COOKIES & COMMUNICATION

Have you ever baked cookies? I’m not a baker but I have attempted cookies once or twice. The process is the same each time: decide on the type (peanut butter is my fav), find a recipe, gather the ingredients, put the ingredients together, bake, and voila: delicious cookies that everyone loves.

But what happens if you don’t have all the ingredients? If a single ingredient is left out or used improperly, the final product can turn out far differently. In baking, every ingredient has a purpose.

I know you’re wondering why I am rambling on about cookies, especially since I’m admittedly NOT a baker. Here’s why: Communicating is like baking. Words are the ingredients, your message is the cookie.

Today’s post is about utilizing all the ingredients at your disposal to communicate more clearly and create focused, impactful content that will attract clients like cookies attract children!

According to the Oxford dictionary, the English language has over 170,000 words in current use. With a variety of word forms, that number is likely much higher. Yet most adult native-English speakers have a vocabulary only 10-20% that size. This means that we are limiting ourselves to a fraction of the possible ingredients when we sit down to compose a message.

Imagine buying cookie ingredients at 7-11, with its limited choice of items, versus buying them at your favorite supermarket (with everything under the sun). When you have more to choose from you can make a higher quality product. With the best quality items, you’d have cookies that would draw a crowd.

Communication should be the same way.

Don’t limit yourself to the gas station variety of ingredients…explore the biggest market you can find and enlighten yourself to the remarkable variety of words at your disposal. Create messages and content that will knock the socks off your audience and have them begging for more!

Much like experimenting with different ingredients can lead to different results in baking, playing around with different words in your communication can lead to different reactions from your audience. The key is to learn which mixture of ingredients has the greatest impact on the recipient!

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Learn 10 new words you can incorporate into your regular communication. Not sure where to start? The easiest way to grow your word-bank is to use the thesaurus. My personal favorite is www.thesaurus.com. Check it out and see what new words you can work into your vocabulary!

Click on over to our Instagram feed and comment your favorite new word!

Thanks for stopping by!

Ciao for now!