The Idea of Effective Communication: Keep it Simple

Read this story from John Maxwell’s Everyone Communicates, Few Connect:

A few years ago, I was being interviewed on a television talk show. The host held up a couple of my books and said, “John. I’ve read several of your books, and they are all so simple.” His tone of voice, body language, and mannerisms made it clear to me and the audience that he did not mean it as a compliment! My response was straightforward: “That’s true. The principles in my books are simple to understand. But they are not always simple to apply”. The audience applauded, and he conceded that what I said was right.

The idea of that story is this: people think simplicity is akin to a lack of intellectual vigor or brilliance. Nowadays, people love to sound big and intelligent and confuse themselves and others with unnecessary vocabulary. That’s not the way to communicate effectively. Effective communication requires simplicity. Here’s another story to teach you the importance of simplicity in communication, also culled from Everyone Communicates, Few Connect:

A pastor once stood outside his church after a church service one day to shake hands with members of his congregation as they exited. One of them commented on his sermon, saying: “Pastor, you are smarter than Albert Einstein.” The pastor was surprised and flattered by that statement, but he didn’t know how to respond. In fact, the more he thought about the comment, the more mystified he was by it. He couldn’t sleep properly for a week! The following Sunday, he finally asked the member what he meant by it. “You see,” the man responded, “Albert Einstein wrote something so difficult that only 10 persons could understand him at that time. But when you preached, no one could understand you.”

I’ll share yet another story from the book:

A preschool-aged boy was eating an apple in the backseat of the car. “Daddy”, he said, “why is my apple turning brown?” The boy’s father explained, “Because after you ate the skin off, the meat of the apple came in contact with air, which caused it to oxidize, thus changing its molecular structure and turning it into a different colour.” There was a long silence, and then the boy asked, “Daddy, are you talking to me?”

That’s how a lot of us are when we talk to people. We want to sound intelligent and learned and in the process trade off effective communication for a brief moment of egotistical satisfaction. Just as we do not enjoy when professors and teachers bombard us with hard-to-understand material in class or when the pastor starts to sound too deep for even the angels to comprehend, we must also learn to keep our conversations and messages simple. That way, our communication becomes more effective.