Principle VI: Persuasive communication cuts through the clutter of information overload by dealing with safety issues.

Turn Maslow’s hierarchy of needs upside down in your mind. Maslow said that we take care of our needs in order, from the most basic to the more refined. So, we take care of physiological needs first — food and shelter, say — before we worry about love, esteem, or self – actualization. Maslow looked ahead to a society where all our basic needs were taken care of and we could focus on
self-actualization.

Nice, but we’ve got a ways to go. Until that halcyon day, imagine a hierarchy of communications as an inverted Maslow’s hierarchy. Which would you pay attention to first: a communication about your personal safety, or one about the metaphorical meaning of hands in Dickens’s Great Expectations? One certain way to get attention is to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The lower a message or communication is on Maslow’s hierarchy, the more it grabs your attention, viscerally.

You’ll see this in your speaking when you hit upon a topic that affects an audience powerfully, at the gut level. Perhaps you’re talking about jobs, or threats to the business in the marketplace, or layoffs. Your audience will lean forward in its chairs, sit up, open its eyes, and so on – all signs that it’s paying close attention because an issue important to it is on the table.

So, to ensure that you’re heard, you must figure out a way to make your communications about the safety of your audience in organizational (or business) terms. That’s not as hard as it sounds. Most issues ultimately boil down to safety, properly phrased, or they’re not worth worrying about.

The exception to this rule is the audience that has satisfied all the issues lower down on the hierarchy and can afford to pay attention to self-actualization. It’s just not often you find such audiences.
The billionaires’ club, perhaps, is one. And even then, if a safety issue arises, it will trump your lesser (because higher up the pyramid) concern.

Messages that we perceive affect our personal (or organizational) safety are inherently interesting to us. Your goal is as a communicator is to find the safety message within your speech in order to present that to your audience. Anything less important is wasting everyone’s time.