Great Communication Focuses On Experience

There’s a fantastic quote floating around, “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” This sentence may sound familiar, and you might think it was Maya Angelou who spoke it first (the internet thinks so too.) I wanted to use this quote in my book, but my editor urged caution because the quote’s  roots are a little murky.

Many of us love this quote and the sentiment behind it because it rings true no matter who first thought of it. We intuitively know that experiences are memorable. Here’s a little neuroscience for you. Experiences drive emotions, and emotions make the experiences memorable.

One of the key points in my new keynote is, delivering value is not enough to create engagement. Good value combined with good experiences is what creates engagement. It turns out this two-sided model, or engagement coin, if you will, applies to just about every human interaction.

Let’s come back to communication. There are two sides to the communication coin too. On one side, there’s what we want to say. These are the words we use—our meaning. I’m estimating that when we communicate, we tend to focus 95% of our effort on what we want to say. On the other side of the communication coin is how we say it. How we say it is the tone we use, the emotion we imbue into the meaning, the expression, and the delivery. 95% (my estimate here, this is not a statistically accurate statistic) of our reader or listener’s understanding comes from how we say it.

Here is an example:

What we want to say: Happy Birthday.

How we say it: #TodayIsYourBirthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY🎈🎂🥰!!!!

So, by all means, get those words right, and then go back and think about how you want the listener or reader to feel and make sure the how you say it is right too.