According to the Guiness Book of Records, the most balls ever juggled is eleven with twenty-three catches. If juggling clubs is your thing, then the record is eight juggled successfully with sixteen catches. While the record for keeping flaming torches in the air? Just seven.
How does that feat compare to your average day and the juggling of short and long term items on your to-do list?
I ask as a recurring subject in conversation with friends and clients this September has been a sense of being ‘swamped’ with information and demands on time. More than once I’ve heard people use the term ‘Cognitive Overload’ to describe how they feel.
In broad and simple terms your brain has what is called working memory which has limited capacity to process information. Research in the 1950s found that our working memory can only cope with, or process, information relating to seven individual items or tasks. Later experiments reduced this optimal number to just four.
Fundamentally the point is that when too much information or multitasking floods the brain, our thinking becomes saturated and stalls. George Miller, the psychologist who led on the research in this area likened it to the early computers and their information processors. For us today it is like a computer with too many open browser tabs that eventually slows to a stop needing to be restarted.
Or a typical knowledge worker failing to juggle an ongoing conversation with their AI, e-mails, WhatsApp’s, Teams and/or Slack messages, notifications from numerous other apps perhaps related to a child’s school, preparation for the meeting starting in 6 minutes, plus an edit of that document you promised to send an hour ago. And this does not include those things on your mental to-do list that rush into your brain at inopportune moments pushing out attention you need to direct elsewhere. Phew!
This mental fatigue becomes a significant barrier to being a good communicator, even if you are normally a higher-performer and experienced in communicating well across big set-piece moments or informal opportunities alike.
As Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do”, so get a process to follow for every Communication Moment, small or large.
By all means start small, relevant to your skills and experience. For you it might be a team meeting is a good area to practice getting your message across and being more assertive. For someone else, a panel discussion in front of 50 people. But the point is that you follow a process. Repeat this process. Repeat again. Refine and repeat. And get better.
1. Start off by being disciplined and focussing on the communication task.
- Who is your audience
- What do you want them to know? How do you want them to think? And how do you want them to feel?
- What do you want them to do after you have communicated?
2. Then move on to how you are going to communicate to help you get that action you want (presentation, meeting, e-mail, phone call, webinar, Town Hall…)
3. Next, what information, facts and figures, stories can you use to connect with your audience, so they think, feel and do what you want them to. You want to power up your content and build deep connections.
4. Be aware of how you communicate and connect with the people who matter. What do you need to do more of? What should you stop doing? What is there new you can try this time?
5. Then practice. Block out the time, eliminate all the distractions and practice. This might be your planned intervention in that team meeting or the presentation to the board. We are all at different points in our journey to communication mastery but wherever we are, practice.
6. After you have communicated evaluate how you have done. Did you make the people that matter think, feel and do what you wanted them to? Mark yourself out of 10 and be realistic with this scoring. This does not need to be a long and drawn out process of evaluation, after all you have e-mails and messages to respond to, but is well worth doing.
Those who see communication as just another tab open on their mental browsers are unlikely to improve their skills to stand out and above their peers or competitors.
Communication is an art as well as a science. It is those who carve out time to focus on improving their skills that do so. They are developing a craft that will help them with their career and much more.