Skip to main content

Alan Alda: 3 Ways to Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Will Understand You

In need of someone to perform surgery in a combat zone, you probably wouldn’t choose Alan Alda, no matter how many times you’ve seen him do it on television. This sounds obvious to those of us who believe that actors don’t know how to do anything at all. But a performer like Alda doesn’t become a cultural icon by accident: his particular skill set has enabled him not just to communicate with millions at a time through film and television, but also to navigate his offscreen and personal life with a certain adeptness. In the Big Think video above, he reveals three of his own long-relied-upon strategies to “express your thoughts so that everyone will understand you.”

“I don’t really like tips,” Alda declares. Standard public-speaking advice holds that you should “vary the pace of your speech, vary the volume,” for example, but while sound in themselves, those strategies executed mechanically get to be “kind of boring.” Rather than operating according to a fixed playbook, as Alda sees it, your variations in pace and volume — or your gestures, movements around the stage, and everything else — should occur organically, as a product of “how you’re talking and relating” to your audience. A skilled speaker doesn’t follow rules per se, but gauges and responds dynamically to the listener’s understanding even as he speaks.

But if pressed, Alda can provide three tips “that I do kind of follow.” These he calls “the three rules of three”: first, “I try only to say three important things when I talk to people”; second, “If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways”; third, ” I try to say it three times through the talk.” He gets deeper into his personal theories of communication in the second video below, beginning with a slightly contrarian defense of jargon: “When people in the same profession have a word that stands for five pages of written knowledge, why say five pages of stuff when you can say one word?” The trouble comes when words get so specialized that they hinder communication between people of different professions.

At its worst, jargon becomes a tool of dominance: “I’m smart; I talk like this,” its users imply, “You can’t really talk like this, so you’re not as smart as me.” But when we actively simplify our language to communicate to the broadest possible audience, we can discover “what are the concepts that really matter” beneath the jargon. All the better if we can tell a dramatic story to illustrate our point, as Alda does at the end of the video. It involves a medical student conveying a patient’s diagnosis more effectively than his supervisor, all thanks to his experience with the kind of “mirroring” exercises familiar to every student of acting. A doctor who can communicate is always preferable to one who can’t; even a real-life Hawkeye, after all, needs to make himself understood once in a while.

Related Content:

Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Scientists How to Communicate Their Ideas

What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Winner at Alan Alda’s Science Video Competition

How to Speak: Watch the Lecture on Effective Communication That Became an MIT Tradition for Over 40 Years

Charles & Ray Eames’ A Communications Primer Explains the Key to Clear Communication in the Modern Age (1953)

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Listening: Learn the Keys to Understanding Other People from the Famed Psychologist

How to Get Over the Anxiety of Public Speaking?: Watch the Stanford Video, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” Viewed Already 15 Million Times

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Alan Alda: 3 Ways to Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Will Understand You is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3AZxXXi
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more