Ep. 037 — Why Emotion, Not Logic, Drives Public Speaking Success

Hosted by Roddy Galbraith

A Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production

Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge — a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communicate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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This Week’s Big Idea

We’re not as rational as we think. In speaking (and life), we decide emotionally and then justify logically. If you learn to shape emotion—yours first, then your audience’s—your content lands, your confidence rises, and your message moves people.

Key Takeaways

• Emotion > logic in the moment. Stats don’t change feelings; stories and state do.

• Fear is fallible. Like sharks vs. deer, our feelings often reflect learned programs, not true risk.

• Beliefs drive feelings. We don’t see with our eyes; we see through our prior experiences.

• Same stimulus, different stories. “Mary & Dave + one dog” = two opposite reactions—beliefs are the hidden cause.

• Avoidance reinforces fear. Gentle exposure (small reps) rewires the loop faster than avoiding the mic.

• Lead with state. Calm body → clearer mind → more credible delivery. 

Quote of the Week

“We decide emotionally—and then we justify logically.”

Resources & Practice

 1) 90-Second Pre-Talk Reset

• Inhale through the nose 4, hold 4, exhale 6 × 6 cycles.

• Plant feet parallel, unlock knees, shoulders back, soft jaw.

• Choose intent: “Help one person do one thing today.”

2) Belief → Feeling → Action Check
Write one anxious thought about speaking.

• Belief: “If I pause, they’ll think I’m lost.”

• Feeling: spike of panic.

• New belief: “A pause signals control.”

• Action: practice “pause–scan–nod” on your next call.

3) Gentle Exposure Ladder (5–10 min/day)
Record a 60-second tip → watch on mute (body), then audio only (voice), then together. Repeat daily for 7 days; post one take to a safe audience (team, cohort).

4) Companion Resources
Grab the show’s companion guide and prompts: Get the companion guide here > MaxwellLeadership.com/TheSpeakersEdge

Full Transcript (Ep. 037 — Why Emotion, Not Logic, Drives Public Speaking Success)
Released: November 10, 2025

This transcript was auto-generated. It may contain minor errors. *Copy text adds attribution automatically

 Hey guys, welcome back to the Speaker’s Edge podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn from some of the world's very best speakers and communicators so that you can learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak. I'm your host for this podcast, Roddy Galbraith, and I'm thrilled you've chosen to be back with us today. We're building on what we started work on last week. We started talking about building self-confidence and we started talking about how can you come to the point where you really believe in something even when you don't believe when you're starting out. How can you develop that self-confidence? How can you develop that self-assuredness? So, we're going to carry on with part two of that. We're going to look at whether we're really emotional beings or whether we're really logical beings, rational beings. What do you think? 

 

Anyway, before we get into that, if you haven't downloaded the companion resources for the show, simply go to maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge. You can download the resources and if you enjoy the show, then we would love it if you rate and review the show as well.

 

All right, so last week then we started talking about fear. We started talking about how our mind plays a big role in the emotional experience that we have in our body, the physiology of our body. And if you remember, we use the example of if you actually see a lion, your body is going to respond with fear. And that's right and proper that it should. But if you just think you see a lion, then your body is going to respond in exactly the same way. There's no lion, but you just thought you saw a lion and exactly the same response happens in your body. So if you can create the response in your body even when there's no lion, then presumably we can learn to control that. So last week we were talking about a number of different things. That wasn't the only thing we covered, but we were talking about the importance of how our imagination can run away with us if we're not careful.

 

But now, what about when you've got more than one person in the same situation and they're seeing the same situation in different ways? So, it's not like we're making it up. We're just interpreting it differently. What role does that play? And really, I want to tap into this core idea that you are not rational and logical like you think. You're not. You think you're rational and logical, but you're really not. You're much more emotional than you would care to admit. And it's true for all of us. We think we're in control logically, but we're really not. It's an illusion. That logical control that we think we have, that rational control that we think we have, it's an illusion. And I'm going to prove it to you because we really, we're emotional beings.

