So, we've been talking about central messages. Good central messages don't appear out of nowhere. Right? They're the distillation of all of your knowledge on a topic. Your ability to find the key thing that you want to communicate. So, step 1, defining a good central message, is to remind yourself of all the key ideas that you know. Now, when you're trying to generate a new idea, a new thing that you want to communicate, you want to brainstorm, and that term gets thrown around a lot, but what I mean by that is literally, write down a stream of consciousness of thoughts, and ideas, facts, points, concerns, limitation, whatever it doesn't matter. Write it down. The important point here is don't edit or refine these or go deep on to certain ones. The goal is volume, not quality. We're going to work work on finding the central message later. Right now the goal is to make sure that everything that you need to remember as you're working on a central message is available to you. Is ready at a moment's notice for you to bring in to your thinking. Similarly, sometimes when you're an educator or you're trying to summarize a body of knowledge into a clear message, don't brainstorm. I think of it as brain dumping. Right? You just list out the key points, the concepts, the dimensions that need to be talked about, and make sure you get them all down. In other words, you flesh out the idea space. The space of all the different ideas that you need to have ready. What does a set of ideas that you need to be thinking of? What are the, I don't know 10 or 15 key points that might be relevant to finding your central message. For example, I design tools to help people make difficult health decisions. Step 1, when I'm going through that process is to make sure that I know all the relevant options or dimensions that I need to be talking about with the patients. So, if there are, say, three different treatment options, what are they? Maybe it's surgery, and radiation, and surveillance. Okay. Those are the three options. Is not doing something at an option too? Maybe that's a fourth option. Either way, I need to think through what are the options set. Once I've done that, what are all the different ways that the options are the same or different from each other? These are the key dimensions that I need to be thinking about before I start to generate my central messages. The key to this brainstorming process or brain dumping process is to force yourself to not organize. This stage is about exploration, not refinement. That comes next. By the way, the literature on decision-making shows that one of the most important things you can do to make better decisions, any type of decision, is to what they call widen your options. In other words, to make sure that you explore the idea space. So, doing a bit of brainstorming or brain dumping doesn't just help you to be a better communicator. It helps you to be a better decision-maker.
