Learning About

Achieving clarity is difficult. It is a master skill that sets expert presenters apart. It is easy to underestimate what it takes to communicate clearly which is why we can so often find ourselves bored or frustrated when listening to others – they are on transmit but haven’t thought carefully enough about what they don’t need to say.

Tangents and repetition, a tendency towards verbosity, detail where it is unnecessary – we fall into these habits when we haven’t spent sufficient time planning. And the message is lost because the listener has to work in order to discern what is important; thinking is hard and an audience resents having to do it for you.

One of the most important stages in preparing what you are going to say is decluttering that which is superfluous. This can be hard. We can get unreasonably attached to a pithy phrase, an amusing anecdote or an analogy – these are the things that take time to craft. And if we’ve arrived at something that looks or sounds good, why would we take an axe to it?

Because what we mean, and what we want understood, shouldn’t be dressed in distracting clothes.

Writers describe the need for ruthless editing as ‘murdering their darlings’. When I’m preparing to talk, I prefer to think of this stage as decluttering. Clutter accrues – it’s the nature of the stuff. When we prepare to talk, we should give ourselves permission to accrue clutter – arriving at original thought requires effort and writing down everything that you know, or that you think you might like to say, is an important early step. But when you create clutter in your notes, do so in the knowledge that you’ll need to tidy up – those many thousands words should serve the needs of the precious few that make the final cut.

Putting things in their right place, organising and deleting – it might feel like an effort to get going but, once you do, you’ll see your thinking sharpen and the message become clear. All of which increase the likelihood of an audience listening to everything that remains.