Great communicators make you feel smarter

They are happy to rise your status by helping you see things for yourself that now you are proud of having uncovered. They are happy when you take that knowledge and spread it. They are happy when you do great things based on that new knowledge.

Their biggest win is when that knowledge helps you to come up with extraordinary things that they themselves would never have thought of.

That’s a big difference to mediocre communicators whose biggest concern is to show up as the smartest guy in the room. They work hard to make us see how smart they are. Their biggest triumph is when their audience recognises just how much smarter they are than us – up to the point where they don’t even care when they makes the audience feel dumb.

Which is not what anyone likes to feel. And so they don’t get the appreciation they think they deserve.

Life as a communicator gets so much easier when we leave our ego at home. When we consider our communication as an opportunity to boost our audience’s ego rather than our own.