Good Morning Reader
Have you ever walked away from a conversation frustrated because your words didn’t land? You explained yourself clearly, yet the other person still didn’t get it.
You replay the moment in your head thinking, why don’t they understand?
Here’s the problem. Most of the time, we don’t tailor our words to the listener. We tailor them to ourselves.
I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with my daughter. She wanted to sign up for an extracurricular activity to boost her UCAS points before starting at her new school. She pitched me one option. I said no.
She pushed harder. She explained how it would help, how it showed initiative, how it was exactly what we’d been asking of her. She was passionate, articulate, and earnest. But she hadn’t done her homework. She had 20% of the information and expected me to decide as if I had 100% not that i need that.
That’s when I shared with her a lesson I learnt decades ago: know your audience.
She knows I like data. I want to see the whole picture before making a decision. What does the school offer? What is free and what is paid for? What’s the timetable? What’s the cost? Without those answers, the conversation wasn’t complete.
It wasn’t that her idea was bad, it was that she hadn’t framed it in a way I could say yes to.
The next day she came back not with a final answer, but with a plan. A list of what she needed to find out when she started school next week, the conversations to have, and how to reframe the proposal with me once she had the facts. The difference was night and day.
This is not just about my daughter. I see it with executives trying to win over a board, founders trying to inspire their teams, even in marriages and friendships. Brilliant ideas die because they are spoken in the wrong language.
You can have the right message and still get the wrong result if you don’t shape it to the person in front of you.
So before your next big conversation, try this simple framework:
The A.C.T. Framework for Tailoring Your Message
- Audience – Who are you speaking to, and what do they value? Are they data-driven, story-driven, or motivated by impact?
- Context – What’s happening in their world right now? What pressures or priorities will shape how they hear you?
- Translation – How do you express your message in their language, not yours? What do they need to hear to move forward?
It is not about changing your truth. It is about communicating it in a way that can be received.
So let me ask you:
- Where in your life are your words failing to land?
- How often are you speaking from your world instead of theirs?
- And what could shift if you stopped asking, Did I explain it well? and started asking, Did they hear it clearly?
Your message might be brilliant. But brilliance without connection never moves anyone.