One of our readers had a very good question.

She watched the Feel Sense Describe video, and asked, “That’s nice, but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?”

Good question. Here’s a voice response with two suggestions:

By the way, we love to get followup questions, we answer all of them, and sometimes we even record our answer (like this) for all to hear. So if you have a question, don’t be shy, ask us. We promise we won’t use your name in the recording, unless you want us to!

Transcript:

One of our tips and tricks subscribers emailed me. She watched this video Feel Sense Describe. And she asked me, “Okay, Matt, that’s nice but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?” And that’s a very good question. We get that question a lot. It’s a very common question. And I’ve got two things to suggest.

One is, don’t think of the numbers themselves. It’s almost impossible to get emotionally excited about those numbers. You know, when you say a number like 1,263, or 9,300,200 and blah, blah, blah … it’s almost impossible to get emotional about that. Instead, think about the humans or think about the people behind those numbers. Think about, you know, the kid who went to a funeral, or think about the graduating student who just graduated from university, and she paid for university because her father had a life insurance policy, or something like that. So think about the humans behind the numbers. That’s suggestion number one.

Suggestion number two is about mirror neurons. And mirror neurons are very strong in any social animal, like humans. By mirror neurons, here’s what I mean. Some years ago, there were some researchers, and they had, let’s say, five groups of monkeys. And they had all of the monkeys, they were wired up to some computers that showed their brain waves or whatever. And so anyway, monkey group number one did something. I don’t know, they picked up a stick, or they picked up a piece of food, or something like that. And the researchers looked at the electronic brain waves that were happening in these monkeys, and they saw the electronic brain waves happening. The thing is that the researchers also noticed that the monkeys in groups two, three, four, whatever, those monkeys they weren’t actually doing anything, they were just sitting there watching the monkeys in group number one. And the exact same electronic brain activity that was happening in group one, was happening in groups two, three and four also.

And what the researchers realized was that, just by watching other monkeys feeling an emotion, the monkeys in groups two, three and four, they also feel those same emotions. And so, one way you can use that in a presentation is whatever emotion you want your audience to feel, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion, and display that emotion yourself. So if you want your audience to feel excitement, then dig deep into yourself and find something that excites you. If you want your audience to feel happy, or sad, or angry, or patriotic, or whatever, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion.

And that brings me to point number three. I’ll finish here with point number three. Point number three is kind of a bonus point. I hadn’t planned on mentioning it. But point number three is that, whatever that source of emotion is in you, you don’t actually have to talk about it. You don’t actually have to mention it in your presentation, cause the point is not to mention it, the point is just to show the emotion on your face. So, if you show the emotion on your face, even if you’re not talking about why you’re feeling that emotion on your face, your audience members will see that emotion on your face and then they’ll start to feel that emotion too.

And then point number 3.5, and then I promise I’m going to finish up. I could go on for hours about this subject but I promise I’m going to stop. So point number 3.5 is make sure that the emotion that you’re showing on your face or in your body language, or whatever, make sure that its real. Dig deep until you find a real, genuine source of that emotion in yourself. People are really, really good at seeing fake emotions. And so, if you try to fake an emotion, your audience is going to see that and there is no way that they are going to feel that emotion too. In fact, they’ll probably think you’re not worthy of trust or something like that. So make sure that whatever emotion you want them to feel, dig deep until you find a real and genuine source of that emotion in yourself, and then connect with that emotion.

Okay, so I promised I would stop there. So I’m going to stop there. I love these questions. Whenever you have a question about anything that we send to you, just email us, or call us, or whatever, and ask us the question. We’ll answer the question and, if it’s a good one, we may even do like here, do a recording. Okay, over and out. Take care. Bye-bye.