Has your experience made you a worse communicator?

You’ve probably delivered your message hundreds of times, and that could be the problem. Your experience is what makes you fluent, what makes you an expert. It also makes you assume. And the more you know, the harder it gets to hear yourself the way a room hears you. Sometimes I tell my team that “it’s only common sense if you know it”.

If you recognize any of these things it might mean that your communication is getting complacent.

• You are presenting to dead eyes. Polite faces, no reaction.
• Your CEO said it was good. Your CEO always says it was good.
• It felt fine, because you have done this a thousand times.
• You scraped through. Again.
• You prepped in the taxi.

One of those is a warning light. All five is a pattern, and it is costing you leadership.

The expert trap

In 1990, a Stanford graduate student called Elizabeth Newton ran a beautifully simple experiment. One person tapped out a well known song on a table. Another person tried to name it. The tappers reckoned listeners would get about half of them. Out of 120 songs, listeners got three.

The tappers could hear the music in their heads. Nobody else could.

Expertise does exactly that. It plays the tune in your head and leaves the room with tapping.

Pamela Hinds tested the same idea with experts in 1999. She asked them how long a beginner would need to finish a task. They said just under 13 minutes. Beginners took 31.5 minutes. She then tried to correct the experts, warning them and walking them through the beginner experience, and their guesses barely improved.

When you’re the expert, its so easy to over assume. To complicate. To skip the bit that would have made it land.

What audiences really want is simplicity. Every time.

I have recorded more than 3,000 episodes of Everyday Positivity. And listeners tell me that they still need and want to hear the simple thing, said plainly, again.

The answer is unglamorous (you might not want to hear it)

Rehearse. Out loud. Regularly.

Especially your key lines, your stories, your one message. Say them often enough that they drop into the memory bank and arrive when you need them.

Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke tested this properly. Students who kept retrieving material from memory recalled 61 per cent of it a week later. Students who simply reread it recalled 40 per cent. Saying it out loud beats going over it again.

That is what rehearsal buys you, clarity and simplicity in your message, and being able to reach for the words you need when the pressure arrives.

Start this week. One story. One key message. Three lines you might need. Say them out loud until they are yours.

Your experience is still your biggest asset. It just needs checking.