Good at what you do, but struggling with your communication skills? Igotchu! 😎
Taking the biscuit…
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Show don’t tell. As Albert Einstein reportedly observed: ‘if you cant explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough’. Communicator of the Week Award goes to Gordon McKee MP for his now viral and brilliantly simple explanation of the impact of the UK’s national debt.
​ ​ Gordon McKee has been building a steady following with short TikTok videos explaining different aspects of politics and his most recent one has gone mega viral because of its innovative use of biscuits as props to explain the debt to GDP ratio and why it matters. Most people think about slides when giving a presentation. But one of the most effective methods of crystallising people’s underatanding of a point is to use props. The right prop strategically used can be more impactful than 20 slides. Bill Gates did it when he released live mosquitoes inside the speech hall to emphasise the dangers of malaria to his European audience. Jill Bolte Taylor did it when she held up a real brain in her Ted Talk to demonstrate how we can choose we experience life when we use the right hemisphere of our brains. So, ask yourself: if I had to ‘show’ them my idea without ‘telling’ them my idea, how would I do it? ​ Kolarele |
Build your Communication SuperSkills
Good at what you do, but struggling with your communication skills? Igotchu! 😎
Always consider if someone before you has said it better! Communicator of the Week Award goes to my friend, Alex Ktorides for the moving eulogy he gave on the sad passing of his father. Eulogies are tough to get right. Should you go through the whole life of the departed one or just give snippets? Should you be funny or sombre or a mixture of both? Do you let your emotions show or button them up to get through it? And what theme can you use to tie it all together? Alex’s answer to the ‘what...
Sometimes, the cruelty is the point! Communicator of the Week Award goes to Shabana Mahmood (the new Home Secretary), who this week set out the Labour Party's new strategy to tackle the perennial political problem of immigration. Labour has an identity problem. Its roots are working class. Its heart is progressive. Its head is neo-liberal. And its fear is that it is being outflanked by the far right. What to do? Whether the new approach to immigration she announced will work is way above my...
Message discipline matters. Communicator of the Week Award goes to newly elected New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. There is a lot of excitement about the new young Mayor. He is a good-looking, eloquent, social media savvy progressive politician. No doubt the excitement over his election will fade once the reality of governing vs the fantasy of campaigning comes into stark focus. But there is one simple reason that Mamdani won (and won handily). Despite the wide-ranging attacks from the...