Simple and Easy

Raise your hand if you love speaking in front of people. Nobody… maybe a few? How about in front of a small group of people? How about just speaking to another person? The fact of the matter is that most of us don’t love speaking in front of people and a lot of us even get varying levels of anxiety when it comes to the matter. Yet we communicate with people on a daily basis and furthermore many jobs require us to speak in front of people in a group or public setting.

Though difficult we find ourselves needing to communicate and convey a message to others throughout our days. And unfortunately, we can’t just wing it if we want to be heard and understood by those we are speaking to. This is because communication is a skill and just like any other skill, there are techniques we can learn and practice to become better.

A study was published in 2012 that compiled every Billboard Hot 100 songs from 1958-2012. What they found in the analysis of these songs was that the ones with simple and repetitive lyrics were more prone to climbing the chart into the top 40 while others fell off the list quickly. They believe this is due to what we call the Processing Fluency Theory. This theory states that the easier a message is to digest, the more positively people will react to it.

Basically, we like it simple and easy.

We want things to be succinct, to the point, and easy to understand. Like one of my favorite English professors in college would often say, “Why take three pages to say what could be said in a paragraph?” I loved this notion initially because it gave me the freedom to write short essays but I’ve now come to realize the value in conveying a message in a simple and effective manner. It’s not about the words you are saying but rather how they are received and the easier to understand, the better.

Ultimately, there are hundreds of techniques and lessons to be learned when it comes to communicating with people whether it’s 1-on-1 or in a packed conference room. But this one is a biggie. After all, what good is a message if people can’t understand it? Speak clearly with volume, use pauses to draw people in, leave the thesaurus at home, and get to the point in a timely matter.

Your words matter, so make them count.