Albert Einstein famously said if you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough hi my name's Matt I'm a current strategy and operations associate at Google prior of that was a Management Consultant at BCG and today I'm going to explain to you how to communicate clearly it doesn't matter what your background is if you're currently a student a working professional or maybe even in Academia clear communication is something that anyone can benefit from because at the end of the day the ability to think in a structured way communicate those thoughts to another human
and do so in a way that is concise and effective is a skill that literally anyone can benefit from so let's get right into it so the first thing we need to understand before we even get into how do I communicate clearly is where does clear communication start and I would say that at the core clear communication really starts with clear thinking because if you cannot structure your thoughts in a way that makes sense in a way that is logical and in a way that conveys the point that you want to get across to someone
then you're at a loss before you've even opened your mouth now the next natural question from here is well then how do I think in a way that is clear well I'll get into that later in this video but it's important to keep in mind that the root of all clear communication starts with your ability to think and your ability to be structured and to be logical but that said there is a three-step process that I recommend following when you are preparing to say speak in a meeting or give a presentation whether it be in
school or at work or anywhere else and this three step process is one know your goal two know your audience and three know how you're going to say it okay and so I'm now going to dive into this three-step framework and it'll make a lot more sense why you should know your goal know your audience and know how you're going to say it if you want to be able to come out of a meeting or an interview where the person on the other side of the table is thinking to themselves wow that guy is a
great communicator so with step one which is know your goal you would be surprised how many people go into a conversation or go into a meeting or even a networking call without knowing what they actually want to get out of it like sure you could say yeah I just want to you know learn a little bit more from this person but what actually is your goal here are you trying to learn specifically about their role are you trying to learn a little bit more about their thought process in switching into this industry or are you
trying to just ask them for a referral for a job knowing your goal is the first step to being able to convey your ideas in a way that makes sense and is concise and so that you don't ramble because whatever your goal is you need to keep this at the back of your mind and so to give a work context example a good example of this is going into a meeting knowing that you want to get alignment with some key stakeholders say it's like the CEO or a VP someone very high up or maybe to
push back on something right these are the most common situations that working professionals will find themselves in where they either need to get alignment on something and say hey this is what we've been working on all we need and what we're looking for today is your feedback but really your sign off on this program or this new initiative that we want to fund or we want to go to them and say they've given us some sort of task or request and we want to show them that we've done some work and we've thought about it
already but given the available resources and what we think is feasible we'd like to push back on this request because we don't think it's a good use of our time or we think that the request simply doesn't make sense and if you're unable to get alignment or to push back you're never going to be able to get anything done at work if you're not able to get alignment nothing will ever get ped and if you're unable to push back people will just pile a million things on your plate and you'll get overwhelmed and so going
into any sort of conversations with the goal in mind is critically important because it's going to keep you focused in the conversation so that you don't go off on random tangents and also so that you can get your point across and so that ultimately at the end of the conversation you can remind yourself okay did I accomplish this goal if not what needs to to happen maybe that's scheduling a follow-up call or some other next steps that need to happen but now that we know why it's important to keep your goal in mind before you
go into a conversation the next step is to know your audience now most people will say no duh of course you got to know your audience everyone knows that well you would be surprised how many people go into conversations without really understanding the perspective of the person sitting on the other side of the table I would argue that empathy is one key trait that a lot of great communicators have in common because they're able to put themselves in the shoes of Their audience and really understand not just what does my audience want but how are
they going to react to certain things that I say and how does their thought process potentially differ from mine so something that maybe I say that seems logical to me may not necessarily sound logical to them and another great example that I often run into because I do a fair number of coaching calls with students and early professionals is often with people who come from very technical backgrounds so for example if you are someone who is in Academia or you've been you've been doing your PhD in a very technical science related field where there's a
lot of jargon or maybe you're in the medical profession for example often times what happens is you've been swimming around in all of this technical jargon and all this terminology for so long in your day-to-day and there's nothing wrong with that but when it comes to finally communicating to someone who might not come from that background say if you're interviewing somewhere and you're speaking with HR for example or even talking to your friend about what you do at work then you try to explain it to them in a way that makes sense to you but
then you end up using a bunch of words that they don't understand or assuming far too much context which brings me to the next point which is you need to assume in most cases zero context now this is just a broad generalization here there are exceptions to this rule like for example if you're talking with a colleague that you've been working very closely with on a specific project project for a while then you don't need to explain everything to them but in 90% of cases when you're explaining something to an audience a group of people
there is more than often going to be one person who lacks a certain level of context and you as the presenter will often have the most context and so you always need to assume that everyone else has a little bit less context than you okay and so how does this manifest in practice well this means that at the beginning of any presentation or at the beginning of every meeting you start and you open with context you say something like all right thanks everybody for joining us today as a reminder we've been working on this project
