How to communicate so smart ideas actually land

Lightly edited for clarity.

Dawn: People have amazing ideas, but they struggle to market those ideas. Language is human, and so it always carries an emotional charge in person. You can struggle to get some of those ideas across. How long can your relationships survive on greeting cards? One framework I teach is the three pillars: engage, educate, inspire.

Dawn: Stories really allow your audience to identify with whatever subject or idea you’re trying to get across. Stories create this immersive emotional experience, and the brain actually doesn’t really distinguish between that kind of virtual experience we have in our mind and what we have in real life. So they’re an extremely powerful way to bridge the distance between you and your audience.

Jorge: Can you tell me about a time you connected better with someone through a story?

Dawn: When I teach networking, one of the things I help people with is small talk. Many people — especially those coming from a culture that doesn’t do networking the way we do here in New Brunswick — tend to undervalue small talk. It can sound trivial. “Nice day today.” Some people are very serious and think, “I can’t be bothered with small talk, I’m a serious person, I want to have deep conversations.”

Dawn: So I tell a little story. I was at a barbecue with someone, and a woman started telling me a story about her son’s dog. The other person walked away because they thought it was too trivial. But it turned out the reason she wanted to talk about that dog was that the dog had been her son’s — and a year before, her son had been killed by a drunk driver. When I tell that story to a class, I just see the lights go on. People go, “Oh — now I get it. Small talk is important. It’s an invitation to go deeper.”

Jorge: I was reading a book about public speaking where the author suggested getting outside your comfort zone — go to a park, hug a random stranger, lie on the floor in a coffee shop. Stuff like that.

Dawn: I’d disagree with that. That’s thinking about public speaking primarily as performance. I don’t see communication as theatrical performance — I see it as a way to connect with people. So for years people have said: if you’re giving a talk, picture the audience naked, picture them in their underwear. That’s the same kind of foolishness to me. What I recommend instead: get there early. Go around the room. Shake people’s hands. Meet them. Then when you get up at the front of the room, you’re not talking to a room of strangers. You can even weave in something you picked up from those conversations. People are more likely to engage and ask questions because they’re already comfortable with you. I always think of communication in terms of relationship rather than one-way broadcast.

Jorge: When someone smart has a generally good idea but can’t get it across — what’s usually going wrong?

Dawn: Most of the time, again, it’s focusing on what they want to say rather than on what the audience is ready to hear and interested in hearing. Eighty percent of my time with clients is spent helping people get to know their audience in a really intimate way, so they can tailor the content, the structure, and the way they’re communicating to that particular audience. That sounds basic, but I teach an approach called perspective-taking, and it goes much deeper than typical marketing. Marketers often look at demographics — age, gender. This goes deeper, and it also goes beyond empathy. We use methods that enable you to really step into the audience’s world view, so you can frame your communication through the same window the audience is using to see the world.

Jorge: I run a video production agency, and I’d love to get inside my client’s head. So I’ve been doing this thing where I’ll talk to an LLM and ask it to play the role of the other person, to come up with their objections.

Dawn: AI can sometimes be helpful that way. Sometimes it’ll completely misread the situation. I tend to use it more for background research. Say I’m putting in a proposal in the forestry industry and I haven’t worked there before. I’ll ask AI: what are some of the top concerns of a forestry executive right now? What are some of the issues foresters are having with their messaging? Background research. Where it breaks down is interpretation.

Dawn: With proposals, I try never to write one until the client and I have pretty well agreed on what we want to do. So it’s not really a proposal — it’s a confirmation of what we’ve discussed. Clients often push me to send a proposal early. I say no, because they have to have skin in the game. It’s really easy to say, “just send me a proposal,” and then I go off and do two hours of research and formatting and thinking. So they need skin in the game. It’s a collaboration. People often overlook that such a big part of communication is listening.

