How to Persuade: Empathy

Empathy is the emotional connection a speaker makes with the audience. The ancient Greeks called it Pathos.

Examples of Empathy from famous speeches:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

Martin Luther King, Jr., Lincoln Memorial, 1963

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

John F. Kennedy, Jr., Rice Stadium, 1961

In both of these powerful orations, the speaker taps into the deeper emotional sensibilities of the audience.

King uses the fundamental founding ideals of the United States as a way to stir in a mixture of patriotism and sympathy. While his immediate audience in front of him was mostly black with a smattering of white supporters, his larger audience was that of the rest of the nation. His intent was to remind us of our inherited vows as US citizens. That "all men are created equal". All men. Not some men, but all men.

And Kennedy, during the Cold War and with an effort to rally the nation to support a peaceful scientific endeavor, moves his audience with several passionate sparks. He reminds us, US Americans, that we don't shirk away from hard work, that we are at our best when the challenges are great, and we all also have the abilities to take on this monumental task. He is, in a sense, acknowledging what most of us perceive as our inherent nature, and offering a challenge to that nature, something no "true hard-working American" would not back down from.

Our emotions are our most primary of motivators. Even in our most logical moments, surrounded by all data, a tiny sliver of emotion haunts our choices. The powerful orator recognizes this little fact and leverages it to inspire people to action, or to offer a tender story, or to generate raucous laughter. It is in having an empathic connection to the audience that a speaker can do this well and consistently draw the audience into their story.