Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less

by Joseph McCormack

Part One: Awareness—the conviction to hold yourself and others to a higher standard of succinctness

Part Two: Discipline—the BRIEF approach to producing the mental muscle memory necessary to make you a lean communicator every time

Part Three: Decisiveness—the ability to recognize key moments when you need to convey what really matte...

You cannot afford to miss the boat on brevity. It's the difference between success and failure.

Today's world is on information overload, and there isn't enough time to sift through all the messages. If you can't capture people's attention and deliver your message with brevity, you'll lose them.

“Light brevity is being concise without comprehension,” Trilling said. “Deep brevity is being succinct with savvy.” Brevity starts with deep expertise. Only with thorough knowledge can you accurately make a summary.

The road to brevity, then, requires hard work and lots of time. Doing all the digging and analysis on your own time saves the members of your audience from doing the labor themselves.

You work around people who are mentally stretched. When you are succinct, you instantly make their life easier. And they remember and are grateful to you for that.

Information inundation:

Inattention:

Impatience:

pedantic

Be disciplined, respectful, and well prepared,

expected one, too. “Oh, I've got one done already.”

Outlines organize and prioritize thoughts with clarity and logic, and help stop nonsensical rambling.

Five immediate benefits to outlining are they keep you: Prepared: I'm ready to deliver. Organized: I understand how all my ideas connect. Clear: I'm certain what my point is. Contextual: I can draw a bigger picture so my point stands out. Confident: I know what to say, inside and out.

Every BRIEF Map is organized in the following way: B: Background or beginning R: Reason or relevance I: Information for inclusion E: Ending or conclusion F: Follow-up or questions you expect to be asked or that you might ask

obtuse

esoteric

someone bad news, don't make it harder by dragging it out.