Jorge: For someone new to the city — a lot of smart people are moving in, MBAs, master’s degrees — I hear them say, “In my own language I’m smart. When I try to go into the other language, I struggle.” What’s breaking there?

Dawn: I can relate. I have a degree in French, but I didn’t use it for years. Since coming to New Brunswick three and a half years ago I started working on it again, and now I’m actually doing presentations and facilitation in French. I asked my tutor the same thing. Her advice is the same advice I’ve given non-native English speakers for years: choose simple words. We often think the way to show our intelligence is to use big words and complex sentences, but in reality what makes you sound smart and knowledgeable is clarity. Think of the simplest word possible. Make your sentences shorter.

Dawn: I taught a technical writing program for IT consultants in a global professional services firm. Eighty percent of the learners were originally from outside the US — mostly India, the Middle East. Many would say, “I’m not good at English, I’m at a disadvantage.” But when we marked the assignments, the non-native speakers often did as well or better than the native English speakers — because they had to consciously keep it simple. They had to choose the simple words to express it. Native speakers tended to reach for bigger words and more jargon. So in a strange way it can even become an advantage.

Jorge: What’s the one framework you keep teaching, over and over, because it works?

Dawn: I work with people from a variety of backgrounds — usually with a deep level of expertise. Researchers, IT folks, engineers, consultants. For all of those groups, I teach some version of what I call the three pillars: engage, educate, inspire. When we have this wealth of advanced knowledge to share, we tend to go right to educate. “We need to bring people up to speed.” We think: if they only understood all the detail, they’d buy in. But first we need to engage them — an emotional activity, not an intellectual one. Then we need to educate, but in a way that builds the relationship. Then we need to inspire them to act.

Dawn: I recently helped a group prepare for a pitch session at a conference. After the conference, the organizer told me she’d been to other pitches and none of the speakers had included an ask in their presentation. To me, it’s not a pitch without an ask. What is the action you want? My group all made an ask at the end — that’s part of inspiring action.

Jorge: What about people running small businesses in Moncton and the Maritimes trying to get noticed? Lots of great ideas, but they struggle to communicate to the public.

Dawn: One of the keys is to be clear about how marketing and communication work together — because many people see them as the same thing. Someone once invited me to be the CMO of a startup, and I said, “No, I don’t have a marketing brain. You have a marketing brain.” Marketing is largely about how you get the message in front of the right people — how you package it. The communications piece is: what is that core message? People are quick to jump into marketing, especially with all the shiny AI tools, but they haven’t done that fundamental piece — thinking through who the audience is, doing the deep dive, thinking strategically about how they’ll engage, educate, and inspire. That has to inform the marketing strategy.

Jorge: Do you use AI in your own work?

Dawn: We’re very transparent about this — there’s a statement at the bottom of our website on how we use AI. We use it for copywriting. So on LinkedIn we have a company page for Clarity Connect and I have a personal profile. Anything on my personal profile is me, the old-fashioned way — I’m typing it. If something on the Clarity Connect page is AI-assisted, that’s fine because I’m not as concerned that it reflects my exact voice. But if my picture is there and it says it’s being written by me, then that’s authentically my voice. Same with emails. I think a real risk is companies leaning on AI for emails when their communication skills aren’t strong yet. How long can your relationships survive on greeting cards? My husband has never bought me a card for Valentine’s Day or a birthday — he always writes me one, because I don’t want a Hallmark saying what he has to say to me. If you want a real connection with clients, an email that’s in your voice — even if you’re missing an article or a comma — is far better, as long as it’s clear, than something polished that could have been written by anyone.

Dawn: A test: if AI gives you something and you’re thinking about using it on LinkedIn or in an email — somewhere it represents you and your character — read it aloud. Does it sound like something you would say? Sometimes I’ll experiment with Claude for copywriting and ask for feedback on something I’ve written. It’ll come back and jazz it up. And I’ll go, “That doesn’t sound like me at all, because I’m not cool like that.” I’d rather be myself, even if it’s a little less exciting, than send something clever that doesn’t represent my character. People will meet me and say, “Oh — this is who you actually are.”

