Longer isn’t better - say less to say more
Can you remember your childhood home telephone number? My mum would answer our juniper green telephone with the dial ring, that sat on the dusty old bookcase with my dad's green encyclopaedias, and in her psuedo-posh voice, say "71720".
I'm sure, like me, you used to be able to remember your childhood friend's home phone numbers too. But nowadays with all of us using mobiles its much harder. As kids, we just had to remember five numbers, nowadays its eleven. Do you even know your partner's number?
More information = more to process
When speaking, its easy to fall into the trap of believing that saying more will enhance the clarity of what you're saying. But the opposite is true. The problem is that in your mind you know what you're trying to say. You already have a mental model of the finished idea. Your listeners don't, so the longer your explanation the more mental sorting you're asking them to do.
Adding layers rather than peeling them away
As you look across the room in a board meeting and see puzzled looks on faces, its easy to think "Ah, I just haven't explained it enough". Mistakenly believing that by explaining more you're removing layers of confusion, but I'd suggest you're adding them.
Saying more is not the answer
Proverbs are highly memorable because they're wisdom condensed into as few words as possible. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is much more memorable than a lengthy explanation of the preventative effect of vitamin c on the common cold.
Do you waffle?
A friend of mine was recently hired into a professional services firm to coach their Finance Director. She was told, "he waffles, and drives everybody crazy during meetings". After meeting this alleged waffler, my friend found out that he has no idea he 'waffles'. He just believed he was 'very thorough'. The rest of his senior leadership team disagreed.
How to stop the waffle
Sensing our own waffling is difficult in the same way judging the length of our pauses is difficult. That's why I ask communicators to use a tactile way of gauging these things. A five second pause in a speaker's mind is often a half second pause in the audience's mind. Just like a concise thirty second explanation in a speaker's mind is often a 5 minute information dump in their audience's mind.
Ride your breath
Ancient Greek rhetoricians like Aristotle and Cicero combined biology with psychology to help make their arguments clearer. They believed that our breath should dictate the boundaries of a thought. They saw the end of a breath as a full stop (or period as it is also known).
They felt that a single breath matches the cognitive limits of an audience's attention. So they aimed to structure a thought so that it fits within one breath. They believed anything longer than this exhausts the audience's powers of focus.
Your brevity tank
The next time you're in a board meeting try it out. Aim to fit each response into a single breath. If you need to inhale and you haven't made your point, you've over spoken. I'd go so far as to call it your credibility tank. The most senior person in the room tends to be the one who communicates most clearly and concisely.
