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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

When Obama speaks, why do his words confirm the beliefs of both Democrats and Republicans? Whatever he says reinforces the agreement that Democrats feel. And it reinforces the skepticism of the Republicans.

It’s our psychology. If someone tells us something, even if it is factually or logically sound, we will ignore the facts and logic if we are feeling skeptical.

Why does this happen?

Our memory is largely composed of stories. When we communicate, I tell you a story which reminds you of a story which you tell to me, and so on. When we hear Obama or any politician speak, it reminds us of a “story”, in this case the story of our political beliefs on that particular subject.

If the speaker’s words conflict with our story, then we work to dismiss the speaker’s comments so that we can confirm what we already believe. Once we’ve resolved the conflict, we actually experience a kind of pleasure.

Scientists have observed this operating in the brain. When people are feeling skeptical, the factual evidence they hear doesn’t engage the reasoning part of their brains. It engages the parts of the brain that are involved with regulating emotion and the parts involved with resolving conflict.

Psychologists call it a “confirmation bias.” What we hear tends to confirm what we already believe.

Now imagine what happens when a skeptical buyer reads or hears information from your company. If you start explaining the facts too early they will turn your facts against you. Your logical argument will simply confirm what these skeptics already believe. The audience will actually become more resistant to you, not less!

How to combat confirmation bias?

Focus on the moderates. You aren’t going to persuade everyone. The most confirmed skeptics will remain skeptical no matter what you do, so stop trying. Focus on the audience in the middle. These people are more moderate in their skepticism and more open to the possibility of another point of view.

Put your audience in a state of persuadability. As Cicero said, you want your audience to be attentive, trusting, and willing to be persuaded. Before launching into the logic of your argument, gain their attention and trust. Communicate how you share their values. Demonstrate that you have practical experience in the subject. Show that you have their interests in mind.

Begin with values or beliefs the audience already holds. Make the premise of your core argument something that the audience already believes. Then build the logic of your argument so the audience believes your choice to be the one that is also advantageous to them.