Why You Need to Close

(Perfecting Your Messaging in Four Parts: Part 4)

In the last three Briefings we’ve examined how to hook the listener’s attention, we’ve considered the importance of clarity, and we established the potency of “sizzle”. But even if you perfectly master each of these elements, you will have wasted your time unless you know how to close.

Our first experiences as listeners ended with “and they lived happily ever after”. To this day, most of us won’t turn off the radio until the song is finished, nor will we put down the book until we’re at the end of a chapter. We’re wired for closure.

Imagine the bus driver stopping in the middle of nowhere and just walking away, leaving puzzled passengers watching him disappear in the distance. You don’t want to do that with your talk or your paper. Since your audience is wired for closure, if you leave them dangling, you won’t be forgiven. Leave them happy, leave them sad, leave them fired up…. but don’t leave them perplexed and unsatisfied.*

But “closing” means more than just a proper ending– it also means “consummating the deal” and should actually start to happen as soon as you open your mouth. Assuming that your talk or paper had a purpose, “closing” in this sense is ensuring that your purpose has been achieved. You set out to win hearts and minds, and your closing is the mechanism to ensure that has happened, and happened convincingly.

If you don’t do that, you will have wasted your time, which is a pity, and you will have wasted your listeners’ time, which won’t be forgiven.

How do you ensure that you will consummate the deal? The simplest way to do so is to “start with the end in mind” and know what you wish to accomplish, then work backwards from there. For a fuller discussion, see “Writing for the Judge” (https://mailchi.mp/203e16694d9d/resolution-for-1580741?e=[UNIQID]) and for a bit of fun on the subject, see What Great Communicators (and Leaders) Can Learn from a Border Collie. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-great-communicators-leaders-can-learn-from-border-norman-bowley/)

*There is an exception: if your intent is to force listeners to go away and struggle with what you have offered, or to seek answers to issues you have posed, you may in fact want to leave them perplexed and unsatisfied. Just be sure you’re deliberate and you plan well.