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Technology
Be Crystal Clear: 3 Truths and 2 Tips to Communicate with Impact [Archive]
In this episode of the Growth Mindset Podcast, Sam Webster explores the intricacies of effective communication, emphasizing the importance of clarity and simplicity. He discusses cognitive biases, the...
Be Crystal Clear: 3 Truths and 2 Tips to Communicate with Impact [Archive]
Technology •
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Speaker A
I have often been completely unable to find an important object such as my keys. And once I give up searching, I might recruit some assistance from someone else who seems to find them instantly, often in the place where I always put my keys. And apparently I'm not actually the only human who makes dumb mistakes like this. We can all completely miss things that are hidden in plain sight. Perhaps more curiously, we can also miss ideas that are sitting in the front of our minds. We'll have all the correct inputs and knowledge, but we fail to use them. Lately on the show, we've spoken a lot about cognitive biases and the sorts of illusions and traps that we fall into. Those episodes have been turning into some slightly epic projects to put together, and I thought I'd share a shorter update episode on one curious aspect of human thought and provide some steps to give us clearer thinking. If you listened to the Ego Based Cognitive Biases episode, you might remember I spoke about the concept of the curse of knowledge. And once we have knowledge, it's hard to imagine what it's like not having that knowledge. In fact, once a concept makes sense to us, it's very hard to imagine the concept not making sense. You can't look at a word written down as just some random squiggles because you know exactly what each letter means. And it's this knowledge that we have that makes it hard to explain the things that we know. It's why teachers need a gift for explaining things, but also a gift for just patience when their explanations inevitably don't actually work the first time. And if you break down what communication is, it's simply the conveyance of information that you have that you want others to understand. And ideally you want to do it without confusing them with. Without boring them. And you certainly don't want to annoy them. But on top of that, our ego has these other requirements. We want people to think we're smart, maybe resourceful, and in general, just a wonderfully incredible person. I mean, who doesn't want our own personal amazingness appreciated? But this can get in the way. If we're talking to a partner, we don't want to appear needy. If we're chatting with friends, we might want to appear witty. If we are teaching something or making a presentation, we want to appear intelligent. And so the last thing we ever want to do is waste time stating the obvious. And yet the goal of communication is to make information that we have obvious to others. And that's a conundrum. Like the whole point of communication is the opposite of what we're trying to do so. We're going to unpack our ego a little bit more in this episode and identify a few tools for clear thinking to help you navigate life with a bit more rationality. Hello and welcome to the Growth Mindset Podcast with me, Sam Webster with some fun ideas on how to apply psychology to our communication and why it gets confusing, and how to unconfuse ourselves. Let's quickly start with romantic communication. How often do people hide what they mean because they don't want to directly state their needs? It can feel weird to simply state I want this, I like this, I need this, touch me there. Instead, we expect some mental gymnastics from our partner to read our minds and understand exactly what we want whilst we never state what we want. We might even provide an unhelpful list of things that we don't mind doing when actually we do mind. Or worse, we might give our partner a list of all of their problems due to their inability to guess our own problems. And we do that instead of just telling them that we wanted a hug or the last ROLO, etc. And we can go to some stereotypical examples here that are by no means rules for every relationship, but often when a woman presents a man with a problem that they have, they'll find that men can be a bit like a dog fetching a stick and they just really want to solve the problem. But if this woman actually wants her man to tell her that her feelings about this problem make sense and that he is willing to emotionally support her in her struggle, then she could just tell him that's what she wants. And as always, if information is obvious for you, you should make it obvious for others. And men also mess this up. They often don't state their emotional needs at all, or their desire for appreciations of their EFF efforts, and instead they bottle it all up. And they get kind of frustrated when no one knows why they're annoyed even though they haven't even explained it at all. And in both cases, what a partner wants is the thing that is right in the front of their mind, yet it's hidden from their partner because they haven't said it. And genders aside, we can just have very different conflict and resolution styles and requirements if one partner needs to resolve conflicts immediately whilst the other one prefers to have some space to calm down, process things first. In these cases, if neither partner states their preference, they can both feel like the other partner is perhaps even being abusive, or like their boundaries are being consistently violated when neither of them have actually stated the obvious boundary for them that's being crossed. And you've probably heard that lots of people got very excited about the concept of love languages, but