Monday Minute: Tools of Trust – Part 5 – Telos

It is time for your Fearless Monday Minute. Today we are wrapping up our five part series on how to build trust with an audience, leaning on Aristotle as our support and guide. So in order to build trust with an audience, you need to 1: Identify that you have enough experience to speak about your topic. 2: There needs to be a logical format to your proceedings. 3: You need to tug on the emotional heartstrings. 4: There needs to be a sense of timeliness and relevance. And the last piece is that there needs to be what Aristotle calls Telos, which means “a purpose”. And I think the simplest way to think about it is the “why” of your speaking. Now, one of the things that I noticed with working with speakers is that our first impulse is to lean on “why is this important for me?” And my invitation is to spin it and think “why is this speaking important to my audience?”