Getting your idea across
Explaining your ideas can be difficult. Getting someone to act on that one idea is even harder. Sometimes it even seems impossible to get inside someone’s head. But the good news is, once the idea takes root in someone’s mind, it is almost impossible to eradicate, as Leonardo di Caprio so cleverly puts it in the thriller Inception.
The question we now face is what we need to do to get our ideas across to our audience. This can either be a reviewer of your project proposal, your business partners, students in the classroom, or your friends to whom you present your clever idea. The principle is the same. We need to get our audience to fully understand the idea and see it as they would see it through our eyes. Maybe that’s not so impossible, but how can we be sure that the idea will stick?
The idea as a seed
An idea that is fully formed, that is fully understood, can stick, is the answer to the above question. Before that happens, we need to look more closely at what must happen for it to be true.
Let’s imagine that we are trying to explain a fairly complex concept to our audience. Something that requires a bit more thought and deeper understanding. Something more abstract than a Picasso painting. Now, you might have a problem with your audience quickly grasping what you’re trying to explain, unless your audience has the same level of knowledge or experience as you. Which isn’t very likely. But there is a way around this.
We can take our idea and plant it like a seed in the minds of our audience and let it form there until it is fully understood. But we also have to remember that all ideas are just potential until you turn them into something real. Our job is to get our audience to really understand our idea and be able to act on it if they choose to.
Let’s be clear that this is about education, not manipulation. Like a scientist who already knows his research is sound and can lead to incredible innovations, but still needs to share his idea with the world. He genuinely wants his novel idea to succeed and improve the lives of others, but knows that it will be very difficult to communicate this idea to his target audiences.
Focus on the WHY
We must take it slowly, and let the idea arise naturally in the minds of our hearers, as if we were planting a seed. Here we will explain how to do that.
Most people appreciate understanding the background of an idea or why it is important. In his Ted talk “How great leaders inspire action” Simon Sinek explains why this approach works and how any aspiring leader can incorporate it. As Sinek convincingly points out, “People don’t buy WHAT you do; they buy WHY you do it.”
Sinek provides a useful framework for his leadership approach, called Golden Circle. At the center of Golden Circle is WHY. The next concentric circle is HOW. And finally, the outermost circle is WHAT.
The WHY
Beginning with WHY gives our audience a way to identify with you on a personal level. If your WHY matches their WHY, your audience will be willing to stick with you through thick and thin. Without a clear WHY people will go to WHAT. And that’s not where you want to get caught, because people will never stop asking WHAT, and you’ll never be able to answer all WHAT’s because people lack a basic understanding of WHY.
The WHY may implicitly or explicitly contain the values and principles that guide your actions and decisions in everyday life. The WHY will give clarity to your story.
The HOW
How something works can be harder to explain than WHY. Remember that we are dealing with complex concepts and ideas here. Once you know the WHY and can articulate it clearly, you need the discipline to act in a way that supports your goal. This is where the HOW comes in. This is where you explain the true differentiators of your idea or product or service. It can be applied in all the scenarios mentioned earlier.
The WHAT
Use the WHAT to explain how you will bring your WHY to life. It is critical that the WHAT you produce matches the WHY and the HOW. The WHAT is the tangible evidence your audience sees. The what needs to be reinforced over and over to build trust.
The magic moment of epiphany
Remember that showing connections between ideas appeals to our human desire to understand phenomena in a “cause and effect” way. We really want to have a clear idea of the essential nature or meaning of what we are explaining to them – we want them to have an epiphany. That is, we want to experience that magic moment of sudden and great revelation.
The good news is that solutions exist to help us get the WHY, HOW, and WHAT into people’s heads faster and easier than ever before.
Technology paves the way to audience epiphany
Using smart editing tools can make it much easier to explain complex ideas to your audience while reducing the possibility of errors. There are different types of software on the market, and the best choice for you will depend on the type of audience you have and the complexity of your ideas.
Successful communicators in the 21st century actively seek ways to simplify and improve their communications with larger audiences. When investing in specialised software that is on the market today, one must think about the features available that will allow them to communicate their ideas faster and with more success.
Nowadays, you can solve most of your grammar mistakes with simple tools like Grammarly and even Microsoft Word’s Spelling Wizard. But you also need to think about your story, what carries your idea into the new world as Noa’s Arc, and how you’re going to transform it in your writing in a way that it enters the minds of your audience.
This is especially true for professionals who have to work with complicated concepts that need to be translated into understandable language. Simple proofreading and basic editing skills are no longer enough, we need something that packs more punch. We need an intelligent editing tool that turns the potential cacophony of ideas into easy to understand WHY’s, HOW’s and WHAT’s!
InstaText is your HOW to your WHY
InstaText is a great tool to get the job done. It is a full-featured personal intelligent writing assistant that paraphrases your English texts like a native speaker and helps you rewrite your texts so that you are understood and perceived as a professional. InstaText improves your style and word choice, corrects grammatical errors and enriches your content to make your ideas understandable and easy to absorb. InstaText goes much further in text enhancement than the current competition.
The technology behind InstaText is state of the art. It represents a paradigm shift. The artificial intelligence developed for it is easy to use, it is intuitive, and it provides much better control over text than existing tools on the market.
InstaText translates the writer’s concept into a meaningful message in seconds. To this end, it uses various methods such as rephrasing sentences, suggesting more appropriate phrases, correcting grammatical errors, leaving it up to the user to accept or reject them.
The end result is that InstaText users can successfully translate complex ideas into understandable language without losing the high level of language.
The idea of InstaText is to help us to write like a native speaker. By using artificial intelligence and language technologies, InstaText automatically improves our English texts. It creates recommendations and ideas on how to improve the content and make it more readable and understandable.
Other tools on the market tend to focus on individual words rather than a concept as a whole, which can be a bit of a problem when trying to get your idea across. With InstaText, your ideas get their best friend! All of this is available as a free 14-day trial. The tool is also available on a monthly or yearly basis. You can decide what suits you best.
“I am a translator and proofreader by profession and have tried many editing tools. It’s not an exaggeration to say that all the other apps I’ve used so far don’t come close to InstaText. It is literally innovative and revolutionary and has taken the editing game to a new level, leaving other competitors in the dust.”
— Dr. Ghodrat Hassani, Researcher in Translation Studies
“This tool is outstanding, exceeded my expectations. I’m used to using Grammarly but InstaText is a more thorough tool and comes up with much better suggestions for rewrites. A game changer for editing.”
— Stephan Skovlund, Business Consultant
“Last year our faculty ordered a full-year license for all staff, and after one year we find that the number of high-quality articles has doubled and the volume of all articles has increased. Without exception, all staff members are very enthusiastic about the application and can no longer imagine doing scientific work without it…”
— Dr. Matej Dolenec, University Professor
