You Can't Communicate Well If You're Unsure of Yourself

I was watching the news the other day and they brought on a special guest. The host asks a question, and the guest just goes. Rambling about something nobody asked about, saying everything on his mind, running down one road and then another. By the end you’ve heard a hundred sentences and you couldn’t tell me a single point he was trying to make.

And it hit me that I see the exact same thing at work all the time. There’s a manager who stops by, and they talk, and they talk, and they say absolutely everything. Every thought, every angle, every possible caveat. And when they finally stop, nobody in the room actually knows what they were supposed to do. Nothing moves. Worse, it starts to rot. People get frustrated, they check out, and the whole thing tips into something toxic, all because one person couldn’t get to the point.

So I coach people on this. Before you say anything, figure out where the person you’re talking to is coming from. What department are they in? What do they actually care about? What are they going to assume this is when you bring it up? Is it going to mean more work for them? Is it going to help them? Is it something they had a hand in, something they feel ownership over? You start from where they are.

Sometimes it’s even more literal than that. Where did they just come from? What did they just walk out of? What kind of morning are they having? When I was starting out, the older people would tell me never to approach the boss the second he walked in, before he’d even settled into his chair or had his coffee. Read the man first. Years later, now that I’m the boss myself, I just smile when someone comes at me with a trivial question the moment I’ve arrived, bag still on my shoulder. They mean no harm. They just never stopped to think about where I was coming from.

And this runs through everything. A presentation, a pitch, the thirty seconds you get in an elevator, it’s all the same move. It’s basic. People miss it all the time.

So why don’t they do it? The reason almost always comes down to confidence. When you’re not sure you really know your stuff, you can’t think about anybody but yourself. You’re stuck in your own head, worried about sounding smart, worried about how the room is reading you. So you overcompensate. You say more. You cover every angle. You babble. All that noise is just insecurity looking for somewhere to hide.

I worked with someone exactly like this. He actually knew his work, but he didn’t trust that he knew it, so he’d walk into a meeting and try to say everything, and walk out having landed nothing. Most of what I did with him was work on his confidence. I kept reassuring him that he knows what he knows. He didn’t need to second-guess himself, and he didn’t need to sit there worrying about how everyone was reading him. Because as long as he was trying to impress people, there was no room left to think about anyone else.

That’s what confidence really buys you. Room. Once you trust yourself, you stop spending all your energy on how you’re coming across, and you finally have attention left over for the person in front of you. Someone who’s still worried about themselves can’t do that. They can’t get out of their own way long enough to reach anyone.

You cannot communicate if you don’t start with where the other person is coming from. And you can’t start there until you’re confident enough to stop thinking about yourself.