Chapter 6: Your Audience Writes the Speech

Part 1: What Drives Us? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Part 2: Tracking Values, Beliefs, Attitudes and Actions

Part 3: Be Aware and Beware: Analyze Your Audience

Part 4: The Holy Trinity: You, Your Audience, Your Message

Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

1.  Draw Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

2. Distinguish between the primary audience analysis,the secondary audience analysis and formal audience analysis.

3. Consider how you can respectfully communicate with people who have differing values, beliefs and attitudes.

4. Describe the components of a good personal support system.

5. Explain what it means to be an audience centered communicator.

6. Describe the significance of establishing a meaningful connection (lock) between the audience, yourself and the content.

Words have incredible power. They can make people’s hearts soar, or they can make people’s hearts sore. —Dr. Mardy Grothe

Part 1: What Drives Us? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Have you ever watched someone do something and questioned their motives? There are reasons we as people are motivated to action. Literally, nearly everything we do from “Saying Hi!” to our decision to further our education or drop out, take the job or hand in our notice, fall in love, marry, have children, lie, cheat, even speak in front of an audience. Let’s explore some of the best ideas about why we as people do what we do.

Abraham Maslow (1943, 1954) spent an enormous amount of time thinking about what drives us as human beings. After much thought, Maslow determined that we are all driven by needs. He tried to categorize these needs and he found that the best way to represent them was in a hierarchical pyramid. Maslow found that people are motivated to achieve certain needs and that some needs take precedence over others. The base of the pyramid represents the deficiency needs and the top levels are known as growth or being needs.