 

And one way that it's useful for us to start thinking about this idea that we're emotional and we're not logical is to consider a great white shark. Because many of us are familiar with great white sharks, aren't we? In fact, in 1975, Steven Spielberg did a great job of introducing the world to great white sharks. Before then, well, I was only six at the time. I didn't know what a great white shark was. Didn't really know what a shark was. But when Jaws came out, then everyone knew that we're supposed to be terrified of sharks and particularly great white sharks. So great white sharks we have learned to be afraid of.

 

And a simple example of this, you may have had your own experiences, but I was learning to surf years ago when I was like 20 years old in San Diego, staying with a friend, and I was on a surfboard and I was sitting out just past the soup, they called it, where all the waves break. It was difficult enough trying to get past that to get out to, you know, where you wait for a wave. But I'd got out there, so I'm far enough out that I'm past all the breaking waves. I'm sitting on the board and I'm waiting for a wave to come along, like, you know, one that is going to be good for me to catch. And so while I'm sitting there, hour after hour, eventually it starts getting dark. And as it starts to get dark and I'm looking down in the water, I can't see what is in the water anymore because it's getting dark. And so immediately my mind starts running away with me. And I'm thinking to myself, I wonder what's down there. I wonder what's down there. And of course, I'm not thinking about, oh, sweet little neon colored fish. I'm thinking about great white sharks because there are. Who could blame me? There are great white sharks in California, aren't there? So, I'm thinking, right, great white sharks. I can't see whether they're there or not now. And so, my mind runs away with me. Before we know, I'm getting out. Right, that's enough for today. And my friend actually laughed at me. He says, "Just because it's getting dark, do you think the sharks and the jellyfish come out?" And I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I think." But once I started thinking about it, just like we saw with whether you just think you see a lion, you can't change that thought very easily. And so I'm getting out. I'm scared. Fear led to the avoidance that we looked at last week. And I got out of the water.

 

Now, in actual fact, if we were logical beings, we would ask ourselves, well, what is the probability that I'm going to be eaten by a shark? There's lots of people here. There's lots of people here every day. There's lots of people here all day, every day, week in week out, year in year out. How many people actually get eaten by sharks? Very few. And in actual fact, if I did take the time to look at the probability of being eaten by a great white shark, I would have found that I was many many many many times more likely to be killed by a deer. But we don't have those same programs for deer, do we? You're much more likely to be killed in an accident with a deer than you are with a great white shark. But if you're driving down the road and you're going past some woods, some forests on either side, you're out in the countryside and it starts to get dark and you can't see through the trees, you're not like, "Oh, I wonder what's in there. I wonder what's in there." And you start worrying about whether or not there's a deer in there. And then you pull over and stop because it's like, "Oh, no. I can't go on. This is too terrifying." We don't have those programs of deer like we do great white sharks, do we? Deer are cute. And we haven't learned to be afraid of them. We don't carry those programs. Remember, our emotions are learned programs that we've picked up. We've learned to be scared of great white sharks thanks to Steven Spielberg, 1975, Jaws particularly, and then Jaws 2. And probably there was three and four and five or something after that, wasn't there? I can't remember. But I remember being terrified as a six-year-old in cinema. My mom took me and my sister and Christian Dawn across the road. We all went to watch it. It was a different style of parenting I think in those days so that wasn't seen as odd. But these days it'd be like a six-year-old see Jaws. I mean I had the t-shirt as well and matching pants with the pictures of Jaws on. And so we were all indoctrinated to be terrified of sharks but in actual fact we're more likely to be killed by a deer. There's thousands of accidents every year where people hit deer and they die. But we don't have those programs.

 

So, we haven't learned to be scared of deer. It's interesting, isn't it? And if you think about flying as another example, you know, if somebody's got a fear of flying and you say to them, well, don't you realize that statistically speaking, you know, probability wise, you're much more likely to die another way of traveling in a car or a bike or a motorcycle particularly rather than flying. Flying is actually the safest way to travel. That doesn't help you. Statistics don't help you because the emotion is there. You imagine an engine failure or something and maybe you falling out of the plane five miles up into the screaming darkness hurtling towards Earth that your mind runs away with you and you're like that's it. I'm not flying. I'm not flying. We talk ourselves out of it because we've learned to be afraid of those things.

