The One Thing That's Holding You Back From Communicating Effectively

Our world is full of mediocre communicators. Not all of us enjoy doing it, but when we are called upon to speak in front of a group, draft a weekly email, or present at a corporate meeting, are able to do so with adequate effectiveness.

But in a society as media-saturated as ours, with every LinkedIn warrior hawking their new podcast and every social media creator grasping for our views, the harsh reality is that “adequate” can often mean “forgettable” and “forgettable” can often mean “useless.”

The trap that we often fall into is spending all of our time trying to decide how to put the idea that is in our head into words. How do we describe what it is that we want our audience to know?

There’s a bit of a paradox at play here in that the person who has the knowledge often has a difficult time conveying their thoughts because they don’t know how someone who doesn’t know would best come to understand it. After all, it already makes sense to them!

Chip and Dan Heath, in their fabulous book Made to Stick, describe this as the “Curse of Knowledge.” They say that “once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.”

The Curse of Knowledge is, they explain, the great villain in the fight to communicate good ideas.

So how do we overcome that weakness?

At risk of sounding like a broken record, communication is a simple model that too many people get wrong. There are three essential components of any idea:

• the Message

• the Sender

• the Receiver

Often abbreviated as MaSeR, this acronym is a helpful reminder that each of these three components are equally important in the successful transmission of information. An unfocused message, incapable sender, or a misunderstood or unresponsive receiver are all surefire recipes for dreadful communication.

Too often, people tasked with communicating will focus on the first two components, to the severe detriment of the receiver.

There is a difference between being a good speaker and a good communicator.

Good speakers can sound impressive. Good—and especially great—communicators captivate their audience, and they do this by understanding them.

Stephen R. Covey says in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, that one should “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

The mark of a great communicator is not the small things that we often fixate on. The fancy words that we use, the impressive clothes we wear, the design of our PowerPoint slides. Even our tone and our word choice is of less importance.

The mark of a great communicator is our ability to understand what our audience doesn’t know, and then explain it in the way that is most effective.

Effective communication begins with listening and learning about the receiver, and then carefully shaping the message (and your own presentation as a sender) to meet your audience where they are.

This does not replace the hard work of practice and trial and error that are still necessary to discover the best way of putting an idea into words, but that becomes a whole lot easier once you have a clear picture of who your audience is.

Takeaway: What separates a great communicator from a good speaker is a willingness to begin by trying to understand their audience first and then being able to adapt and explain your message in a way that will connect with them.

My name is Brent and I like to talk about ideas and the way that we share them. Thank you so much for reading!

If you learned something today, I’d appreciate it if you’d share this newsletter with a friend. Good ideas should be contagious, so please help them to spread!

If you disagree or have thoughts to add to what I’ve said, please respond and let me know! I’d love to know if this newsletter is helping you think or changes your opinion on any topics that it covers.