Getting the Brilliant Idea in Your Head Into Words Someone Else Can Understand
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Heidi Richards Mooney is a dynamic professional speaker, celebrated author, seasoned entrepreneur, and Senior Executive Contributor dedicated to empowering individuals and businesses to succeed. As a past president of the Florida Speakers Association, she has inspired countless audiences with her expertise in PR, internet marketing, and brand elevation.
I have a confession to make. My ideas make perfect sense in my head. In there, they are organized, connected, insightful, and occasionally brilliant. I know where they started, where they are going, and why Point A obviously connects to Point F.
There is just one problem. My reader wasn’t there for B, C, D, and E. I also tend to repeat myself. I often repeat myself. See what I mean? Writing has taught me something that applies far beyond books and articles: having something worthwhile to say and communicating it so someone else understands it are two very different things. Sometimes what sounds perfectly clear inside our own heads becomes considerably less brilliant once another human being tries to follow along.
Use your words
There is a phrase many mothers have probably said to a frustrated young child. The child is crying, pointing, sputtering, perhaps becoming increasingly exasperated because Mom clearly does not understand what is so incredibly obvious to them. Eventually, Mom says:
“Use your words.”
Sometimes I think writers, and communicators in general, need someone to tell us the same thing. We know what we mean. We know the backstory. We know why one idea connects to another. We know the experiences that shaped our conclusion. We know what happened before the story began and what occurred after it ended. Our audience knows none of that.
Yet we sometimes write, speak, teach, or lead as though everyone else has been living inside our heads with us. They haven’t. Use your words. But that advice has another side. Sometimes we use too many words.
We explain the point. Then we explain why the point matters. Then we provide an example. Then we restate the point. Then, just in case someone missed it, we explain it again. The better advice may be, “Use the words your reader needs, not all the words you have.”
The curse of knowing what you know
Research explains why this is so difficult. It is called the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, our knowledge can interfere with our ability to accurately judge what someone who does not know it will understand.
Researchers have found that the bias is remarkably persistent, and even explicitly warning people about it doesn't necessarily make it disappear.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan senior lecturer Miro Kazakoff describes the practical consequence succinctly: experts often struggle to communicate with nonexperts because they omit context, dive too deeply into details, or assume knowledge their audience doesn't have.
In other words, sometimes the more we know about something, the harder it becomes to remember what it was like before we knew it.
That's a challenge for authors. It's also a challenge for leaders, teachers, consultants, speakers, marketers, coaches, and anyone whose job involves transferring an idea from one person's brain to another.
You hear the song, they hear the tapping
One of my favorite illustrations of this phenomenon comes from a psychology experiment conducted by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford.
Participants were assigned to be either "tappers" or "listeners." The tappers tapped the rhythms of familiar songs while listeners tried to identify them.
Before learning whether the listener was correct, the tappers estimated how often they thought listeners would recognize the song.
They predicted about 50 percent. In reality, listeners correctly identified only 3 of 120 songs, 2.5 percent. Think about why. If I am tapping Happy Birthday, I can hear the entire song playing inside my head. I hear the melody. I know the rhythm. I may even be mentally singing the words.
The person sitting across from me hears: Tap. Tap. Tap tap. Tap. That's it. Isn't that exactly what happens when we communicate? We hear the song. They hear the tapping.
We become frustrated because we cannot understand how they are missing something that seems incredibly obvious to us. But we have information they don't.
Your reader cannot read your mind
This lesson has become particularly important to me as a writer. I tend to see connections quickly. An experience from 20 years ago may connect in my mind to a conversation I had yesterday, which leads to a marketing lesson, which reminds me of something an author said, which suddenly gives me an idea for an article. Inside my head? Perfectly logical. On the page? Not necessarily.
Sometimes I have jumped from Point A to Point F without giving my reader B, C, D, or E. Other times I've done the opposite and given them B, C, D, and E three times each.
That's why writing benefits so much from another perspective. An editor might ask, "How did you get from here to there?" A reader might say, "I don't understand what this means." A colleague may point out, "You already said that." Sometimes someone simply asks the most useful question of all, “What are you really trying to say?”
Why feedback matters
Research supports this, too. One study examining perspective taking found that feedback helped people adjust their judgments of what another person might understand. In particular, narrative feedback, not merely being told whether they were right or wrong, helped reduce egocentric bias in subsequent judgments.
That matters because once we are deeply immersed in our own work, we stop seeing things. We know what we intended to say. Intention can become a terrible proofreader. We read what we meant instead of what is actually on the page. That is one reason collaboration matters.
AI can be a thinking partner, not a replacement for thinking
Today, one of the tools I use to get outside my own head is AI. There is an important distinction here. I don't believe AI needs to replace our ideas, experiences, stories, opinions, or expertise. It can help us interrogate them.
I often begin with an idea, a story, a collection of thoughts, or sometimes little more than:
"There's something here. I'm just not sure what it is yet."
The value comes from having a collaborative tool help me explore questions such as:
"What am I really trying to say? Is the connection between these two ideas clear? What does the reader need to know before this section will make sense? Did I assume knowledge I haven't actually provided? Does this story strengthen the message? Have I already made this point?"
Yes, occasionally:
"Heidi, you've already said that."
Probably more than once. The thinking is still mine. The experience is mine. The perspective is mine. But collaboration helps me build a bridge between what I can see and what someone else can see.
Whether that collaborator is an editor, colleague, trusted reader, writing coach, or AI, we sometimes need another perspective to reveal the gaps familiarity has made invisible.
First make it exist, then make it make sense
This also changes how I think about first drafts. A first draft doesn't need to communicate everything perfectly. First, get the idea out of your head. Write the messy paragraph. Tell the story. Capture the insight before it disappears. Then come back and ask, Will someone who wasn't inside my head when I wrote this understand what I mean?
Add the missing steps. Remove the unnecessary ones. Clarify the language. Cut the repetition. Ask someone else to read it. Be willing to discover that the sentence you thought was absolutely brilliant might need a little work. Or a lot. That's not failure. That's communication.
Maybe mom was right all along
Perhaps good communication really does begin with that childhood instruction: use your words. Tell us what you mean. Don't assume we know what you know. Give us enough context to follow you. Don't bury the idea beneath unnecessary explanation. When you've said enough, stop.
Because whether you're writing a book, leading a team, delivering a presentation, teaching a class, creating content, or explaining an idea to a client, your audience cannot hear the song playing inside your head. They only hear what you give them.
So perhaps the process is simpler than we make it. First, make it exist. Then, use your words. Then, make those words make sense. Then, remove the words you didn't need in the first place.
Your job isn't to put everything you know onto the page. Your job is to give your audience enough of the melody that eventually, they can hear the song too.
Read more from Heidi Richards Mooney
Heidi Richards Mooney, Author, Coach & Entrepreneur
Heidi Richards Mooney is a dynamic professional speaker, celebrated author, seasoned entrepreneur, and Senior Executive Contributor dedicated to empowering individuals and businesses to succeed. As a past president of the Florida Speakers Association, she has inspired countless audiences with her expertise in PR, internet marketing, and brand elevation. A small business owner and PR strategist, Heidi specializes in helping clients amplify their online presence, craft compelling narratives, and achieve measurable results. She empowers clients to get their websites and online profiles noticed by leveraging innovative Public Relations campaigns, capitalizing on achievements to secure media attention, and building a consistent, influential brand voice.
