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In order to close that gap of the Problem and get the audience from where they are to where we want them to be, we need to make sure they have everything they need. To do that go back to the Goal so you can show them they have all the tools and that those tools add up to something bigger than they had in the first place. This is the Goal Revisited: the Goal plus the benefit that going through the Change will have for the audience, the bigger version of the Goal.

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In order to get the audience to Change, we need to give them examples of the Action in a format that they can relate to. The three that work best are process, category, and criteria.

For process, give your audience a series of steps to take, in order. For categories, you show the areas where the change can apply: to your sales, marketing, etc. Criteria, unlike process, is things that don’t have to happen in order but have to be there for the Change to happen

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When you’re working on your Red Thread you often want to start with the Change. However, a common pitfall is to focus on the actions you want people to take, rather than the Change you need them to make that drives all those actions. The difference is between plans and intent. Your audience needs to understand what the overall purpose of the Action is if you want them to follow through and be flexible if (for some reason) that action can’t or won’t work for

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Great ideas aren’t just found, they’re built piece by piece. To make that idea irresistible to someone else, we have to do the same thing: build that idea piece by piece in their mind. This week, we’re looking at the idea behind the Idea, the thing that makes the Problem impossible to ignore but also puts the Goal within the audience’s reach.

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We want to put an intractable problem in front of an irresistible goal for our audience because it creates context, but often the context we’re providing is something the audience already knows. The trick is to focus on the Problem of perspective that’s getting in their way.

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When we’re trying to share our irresistible idea with someone, we need to make sure that they have a reason to keep listening. We often focus on explaining why our ideas are important to us, rather than why they’re important to our audience.

How do you make sure that you address the audience’s goal? Make sure that you start with something that audience finds wants that isn’t our idea: an irresistible outcome.

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When we’re trying to find our way through a difficult time, even when we’re getting help from others, we’re always trying to find new answers to help us change what’s happening. A lot of times, however, the search for the new leads us to miss something that’s been there all along. The muscles that we use the most are the strongest, so if we can find ways to reframe a situation we can find a new way of using our “old” ways of thinking.

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We all need certain landmarks in our messages to help point our audience in the right direction, but are you telling your audience how those landmarks string together? To make sure those transitions between your point are present, Tamsen has developed the TraPIT method: Transition, Point, Illustration, and Takeaway. Start structuring your message in terms of TraPIT blocks, and you can make sure your audience is never lost.

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Sometimes when we get up to give a big talk or presentation, the speech that sounded great on paper suddenly falls flat when we say it out loud. Why does this happen? It has to do with how we process language, which we do by taking in information from other people. This ability to learn from two perspectives, both ours and our audience’s, is called dialogic processing.

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According to Goethe, all the rope the British Navy uses, from the largest to the smallest, is made with a red thread woven into it. That means that even the smallest piece of rope can be identified as the property of the crown. A lot of advice revolves around stamping your work from the outside. While those things are important, they’ll be even more powerful if the core of something is recognizably yours, if it’s interwoven with the Red Thread.