 

So our emotions are learned programs. Now, if we were actually logical, there's many other things rather than sharks and bears and snakes and alligators here in Florida or whatever else it is that we're afraid of, things that might kill us. Do you know what's much more likely to kill us than sharks? Heart disease. It's like one in five apparently your risk of dying of heart disease. One of the biggest killers, heart disease in your lifetime. One in five chance of dying of heart disease. Car accidents one in 84. One in 84 your risk of dying in a car accident. That's quite likely when you think about it, isn't it? One out of 84 people. Whereas, if you look at air accidents, it's one in over 5,000. So, there's a huge difference between dying in an air accident and dying in a car accident. But, we haven't learned, most of us, we haven't learned to be scared of cars. So, we don't even give it another thought. We feel like we're safe in our car, but we're many, many, many, many times more likely to die in a car accident than we are in an air accident. Drowning. The risk of drowning is about one in a thousand, one in 1,100, something like that. But the chances of being killed in a shark attack is one in 4.3 million. So again, there's a huge difference between drowning in the sea and being eaten by a shark in the sea. But we don't have the programs of drowning, most of us, unless we've learned to. But we do have those programs for sharks. So, we're terrified of sharks and we're not terrified of drowning, which is far far far more likely to kill us.

 

And then it's not just negative emotions that we have this distortion where we're emotional beings and we're not logical beings. You know what the chances of winning the Powerball are? Apparently, I Googled this a little while ago. One in 292 million. So, you're way more likely to be eaten by a shark than you are to win the Powerball. There's virtually no chance of either of them happening. But certainly the Powerball, winning the Powerball is far far far less likely. But it doesn't stop us enjoying talking about what we're going to do with the money, does it? We'll have an excited conversation about, oh no, what should we do first? Or what about this or what about this? We really get into it because we're driven by emotion, not logic. We're controlled by emotion, not logic.

 

And if we were really logical, do you know what we really should be afraid of? Which animal kills more human beings than any other by miles? You know what it is? It's a mosquito. A mosquito kills way more people than any other animal. Up to a million people a year are killed by mosquitoes. But we don't see a mosquito and like, "Ah, it's going to kill me. He's going to kill me." We don't have those programs, most of us, do we? Not like we do for sharks or flying, things like that. And I think second to mosquito actually is man. Man kills about up to a half a million people a year apparently. So, like, you know, it's big numbers, isn't it? The shark is way down there. Way down there. Same with snakes. So, we're not scared of the facts. We're not scared of the objective facts. We're not scared of the probability. We're not scared of the data. We're scared of our feelings. It's interesting, isn't it? Why? Because we're not logical beings. We think we are, but we're actually emotional beings. We're driven by our emotions.

 

If we were logical, then if you saw like a hamburger and Kentucky Fried Chicken and sausages and French fries and you saw them all piled up on a plate, you'd be like, "No, get away from me. You could kill me. You could kill me." But it's delicious. We have programs for yummy and tasty, don't we? We don't have programs for ah, you're going to give me heart disease. Get out of here. But we're far more likely to be killed by those than the other things that we've looked at. Fascinating when you think about it. We're emotional beings. We're not logical beings. We decide emotionally based on the things that we really really want and then we justify them logically. So we're not logical beings. We're emotional beings.

 

So then it's worth us looking at where our emotions come from, isn't it? If we're emotional beings and we've learned these emotions, we really need to understand where they come from if we're going to have a hope of beginning to control them and therefore the direction that our life is going to go in.

