Say It

Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Most people do neither. They hint. They imply. They drop the half-statement and wait for the other person to assemble the rest. They call it subtlety. It is not subtlety. It is laziness wearing a nicer coat.

Implicit communication offloads the hard part onto the listener. You felt something, you gestured at it, and now the burden of figuring out what you actually meant belongs to them. You made your problem their problem. Reading between the lines is real work, and you just assigned it to someone else without asking.

Who has mastered the reading of minds? Nobody. Not your spouse. Not your kids. Not your colleagues. They are all guessing. Experience and context improve the guess, but a guess is still a guess — and if the thing matters, why are you leaving it to chance?

This is the part that gets me. People are most indirect about the things that matter most. The harder the truth, the more they wrap it in hints. The conversation that needs the most clarity gets the least, because the stakes make them flinch from saying it plainly.

Say the hard thing plainly. That is where the courage actually is.

There is a myth that the indirect person is the sophisticated one. The opposite is true. Hinting is what you do when you are afraid to be on record. Plain speech is what you do when you are willing to stand behind your words. One is hiding. The other is showing up.

And understand what parables were for.

The great teachers used stories and metaphors to make hard ideas land — to carry meaning into the listener, not to lock it away behind a riddle. The metaphor was a bridge, not a vault. Somewhere along the way people inverted it. Now they use the indirect to seem deep instead of to be understood. That is backwards. If your cleverness obscures your meaning, your cleverness failed.

Your job is to get the message across cleanly, with no room for misinterpretation. Not to be admired for how you said it. Not to protect yourself with deniability. To be understood.

If the message does not land, lay yourself all the way out and say it again, plainer. The failure to be understood is on the speaker. Always. You do not get to blame the listener for not decoding what you would not say.

Say what you mean. Deal in truths and realities.

Then you never have to be read. You can just be heard.

“The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.” — Sydney Harris