Compétence nécessaire en Éloquence et Communication pour avoir de l’impact
How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people
Metadata
- Author: Matt Huang
- URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHmAS4q-GqY
Highlights
step one is
you need to understand the topic or the issue that you want to explain. And this seems so simple, but you’d be surprised how many people start talking about something and they only have like a 50% grasp of the concept or the issue that they’re trying to explain to someone. And as a result, the message comes across kind of muddied and the listener might have to ask them to restate what they said and they have to ask follow-up questions because really the listener just doesn’t really understand what that person said.
And then knowing what your objective is. What are you trying to get out of this conversation? If you’re going into a meeting with say a highle executive, what are you trying to get out of them? And it can’t just be, oh, I’m just trying to tell them or give them an update on what I’m working on. Like, no, you think they’re going to accept that. Their time is extremely
limited. You have to remember if someone is a very high level executive at a large company, for example, every day there are many, many, many people asking them for this and that. They’re in meetings all day. They’re tired. They’re thinking about a million different things. And then all of a sudden you come in and you have 30 minutes and you start spewing all this nonsense. Uh maybe giving a ton of background context that’s totally irrelevant or not helpful. And by the end of it, they don’t even understand what you want from them. Do you need a decision from them? Do you need them to say yes, this looks
good to me or are you trying to convince them to change their mind about something? You need to be extremely clear on what your objective is. Because even if you do understand the topic or the issue, if you don’t have an objective when you go into a meeting, nothing that’s like your north star, then every word that comes out of your mouth is really not going to be that helpful for the other person to understand because the question that they have in the back of their mind is going to be, okay, he’s saying all this stuff. What do I need to do? What does he or she want from me? Right? That’s
the question that people are going to be thinking. But that leads me to the third part, which is once you do understand, okay, this is the topic I need to bring up. this
And then knowing what your objective is. What are you trying to get out of this conversation? If you’re going into a meeting with say a highle executive, what are you trying to get out of them? And it can’t just be, oh, I’m just trying to tell them or give them an update on what I’m working on. Like, no, you think they’re going to accept that. Their time is extremely
limited. You have to remember if someone is a very high level executive at a large company, for example, every day there are many, many, many people asking them for this and that. They’re in meetings all day. They’re tired. They’re thinking about a million different things. And then all of a sudden you come in and you have 30 minutes and you start spewing all this nonsense. Uh maybe giving a ton of background context that’s totally irrelevant or not helpful. And by the end of it, they don’t even understand what you want from them. Do you need a decision from them? Do you need them to say yes, this looks good to me
or are you trying to convince them to change their mind about something? You need to be extremely clear on what your objective is. Because even if you do understand the topic or the issue, if you don’t have an objective when you go into a meeting, nothing that’s like your north star, then every word that comes out of your mouth is really not going to be that helpful for the other person to understand because the question that they have in the back of their mind is going to be, okay, he’s saying all this stuff. What do I need to do? What does he or she want from me? Right? That’s
the question that people are going to be thinking. But that leads me to the third part, which is once you do understand, okay, this is the topic I need to bring up. this is the issue I need to raise and the the objective of this conversation is that I need this person to say yes to go ahead with this program then what’s the fastest path to explain that and yo
And then knowing what your objective is. What are you trying to get out of this conversation? If you’re going into a meeting with say a highle executive, what are you trying to get out of them? And it can’t just be, oh, I’m just trying to tell them or give them an update on what I’m working on. Like, no, you think they’re going to accept that. Their time is extremely
limited. You have to remember if someone is a very high level executive at a large company, for example, every day there are many, many, many people asking them for this and that. They’re in meetings all day. They’re tired. They’re thinking about a million different things. And then all of a sudden you come in and you have 30 minutes and you start spewing all this nonsense. Uh maybe giving a ton of background context that’s totally irrelevant or not helpful. And by the end of it, they don’t even understand what you want from them. Do you need a decision from them? Do you need them to say yes, this looks good to me or are you trying to convince them to change their mind about something? You need to be extremely clear
But that leads me to the third part, which is once you do understand, okay, this is the topic I need to bring up. this is the issue I need to raise and the the objective of this conversation is that I need this person to say yes to go ahead with this program then what’s the fastest path to explain that and you’d be surprised a lot of people tend to ramble in meetings and they think that more airtime equals better comprehension because you’re giving them more details but the problem
is what you don’t understand and something that I’m going to talk about in the delivery section is that you’re actually just increasing the mental load for the listener the more details especially if you’re including more irrelevant details to your explanation
for example let’s say that I am coming to the police station and I need the police officer to help me find a criminal who just stole my laptop so
in one scenario I could come into the police station and say I was just in my house at 5:00 p.m. And I was cooking dinner with my mom and then we were eating dinner and all of a sudden we heard a noise in the back and I went to the back to investigate and I opened the door and I saw a shadow running across the yard and then I realized that it was a person and they were holding my laptop and then I yelled at them and I chased them but they were too quick and so I wasn’t able to get my laptop back and so we decided to come to the police station
and now I’m begging you police officers please help me open a case for this stolen item. Now, that probably took me, I don’t know, 20, 30 seconds to say, maybe longer. But what if I just went to the police station, said, “Look, I need your help. My laptop was stolen.” How much quicker is it for the police officer to understand what I need from him?
