Tools for Capturing your Audiences Heart

Four tools can help you appeal to your listener’s feelings: vivid descriptions, metaphors, analogies, and stories.


In the most successful persuasive situations, people first accept the presenters’ proposal unconsciously, based on their emotional response. Then they justify their decision based on a logical assessment of the facts.


Four tools can help you appeal to your listener’s feelings: vivid descriptions, metaphors, analogies, and stories.

Vivid descriptions—words that paint evocative images in people’s minds—deeply tap in to listener’s emotions. For example, suppose you want to persuade your supervisor to approve a new policy that will enable some employees to telecommute several days each week. You anticipate that our supervisor will worry that telecommuting may reduce worker productivity.


To persuade him otherwise, you vividly describe team members working diligently from their home offices, free of the many distractions that crop up in the office on a typical workday. You contrast that picture with one of employees being frequently interrupted by well-meaning coworkers who stop by to chat. As you paint these images in your supervisors’ mind, he begins experiencing two emotions: a desire for a more focused, industrious staff, and an aversion to the disruptive reality you’ve described He agrees to consider telecommuting as a viable alternative.

ACTION POINT: Use vivid descriptions to paint evocative images in your audiences
minds.