it's just an exercise in stating your needs and saying the thing that is obvious for you, but not for someone else. So we've already seen now that the ideas that are sitting right in the front of our mind might be the thing we're looking for. Just like my Elusive Keys, we can frantically run around our heads searching for anything and everything to say when the thing we need to say is right in the front of our mind. We can stop trying to find other things elsewhere and go with the obvious. And besides couples, we all have to communicate. Whether writing an email, giving a presentation, phone calls, interviews, being a creator. We are actually all writers, that's for sure. And we all know that if you read a title and it doesn't tell you what a blog is about, it's not very helpful. Or if you read a conclusion where you can't even find the point, it's a bit useless. But if we're the one writing and we know exactly what we're talking about, it's impossible to see what others perceive and what they find difficult to understand because we can't ever read our words without knowing why they were written. And then, as we have our own desires to seem intelligent, there can be the pull to add some extra points or allude to a side topic that's maybe a bit hard to understand, and doing so is just adding further evidence of all our amazing knowledge and brilliance. But we forget that communicating isn't about making us feel smart, it's about making our audience feel smart. They aren't there to feel confused. When I worked at the BBC, my boss had a rule that you could only write emails with four sentences unless you had a really really really good reason because it's so easy to get lost in communication fluff. That isn't the point that's required. In fact, if you look at the best selling non fiction books out there, none of them are mind bending philosophy where you have to reread each sentence ten times to finally get the point. No, you'll find popular books hand deliver simple concepts for the reader to understand. They'll often make difficult things simple to understand or maybe boring topics engaging to read like Rich dad, poor dad. Maybe you didn't like the book. I personally found a few large holes in it, but from my example here it is a very simple story about a kid growing up learning basic principles about money from a rich dude that his poor father couldn't teach him. And the book is readable by 5 year olds. And it's certainly easier to digest than an economics textbook, yet millions of people said it changed their lives financially. Or you could look at Tim Ferriss with the Four Hour Workweek or Mark Manson's the Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. They are freakishly easy books to read, yet people felt that the books made them smarter. So our goal in communication is to make complex things simple, but we deny our goal by trying to be more complex and come across intelligent. In fact, many people can make simple things complex by ignoring the obvious facts that need to be said. I've read startup pitch decks where you don't even know what the company does after reading 20 slides all about the company. And I'm sure you've probably visited a website where you had no idea what was going on or what the company did. And when it comes to writing, one of the weirdest things that you learn to lean into as a writer is the feeling of being a little unpleasantly exposed. If you write in superfluous prose and grand theories of everything, it's easy to easy to feel protected. But if you directly state your point in its most simple form, you feel a little bit naked. It's as if people could judge you and your idea for being too obvious or like you've undersold them something when they can look at the idea in its pure basic form, but that's all they need. Once we gain some familiarity in a topic, it's really hard to remember that the things that are now obvious for us are really the essential building blocks for someone else. And this is why it can be better to learn from someone that's just one step ahead of you, rather than someone who's a master because they've forgotten what it's like to learn the simple steps that they've done a million times. So when we communicate, we should let go of all the things we want people to think about us and focus on the core of what we simply need the other person to understand. In fact, you want them to instantly understand and be like, oh yeah, but of course, that's so obvious. I could have thought of it myself. I just hadn't had the thought yet. Because we all know the feeling when someone explains something to us, and it's really hard to understand. Like they're trying to break the laws of physics in our mind with weird connections they're making. And it's not cool to try and do mental wizardry. It's exhausting and off putting. Ultimately, as humans we like it when one plus one equals two, because it does. And our explanations shouldn't try to bend reality, but to shine a light on reality. So, considering our ability to completely ignore the obvious, I'll state some clear obvious things. Clear communication is better communication and saying things that are obvious might make you feel dumb or even exposed, but it's the obvious things that you need to say to get these front of mind things out. One technique is to try and imagine that you can only say one sentence to someone to explain what it is they need to know. Investors in fact will often ask a company what do you actually do in one sentence to get the clear light of day version of exactly what the company does so you can do it for yourself in any communication problem, which is what is the one thing I need someone to understand? And if you do have some more time, then you can try doing a