Read the full transcript of personal development expert Joel Ellis’s talk titled “3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Communication at TEDxJabavu, May 7, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
JOEL ELLIS: We really should be amazed when we consider the nature of human beings. Let’s face it, we’re some of the most fragile creatures on the earth. Many species after just minutes, hours or days can take care of themselves and survive. We can’t. We take years. And yet while being fragile, we’re the most adaptable, flexible and creative creature around. Because what we do is we look at other creatures and study how they survive in their environments and we model that and we take and use that to be able to survive in pretty much every environment.
Humans have the ability to shape ourselves but also to shape the environments for our survival and we have a powerful, unique ability to do this and it’s called critical thinking. Critical thinking is where we can process many variables in a situation and come up with an answer. This has led to us being able to have people living on Antarctica and in the middle of the Sahara Desert and in space. We will take and adapt and use whatever we need and by critical thinking we come up with those solutions.
Communication as a Lever
We also have a tool to enhance our ability and that tool is communication. Communication is the lever whereby we take our own critical thinking ability, our individual critical thinking ability and we form communities of thought where we solve bigger problems. When I talk about the International Space Station where people have lived for years and years and years now, that took a lot of people thinking about that problem.
Humans are adaptable. Humans are flexible and we have this ability of critical thinking that we then turn into personal growth and societal growth by communicating with one another. In business, we think about change management, being able to address problems, to address chaos that is surrounding us because that’s really what we’re dealing with in our environment. Change management isn’t necessarily just a big program for businesses but do we need something else?
We have critical thinking, we have communication as a lever, what more do we need? Well I suggest that we need a fulcrum. Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and scientist said, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to put it on and I’ll move the world and he was right. So we can take our lever of communication and we can move our critical thinking but if we take and put a fulcrum with it, we can be much more powerful and much more effective.
The Power of Talking
So today I’m going to talk to you about a fulcrum, three basic principles of talking. We’re going to talk about talking because that’s the most used communication method we have. We have lots and lots of documents and lots and lots of photos and lots and lots of videos around now but they do not communicate concise instructional information like talking does. We all talk. Today I’m going to talk about how to use these three things.
Now when we think about talking, we notice that there are problems with talking. It has the least retention value of any form of learning for the hearer. We’ve documented that scientifically multiple times. You forget it pretty quickly if you only hear it. Now if you see it while you hear it or if you write it down while you hear it, you remember it longer and yet it’s the most used.
Talking is also problematic when there’s noise around. If we’ve got the music playing in the background, it’s harder to understand what I’m saying. It’s subject to distraction. If you’re listening to me and your neighbor leans over and starts talking to you, then you’re not going to hear as much about what I say. But with care, we can overcome all of these problems.
In the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union right in the middle of the Cold War collaborated on a project called the Apollo-Soyuz Project where they sent astronauts from the United States and cosmonauts from the Soviet Union into space together. They spent a lot of time planning, prepping for that. All of them knew how to speak Russian and English, but they had one rule that was very important. When they spoke, they only spoke in the language of the person they were speaking to.
The reason is that we, human beings, receive information, process it faster and more effectively in our native tongue, no matter how many languages we speak. We process it faster if we hear it in our native tongue. If you’re out in space and problems can cause death real quickly, you want to be able to react quickly on the information you’re given. That still holds true today, even though they did that back in the 70s.
Communication Challenges in Management
Now let’s consider the problems of communication in management. Let’s go into a context of management. Have you ever had this experience where you’re working with an associate, maybe an employee, maybe a co-worker, maybe a peer, whatever, and you give them an assignment? Say, I would like you to go do this by such and such a date, and they say, yes, I’ll go do it. Well, you get close to the date, and you go check, and they haven’t gotten the work done. You say, well, why didn’t you do this? Well, I didn’t understand that’s what you wanted. Communication didn’t take place effectively. Most of us have had an experience like that.
After 50 years, after my undergraduate minor in communication arts, I was stopped short one day when I was confronted with an incident where I had obviously communicated ineffectually. And I stopped and thought about it and said, well, how can I improve this?
How can I change? Because I realized I’d been doing that a lot. And so I studied the matter, and I looked, how can I improve this? And I found some principles that I’m going to share with you today that I have been practicing, and I’ve been able to really see the change that comes about.
The ABC Formula for Effective Communication
And I’m going to put this in a simple ABC formula for you. So you can remember A, B, C.
