How to beat the brain's natural laziness

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

In his book Storybrand, Donald Miller gives an example of the competitive advantage of clear messages. 

Miller used to ask the audience attending his keynote speeches whether they could tell what Jeb Bush’s main message to American voters was. 

The response was always complete silence. 

Then, he asked them if they could tell Donald Trump’s central message. One hundred percent of the audience could do so without thinking.

I don’t believe the better candidate won, but rather the clearest message.

Does this apply to communicating the Gospel? 

Yes, because the human brain is drawn toward clarity and away from confusion. 

The Gospel is immensely complex and has great depth, but it is also relatively straightforward. To spark curiosity, we should be able to clarify our message so people will listen and want to hear more. That’s the purpose of every compelling pitch - not to explain everything but to awaken in others an urge to want to know more.

In this week’s blog, I cover some insights on the power of clear communication. 

Clarity wins 

If you believe that the Gospel is the world’s most important message, your first job is to ensure that people can quickly understand it.

The brain is lazy. Daniel Kahneman brilliantly described this phenomenon in his bestselling book Thinking - Fast and Slow. To avoid burning unnecessary calories, our brain uses what Kahneman calls “heuristics”—mental shortcuts that help us navigate a world of information overload and immense complexity.

Since the brain doesn’t want to burn calories, it processes just a tiny fraction of the information we receive.

To drive action, you need to help your audience’s brains quickly and easily understand your message and how it will help them.

The human brain is drawn toward clarity and away from confusion. Great leaders have always formulated clear, understandable, actionable ideas and visions. Clarity has always been important, but it is imperative today.

We live in times of information overload and low attention spans. We encounter between 3,000 and 4,000 commercial messages daily, so we must constantly improve our filtering. Message clarity has become an even more critical skill for effective leadership in this increasingly noisy environment. 

The accurate measure of effective communication 

In The Compelling Communicator, Tim Pollard introduces the concept of “retellability” as a measure of effective communication.

According to Pollard, the test of good communication lies not in whether we have expressed our intentions but in whether those who have listened can clearly and understandably retell the information to others.

“Retellability” refers to how easily and precisely people can repeat what you said when you’re not in the room.

Clear ideas are the easiest to retell, increasing their viral potential. 

We are fumbling with our smartphones, being bombarded with messages, and our brain has a full-time job choosing what to store and get rid of. The vast amount of information is never processed and is out of our minds as soon as we hear it.

In her book The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains how “the tsunami of information we are receiving today can make us even less sensitive to data because we’ve become accustomed to finding support for absolutely anything we want to believe, with a simple click of the mouse.”

Clarity wins. And a clear message that resonates with our deep beliefs and identity is irresistible. 

More than ever, people shut their ears to confusing messages, so we better make sure that the best ideas are the clearest. 

The days of sender-centricity and “death by PowerPoint” are over.

We need to clarify our message so people will listen. 

See you next week!