paragraph version of what you need someone to understand and maybe even a one page version where you can also answer things like what are you assuming the other person already knows? What are the things that feel obvious for you? What are five other ways of explaining it? Or five other analogies that you could make? And these will all help you make things more obvious. And now onto a seemingly completely unrelated topic that is obviously related for me for now, and it might feel like mental wizardry for you for a minute or two, but if you stay with me it will crash into the stunningly obvious as well and become new information for you. I'm going to talk about the concept of bundling and unbundling things. It's a common business concept, but I find it can be really useful for problem solving on a personal level and creating clearer communication. So firstly, what is bundling and unbundling and how does it work for businesses? Bundling is the combination of items or services into a single package and bundle. Unbundling is the segregation of items and services into separate packages. And when you look at businesses, many are the result of just bundling or unbundling existing services. And this new format delivers a benefit to users that was not possible with the existing forms. For example, to create my podcast, I used to use a recording tool, a transcription tool, I used to edit the audio in Adobe and sometimes do some sound editing and mastering in Audacity and and perhaps use some separate sound plugin tools from other companies. And that was a lot of things. Now all of those services have been bundled into a single software package of descript, and it saves me lots of Time you might have heard of the note taking tool notion in it's got spreadsheets, databases, calendars, task boards, and of course just basic writing notes capabilities all in one app. And you can run your admin, your ideas, project management all in one place. If you want to look at unbundling, then perhaps if you get like an ESIM card that only has data on it, where you don't have to pay for extra things like texts and minutes that you don't need. But it's of course a massive advantage to unbundle and separate it. Or there's Coursera, the online video platform where you can access a single university course at a time without having to attend an entire college degree in person. Like a completely amazing product by just unbundling things that were already out there. So once you understand the concept of bundling and unbundling, you see it everywhere. Airlines used to all be quite similar. You'd get some dodgy food and luggage as part of your ticket. Then premium airlines came along and they bundled higher quality services, more luggage for free, good food. Virgin would even check that you had a taxi to your hotel and that was the bundled up version of airlines. And then you had the cheap airlines that were unbundling the services, they'd remove things like luggage and food, and so all you had was a seat at the lowest cost and it allowed you to travel cheaper anyway. By this point, the concept of bundling and unbundling for businesses should be obvious to you, but it also applies to creativity, science, engineering, cooking, music, writing and communicating. In psychology, even a personality is the bundled traits of someone combined with their personal history. They may have a number of different quirks or even disorders that dictate how they react to different circumstances. However, an individual trait is the unbundled element of someone's personality that explains how they react in certain situations. The methodology behind most psychology research is basically just trying to find new ways of isolating a singular part of a human's reactive framework to identify a novel insight and study it. I mentioned that we can use the bundling concept for problem solving. If we want to manage stress, we might want to bundle things together like a plan for diet, exercise, time management and relaxation into a single daily routine. Whilst we also might need to unbundle and address individual elements and start with a single win before taking too much on all at once. Habit building, for example, can be really effective when we bundle a habit together with other routines, such as before I go to bed, I brush my teeth. James Clear in Atomic Habits just Calls it habit stacking. Maybe every time you have a coffee you do 20 squats. Little things you can bundle together. We can also create clearer thinking on a topic by bundling it together. Perhaps try making a mind map or summarize lots of related concepts. For example, psychology would be limited if we didn't sometimes integrate neuroscience and biology and chemistry into our knowledge. But then, of course, we have to unbundle parts of psychology to get specific understanding on an individual element, like a specific cognitive bias or a disorder. If you want to understand climate change, it helps to unbundle it into different sections like causes, effects, mitigation strategies, economics. And if you want to fully understand your partner's personality, it helps to understand their individual traits and quirks. And now at this point, we can finally get on to communication, where it should finally make perfect sense. And if it doesn't, you can tell me to work on my own terrible writing and inability to make obvious things obvious. Communication can really benefit from a lot of bundling and unbundling principles. To make obvious things for you obvious to others, we can bundle our messaging to be more holistic. When we give feedback, we can use a thing called the feedback sandwich, where you say something good first, then you address all the bad parts, which is the thing you wanted to say, where