If You Want To Be Heard, You Need To Speak Less

Focus on getting your point across, not filling the silence.

Words are powerful.

But too many words can be confusing. Sometimes even boring.

Yesterday, I had a two-hour training on suicide prevention. It’s an important topic, and I paid attention, but the only thing I really remember is that we were discouraged from posting photos of celebrities who died by suicide in our classrooms.

It’s not that there wasn’t more information in the presentation. It’s not that I couldn’t understand the presenter. In fact, even through her N-95 mask which was covered over by a second fabric mask, she was easy to understand.

The reason I didn’t get more out of the session was that she talked non-stop, for the full two hours, overloading us with data, case studies, stories from TED Talks, and examples from her work as a school counselor and therapist.

Her presentation was so dense it reminded me of changing the font to a smaller and smaller size to fit more words on the page. It felt like she was talking at us in 8 point Times New Roman and I didn’t have my glasses.

It was an unfortunate situation because my coworkers and I, as high school teachers facing an unprecedented schoolyear, really want to know more about how to identify risk factors in our students. And the presenter had a wealth of knowledge on the topic.

But we just didn’t seem to connect.

I’ve seen it happen before. A passionate expert has a chance at an eager audience. So naturally, the expert wants to share every piece of knowledge and every related tangent they can. The audience glazes over as facts and figures ricochet around the room like buckshot off a hubcap. Both parties leave the room wishing they had spent the hour in the gym instead of in a room with people all failing to find the magic of connection.

Why does it happen? Why do talented, well-spoken people fail to connect with their audience?

Here are three reasons:

1. They speak too much.

I recently heard famed linguist Steven Pinker explain language as an agreement between a speaker and a hearer. When the goal is to communicate ideas, it’s the speaker’s responsibility to use words that make sense, speak at an acceptable rate, and be reasonably clear. It’s the listener’s responsibility to pay attention and make sense of the words, even if they aren’t spoken with absolute perfect clarity.

If a speaker violates this agreement by simply using too many words without pausing for understanding, the listener will lose track of the ideas.

The human brain is amazing, but it still needs moments of pause to process information and synthesizes it into new ideas.

2. They aim to impress.

It’s a long-held misconception that smart people use big words and complicated sentences. In fact, the opposite is most often true.

People who have a true, deep command of a topic can explain it to any audience, often using simple, approachable language.

When a speaker uses language that is too technical or too wordy for their audience, they may sound impressive, but they’ll often fail to communicate.

3. They fail to make connections.

A disjointed collection of ideas or facts is not memorable, no matter how good your slides are or how clear your speech is.

To make sense, and better yet, be memorable, a presentation needs to have a thread that holds it together from start to finish. The thread could be an image, a personal story, or an object. Whatever it is, the thread should tie each new idea to the last one, so the hearer experiences a journey, not a staccato splatter of unconnected ideas.

How to be heard

If you are taking the time to speak, chances are you want to be heard. Here’s how to flip these flops upside down and improve your chances of connecting with your listeners:

1. Say Less:

Pare down the amount of information you aim to share. A deep, rich discussion of one topic will be far more impactful than a quick stab at ten topics.

Pause. Give people time to think.

Leave them wishing you had said more, not wishing you would finally shut up.

2. Aim to Communicate:

Consider what your listeners care about and want to know, not what you care about and want to know.

In my high school biology class, today, I was teaching about insects. One student told me about an Orchid Mantis from Animal Crossing that interested her. There is almost nothing I care less about than Animal Crossing, but I wanted my students to be engaged, so we had a long discussion about whether video games can be a way to learn about nature.

My preference would have been to stick to talking about the evolutionary history of insects starting in the Devonian period.

But I was able to communicate the same ideas far more effectively by relating them to Animal Crossing instead.

3. Make Connections:

As humans, we were born to love stories. Even young babies love to follow the narrative arc of a five-page board book.

The difference between a boring lecture and a thrilling story is just how the speaker moves from one topic to the next.

I first appreciated the power of this when I was student teaching. Sensing I was losing my students as I copied notes on the whiteboard, I drew a squiggly figure and put my notes in a quote bubble. The kids laughed and asked what the critter’s name was.

I named her “Old Gretel” and she helped me teach biology for the rest of the term. Any topic could be fun and exciting when it was tied to Old Gretel. Learning about how blood clots was far more fun when it started with Old Gretel impaling herself with a barbecue skewer.

Even more powerful is when ideas are connected to history, to geography, to personal experiences.

So if you want to be memorable, skip the lists and stick to stories.

The sad truth is that we’ll all forget most of what we hear. But we won’t forget everything.

Your words can be memorable.

Just don’t use too many of them.

For more tips on being an effective speaker, try this: