The One Thing Great Communicators do to get to the Heart
Great communicators understand in order to get to the heart they have to speak from the heart.
The Greeks- lovers of rhetoric- said that one of the essentials to transformative communication was the ability to speak with pathos. For the Greeks, pathos was not animation, but a kind of speaking that came from deep within…speaking which came from the heart.
In her novel, The Invention of Wings, award winning author Sue Monk Kidd, describes a scene where her character, Sarah Grimke, goes to church at a crossroads in her life. Sitting in the pew listening to the preacher, Sarah reflects, “I felt utterly spoken to, and in the most direct and supernatural way. How could he know what lay inside me? How did he know what I was only that moment able to see myself? These words ravished me. They seemed to break down some great artifice. I sat on the pew quietly shaken while Reverend Kollack looked at me now without focus or interest…He delivered me to the precipice where one’s only choice was between paralysis or abandon” (page 163). Sarah would leave this sermon forever changed.
What happened? Reverend Kollack spoke to her heart.
This all sounds well and good, and if you are like me, what communicator doesn’t want to get to the heart? So how exactly do we do this? Tim Keller, one of the most transformative communicators of his generation offers some help when he says we have no hope to get to the heart, “...unless you are consistently preaching from the heart. What you are calling people to experience you must be experiencing yourself. What the Holy Spirit is to do in the hearts of your listeners he will normally do first in and through you. You must be something like a clear glass through which people can see a broken but gospel-changed soul in such a way that they want it for themselves” (Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, page 205).
Now I understand full well it’s beyond our capacity to get inside the hearts of our hearers. At the same time, we can unnecessarily get in the way of the greater work that needs to be done in the hearts of people who come to hear us. All we as communicators can do is to create pathways to the heart, and I have found the following essential in reaching the hearts of people:
Prepare yourself way more than your message. Is my heart regularly warmed and stirred by the truths I’m proclaiming? Am I praying regularly and richly, or are my prayers last minute, “Hail Mary’s,” where I ask God to bless my speaking, detached from the daily rhythm of communing with God?
Speak from the margins. Dr. Richard Swenson, in his book, Margin, defines margin as the space between our loads and our limits. The idea here is one of comprehensive rest- physically, emotionally and spiritually. If you’re a parent, you know impatience and harsh communication with your children is almost always connected to a margin-less life. On the other hand, the road to life altering, heart reaching communication happens when we do so from the margins of a well rested life.
Know your content. If you don’t know your material well, you will be more focused on remembering the message, than reaching the hearer. Knowing your content well allows you the space to actually feel what you are saying, while you are saying it, and this only serves to connect us to the hearts of our audience.
Believe your content. It’s one thing to know your material, it’s quite another to believe it, and trust me, your audience can discern whether or not you are actually all in on what you are trying to persuade them to do. While nothing runs people away more than inauthenticity, on the other hand, nothing draws people in like a speaker who actually believes what they’re saying.
Note: I realize I missed last week, and for that I’m not sorry:). I was on vacation with my wife.
What I’m reading:
The Weight of Glory (re-read), C.S. Lewis
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