Stumbling
Many of the smartest people I know are people you would probably describe as being bad at communication. They stumble over their words. They repeat themselves. They ramble. They get lost in their own train of thought.
By many conventional standards, they come across as rather unintelligent.
So what does that mean?
Well, to me, it means that conventional standards are stupid. Stupid in that one’s intelligence is not very correlated to their communication skills. And anecdotally, I often find the opposite scenario to be more likely to be true; the smoothest of talkers are the ones often selling garbage. [0]
I did not always understand this.
I would sit in job interviews or meetings or classes thinking: “Why is this person so bad at presenting this information? They must not know the material.”
Worse, I would judge people’s competence by their ability to quickly respond well to questions or ideas.
What I learned was that many smart and competent people “externally process” information. Meaning that when you ask them a question, especially one that they perhaps have never thought about before, they may need to talk out their thoughts in order to reach clarity and present a final answer. And that needing to do this has nothing to do with their intelligence.
It’s strange not to externally process, and I’m wary of people who never demonstrate this kind of behavior. Politicians, for example, rarely use external processing—they’re supposed to come off confident and charismatic. And so, if someone asks them a question they don’t know about, their job is to immediately steer the conversation back to something they do know about. The smoothest communicators you know are probably doing some version of this.
Even after externally processing, people can be ineffective at expressing their rationale. And, especially if they feel uncomfortable or under pressure, they typically don’t say: “I can’t say why I believe this but I believe it anyways.” If I went ahead and dismissed any knowledge that could not be explained clearly with words, I would be missing out on lots of useful information.
With this in mind, I approach conversations a bit differently.
I care much less about someone’s “latency” (i.e. how quickly they process and respond to information). I try to make the other person comfortable by giving them space to think. I try to let their energy and voice (or lack thereof) drive the conversation, to see where it takes us. Even if that means allowing them extra time to externally process and stumble over their words.
This is just another reminder to myself that there’s more than one way to be effective, and to beware of subtle biases that are preventing me from seeing that.
[0] Some roles require strong communication skills. But even so, I would suggest you beware of slick salespeople who just read How to Win Friends and Influence People.
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