Tamsen Webster recommends three books to improve your communication: Made to Stick for the SUCCES framework, Make It Stick for learning science, and Magic Words for the power of small words in persuasion.
What are 3 books that you can read to immediately make you a better presenter, speaker, communicator, and message maker? That's what we're talking about this week on Find the Red Thread. I'm Tamsen Webster, your host. If you are a fan, please do me a favor, like and subscribe. When we want to get better at something, a lot of times we turn to books. We turn to books that are full of information on the topic we're trying to get better at. Maybe it's messaging, or maybe it's communications, or presenting, maybe it's ideas. Whatever it is, we want to get as much information as possible. But it's not just information we want, right? We actually want to move from being informed about something to being transformed in how we think or use that information. We're reading the book because we want to get transformed the way we think or do. So what is it about books that really make that difference? Well, for me and the 3 books that I want to tell you about today, I think the difference is that they make the useful usable. Because if something isn't usable, we're not going to use it, and therefore it's not going to transform us. In every case, these 3 books have taken something that will have very high impact and found a way to communicate it in a way that takes very little effort on the part of the reader to put it in place. Now, what are these 3 books? Well, the first book is about the messages themselves, and it's a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It's a book that's been around for a while. You may have read it already, but it is so sticky, which is appropriate given its title. About how to make your messages resonate with other people. And the low effort they make— the low effort way they make that information usable is by turning all the information into an acronym: SUCCES. S-U-C-C-E-S-S. Which captured in that acronym are the qualities that your message needs to be as sticky as possible. The more qualities, the more likely it is to stick. That's how— that's a book that can help you get better at the messages. But how do we get better at making sure people interpret them, use them, and actually use them in their own lives? After all, that's what we're trying to do with our ideas a lot of time. That's where a second book, very similar in name to the first, comes in. And that book is called Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown. So Made to Stick is about the messages. Make It Stick is about the The Science of Learning. So what Make It Stick does, what Peter Brown does in his book, is he takes all these different concepts of learning and then tells us what they are and how they're applied. He has these great sections at the end, talks all about case studies, how different people have applied different methods to get learning to happen. And these are methods you can use yourself to make yourself learn better, but it's also things that you can use when you are sharing your messages to make sure that other people learn them well as well. So what's the third book? Well, the third book is a book I stumbled across quite by accident a number of years ago, but it is a book that I still every day use information from it, and it's called Magic Words by the author and now friend Tim David. Tim collected just a few little words, words like and, and but, and someone's name, and tells us why they're so powerful when you're putting messages together. My favorite example is just how moving what's before or after the word "but," B-U-T, can completely change how someone hears and responds to a message. Now, Tim has gone on to write several other great books as well, but that book, Magic Words, as I said, literally affects how I put messages together every day in a really practical way. And that, and so for him, that, for Tim, that low effort, high impact mechanism was just taking it down to these simple, simple words that you can use as you're constructing the actual language of a message to make sure it's as powerful as possible. So those are the 3 books that will immediately transform you as a communicator, at least in my experience. What are your favorite books? What are the books that have had that kind of impact on you? On you? I'd love to know, so please respond in the comments or online. I'd love to hear from you. That was this week's episode of Find the Red Thread. I'm your host, Tamsen Webster, of TamsenWebster.com.