the best speakers are the ones who are able to express the idea or the thing that they need from someone in 5 to 10 seconds or less. Any longer than that and you honestly don’t understand the thing that you’re trying to explain
But going back to this list of key considerations with content and structure, the last one is anticipating key questions. Now, this is kind of a second level thing. Once you’ve gotten better at structuring your
thinking, understanding the thing that you want to actually talk about, and knowing your objective, and laying out the path to explain it in the most concise way possible, then the next level is like, okay, I foresee that when I say this one thing, they’re going to think this. And so they may have this question and so I should actually preempt that by explaining the answer to their question.
so an example of this is say I’m explaining to my boss that we’ve been seeing declines in revenue from this specific product in the business and we’re not sure why. Now I’m going to stop there. Now imagine if I just told my boss that. Okay, we’re seeing declines in revenue for this product and we’re not sure why. Then what is he going to be thinking? he or she is going to be thinking, okay, well, have you looked into this and that? Have you tried talking to this and this person? Have you tried to determine whether this is a external issue that is affecting all of our competitors and our entire industry or is it like something that’s localized to our company? A good communicator will know this and they
will think about it and take action to address some of these questions so that in their delivery they can say something like, “Look, we’re currently investigating this decline in revenue for a specific product line and we’ve already ruled out the fact that this is a marketwide issue because our competitors similar products are doing very well except ours. And so we’re looking internally right now at XY andZ and we’re going to talk to XY andZ about this to try and get to the bottom of what’s actually causing this issue.”
But let’s move to the last part which is the delivery. So how do we make the delivery effective? And here I’ve kept it really short with three main things. The first is you need to always remember decrease the mental load of your listener. If you decrease the mental load of your listener, then that gives them more bandwidth to actually think about what you’re saying
a great example of decreasing mental load is being smart about your word choices. And so a very easy way to make things extremely difficult for someone to understand is to use an insane amount of adjectives, especially long verbose words that don’t actually contribute to the meaning of a sentence.
great example of this is, you know, if you had a sentence like he voraciously read through the Victorian era novel Jane Austin and finished it in just under 6 hours, you can actually shorten that sentence to get to the essence of it by literally saying, “He read quickly through Jane Austin and finished it in 6 hours.” Or, “He read through Jane Austin in 6 hours.” That’s the essence of the sentence.
What I’m trying to explain to you is how to deliver the message with ruthless effectiveness, which often involves taking out any flowery language. Flowery language might be okay in a novel, but it’s not okay when you’re trying to explain something quickly to someone who has limited time and mental bandwidth.
Now, the second thing is top- down communication. get in the habit of communicating in a top- down way. What this means is you always start with the answer first or maybe it’s the main idea or maybe it’s the question that you need to ask them. You always say, “Hey, so today we need your input on this program
that we’re working on. We need your thoughts on this project or this paper that we’re writing and these are the three things that we need your thoughts on or this is why we think that the product is not doing well.” But up front you say, “Okay, look, the product’s not doing well and this is why we think it’s not doing well.” And then you have supporting evidence under each of it. The reason why top-down communication is so effective and is taught at firms like McKenzie and BCG is because executives again have very little time and mental bandwidth. And by doing top- down communication, you’re actually decreasing the mental load. you’re
minimizing it because they don’t have to wait for you to do this whole explanation before understanding oh like that’s the final outcome or that’s the actual thing that they wanted to ask me about because then instead of holding all of these thoughts in their head then they understand immediately what you’re trying to get out of the conversation.