for the past 3 weeks and it's focused on figuring out if there is a possible solution to this problem and so we've engaged with X Y and Z different parties at the company so far and today the purpose of the meeting is to get everyone's alignment on the process that we've landed on and determine what the next steps are something like that I'm obviously making this up as I go but you always need to assume zero context and I know some of you might be thinking is this really necessary like it feels a little bit
redundant to always have to do this and what I would say to that is look nobody will get mad at you for restating the context and grounding everybody in the pre-existing facts if somebody gets upset that you simply spent an additional 5 to 10 seconds laying out the groundwork before diving into the details that's a them problem not a you problem so don't worry about sounding redundant you need to be concise but you can always restate the context at the beginning of every meeting and I also just mentioned this but just to write it down
remove the jargon if you're communicating with someone who's not Technical and a note on jargon I honestly don't think that using jargon is very effective in any sort of contexts unless you happen to be speaking with someone who also is in that same field and would really understand I think that at the end of the day any complex concept should be able to be broken down into extremely basic components and you should be able to explain it to someone in extremely simple terms again going back to that Einstein quote if you cannot explain it simply
you simply don't understand it well enough and Richard feeman who is another famous physicist also advocated for the Fineman technique which is when you basically take a complex concept and you write it down on a piece of paper you try to explain it in very basic terms and analogies and basically teach it to yourself and at the end of that if you don't still understand this concept then you have to go back and even simplify it further which really goes to show that first principles thinking being able to break things down into the most basic
components is applicable to any field no matter how complex if you cannot explain to basically a 10-year-old what you are working on then that either means that you do not understand it well enough or whatever you're working on doesn't make as much sense as people think and maybe there's a problem but all that's to say you really need to know your audience and put yourself in their shoes before you even open your mouth if you do that you will be much more effective in meetings and in interviews and in conversations with people because people aren't
going to have as many questions about oh wait why are we even having this conversation and what were we working on before that all of these kinds of questions can be avoided if you ground everybody in the facts before you get into the details okay but that brings us to the third step which is know how you're going to say it and there's really two things here one is you need to be structured and two is you need to write it down okay well why do you need to be structured being structured is important because
if if you don't come into a meeting with basically like a road map of the things you want to talk about it is very easy to get completely derailed when one person suddenly asks a question about the first thing that you wanted to talk about and then the whole conversation goes in that direction and by the end of like 30 minutes or maybe an hour all you guys have done is spent that entire time talking about that one thing when in reality you wanted to talk about three or four different things and so it's important
to be structured from that perspective but also because this is going to force you to think about okay how do I actually want to deliver this message I know high level what my goal is and what outcome I want to drive and I know who my audience is but how am I actually going to in practice deliver this message in a way that is the most effective is the most logical and is the most likely to convince this person or this group of people to do what I want basically and so being structured simply means
you think through okay the flow of the presentation or the discussion right you're going to start with number one and then you're going to go to number two and then finally you're going to end with number three and maybe there's some call to action here now number one is usually the context which means you want to start with the context as I've mentioned assume zero context from your audience two is you want to get into the meat of the discussion right and so this will probably be broken out into multiple multiple talking points if it's
a complex problem and you're going to end with a basically a recap and CTA which is a call to action now the call to action is really important because at the end of every meeting and at the end of every conversation with like a business partner or a professor or anyone else that you're working with or trying to convince of something you need to have some sort of call to action now this could be as simple as saying at the end of a meeting all right so it sounds like we've got an alignment on this
in terms of next steps it sounds like Matt you are going to put together the financial model for this business uh Bob you're going to put together some trading comps so that we can understand what the market is currently valuing this company at and Alyssa you're going to start putting together a list of potential buyers for this business so the call to action is basically just also delegating work to different people or yourself depending on what the outcome of that meeting was and you need that because it's going to move things forward from the meeting
you don't just want the meeting to be a meeting and that's it in most cases you actually want people to do something coming out of that meeting even if it's as simple as sending an email out to someone because otherwise why are you even having this meeting the most ineffective meetings that I have ever been been in in my professional career which granted hasn't been that long have been meetings where there was a discussion for like an hour and at the end of it nobody knew what to do and so coming out of that meeting
nothing moved forward because there were no action items and the person running the meeting simply wasn't able to delegate effectively and so you just lose momentum and the objective doesn't get achieved but moving to the second Point here which is you should write it all down going back to what I had said earlier about how the root of all clear communication is clear thinking I would argue that if you can write clearly you can think clearly because writing and thinking are very similar and if you're able to put down ideas on paper in a way
that is logical and makes sense if you can write effectively then that means that you can think effectively and if you can think effectively and write effectively then you already have 50% of the battle when it comes to communicating effectively and so I would say the biggest thing here is again to be concise and to be logical and the reason why I always write things down before I have to present something or before I have to go into a meeting where I have to speak is because if you read it back and it doesn't make
sense then do you really think it's going to make sense when it comes out of your mouth no right so that's why it's so important to be able to put your ideas down on paper or in writing if you want to be able to communicate effectively
