Every Sunday night countless podcasts get released so that people all over the world can spend the upcoming week indulging in their favorite shows. That leaves me with a great selection every Monday morning for my drive to work. For the most part, I pretty much listen to the same set of podcasts each week, so it’s really just a matter of figuring out which one will I listen to first. This week (as I have many times before), I chose Joe Ferraro’s “One Percent Better” Podcast for my first listen of the week. It was outstanding. That’s not the exception for Joe. He regularly puts out really high quality stuff, but this one really resonated with me. In fact, after I finished listening to it, I shot Joe a text message to let him know that it inspired me to write a blog post about something I had heard. Well, here’s that post.

This week Joe interviewed Tim Pollard, author of The Compelling Communicator. I may be weird, but I actually enjoy public speaking. That’s why I listened to this episode on Monday. I always want to get better at communicating, and Tim was discussing what science has shown to be the most effective ways to communicate while also dispelling the myths about what it is that makes someone a “good communicator.” Being a psychology guy, I really geeked out when he started talking about the way the brain receives/interprets/stores incoming communication. It was fascinating.

All that being said, if you want to get a little bit better at communicating, or if you want to better understand the brain science behind effective communication, you should definitely listen to Episode 50 of the One Percent Better Podcast. While I loved the episode, the purpose of this post isn’t to convince you to listen to it. Instead, I want to talk briefly about one phrase that Tim shared during the interview.

“It’s not be interesting OR educational. It’s be interesting AND educational.”

-Tim Pollard

When he made that statement, Tim was discussing public speakers, and he was explaining that sometimes it seems as if you have a choice to either be educational (get your message across so that it’s ‘retellable’) or entertaining (keep everyone engaged/excited/interested). Some of my educator friends just saw the word “engaged” and said, “Wait. You said ‘engaged.’ Doesn’t that mean that they are learning?” Not necessarily. Tim goes on to tell a story about a man who, by almost anyone’s standards, was an outstanding public speaker. Immediately after one speaking engagement in which this man literally had people weeping and cheering for him, Tim walked directly to one of the audience members to see how many of the speaker’s main points he could recall. This was someone who admittedly thought the speaker was AMAZING. When Tim asked him to recall the main points, he was only able to recall 2 out of 10. This man was fully engaged and completely entertained by the speaker, but he didn’t remember 80% of what he said!

When I heard the quote that I laid out above, the word “educational” stuck out, and it made me think about my work as an educator. I think a lot of us unknowingly fall into the trap of believing that we can either be interesting or educational, but we can’t be both. Again, some of my educator friends are probably disagreeing with me at this moment, but the next sentence, if they’re honest with themselves, might change that. I’ve heard it said, and unfortunately, when I was still in teaching role, I probably said it myself… “This particular part of the content is so important that I have to direct teach. There’s just no other way to make sure they get it.” When we say that, we fall into the trap of “interesting OR educational,” and unfortunately, way too many of us make or have made similar statements far too often. We use “important content” as an excuse for not finding creative ways to get our students to learn at high levels.

Throughout the interview, Tim explains to us how to communicate effectively while being both interesting AND educational. He explains it much better than I could if I attempted to do it here. He is a world-class communicator after all, so if you really want to hear him explain it, go check out the podcast. Instead of trying to explain the things that Tim said, I just want to leave you with a few reflections that I had as I thought about communicating with a group of people.

1. They may be engaged, but it doesn’t mean they are actually learning.
2. You may have said it, but it doesn’t mean they actually learned it.
3. Regardless of what it is that we are communicating, it is our job to make sure that the listeners are engaged AND learning at the same time. We should take that challenge personally.
4. Focus on “retellability” (I am not sure if that’s really a word, but we’re going to roll with it). When preparing to communicate, we need to be preparing to communicate in a way that our audience will be able to easily retell the stories/anecdotes/information that we share. That’s when we know we’ve been effective.
5. Never settle for “this is the only way it can be done.” That’s almost never the case.

Thanks again for reading today. I hope this one made you think a little bit about your thoughts on communicating and what effective communication looks like.

See you next time!