A is assess your audience. Think about who they are, where they are, what’s their mental status, what’s their emotional status, what language do they speak? Not just in the language of their nation, but I’m a baby boomer. When I’m speaking to people of a younger generation, the words I use may mean something totally different. I have to think about those things.
I want to tell you a story about this. In 2003, the United States Air Force Thunderbirds were performing as they do routinely dozens of times a year. The first five planes took off, and Thunderbird 6 is the last one to take off, and he’s going to perform a very specific maneuver. Within 30 seconds of taking off, he had crashed. Despite real detailed processes and procedures and safety concepts all over the place, the pilot had crashed his $20 million aircraft.
Why did this happen? Well, they found a number of reasons that contributed to it, but one really applies to our thoughts today. Right before they took off, the commander said, we’ve got this, fly it like at home. Now in Thunderbird 6, the pilot’s mind flipped over to where he’d been practicing. He had trained and practiced at Nellis Air Force Base. Nellis Air Force Base, he could do this maneuver, and his mind went to that altitude.
The problem was they were flying at an airfield that was 1,000 feet higher in elevation. He wasn’t thinking about that, and so when he did this maneuver that was a loop over the airfield and he came back around, his airplane was going to be 500 feet underground. That was something that they said in the accident review board report. They called it a pre-conscious level of awareness. His subconscious mind did that. Now the Air Force has changed a lot of their procedures since then, and that pilot miraculously survived. I’ve actually met him.
We have to think about our audience and maybe even where we are that might affect them. My wife has hearing aids. I have to know, okay, has she got them in or does she not because it affects how I speak to her. That’s a very practical thing in our life together now.
Our second point is to broadcast with clarity. After I’ve considered my audience and I’ve considered my message, what I’m wanting my audience to get, I need to broadcast clearly with clarity. I need to use words that they understand because if I’m just making noise, it’s just static. If they don’t understand the words I’m saying, they just can’t figure it out.
I’ve had the experience of speaking up in East Africa and Uganda and Kenya and Ethiopia a number of times.
I always had a translator because I couldn’t speak in Zulu today for you because I don’t know Zulu. I don’t know Swahili either. I do well speaking English because I’m from the south part of the United States. They say we have funny language. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what their problem is. But at any rate, I’ve always spoken with a translator and it’s a wonderful experience.
But it’s funny, just about every time I’ve spoken, someone from the audience corrects my translator on a word choice, on their vocabulary. And that wasn’t their fault. It was my fault because I used a word that they didn’t know how to translate clearly but somebody in the audience did.
So when I’m trying to communicate with someone, trying to give them an assignment, trying to get them to understand what I want them to do, I need to make sure that I’m doing the best I can to communicate it clearly. I read just the other day a statement that communication is not about speaking our mind. Communication is about ensuring that those who hear us know what we mean. That’s the important point because otherwise we’re just talking and we might as well be talking to ourselves.
And the third point is to confirm your message. Now every time I say this to someone, they say, well, how do you do that? And I always say, well, it depends. It depends on the circumstance you’re in. It depends upon the situation.
Because if it’s someone that I know really well and I know their track record of getting things done when I tell them how to do stuff and we have a good history together, and when they say, yes, I’ve got it, Joel, I just quit thinking about it because I know I’ve got trust in them, they’re going to do it.
But if it’s somebody I don’t know that well and I don’t have that level of trust, then what’s going to happen is I have to say, okay, now, do you really understand what I’m saying? Can you repeat back to me what you understood? Or I might even tell somebody in a more complex assignment, can you go sit down and write an email recap and send it back to me so that I know that you understand what we’re talking about?
In the Navy, in the merchant marine, they have a process called verbatim response, where when the officer of the deck gives the helmsman a command to turn the ship to a certain heading, the helmsman will repeat the exact words back to the officer, the exact same words. That way the officer knows, yep, they’re going to do what I told them.
Now, that’s not practical in our normal everyday business that most of us are involved in. Some of you may be in the Navy, may be helmsman, great. But most of us here are not. But there has to be some way, the principle of confirming the message, confirming that there’s understanding still applies.
The ABC Method
So, ABC, assess your audience, broadcast with clarity, and confirm the message. And we’ve not explored these deeply today, but with what I’ve given you, I’ve given you a fulcrum that you can put under that lever of conversation, communication.
I’ve given you a lever that you can go, even tonight, and you can be more effective in your conversations, more communicative, get your meaning across better. And doing so, you can make change happen, chaos will be reduced, and the time to get things done will be decreased.
Now you have the ability to think critically. You have the lever of communication. Now you have a fulcrum. Why don’t you go move your world? Thank you.
