Consider Your Audience

Sometimes I read inspirational quotations or articles and I shake my head. I know what they mean, and I know that their message is really important, but it just isn’t worded in a way that will get through to people. We’ve heard all the clichés. Now I know what they mean, but you can’t just say a pretty ideal and expect everyone to buy into it. It is way too easy to brush it off. I brushed those off all my life, because you can so easily disprove it to yourself the way it is written! For example, “You have control over your own happiness.” You can’t just leave it like that. That’s not enough! People read it and are like, “Eh, maybe. That’s a very nice thought. Back to reality.” That’s how I used to read it!

You have to guide people to that conclusion. That’s exactly what it is – a conclusion. You’ve missed the entire story, all the facts, all the evidence, and you’re presenting the conclusion to people and expecting them to flip a switch and believe it? It’s not even that difficult to guide people to that conclusion! The Untethered Soul was fantastic at it. It did it for me. From then on, I was able to see everything else with a slightly different perspective.

If you actually want to help people, you have to actually consider your audience. Consider their current thought process, and figure out how your words can take them from Point A and get them closer to Point B. You can’t just declare, “Hey! You should be at Point B!” You have to figure out where Point A is and tell them, “Okay, you see that purple flower two steps to your left? Let’s go over there. Now take three steps forward. You with me? Now turn to your right and look UP. See it? That’s Point B!”

You know what I mean??

You have to meet them at their own level of understanding and at their own perspective. You can’t just skip to the conclusion. It will never resonate with them. Not for long, at least. You want it to stick. You want them to REALIZE it, not just try to trick themselves into believing it and living by it for a little while. It’s like the Parable of the Sower. You want that idea to take root in good soil and grow into fruitful, strong plants.

Not only is this the case with philosophy and spirituality, but it’s true in any form of communication. You have to anticipate where your audience is coming from and what their level of understanding is. If I spoke to you with all the acronyms I work with all day every day, no one would know what the heck I was talking about. Sometimes that’s a problem I have. I research things in a certain way such that I can understand what they mean, and those definitions don’t always translate over to others. I have to back up, start from the beginning, consider their point of view and try to re-define everything I know in terms that they can understand. Honestly it’s annoying sometimes, because I’ll be busy and in-the-zone, and if someone asks what I’m doing… I mean if I straight up told them what was in my head, they would have no idea what that meant, or they would come to a completely different conclusion. There would be no context. So I have to stop what I’m doing, take a step back and take the time to draw up a diagram in my head of how to explain it to them. It’s a toss-up between that and being so generic that it doesn’t mean much. Luckily I don’t have that problem right now, and I set time aside to figure out the best and most concise way to explain my daily activities at our daily progress meetings. I’m just using it as an example. Remember your audience. That’s great that you want to explain something, but if you don’t think about your audience, you may be wasting your breath.

How can you adjust your wording such that your message resonates with your audience?