Thoughts are remembered more easily when you create a mental picture in the mind of your reader or listener. The following is thanks to my Fort Worth FireFighters and Fort Worth Policeman students. I recently traveled up to Fort Worth and was greeted enthusiastically by Battalion Chief Johns, Lt. Stevens and the rest of the class:
Controlling the the finite skills of communication under extreme duress
Even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while
Identify the box, make sure people don’t stray to far from the edges, be nice and play fair…all that stuff we learned in kindergarten
The leaders are in the trees pointing us in the direction and the managers are behind us sharpening the axes and feeding us to keep us moving through the forest
We had a recruit in this class and in those simplistic terms he would not play fair, carry his own load, he actually became a cancer to the rest of the class
Just like cancer cells multiply if you do not treat them or remove them, if we would have not up held the standards, his attitude would have spread to the rest of the class
When you speak, give direction or a presentation, do you share vivid details and paint a picture, or do you give facts, figures, statistics and boring phrases? Which one is more likely to be remembered?
