It takes a thousand words, (or maybe more), to describe a picture because there is a lot of detail in a picture. The shapes, sizes, colors, textures and locations just to name a few.
Our thoughts are like a picture in our mind. The challenge of great communication is to take the picture that is in our mind and describe it so someone else will be able to “see” the same picture (thought).
In the last post I talked about the balance between simplicity and complexity in our communication. We don’t want to share our thoughts with too much complexity and detail that our listeners loose interest, nor do we want to speak so simply that we don’t get our message sent or we make our listener feel undervalued.
Let’s look at how we can maybe find a balance. If we were describing the color of something we could call it “Smaragdine” or we could simply use a more commonly used word such as “Emerald” or even “Green”. Using one of the latter two words will get our picture transmitted better to most people than the first word.
If we were describing a shape and we called it a “Rhombus”, most people would not know we were talking about an equilateral quadrilateral. Oh, even then we might loose most people. The simplest word to use to share our thought would be either “Square” or “Diamond”.
If we were describing a piece of jewelry, namely a ring; we could say it had a smaragdine, rhombus mineral. Chances are, whoever we were describing this ring to, would not know that we just said the ring has a green, diamond shaped gemstone.
The ditch on the other side of the road would be to describe the ring as “having a rock of some kind in it”. This would not be descriptive enough to get the thought in our mind to someone else.
We want to learn to have enough detail to fully describe the picture in our mind without overloading our listener with difficult to understand language.
Enjoy the challenge of learning to speak in a way which will get your messages across better and you will marvel at the positive results!