Avoiding Complex Language
I was watching one of Shade Zahrai posts on Instagram and I realized "How many times I undermined my efforts and skills with using complex language in work or life!?" and "How many people I met with self-doubt and imposter syndrome trying to hide themselves behind complex jargon during my career!?"
The answer to the above questions is: Many, too many!
In the early years of my career, I was thinking that if I used some complex words in my interactions with customers and colleagues, it would give me a professional face and prove that I am smart and well aware of the environment! Which was a wrong idea most of the time, since using those words or sentences (especially with high level clients) were leading the conversation to total confusion and misunderstanding.
Gradually I learned to use jargon in some specific places where there was real necessity to express specific topics. Thanks to this discovery, my communication effectiveness advanced simultaneously and then I was getting better mutual results in my interactions.
In my career, were/are some professionals who are stocked with this syndrome/delusion and verbose. I am sure if you did not meet them until now, then you are one of them. Some even could not pronounce those complex words well, so they come up with a completely vague mumbling of specific words and you can easily recognize their weakness from that pronunciation. Compare this situation and result in real work-life when one expert talks/presents using field specific language and the topic seems very difficult to approach to the layperson (= a normal person without related highly expertise 😁😁), and on the other hand, another professional may talks/presents conveying the same information using terminology and phrasing easily understood and relatable by ordinary people. In your opinion, which one has better influence and result?
Some days ago, I found an enlivening (= fun 😁😁) post by ISMO Comedy about AI and the impact of artificial intelligence in our life. Before I shared it to the LinkedIn community, I searched to see who else found this hilarious video clip funny (and I wanted to be first to share it on LinkedIn 😉).
Unbelievable! Unbelievable! I found many people who are having claims over AI, shared this video with captions full of serious, unfunny and professional AI jargon words in order to promote themselves or lead to their own desired conclusion! (and some of them missed mentioning the ISMO as creator, maybe intentionally) Since then, I have been asking myself "Why do some people easily transform simple and concise things to complexity!?"
Recently, I am in the process of several interviews with recruiters and business unit managers every week and in a few of them I have noticed this unfortunate imposter syndrome. As an example, I had an intake (interview) with a kind HR partner who has around 2 years of work experience (which I believe is a respectable work experience). He/She corrected some of my words in my simple answers right into my face! 😁 He/She substituted "Drive" to "Stimulate", "Check" to "Assess" and "Convincing" to "Persuasive" and then I guess He/She wrote a report to the hiring business unit that I am an uncompetitive candidate!
As I said earlier, I fully support the idea of using specific words in every profession in order to express better and deeper meaning in professional communication, but we should not forget the effect of simplicity in our communications. Sometimes you hear or read words of medieval literature or the Latin origin of an English word willfully (deliberately 😁😁) to show off how smart and educated that person is.
Of course there are words in every field which can not be replaced with mistakenly simple (daily life) words, because either the meaning is important or these words are used in a fast-paced environment. For example, in the jargon of offshore drilling, it is not wise to use other words to simplify the phrase "Choke and Kill Line Friction Pressures" because this phrase is giving a clear, fast and right to the point message to the audience and might save people's life.
We are living in a #complicated and complex world, let's #make it #simple or simpler and smarter in every aspect we can.
I wrote this to #share my #viewpoints and experiences regarding #transformation #cluture of organizations in different aspects and I will be very glad to learn your ideas about this.
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