Engineers. Business executives. Marketing specialists.
You’ve spent years learning your profession. Honing your craft. Accumulating experience.
You communicate with your peers in a specialized language. You use the abstractions of shorthand, codes, and acronyms that make communication faster and more efficient.
But the benefit of speaking in abstractions with each other becomes a curse when speaking with someone outside your group. Chip and Dan Heath call it the Curse of Knowledge.
Experts forget what it was like not to understand their field, to be new. And the more they rely on their language, the more frustrating it is for their audience.
Whether you are talking to a customer, teaching a class, or explaining to your mother “what you do”, your tendency will be to communicate to others as if you are talking to one of your peers. And then, surprise, your audience won’t understand or remember what you say.
The cure for this curse?
Once you have clarified your core message and made it as simple as possible, then you want the audience to:
- Pay attention – Your audience needs to believe that you share its values, that you know what you are talking about, and that you have its interest in mind. Speak in their language and vocabulary. Use specific examples to demonstrate your character.
- Understand and remember your idea – Go to your audience and its beliefs. Simplify your message and make it more concrete. Emphasize real-world examples instead of concepts. Make your facts and statistics accessible. Tell a story.
- Take action – Appeal to their emotion. Tell a story with you in it that makes the audience feel it is experiencing the scene with you. Describe in detail through your story what they can expect if they act.
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