Imagine each of these… you’re covered in mud and rolled in feathers, a baseball balanced on top of an upside down cup, you’re watching a dog swim from a goggle-wearing, breath-holding position under the water. All of these things took a split second for you to imagine. You’re good at this!

Of course you’re good at this. We all are! We don’t have any trouble imagining any of these things because their physical and they’re familiar.

We’re Experts at Imagining the Physical

We’ve experienced feathers, baseballs and swimming dogs before. So we can imagine these things quickly. In fact, you can even use your imagination of the real world to predict the future.

For example, imagine the baseball sitting on top of an upside down cup. Then imagine someone stands up from the table too quickly and he bumps the table with his leg. Everything on the table shakes and wobbles. What happened to the baseball?

If you imagined it shaking a bit and maybe even rolling off the top of the cup, you were predicting the future. You were playing a little game our brains love and we call it the “what if…” game. This game is actually a vital part of our success to remain at the top of the food chain. All because we can accurately predict cause and effect.

So, What’s the Hard Part?

Now try to imagine these things… imagine time passing, imagine love, imagine assertiveness, and imagine strategic initiative. Did you find this exercise a little more difficult? We all find this more difficult because we can’t actually imagine the thing itself. It’s too abstract. What you probably did in your mind was to imagine something physical and then adjusted it toward the abstract.

For example, when I said “Imagine time passing” you may have done the Twilight Zone thing and imagined an analog clock face with the hands of the clock spinning around. Or maybe you imagined a person sitting somewhere bored with their head in their hands as the time passed by ever so slowly. Either way, you imagined something more concrete and then adjusted it toward the abstract.

The tricky part for all of us is to try and imagine the abstract. That is difficult! And, this is where I’ve seen presenters and speakers drop the ball. They never provide the audience with assistance interpreting the abstract.

Don’t Burden the Audience!

When speakers deliver abstract and conceptual ideas, the audience will do their best to interpret and imagine it. But, if the speaker never gives a concrete or physical example for understanding the abstract, we will try to create that model ourself. That’s hard work!

The more complex or abstract an idea is, the harder it is for the audience to conceptualize it in a way that helps them understand, remember, and apply it to the future. When speakers don’t provide us with analogies or metaphors to assist us in our conceptualization, we get tired. It’s hard work! In fact, sometimes it gets so difficult to interpret the idea into something more useful than just words and we just quit!

So, What’s the Problem?

Everyone will create their own image of understanding. In fairness, there’s both good and bad in this reality. The GOOD is that each person in the audience will create a unique image to understand, remember and use your concept. If you want creative solutions, this is fantastic! Once you share your idea, you’ll gain a plethora of new ideas from everyone else because they each interpret the concept in their own unique way.

The BAD of the situation is actually the same thing… everyone will have their own idea on what you shared. If the goal of the presentation is to get everyone on the same page, you might be missing the mark. So, what can you do as a speaker to help your audience get on the same page when you need to share an abstract or conceptual idea?

Give them a Metaphor!

Knowing that each person in your audience is skilled in imagining physical items and manipulating those items with cause and effect to predict the future, we can provide our audiences with a metaphor to understand our abstract idea. I’m sure you’ve seen speakers do this before…

“Just like FedEx revolutionized overnight shipping with better logistics, we’re going to revolutionize custom furniture design.”

“A stool with three legs can stand. A stool with only two legs is much more likely to topple over. Our approach to this project will only work with all 3 regions in support.”

“Our plan is like a series of river tributaries all flowing into the Mississippi. We will take the strategic ideas from each region and mold them into one plan for the entire organization. But, just like a river flows in one direction, all our ideas will need to align for us to reach our ultimate corporate goal.”

Saying goodbye until next week is like eating your last scoop of ice cream and knowing you can’t get more at the store until next week…

See you next week,
Russ