 

Now, Mark Twain said years ago, this is, I think, a great way of summing this up, very kind of self-evident in a simple example. He said, "If a cat sits on a hot stove, it will not sit on a hot stove again." So, if a cat sits on a hot stove, it will not sit on a hot stove again. In fact, it won't sit on a cold stove either. It won't sit on a hot stove, it won't sit on a cold stove. In fact, from that moment on, he said, "The cat is just done with stoves. It cuts stoves out of its life completely. It doesn't want anything more to do with stoves because it sees them as dangerous. It's learned something about the world. It's learned that stoves are dangerous. And so it cuts them out of its life completely. It believes that to be true, that stoves are dangerous."

 

Now, if you think about it as a survival mechanism, will that stop the cat from being burned by a stove? Yes, it will. If it avoids all stoves, it won't be burnt by a hot stove. But you see how clumsy that is. We're more sophisticated than that, aren't we? We can do better than that. We don't need to cut people out of our life if we have a bad experience with people. We don't need to cut love out of our life if we have a bad experience with love. We don't need to cut money out of our life if we have a bad experience with money. If we're training and we get injured, we don't cut exercise out of our life just because we have a bad experience. We're more sophisticated than that. We can learn from those things and then we can use them. We don't allow them to use us.

 

So, it's very interesting when you dig into this, particularly when we get to the cause of our feelings. So, beliefs and emotions really are like two sides of the same coin. And we're going to dig into beliefs more next week because it's a big topic, something that we can't tackle in one episode. But today, just think of beliefs and emotions as two sides of the same coin. Depending on what we believe, then our emotions follow from that. And not just our emotions, actually. Our beliefs drive our thinking, our thoughts, and our feelings, as we've already seen, and our actions, the things that we do, and our reactions, the way we respond to things when things happen. Symptoms potentially that we experience in the body, our perceptions, the way we see things. If we believe something is a certain way, then we tend to see it a certain way. If we believe something can't be a certain way, then we tend not to see it in that particular way. So our perceptions are driven by our beliefs, our expectations. If you think about it, what is an expectation? If you expect something to happen, what is it? It's a belief about what's going to happen in the future. So it's still like a belief. It's still a perception that we've learned, an expectation. We're expecting something to happen because we believe that it will. So it's still driven by our beliefs, the options that we perceive, the options that are there in front of us.

 

Michael Beckwith said choice is a function of awareness. The more aware we are of different options, then the more choices that we perceive. If we don't have the awareness, if we don't see them there, then the less options we have, the less choices we have available to us because we're not aware of them. That's why you can have some people who see a situation and they just keep making the same mistakes. So they keep banging their head against the same wall because it's the only option they see. And they think to themselves, well, everyone would behave like this in this situation, wouldn't they? That's why I'm doing it. I'm not stupid. I'm doing it because it's the only option. But somebody else that sees it differently, a different level of awareness perceives more different options. They can see a different path. And so they take a different route and they go through different challenges. Maybe challenges that would make other people turn away. They overcome those challenges or they go around them or they do something so that they're not a problem for them. They climb up upon them and they move off in no time and they're off in a different direction because they saw the situation differently. All of these things come from our beliefs and our emotions come from our beliefs.

 

So, next week we're going to dig into beliefs in a little bit more detail and we'll look at particularly where they come from when we're young and the impact that that has on us. This week I want to look at the power of beliefs and you might say the problem of beliefs and that is that we believe them. We believe them and this can be a problem. So I'll give you a simple example of this. Again, this is one of those examples that I think of as self-evident. I'm going to share an example with you and you're going to think about it and hopefully you're going to go, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, that makes sense."

 

So my favorite example of this is Mary and Dave. Mary and Dave are two people who get together and become boyfriend and girlfriend. They're walking down the road holding hands. And as they're walking down the road, a dog comes running towards them. What happens in that moment? Well, if we knew something about Mary and Dave, we'd be able to guess how they would respond in this moment when the dog's running towards them. Mary loves dogs. She's never met a dog she doesn't like. And so, she leans in to the dog. She wants to play with it because she loves dogs. Dave got attacked by a dog when he was young. He's terrified of dogs. He's never met a dog he doesn't hate. And so, he feels like he needs to get out of there. So as the dog runs towards them, exactly the same situation, exactly the same dog, one dog, one situation, two people, two completely different emotional responses. Physiologically, their body is completely different. One is joy leaning in, and one is terror. That feeling that something awful is going to happen and they need to get out of there as quickly as possible. That's what Dave is feeling. So two different responses. They couldn't be more different.