the person messed everything up. And you can conclude with some very encouraging statements about why you think they're going to be great. And that's a much more effective way of saying that someone messed something up. We can also just group related information together and try to use things like analogies or start with more relatable information. For example, when I started this episode and I spoke about our communication problems, the obvious point for me was communication for authors. But most of you, the listeners, probably don't define yourself as writers. So I addressed relationship communication first, as that made more sense for more people, and then when I spoke about communication for writers afterwards, it felt like an expansion upon it. And then for aiding our communication, we can also use unbundling, because sometimes we have lots of things to say in a speech or to a partner in an argument. And if we can identify what are the individual elements that need to be understood, it can save us from jumping around or having some assumptions of some things that people should know when we're saying something, but they don't know. And I think one of the complicated things with arguments is that we might have five or even 10 different things going on at the same time. It can be hard for someone to apologize about one thing when they still feel hurt about four other things. When we can learn to unbundle our feelings and misunderstandings into the individual elements, it can be really powerful to turn this amorphous blob of just hurt feelings into separated, specific elements that can each be addressed outside of relationships. If you have a project meeting with your team, you'll want to unbundle it into different sections like planning, execution, review. If you listen to the episode about Jeff Bezos Mental Models, which was a really good episode, we spoke about the fact that Amazon organized meetings in a way that each one has a singular goal and decision to be made by the end of the meeting. And the goal was clearly defined and obvious. And in fact, Jeff Bezos even says that one of the most important things in business is to just keep the obvious things obvious. And sometimes bundling is essential for doing that. There are lots of cool things that we can do here if we want to dig into it further for your communication or your habit building or project planning, where of course clear thinking is essential. So far in the episode, I've really broken down two main tools for clear thinking, which was my goal for the episode, the fact that we hide things that are at the front of our mind and just trying to break them down into a singular sentence of just what we need to be understood, and the concept of bundling and unbundling things to make our communication clearer. I could of course go on for hours, but really at this point, the work is now on you to put your own ideas through these frameworks. This you want any helpers? Then I put a little document together in a link in the description with just some suggested points that you can go through on how to make things more obvious for yourself and apply bundling and unbundling to any concept to help you build clarity. After all, growth, mindset and mastery is essentially unbundling individual elements that you can improve and then combining them into the bundle form of mastery of an entire topic or skill. So if you do have a few ideas lurking around whilst you've been listening, don't let them slip away and check out my notes and put some time into it. I'm sure you won't regret it and I'd love to hear what ideas you have. So do check out that link in the description. And on the subject of hearing from you this summer, I want to talk to more of you, the audience. So I've opened up my Wednesday afternoons to talk to anyone, and I mean anyone, completely free. You could be 18 or 81. I really don't care in case you forgot about things I've done, I've launched and sold a few businesses. I've invested in quite a few businesses. I've been to over 60 countries, ran ultramarathons. I've been a mountain guide in the Himalayas. If you want to chat about the psychology of your marketing plan, help with a podcast idea chat relationships. I would be happy with anything. I just want to see some more faces and I am living a pretty chill life in Portugal by the beach where I don't have that many calls. So I thought it would make sense to connect with some more of you. So feel free to look in the episode description where there is a booking link if you felt like you've ever had a question you wanted to ask me. And on that, if you can share the episode with a friend or drop a comment or a review, you will make me super happy. The best way to support the podcast is looking into our advertisers who keep the show running. Remember, life is too short for not finding your keys and generally being confused about things. So make the obvious things obvious. And of course, don't forget to be kind to yourself. Do climb a tree this month and smile at strangers. Thank you so much for listening. Your consistency to reach the end of an episode is legendary. My hero. If you have any ideas or feedback for the show, I'm always interested to hear from you. You're the best. Studies show we need time for information to sink in, so I'm going to give you a 5 second pause to reflect on one idea from the show before you jump back into your busy life. Ready and.
Topics Covered
cognitive biases
clear communication
curse of knowledge
ego in communication
romantic communication
love languages
bundling and unbundling
effective problem solving
habit stacking
psychology in communication
clarity in presentations
communicating needs
obvious communication
complexity in communication
mind mapping