You Can Be Confident and Thoughtful At the Same Time

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

I recently saw a tweet that said, “We pay too much attention to the most confident voices – and too little attention to the most thoughtful ones.” My initial reaction was that confidence and thoughtfulness are not mutually exclusive. 

Confidence is defined as “the state of feeling certain about the truth of something.”

Thoughtful is defined as “the consideration for the needs of other people.”

For example, we can be confident that a particular program is the right thing to help people. 

While I’m not sure exactly the point the author of the tweet was trying to make – that is one of the disadvantages of being character limited in Twitter – it did make me wonder if sometimes we pay more attention to the loudest voices because well, they’re the loudest. And therefore, the quietest comments don’t receive the same level of consideration. 

Employees at every level of the organization need to recognize that being loud is not the same as being confident and being quiet doesn’t mean someone doesn’t know their stuff. When we’re listening to others, we need to be prepared to hear the truth in varying degrees of volume. 

This is also the case for the person telling the story. Sometimes, a speaker needs to amp up the volume on their message to get attention. And there might be times when dialing it back will get more attention. I wish I could say there’s a failproof formula for when to turn it up or down, but sometimes it takes doing an audience analysis. Which is what I wanted to talk about today.

Whenever you’re talking with one person or a group of people, it’s good to know who you’re talking to. What I mean by that is understanding some background information about who they are will help to deliver the message better. Sadly, what people often do is rely on the listener to meet the speaker where they are. It should really be the opposite. The speaker should figure out how to meet the listener. Make listening easy because can be so difficult.

Audience analysis doesn’t have to be long or complicated. Here are four things to understand about your audience:

• Size: Are you talking to one person or a group of people? And if it’s a group, how many people? The larger the group, the more you might have to consider in terms of logistics to successfully get your message across.
• Location: Will everyone be in the same room together? If you’re talking to a dispersed group, does that need to be factored into the conversation? I have nothing against video calls, but they might not be the best for all discussions. 
• Demographics: Who are the people participating in the conversation? It might be helpful to know job titles, tenure with the organization, and possibly things like gender/age/etc. For example, if you’re planning to use a pop culture reference, you want to make sure that everyone gets it. 
• Topic Knowledge: Does this group have the same level of background on the topic that you will be discussing? If not, do you need to talk with some individuals beforehand? You don’t want someone to be embarrassed that they don’t know something. 

Ultimately, we want our audience to think of us as being confident and thoughtful when we’re discussing ideas. That means doing an audience analysis before pitching an idea or doing a presentation. The audience analysis allows us to present ourselves in a way where others pay attention to what we have to say AND get projects approved that will benefit the organization.

Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby while exploring the streets of Miami, FL

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