 

Who's right? Who's right? Mary or Dave? We've got these two polar opposite responses to the same dog in the same situation. They can't both be right, can they? Well, if you think about it, we don't actually know anything about this dog at all, do we? We don't know anything about this dog. So, we don't know which one of them is right. They don't know either. They're just taking their past experiences, their past baggage. The dogs that their beliefs are based upon probably died years ago, but they're projecting that baggage. They're projecting what they know to be true, what they believe to be true about dogs onto this dog, and they're deciding what the dog is right. They can't both be right, can they? So, you can see they've got different responses. They're both guessing what this dog is right. It's not a reflection of reality. It feels like it is, but it's really not.

 

Now, you can't explain this to Dave because when he sees the dog, he knows he's in danger. How does he know? Because he can feel it in his body. He can feel the terror. He knows the dog is dangerous. He knows the dog is the cause of his fear because the dog appears and he feels fear. So, he knows the dog is causing the fear. Many of us have probably been in a similar situation. If not a dog, something else. But if you think about it in this situation now with Mary and Dave, two people, two different responses, one dog, one situation, Dave is experiencing fear and he knows that the dog is dangerous because he can feel it. Well, Mary's joy is just as real to her. She's experiencing joy and she knows the dog is safe because she can feel it. Neither one of them is pretending. Dave's not pretending. Mary's not pretending. This is what they each believe to be true about dogs. They're two different things, aren't they?

 

So, we can't say that the dog is the cause of Mary's joy, because if it was the cause of Mary's joy, Dave would feel the same way. It would be the cause of Dave's joy as well, wouldn't it? Because you can't have two different effects to one cause. If it is the cause and the cause is joy, the result is joy, then Dave would have joy, too. And from Dave's perspective, the dog he knows is causing his fear. But if that were true, Mary would be feeling fear too because you can't have one cause and two different effects. So there must be a different cause. The cause can't be the dog, can it? There must be two different causes that the dog is activating. So the dog is activating something in Mary which is causing her joy and the dog is activating something in Dave that is causing his fear. And that's the belief that each of them hold about dogs. Different beliefs lead to different emotional responses, consequences in each of their bodies. So, it's the story Mary tells herself about dogs that is causing her joy. It's the story Dave tells himself about dogs that is causing his fear. And if either one of them wants to change what they're experiencing, it's not the dog they need to change. They need to change the underlying belief that is the cause of that.

 

You see, we don't see with our eyes. We see through our eyes. We see with our emotions. We see with our past experiences. Do you see that? Their past experiences, their baggage is causing them to decide what this dog is like. So, we really don't see things the way they are. We see things the way we are. I know you've heard that before, but when you think of an example like this, it really, really puts it in a different perspective, doesn't it? I love this example. I use this example a lot and I could have told you a true personal story about when a taxi driver came to pick me up in London to take me into London for a speaking event and when I turned around to get my cases, our dogs ran out. We had two Rhodesian Ridgebacks. They ran out and the taxi driver flipped out. He was like, "Oh my goodness, get them away." And I said, "Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They're friendly. They're friendly." And they wouldn't hurt him. They are friendly. They were friendly. And he's like, "Please get them away. Please get them away. Please get him away." He was 6' three, this giant guy and he just melted when he saw the dogs. So I took the dogs and put them in. He jumped in the car, did the window up, locked the door. He didn't speak to me for an hour's drive into London. Didn't say a word. He was terrified.