Now, the second thing is top- down communication. get in the habit of communicating in a top- down way. What this means is you always start with the answer first or maybe it’s the main idea or maybe it’s the question that you need to ask them. You always say, “Hey, so today we need your input on this program
that we’re working on. We need your thoughts on this project or this paper that we’re writing and these are the three things that we need your thoughts on or this is why we think that the product is not doing well.” But up front you say, “Okay, look, the product’s not doing well and this is why we think it’s not doing well.” And then you have supporting evidence under each of it. The reason why top-down communication is so effective and is taught at firms like McKenzie and BCG is because executives again have very little time and mental bandwidth. And by doing top- down communication, you’re actually decreasing the mental load. you’re
minimizing it because they don’t have to wait for you to do this whole explanation before understanding oh like that’s the final outcome or that’s the actual thing that they wanted to ask me about
Second is a storytelling. Now, storytelling, I will say, is effective in certain scenarios where you really want to illustrate an idea or a feeling. And when you use it accurately, and when you’re good at storytelling, it can be
extremely extremely effective for the delivery because you captivate the audience. And I’m telling you, the best storytellers out there, they’re also really, really good at articulating their thoughts and they understand what people actually pay attention to. Now, I’ll probably make a video about storytelling later on, but high level how to get really good at storytelling is you need to understand that details are really important when it comes to storytelling. You want to show not tell. So, for example, instead of saying something like, I almost got killed last night. Instead, if you put them into the
actual situation, you include details on the location, on how you were feeling, what you were thinking in that moment, and you don’t just tell them. You say something like, “Last night at 11:00 p.m. I was walking home after a late night of dinner and drinks with my friends in the Soho neighborhood of New York City. And as I was walking to the subway, I go through the turn styles. I’m waiting on the platform and suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I see this black shadow moving and there’s this like man in a black coat and with a mask on carrying a knife and he’s slowly
walking towards me.” And in that moment, I honestly thought I was in a horror movie and I froze. Like my blood literally ran cold and I was like, “Holy I’m I I need to get out of here.” And so I run and thank God, the subway comes like two seconds later as I’m running in the opposite direction down the platform because I turn around and this guy’s like starting to like move a little quicker and he’s starting to run at me and I’m like, “Oh my god.” And I see the conductor. He sees me and he opens the door and then quickly closes it after I run through the subway. And only then am I able to take a sigh of
relief and I turn around and this guy is staring at me through the the windows of the subway and he’s holding this knife and he’s like screaming all this random gibberish at me and it was just absolutely horrifying and I couldn’t sleep last night even after I got home. Okay, so you see how that story that I just told you had a ton of detail and it also had a lot of suspense, right? Because I was being chased by this guy with a knife. What that does when you put people in the actual moment is it captivates them and it makes them think about what if I was in that situation and the little details around like what
I was thinking in my head and how I was thinking like oh my god I’m screwed. I need to get out of here. Like those things those are the kinds of details that captivate people with a story. You don’t just say oh I was really scared like that’s boring. You say you know I saw my life flashing before my eyes. You say something like that that gets people paying attention. But anyways, the last thing is just the energy with your communication.
different people have different levels of energy. If you’re naturally someone that is high energy, then good for you because high energy tends to be a little bit more engaging for people to listen to. But if
you’re someone like me who’s naturally a little bit more introverted, a little bit more reserved, what you might need to do is you might need to dial up the energy when you’re giving a presentation or you’re in an interview, for example, the reason why you need to dial up the energy is because it engages the audience more. because they can feel the energy. And whatever energy level you think that you’re projecting, you need to dial it up and turn that dial up by at least 2 or 3x more, probably like 5x more energy. And what this is going to do is it in reality, you’re going to feel like you’re coming across like super energetic, but to them, it’s not
going to be as energetic as you think. So keep all of this in mind.
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