This is the third in a series of blogs on achieving authenticity in public communications.  Authenticity is the sine qua non of our age. We all want it, and when it’s lacking in a public figure, we turn off to that person.  I talk more about authenticity in my book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but these blogs will cover a condensed discussion of the topic. 

The third step in achieving authenticity is to be passionate.  How do you effectively communicate passion through your content? Recognize that all the verbal expressions of emotion are not as strong as the nonverbal ones, and if the two are at odds, the person you’re communicating with will believe the nonverbal always.  That said, there are some ways to express passion through content.

The first, and simplest, technique is to label the emotion.  And yet this technique is one that people deny themselves all the time, because of our reluctance to talk about negative or strong emotions. Is it easy to look at a loved one and say, “I’m angry with you?” How about going into your boss’s office and saying, “Boss, I’m really frustrated because you have systematically under-funded and understaffed this initiative, and you know my career depends on its success?” And what about telling an old friend that he’s let you down by not showing up at a performance that really mattered to you?

A second equally simple yet profound technique to show passion in your verbal expression is to tell an uncomfortable truth.  It’s important to distinguish telling the truth from labeling the emotion. Certainly there can be overlap, but to tell an uncomfortable truth can often mean keeping your emotions in check. The passion that shows up in these instances is courage.

A third technique is to focus on the physical details of a situation without labeling the emotions. This technique works when everyone knows that the situation is emotionally charged.  Think Hemingway.  The idea is to let the audience inject the emotion precisely because you hold back.  Let them do the work. 

What other verbal techniques convey emotion?  Two main techniques, the rhetorical rule of threes and (appropriate) repetition, are the most powerful ways to convey emotion through rhetoric.

I’ve blogged about the Rule of Three’s before.  Basically, we like things – they sound complete and stronger – grouped in threes.  If the phrases or ideas are of unequal length, put the longest one last. 

There’s a real art to repetition. How do you manage it so that it doesn’t sound simple-minded but rather creates a crescendo of emotion that builds with each repetition?  The key is the phrase that’s repeated. It has to be able to bear the weight, and the words have to be affirmative, simple, and evocative. It’s not easy to find the right ones. The political world is full of repetitive phrasing and chanting of key phrases that the speaker begins and the audience takes over, but most of them are quickly forgotten.  An exception, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I have a dream.”

Each of these devices heightens the emotional content of the words for effect; these are ways of conveying your passion with the words themselves.