Episode Details

Thanks for joining in for the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Charles Stone, lead pastor at West Park Church in Ontario, Canada. He also is an author and provides training for pastors.

75% of people forget most of what they’ve heard from a talk within an hour. 90% forget what they’ve heard after a week unless we learn to employ certain techniques and principles in our communications. Charles is with us today to share how to craft your communication so that it better sticks with your listener.

• Understand your listeners. // Most pastors do a good job extracting what the scriptures say. However, we also need to clearly pay attention to what is going on in the brain of our listeners and how to craft the communication of the message (before we get up to preach) so that it sticks.
• Consider how we process. // It’s hard to keep people’s interest today. You can overdo the entertainment side of teaching. We need to take into consideration the way God created our brains and how we process information and learn as we preach the gospel because Jesus modeled these same things.
• Eight blobs of communication. // Charles refers to eight “blobs” on the platter of communication to keep in mind: clarity, attention, affinity, capacity, durability, emotion, mindset, and transfer. Each of these principles has three takeaways in Charles’s teachings. You don’t have to use all eight of these when giving a message, but try using three or four at a time. Download the 8 Core Communication Principles Checklist here.
• Principle of clarity. // In the principle of clarity, Charles teaches to begin with the end in mind. The three takeaways for this principle are to clarify the big takeaway (gist or verbatim), create a concept map, and the primacy recency principle. The primacy recency principle is about how people remember the most of what you say at the beginning of a talk, and they remember the second most at the end of the talk. This is because as you introduce a new concept, the brain begins to process the information to send it into long term memory. It’s important to front load and back load your key points because that’s what your audience will remember.
• Dual coding in our brains. // The brain encodes both visually and auditorily. When you mesh those two together, that is known as dual coding, and what you’re saying will stick better with the listener. Your working memory is where things are processed and if it’s important enough it then moves to the long-term memory. Working memory is like a small stage. Only so much information can be on that stage at the same time. If you can use dual coding to better help people remember your teaching, it will stay in memory longer. One of the ways of helping someone remember is by using acronyms. Acronyms can be easier to remember, and then your listeners can recall those memories of what was learned.
• Stay simple and clean. // Don’t allow the visuals you use to be so attention-getting by themselves that people forget what the message is about and what the visual means. Don’t overcomplicate your visuals. People may be so focused on the visuals that they don’t listen to your words. Meanwhile putting a small amount of text on a screen reinforces what people are hearing because it is both heard and seen.