Crystal Clear Communication 🔮

Imagine spending 20 years of your life studying to become a doctor. You memorize all the facts. You know all the treatments to improve someone’s health.

You studied for this. You want to help people.

Now your first patient walks into the room. They tell you their problem.

This is it.

You go into your brain and pull out all the relevant words. The necessary tests. The possible diagnoses. You have your suspicions. You rattle off all the things.

You slowly see their eyes glaze over. They stare down at their phone. They don’t even seem to be paying attention to you and your torrent of knowledge you are releasing.

After you stop to catch your breath, they ask,

“Can you just give me a pill or something?”

In so many walks of life, the gaining of knowledge is only one aspect of a profession. The second aspect is communicating that knowledge to others. If you aren’t a strong communicator, you cannot share with others the knowledge you have, nor convince them to consider listening to your perspective.

Taken a step further, poor communication can lead to dire consequences.

There are countless communication errors that have led to plane crashes because the knowledge of one party was not communicated clearly and precisely to the other party.

Because someone did not actually communicate a problem.

Because something presumed that the listener understood the situation already.

Because a situation was misinterpreted.

Because communication was not clear.

So what can we do?

1. Clearly Know What You want To Communicate

   If you are not clear about what you think or what you want to say, it can be downright impossible for others to know.

   Let’s say you need help from someone on an IKEA furniture build project and you are simply overwhelmed. They ask, “How can I help?”

   Do you ask them to simply be present by your side as you continue?

   Do you ask them to take over and continue to follow the directions starting on page 4?

   Do you ask them to hand you a tool that you cannot reach?

   Do you ask them to help you lift the furniture so you can hammer a nail on the bottom?

   If you cannot put into words how to help, it can be extremely hard for the helper to know how to support you.

2. Clearly Understand Your Audience

   Know who you are speaking to and how they listen. You speak to a 4 year old differently when compared to a 15 year old, a 50 year old, and an 80 year old. You know how to tailor your speech to people of differing ages. But what about people with differing educational backgrounds or different cultural experiences? What about a room of CEOs? What about a room of employees?

   Let’s say you are giving a talk in front of a niche group of mechanical keyboard builders at a local meetup. You are a physiotherapist and your talk is about the ergonomics of your hand and wrist position when typing. If you bust out your human biology, muscle, and health jargon, you can bet that lots of people will zone out.

   But if you relate your talk to what is important to them, their sitting position while they painstakingly solder away on their keyboard PCBs or consider 3D printing keyboard risers to support a neutral wrist position when typing, those things resonate more with your audience.

   Now you are speaking in a way that is relevant.

   And relevance translates to importance to them.

   And importance translates to active listening.

3. Be Concise

   People have a short attention span. Say what you need to say in the shortest, most straight-forward way. That’s how you communicate your ideas, waste no extra time, and respect your audience’s time.

   Let’s say you are a guest speaker at a conference. Everyone in attendance is a busy CEO running a business and they, in the hopes of taking their business to the next level, come to a conference to discuss pioneering and innovative technologies.

   Each speaker has 30 minutes to discuss their contributions and challenge CEOs to manage their businesses better. You instead spend 50 minutes instead of 30 minutes because you have so much to say. You talk about every aspect of your innovative technology. You talk about every scenario or situation in which it is useful.

   The trouble is...that you didn’t respect the audience’s time. They don’t need to know every scenario in which it is useful.

Out of all the pillars of clear communication, I think these 3 are key 🔑.

I think they are underrated because people don’t truly spend the time to evaluate these three pillars before they prepare for their presentation. They don’t take the time to sit down and go through it first to examine the foundation of their presentation.