As an individual, as a company, as a nation, and as a world we continue to struggle with effective communication.  Here is a list of 10 key words to keep front of mind to improve as we work to become better communicators.

1. Prepare: We need to prepare our communication ahead of time to ensure that it expresses what we want to express and follows the guidelines below.  Winging it just does not work.
2. Clear: We need to ensure that our message is crystal clear.  We would do well to follow Napoleon advice on giving orders: “Orders must not be easy to understand. They must be impossible to misunderstand.”
3. Simple: Our message must be simple with readily understood language and sentence structure.
4. Moderate: We need to moderate what we communicate.  At most, we should only bring up 3 – 5 ideas or issues.  With more ideas than that, the brains of our audience cannot understand all; our full message will not get through.
5. Why: In communicating, we do well to always give the why – why am I asking you to do this?  This why gives the audience the reason to understand that the message is important and should be listened to.
6. Story: Whenever possible, we should share a story. Stories help us relate, digest and remember the information to be communicated.  As American Cognitive Psychologist, Roger Schank writes:  “Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.” 
7. Read: While we communicate, we need to read the faces and body language of our audience to detect their understanding, agreement with, and support of what we are communicating.
8. Listen: We need to ask for questions and feedback.  We need to be specific, avoiding the simple question of ‘do you understand’ which is inevitably answered as ‘yes.’  We then need to listen to their response – what they say, how they say it, and what they leave unsaid.  We then need to take this feedback and incorporate into our message as we….
9. Repeat: We need to repeat our message, especially the few, crucial points of our message.  This allows our message to be processed more easily and fully as it is being heard a second (or third) time.
10. Confirm: At the end, we need to recap and confirm what the next requested action is that will allow the message and details communicated to be fully implemented.

None of these 10 words or concepts are difficult.  But they are hard to implement daily.  Nevertheless, following these 10 words in our communication will make each of us a better and more valuable communicator.