I love the concept of the MOTs. That catches me out daily!
As a business coach helping people start their own businesses online, I see this show up all the time in their marketing. Messy thinking and messy communication almost always lead to messy messaging. Websites full of jargon. Offers that try to solve too many problems at once. Social posts that ramble instead of resonate.
And as you said here, if their ideas cannot travel clearly and quickly to the audience, they cannot create any impact. In business, that often means confused prospects, lost sales, and a lot of frustration.
The MOTs concept is such a powerful way to help clients pause, close some tabs, and strip their message down to what really matters. I tell them all the time, “If your audience cannot understand what you offer in one or two sentences, they will not buy it.”
It’s wild how often I meet brilliant people whose thinking is exhausting not because they lack rigour, but because they’re not having any fun.
Perfectionism is often the mind’s way of compensating for a lack of play. If you’re not allowed to have fun with your ideas, you start trying to make them bulletproof instead. And ironically, that’s when communication gets bloated, hesitant, and hard to follow.
Auditing your communication is vital. But sometimes the breakthrough isn’t more discipline...it’s more delight.
Fair call, although I see that a lot less than the issues I've written about in this. And frankly, if the communicator is having fun jumping all over the place in their own head, it can still be exhausting for the audience. If everyone is having fun AND there is clarity and efficiency, that's great.
Totally hear you. I’m definitely not talking about the kind of 'fun' that results in ping-ponging or incoherence; that’s more like indulgence than fun to me.
I mean the deeper kind.
The sense of creative freedom and levity that lets your thinking breathe. Ironically, it’s when smart folks aren’t having that kind of fun that they start overcompensating with complexity and perfectionism. The result still exhausts the audience, just for a different reason.
Oh yeah, true true! I've been in some situations where I've had to hold my thinking-breath in that not-fun way too. It's not fun and definitely makes me feel dumber.
I love the concept of the MOTs. That catches me out daily!
As a business coach helping people start their own businesses online, I see this show up all the time in their marketing. Messy thinking and messy communication almost always lead to messy messaging. Websites full of jargon. Offers that try to solve too many problems at once. Social posts that ramble instead of resonate.
And as you said here, if their ideas cannot travel clearly and quickly to the audience, they cannot create any impact. In business, that often means confused prospects, lost sales, and a lot of frustration.
The MOTs concept is such a powerful way to help clients pause, close some tabs, and strip their message down to what really matters. I tell them all the time, “If your audience cannot understand what you offer in one or two sentences, they will not buy it.”
Thanks Malissa.
Too many MOTs = dumber brain = messier thinking = uglier communication
Got any tips for closing the MOTs or even identifying one's MOT limit?
It’s wild how often I meet brilliant people whose thinking is exhausting not because they lack rigour, but because they’re not having any fun.
Perfectionism is often the mind’s way of compensating for a lack of play. If you’re not allowed to have fun with your ideas, you start trying to make them bulletproof instead. And ironically, that’s when communication gets bloated, hesitant, and hard to follow.
Auditing your communication is vital. But sometimes the breakthrough isn’t more discipline...it’s more delight.
Fair call, although I see that a lot less than the issues I've written about in this. And frankly, if the communicator is having fun jumping all over the place in their own head, it can still be exhausting for the audience. If everyone is having fun AND there is clarity and efficiency, that's great.
Totally hear you. I’m definitely not talking about the kind of 'fun' that results in ping-ponging or incoherence; that’s more like indulgence than fun to me.
I mean the deeper kind.
The sense of creative freedom and levity that lets your thinking breathe. Ironically, it’s when smart folks aren’t having that kind of fun that they start overcompensating with complexity and perfectionism. The result still exhausts the audience, just for a different reason.
Oh yeah, true true! I've been in some situations where I've had to hold my thinking-breath in that not-fun way too. It's not fun and definitely makes me feel dumber.