How To Talk To Humans
How To Talk To Humans
"Pre-Framing A Message" The Coming Attractions of Communication
In this episode, host Larry Wilson breaks down the importance of effective communication through the practice of “pre-framing” a message—setting context in advance so the listener knows where you’re headed. Using examples from author John D. MacDonald, Larry shows how book cover copy and reader comments help frame a story before it even begins. He also connects this idea to business communication, including sales conversations and meeting preparation, and even references speed-reading pioneer Evelyn Wood to reinforce how pre-framing improves understanding and engagement.
Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method
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Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrial, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned in 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world. And their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Thanks again for joining me for another episode of this podcast that is so near and dear to my heart. I talk so much about communication here, and I wanted to speak to a specific element because so many of you I know are involved in business, whether you're entrepreneurs, whether you're a one-person operation, whether it's a small company. And that is the importance of pre-framing your message. Now, if you're speaking one-on-one to someone, I don't really think you have a need to pre-frame. I'm thinking more in terms of uh campaigns. Perhaps you're rolling out a big promotional or marketing campaign. Or it could be something on social media, but it probably is something bigger than just what you had for lunch. It's probably something that maybe it's a new program or a new offering you have. And the importance of pre-framing cannot be overstated here. Because if people are really paying attention to what you're saying, and I hope they are, because I hope you're presenting in a way that they feel a connection with you, then pre-framing helps deliver your message in a way that will stick with the recipient. It will hopefully make it clearer to them, make it impossible for them to misunderstand. I'm always thinking of this. In the old days, in films, they used to use uh coming attractions to pre-frame stuff. Uh I assume everyone's seen enough of these, or at least you've seen a parody of one where it may only be 30 seconds or 60 seconds, and it's supposed to be bombarding you with images that are exciting and make you want to see this film. And it's become so uh self-referential that sometimes it's difficult to follow whether they're being serious or whether they're poking fun at themselves. It's not always clear. But many of us have seen coming attractions. There's a certain voice, uh imagine a world without water, when one man controls the moisture. That somehow deeper register and commanding, and you know, so sometimes it's that. But the purpose of uh coming attraction was to pre-frame what the film was about. When you say imagine, you know, imagine astronauts stranded on a planet where they discover humans are the animals and apes are the evolved species. That was not the greatest pre-framing I could think of. But obviously that's about Planet of the Apes, right? Well, if you see that combined with images that show apes riding horses and firing guns and orating before big groups of other apes, it gives you some sense. Oh, wow, this is crazy. Now, it may not tell you the whole story. So maybe it doesn't tell you astronauts are stranded on this planet. Maybe it just says, imagine a world where apes and humans have reversed their roles. Or I'm not really, it's not really my specialty, but I think you understand what I'm saying here. This kind of preframing is very, very helpful. Not only does it help a person understand what it is your message may be. In this case, we want them to know about this movie and be interested in coming to see this movie. But it could be involved in anything. It could be as simple as, I'm making this up as I'm talking to you, but you could be about to launch a campaign, and the person who's the most successful is going to win a first-class airline tickets round trip for two anywhere in the world, and a stay at a five-star resort anywhere in the world. So maybe you're about to roll that campaign out with that associated prize for someone in your organization. And so the pre-framing for it, this is just an example, it's not the only way you could do it, but might be if you could go anywhere in the world and it wouldn't cost you a dime, where would you like to go? And then maybe there'd be a bunch of images flashed of exciting resort vacations, Hawaii and Paris and uh Bakersfield, and you know, all these other places that everyone wants to go. That's just a possible way that it could be presented. But sometimes we use bullet points to pre-frame stuff. Maybe you're about to present some sort of report, maybe it has to do with your business or the business of a client of yours or something, and you may have four bullet points before the actual report. And those bullet points are referring to the most important four things that are going to follow. That's a way of pre-framing. I I'm thinking of when I was very young, now I can't remember her name, I want to say there's a woman named Evelyn Woods, and she had some program about speed reading. And you might wonder, why is this so important? Well, this is in the days before computers, and anything that people could do that they felt gave them an advantage in business was regarded very highly. So, speed reading, one of the ways it was presented, is you'll get more work done, you'll be able to read more things that have to do with business faster than your competition can read them and things like that. It certainly wasn't intended for people who read for enjoyment, which is most of my life, is reading books for pleasure. That's not what speed reading or Evelyn Wood was about. But uh, it was very, very big. When I was very young, it was a very big deal. Speed reading. And there are all these different tricks. I won't tell you any of them because I don't want you to do it. I want you to take your time. Uh, speed reading, you're very likely to make mistakes. You're very likely to overlook things or accidentally misread things. But the idea was they were just