88 Improve your Communication Skills Metaphors create meaning. They burn ideas into your
listener’s mind (that’s a metaphor!). They help listeners to
remember by creating pictures (or sounds, or tastes, or smells)
that they can store in their mind (I’m using the metaphor of a
cupboard or library to explain some part of the mind’s
working).
Remembering your ideas Memory played a vital role in the art of rhetoric in the days before
printing. With no ready means of making notes or easy access to
books, remembering ideas and their relationships was an
essential skill. Whole systems of memory were invented to help
people store information and recall it at will.
These days, memory hardly seems to figure as a life skill –
except for passing examinations. It seems that technology has
taken its place. There is no
need
to remember: merely to read and
store e-mails, pick up messages (voice and text) on the mobile,
plug in, surf and download…
However, memory still plays an important part in persuading
others. If you can’t begin to persuade someone without a heap of
spreadsheets and a briefcase full of project designs to refer to,
don’t start. Nobody was ever persuaded by watching someone
recite from a sheaf of notes.
Find a way to bring the ideas off paper and into your head.
Give yourself some clear mental signposts so that you can find
your way from one idea to the next. Write a few notes on a card or
on the back of your hand. Draw a mindmap. Make it colourful. If
you’ve assembled a mental pyramid, draw it on a piece of paper
and carry it with you. Have some means available to draw your
thoughts as you explain them: a notepad, a flip chart, a
whiteboard. Invite the other person to join in: encourage them to
think of this as the shape of their thinking.
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