By Bill McMahon
The Authentic Personality
CEO

EAGLE, Idaho — The surest way to attract and hold the largest and most loyal audience you can is to consistently create meaningful emotional experiences for your listeners. Experiences that make their lives more interesting, rewarding and fun. Experiences that challenge them to think, feel, and grow.

Creating magical moments for your listeners flows naturally from recognizing and fully understanding meaningful emotional experiences in your life. Here’s a process for doing just that:

1.Pay close attention to your feelings 24/7. Noticeable emotional reactions or changes in what you’re feeling. Make note of what you’re seeing, doing or what’s happening to you when these reactions or changes occur. Something that makes you feel joy or sadness, anger or fear, interest or surprise, disgust or shame, or any other conspicuous emotion. Describe what you’re feeling and exactly what caused your feeling. This is the essential raw material you need to constantly create magical moments on the radio.

2.Explore what effect your feelings have on you and why you might want to share your experience with your listeners.

a. Did your feelings and the experience that triggered them change how you think and feel about someone or something?

b. Did you learn something new?

c. Did your experience change you in some other way?

3.Clearly define your intention for sharing your experience. What beneficial effect do you hope sharing your experience and the effect it had on you will have on your listeners? This is the most important step of the process. It requires a keen understanding of the effect your experience had on you.

4. Create an intriguing expectation statement. It should immediately engage your listeners by setting up an appealing beneficial expectation for them. It will also help ensure that you deliver on the expectation by providing a guide or framework for the on-air presentation of the story that you’ve chosen to share. Here’s a couple examples of expectation statements:

a. For sharing the story of an experience with a song: “When I feel frustrated, disappointed, or even depressed with my work and what I’m accomplishing, this song always gives me a reality check and makes me feel better.”
b. For sharing the story of an experience reading a book: “Here’s how I learned that most of us, including me, have a gap between who we are and who we think we are and how that gap affects us and those around us.”

Bill McMahon, CEO of The Authentic Personality, is a longtime talk radio station and talent consultant who has played a role in the development of the careers of many leading hosts over the past three decades. He can be phoned at 208-887-5670 or emailed at Bill@AuthenticPersonality.biz.

Tags: Bill McMahon, talk radio, The Authentic Personality

Category: Advice