Most anyone who has delivered a presentation has experienced the challenge of keeping an audience engaged and focused on the task at hand. When you present—even more so if you train—your objective is to persuade. You persuade people to think differently, you persuade them to act differently, or you persuade them to see the world through a different lens. In one-on-one discussions persuasion is palpable—you can easily gauge how the other person is reacting and responding to your message. In larger groups it is often difficult to know with certainty how your message is being received. You need an approach you can trust to drive the message home. With so many different learning styles and interest levels in a room, this is easier said than done.

Emotional intelligence is a common denominator that has a tremendous impact upon how all types of people respond to a message. If you want someone to change, or at least show genuine interest in a novel idea, you must engage the rational and emotional centers of his brain. Much of our work here at TalentSmart^® centers on persuading people to increase their emotional intelligence skills. Ironically, an individual’s emotional intelligence is the very thing we tap into to persuade her to increase her emotional intelligence skills. Allow me to explain...

The design behind our new Emotional Intelligence PowerPoint 2.0 training program is a perfect illustration of this irony. Emotional Intelligence PowerPoint^® 2.0 is a 33-slide training program that can be used to facilitate sessions ranging from one to four hours in length. The sessions help audience members to understand emotional intelligence, discover how it impacts individual and organizational performance, and follow a proven process to increases their emotional intelligence skills. What audience members don’t realize is they are persuaded by the content in the sessions because we crafted it to appeal to both the emotional and the rational centers of their brains.

Let’s take a peek behind the curtain so you can see what I’ve just described. We designed the presentation to appeal to the audience’s rational brains first. Attention levels are high at the beginning of a presentation, creating the perfect opportunity to showcase how emotional intelligence operates in the brain and why it’s behind so many actions that are critical to the audience’s success.