going to get you through text really fast. But I think of it because of one particular thing that has stayed with me all these years and is effective and is very, very useful. That is one of Evelyn Wood's admonitions was when you pick up a book, before you open it, read everything on the cover, turn it over, read everything on the back. And at the time I remember thinking, what's the big deal? Well, the big deal, she didn't use this term, but was pre-framing that uh this is probably um has to do more with uh softcover books than hardcover books. I don't know if anyone knows what hardcover books are anymore. But uh softcover books you might buy almost anywhere, and the whole idea of there were a lot of things printed on the front besides the name and the author's name. It might say Noble House by James Clavell, a novel of contemporary Hong Kong. Now that's not huge pre-framing. It's not huge pre-framing. But it does show us if you're interested in historical fiction, oh, this might be for me. If you're interested in Hong Kong, oh, this might be for me. Now, if you know about James Clavell and his work, of which I'm a huge fan, just seeing his name on it, sign me up. I'm bring it on. Doesn't matter what it's about, I'm in. But on the back of a soft cover edition of books, there frequently be all kinds of other information. Evelyn Wood, her premise was that there's so much information on the front and back cover that will tell you what this book is about and what to expect, and what the flavor of it may be, and what its point of view may be, all these things that if you absorb those before opening the book, you will be able to understand and absorb that information faster and better with greater recall. I don't know if it was ever tested, but in my life it's proved to be very effective. Now, these are just, you know, this is not scientific what I'm presenting to you. I'm just telling you what my experience has been. I'm also a huge fan of books of by the writer John D. McDonald, who wrote like pulp fiction stuff in the 50s and 60s, and then evolved. Every writer I know, every serious, certainly every serious television writer I know, has read everything by John D. McDonald because he's a wizard of plot and storyline and dialogue. They're just, they're fantastic, but they're very kind of pulp fiction, you know. There's gritty, raw elements to them, graphic violence, and it's very anyway. McDonald crafted this character, Travis McGee. And McGee is you've seen McGee replicated so many times, but not realize that's what it was. Uh Travis McGee is clearly the blueprint for um suddenly I forgot his name. Uh Thomas Magnum of Magnum P.I. So clearly, uh not just from the initials, but McGee is not a private eye the way Magnum is. He's just sort of a boat bum who lives in Florida on a very fancy boat he won in a poker game. Magnum lives in a mansion in Hawaii, but it's not his mansion. It's some generous benefactor who lets him live there. And there's always beautiful women coming in and out all the time, just like with Thomas Magnum. And there's mysteries and there's plots and there's all kinds of things that have been worked out, and there's fist fights and gun fights and all kinds of things like that. But if you ever watched Magnum PI and then you read any John D. McDonald's stories about Travis McGee, you'll immediately see, go, oh, I see where this came from. But I think of uh there was a series of reprints of some of the Travis McGee books. You'll also know the McGee books because they all have a color in the title: a purple place for dying, pale gray for guilt, the bright orange shroud, uh the deep blue goodbye. So it was just sort of a gimmick, you know. They all had a color in the title. But uh in the reprints, they had all these modern authors ask them to write blurbs about John D. McDonnell, and they were glowing, they were all love letters, and they were going on and on. I mean, you really couldn't ask for bigger names in literature than they assembled. But the greatest of all the blurbs, and I say this because, well, you'll see, was from Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote, to diggers a thousand years from now, the collected works of John D. McDonald will be a treasure on the order of the tomb of toot uncommon. And oh my god. When I read that, I thought, yes. I mean, I already knew the books, and I thought, I couldn't say it any better than he said it. Yes. To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. McDonald will be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutancum. He's really right. Now that's incredible pre-framing. When you see that, if you know Kurt Vonnegut, a towering genius of literary talent, I mean, just an extraordinary writer. For him to heap such lavish praise. And he's not saying anything specifically. He's not saying, I like this book better, or this book was this. He's talking about how he feels. And I feel the same way. It can't just be me and Kurt. It's got to be everyone who's ever read John D. McDonald. I know that every television writer I know feels the same way. And that kind of pre-framing allows your targeted recipient, whoever it may be, whether it's one person, whether it's a million people, whether it's an ad campaign, whether it's marketing, whatever it is, it allows them to have a clearer idea of where you're going with this. Well, if what you're about to read is a treasure on the order of Tuton Kama, well, then I'm very excited. I don't, I can only tell you what I'm thinking. If I see that blurb on a book, I'm not thinking, oh, this is going to be dry and data-filled, or this is going to be hard to understand, oh, this is going to be slow going. No. I'm thinking this is going to be a glorious treasure chest of reading pleasure. And that's of course exactly what it is. So I'd like you to think about that when you have a specific message that's going out for a campaign or marketing or social media. So think about what you might present in advance of the actual message. Because that pre-framing is your friend and can make your message impossible to ignore. I hope that you'll be here with me again next week and that we'll have more to discuss that hopefully will be as important as pre-framing. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. With that, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethods.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.
