Do your listeners have a “stake” in you?

Last time I talked about voters’ “investment” in Barack Obama, then moved to the general “investment” that listeners have in a speaker.

The word “investment” has an initial economic context, as do the words “equity” and “own”. But all these terms of moneyed wealth have increasingly taken on new fields of operation in the realms of the psychological, spiritual, and political.

So when we talk about a speaker and his or her audience we are concerned about the “currency” he or she offers the audience in their “transaction” and whether or not they accept the “gift” of that currency.

If the audience accepts the transaction, the speaker now has made the listeners “stakeholders”, at least implicitly. If the listeners begin to become at least partial disciples of the speaker, they and what they pass on comprise dividends provided by the intellectual “stock” of the speaker splitting in the event of the speech.

Curiously, the more “equity” the speaker “loses” by the spreading of his or her intellectual “wealth”, the more influential that speaker becomes through this wide dissemination of his thought. Listeners become followers, owning, at least in part, the words and ideas of the speaker.

Now, we have returned to one of the earliest distinctions I shared with you, from Kirkegaard, in my first blog post, the difference in the Danish thinker’s mind between the genius and the prophet. The prophet’s message does not “dilute” or “splinter”; a genius’ thought, however, gets “broken down”.

Keep ownership, equity, investment, and the currency of your ideas in mind as you plan your next communication.

Ask yourself whether you should worry about the essence of your ideas “breaking down” or not.

Stay tuned.