 

And we hear that example and we think to ourselves, "Oh my goodness, he's probably had a bad experience with dogs in the past." And we leave it at that. But my daughter, who was about six months old when we got the dogs, she grew up with dogs. The same dog. She's crawling all over, putting her fingers in their ears, pulling their ears, and she had a completely different response. Completely different response. So that when a friend came over actually with a big Rottweiler, she thought it was the same. She hadn't learned a kind of balanced view of what dogs are like. Some dogs are fun, some dogs are dangerous, some dogs can be fun, some dogs can be dangerous. And so I was very worried that because of her programming that all dogs are great fun and there's this giant Rottweiler. If you look at a Rottweiler's giant mouth and like a three-year-old baby's little head, it's just too dangerous. And the owner could see that I was worried. He said, "Don't worry, he's fine. Don't worry, he's fine." I'm thinking, "I'm not going to take the chance." And so I moved Emily out of the way.

 

Now, I could have told you that story, but it doesn't put the two emotions against each other in the same way as a hypothetical example does where I've said imagine two different people, Mary and Dave, and one dog, one situation where we can see like in that moment, which could happen, couldn't it? And we've got these two different responses to the same dog. So, it's a powerful way of illustrating that point. And normally people go, "Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it."

 

So, fear is fallible. Fear is fallible. But does it have a purpose then? Yes, absolutely it does. If you imagine a deer in the woods and then it hears like a stick crack, it just runs, doesn't it? It just runs. It takes off. Why? Because it's probably something, a predator coming to get him. So, it runs off and it serves him well most of the time. But that's not the only response. It could be somebody coming to feed him, couldn't it? But that fear response leads to avoidance. Well, we're exactly the same. We often take off when we hear noise. When we're scared of something, we avoid it. We run from it. If you're scared of snakes, you tend to avoid them. If you're scared of dogs, you tend to avoid them. If you're scared of speaking, you tend to avoid it. But if you avoid it, you're avoiding the very thing that leads to outgrowing the fear. If we avoid the things that we're scared of, then the illusion remains in place. In fact, we reinforce it.

 

Mary and Dave had very different expectations of the dog in this particular example. And because of their expectations, they behaved towards the dog in a different way. Now, what do you think the chances are that if Mary convinced Dave to stay, he looked a little shifty around the dog and the dog picked up on Dave being a little bit weird and he started getting a little bit like, "I'm not sure I like Dave." Because the dog would respond to the way that Dave is treating the dog, wouldn't it? He wouldn't trust Dave. It's like, "Yeah, something's off here. Something's off. I'm not getting good vibes." But with Mary, he can see that Mary's intent is joy and fun, and the dog probably loves Mary. And so Mary and Dave's expectations elicit a different response from the dog in all likelihood.

 

All right, so that's enough for this week. I think it's fascinating to look at fear. I really wanted to bring out the fallibility of fear in this episode. So that if we're feeling fear, particularly around speaking, which is a lot of the people that I work with every week, they are struggling with overcoming a fear of standing up and speaking in front of other people. If I can convince them of the fallibility of fear, then maybe they don't put quite so much faith into it. Maybe they can begin to put faith in their own potential, in their own ability to outgrow their fear, in their ability to be strong and confident in front of an audience, which is absolutely possible. It's a process, but it's absolutely possible.

 

All right. So, next week we'll look at the developing mind of a child. Fascinating, fascinating topic. And then we'll be done with self-confidence for the time being.

 

All right. So, each week I talk about the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team. And if you're interested in becoming a speaker, I highly recommend that you check it out. You just go to maxwellleadership.com/speak. And if you jump on a call with a program advisor, they can tell you about the program. It really is a no-brainer if you're interested in developing your speaking. There's nearly 60,000 coaches worldwide in about 168, 169 now I think it is, countries around the world. It's one of the best places to learn the Maxwell Method of Speaking. And frankly, there's no one better to model than John Maxwell if you want to develop your speaking. So check it out. It's no obligation. You've got nothing to lose really. Just go to maxwellleadership.com/speak.

 

All right. Don't forget to download the companion resources for this week. Go to maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge. And remember, communication is one of the most important skills you can develop, if not the most important skill you can develop. And it is a learnable skill. It is a learnable skill. So you can learn to master your message and inspire your audience every time you speak if you stick at it. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. Take care. Lots of love. Bye-bye. God bless.