A lot can go wrong between having an idea and another person understanding what you mean.
In The Spoken Idea, I write about what I've learned from communicating across languages, disciplines and professional settings, and how we can get better at expressing ideas, listening and understanding one another.
What I share
After more than ten years of teaching, training and public speaking, I keep coming back to three parts of communication:
Sometimes the speaking problem begins before you speak.
You know roughly what you think, but the idea is still unstructured. So you start talking before you know which point matters most, how the pieces fit together or where the answer is going.
I share what I've learned about thinking while speaking, organising an answer, framing a point and deciding what needs to be said first.
Knowing something and explaining it are different abilities.
You may understand a subject deeply and still struggle to make it clear to someone who doesn't have the same background. This becomes harder when you add time pressure, an unfamiliar audience or another language.
I share what I've learned about explaining complex ideas, presentations, difficult questions and communicating clearly through English.
Communication is not finished when you've said what you wanted to say.
The other person may hear something different from what you intended. And sometimes the important part of the conversation is in the question you haven't asked yet.
I share what I've learned about listening, asking better questions, disagreement, misunderstanding and what helps people understand one another better.
About
My academic background is in immunology, microbiology and Islamic philosophy of science. I've spent more than a decade teaching at university, where a large part of the job is taking complex ideas and helping another person understand them.
I also learnt to speak English seriously only as an adult.
That gave me another version of the same problem. You can know what you want to say and still be unable to express it as clearly as you can think it.
English is one part of my work now. But the question I keep coming back to in The Spoken Idea is broader:
What helps one person understand another?
Spoken English at work
Some readers of The Spoken Idea have a more specific problem.
They already have the expertise. But when they need to explain it in English in a meeting, during a presentation or when answering a difficult question, their English doesn't always show what they actually know.
Clear in English is where I train multilingual professionals and scientists to speak more clearly and confidently in those situations.
Visit Clear in English