the message. pathos is the heart stories that we tell, that accompany the information that we present. And in finance, you'll very often find presentations that are devoid of this path those connection, which is why the perception of those in finances that we are not very strong communicators. And finally, we have logos. Logos is the logical argument of our message, just the data is the analysis behind our recommendations.

It's the cause and effect type scenarios that we lay out for our audiences to allow them to follow our line of thinking. And while this logical argument, obviously has a lot of merit, it's good to fall on deaf ears and fail if it's not accompanied with kind of ample amounts of ethos, and pathos. When we coach financial professionals, generally I typically don't spend a whole lot of time working on improving our critical thinking and logos because many of us in the financial profession exemplify this trait in space. So keep in mind that your messages cannot just be logos alone, there must be an element of ethos, unpack those, otherwise it will fail to be persuasive to your audience. Generally speaking, your executive presence is amplified when you present both sides of an argument. When you're passionate, you're credible.

You're likable, you provide third party evidence which boosts ethos, you framed the argument with context, that's logos, and you remain visible and you're present, and you're able to make a connection with the audience as you're presenting. Each of these traits are examples of ethos, pathos, and logos. In our next lesson, we're going to look at how you can build some rapport with your audience.