Clarity Comes From Understanding Our Message
Clarity Comes from Understanding Our Message
Most of us equate clarity with eloquence.
We assume that the people who speak beautifully must also think clearly.
Yet in practice, it’s the other way around: the people who think clearly are the ones who end up sounding eloquent.
When I work with international executives and experts, the conversation usually begins with the same request:
“Help me sound more fluent.”
They expect vocabulary lists, pronunciation drills, or idiomatic phrases.
But fluency is rarely the real obstacle.
The real problem is that they haven’t yet understood their own message.
The Invisible Part of Communication
For those of us who work in more than one language, clarity begins even before we start to translate, or even to write.
It’s a cognitive process, the translation of our thoughts into a structure others can follow and understand.
Psycholinguists sometimes call it conceptual encoding: the stage where we decide what we mean, before we search for language to express it.
If the concepts are fuzzy, no amount of linguistic polish can produce a sharp message.
This is why people who are absolutely proficient and even fluent still struggle in high-stakes meetings.
This is why people who use their own native languages often struggle in high stakes-meetings!
Their grammar is fine, but the internal architecture of their ideas is unfinished.
They’re trying to speak while still thinking.
You can hear it in any language: sentences begin confidently, then circle, stall, and collapse into qualifiers.
That is not a linguistic failure; it’s an organizational one.
The speaker hasn’t done the pre-work of defining what they want to say.
An important aspect of all reputable MBA courses lies in preparing participants for effective public speaking. And a fundamental part of effective public lies in preparation: defining what we want to say, honing the message, understanding our audience and their needs.
Thinking as Editing
Good communication is the art of deliberate omission.
Behind every clear message lies an invisible act of editing—deciding what matters and discarding what doesn’t.
Writers do this instinctively; leaders must learn to.
Editing requires intellectual courage: the willingness to abandon details that don’t serve the point.
As Blaise Pascal wrote in the seventeenth century, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Compression takes effort.
But that effort is what transforms noise into signal.
Three Questions that Build Clarity
I often give clients a simple framework to test whether they have truly understood their message.
What is the one thing I want my audience to remember?
If you can’t answer in one sentence, you’re not ready to speak.Why should they care?
Relevance is the oxygen of attention.
Until you can connect your idea to their world, you haven’t clarified your purpose.What action or feeling should follow?
Clarity is not purely intellectual; it’s functional.
It guides behaviour.
These questions work whether you are preparing a keynote, a pitch, or a five-minute project update.
They also force you to examine your assumptions.
Sometimes, halfway through answering them, people realise their goal is different from what they thought.
That is the moment genuine clarity begins.
From Structure to Confidence
When you know the architecture of your message, language anxiety drops dramatically.
Structure acts like scaffolding: it holds the idea steady while you find the words.
You can forget a phrase and still finish the thought because the thought itself is solid.
This is why people who plan their ideas—on paper, in mind maps, or simply in mental bullet points—speak more naturally.
They’re free to focus on tone, connection, and nuance.
The brain can only juggle so much at once; structure reduces the cognitive load.
Practical Exercise
Before your next presentation or meeting, try this short discipline:
Write your goal in one sentence.
(“After this meeting, I want them to understand …”)Underline the verb.
It tells you whether you’re informing, persuading, or inspiring.Remove every phrase that doesn’t serve that verb.
You’ll discover that your slides shrink, your sentences shorten, and your confidence rises.
You’ll also notice that people start quoting you more often—because they finally remember what you said.
The Paradox of Clarity
Clarity feels simple when we hear it, but it’s the product of deep thinking.
It demands empathy (to see from the listener’s view), logic (to order ideas), and humility (to accept that simplicity wins).
Mastering English pronunciation or grammar may take years; mastering clarity is a lifelong habit.
As global professionals, our challenge is not just to speak another language but to make meaning across cultures, disciplines, and expectations.
The clearer we are with ourselves, the easier that becomes.
A Closing Thought
Whether we are selling, teaching, or leading, our influence begins in the same place: understanding our own message first, and our audience’s needs second. Only then can we begin to write, in any language!
Next step: Book aProLanguage Power Session to put this into practice.
One focused hour, designed to help you find clarity in your message and confidence in your delivery.
Book your session here.
(Updated October 2025)
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