Most Communication Today is Missing a Vital Component
People are unnecessarily losing deals, sales, associates, relationships, and opportunities every day by not becoming skilled in the area of emphasis.
Emphasis is not just pushing a phrase or a word. It is knowing when it must be utilized and why. The right emphasis in the right place changes everything — for your audience, your clients, and your results.
We are living in a world so overwhelmed and overloaded with communication that when emphasis is missing, you can lose someone — or an entire group — you should have had with you in clarity, understanding, cooperation, and action.
Emphasis is One of the Most Overlooked Keys to Effective Communication
In this short video, Kim Greenhouse shares her professional observations about what has happened to the human attention span and why emphasis may be the most overlooked and most costly skill in communication today.
Watch and find out how much is at stake — and what to do about it. She would know — she has introduced and interviewed leaders all over the world in just about every profession.
Join the Stewarding Communication webinar series — a live, small-group experience designed to strengthen your communication from the inside out.
Read the Full Verbatim Transcript: “Emphasis” with Kim Greenhouse
Emphasis
Thank you for clicking on this part of the website under emphasis. And I want to share something with you that I’ve noticed over the many, many years watching people communicate. There’s so much talking, and there’s so much attention to what we have to say in content, that a lot of times we forget that there are millions of people — hundreds and thousands and millions of people online at different times — and they only have the attention span for so much.
The average person has lost their ability to focus. They’ve lost their ability to hold a focus. They are entrained now in clicking likes, dislikes, tweets, quick communications, texts, and thinking that that’s full communication. Well, it’s not. It’s not. It’s communication, it’s part of it, but it’s not. So we’re living in a world now where people’s attention span is being degraded by the second. And many of the online atmospheres and ecosystems are set up, unfortunately, to promote the ability to not concentrate — taking just bits, tiny, tiny bits of information.
So it’s very important, in a world where a lot of people are online digitally, that not only in regular communication, day-to-day communication, phone communication — it’s very important to emphasize what it is you’re saying.
And the lack of emphasis is creating an overload of data and information that is happening all over the world. People are saturated with information. They’re saturated with being available every moment, every minute, every hour to problems going on around the world. Because now, with these online ecosystems, it’s very hard to get away from it. You have to really train yourself to do it.
So when it comes to communication, emphasis is very critical, both in spoken communication and written communication. And in fact, it’s so important that most people are lost after a few minutes. That’s how difficult it is for people to hold attention. Click, click, move, da da da da da. That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s like a child. That’s children’s-level attention span. Humans are being reduced to that by the proliferation and the entanglement and the entrainment of the online universe.
So I want to invite you — if communication is something you want to look at, you want to make sure people leave with what it is you’re emphasizing, and knowing what to emphasize — book an appointment with me.
I’ll give you an example. I saw a wonderful, attractive, handsome guy who has a beautiful voice, a gentle spirit, expertise like there’s no tomorrow, communicate — do an online session, like a little conference or webinar, introducing a new video portal. And watching him, it was clear to me, through a long, drawn-out discussion — if he had just highlighted, boom, boom, boom, these things — it totally wakes up the audience, totally brings in the audience to understand how what he’s presenting — he was also presenting AI — relates to the rest of us.
So what’s the baseline? Most people don’t know what AI is. What if you’re 85 years old? What if you’re 70 years old? Do you know what it is if you’ve never seen it? People are talking about it. People don’t know what it is. I, who did a show on Bitcoin with some of the biggest Bitcoin people in the world — okay, years ago, before I went to live in Europe — I had no idea what it was. And do you know that it took me another nine years to semi get a handle of it? Because the way it was introduced, even by the great ones, was from the center of their universe of knowledge and expertise and experience. But when it came to parlaying it out to the public, for people not in that space — gone. Gone. Gone.
You see what I’m saying? That’s an example of emphasis, the articulation, the emphasis of what it is. You can talk all around it, you can say all this stuff about it. I didn’t get it until 2023. And I did a show with some very famous people in this world about this very subject, and nobody could explain it to me. Nobody.
I understand why now, that I have been on the inside to see what it is — what are they referring to? What are they talking about? What is this thing? But it was because the architecture of emphasis was missing. Key emphasis points were missing. And unless you were in that space, you were lost, as I was.
So if you’d like to book a session to see what — maybe better emphasize what should be emphasized, what shouldn’t be emphasized, and why — book the appointment. Love to be of service.