Jorge: Can you tell me about a time you helped someone whose idea went from being ignored to landing?

Dawn: This one was a bit of a shocker for me, because the amount of help I gave was small and the result was big. I worked with a researcher who was trying to get renewed funding. She presented to healthcare executives, and they said no — doesn’t look interesting. She was taking one of our courses, and most of them are self-paced with materials and then group coaching sessions. She literally watched a couple of the videos and said, “Oh — I see what I’ve been doing wrong.” She had been presenting the research project in terms of the value she saw in it — as a researcher, she was interested in discovering things, building on knowledge, asking new questions. After watching the videos, she flipped it around and presented the project in terms of what the executives would get from it. They said yes. It was small. But I see the same thing again and again. The people I work with are smart — they know how to write, give a presentation, put a paragraph together, write a report. What they need is the shift from giving information to getting buy-in. That’s a mindset shift.

Jorge: You were an English professor before this. What made you realize that communication, not credentials, is what moves people?

Dawn: When I left the academy and went into the business world, it was a rude awakening. I’d spent so many years in a very hierarchical environment, where credentials counted for everything, and where I was in charge of the classroom. I’m Dr. Henwood. I don’t have to persuade you to listen to me — you signed up to listen. Then I worked with a coach who said to me: “Dawn, your PhD is not a benefit. It’s a feature.” What she meant was: it doesn’t mean much outside the academic context. You actually have to earn the trust of people in business. That was a really helpful moment. I started to realize how important things like voice, emotion, and engagement are to successful communication, instead of just imparting information and assuming I had everyone’s trust already. Now, when I work with people, that’s something I emphasize throughout: how are we building trust as we engage, as we educate, as we inspire? So people will move forward with us.

Jorge: In marketing people now say you need seven to thirty touchpoints before someone buys.

Dawn: Brace yourself — some are saying it’s up to thirty now. The world’s noisy. For somebody like me, who’s a little introverted, that’s really challenging. What are the ways I can connect with people that aren’t just spitting stuff out — that are meaningful interactions? When I go into discovery meetings, the first thing I’m trying to establish is whether we trust each other. If we trust each other, everything else can be figured out. Budget stops being the question.

Dawn: I tend to see three scenarios. One: great, we have the money, let’s get started. Two: great, we love this, we need to go find the money — we’ll come back in six months or a year. That’s a seed. Three: we really want to work with you, we have this much, what can we do together? I’m a coach as well as a content creator, so sometimes we blend services. But it all starts with the trust piece.

Jorge: How do you decide what to post about? I have a video edited and ready to upload, but yesterday I looked at it again and thought: this might actually hurt my brand. I don’t want to hurt myself or the people in it.

Dawn: Kudos to you for being aware of how you want to communicate authentically. To me it comes back to that authenticity piece — if something doesn’t feel right, it’s probably not right. My problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s being consistent. I keep a running list in a Google Doc I can access from any device. Ideas come to me walking down the street, reading something, seeing a post. Recently, the CBC came out with an explicit AI policy for their journalists — they use AI for background research, never for writing. When I saw that, I dropped a link into my doc. A week later, when I needed a LinkedIn post, it was there. The other thing: listen to the questions your clients are asking. Notice the challenges you see them running into. That’s ready-made content.

Jorge: If someone listening could change just one thing about the way they communicate this week — what is it?

Dawn: Listen more. Clients hire me because I’m a communicator and I help them express themselves clearly. But they also hire me because I’m a listener. That’s what I’ve come to realize over the past number of years — I listen deeply, and I help them articulate what they want to say in a way that drives action. I also enable them to listen more deeply to their audience. So when they’re having discovery conversations, they’re listening genuinely for the feedback they’re getting, instead of just trying to sell. When they’re giving a public presentation, they’re designing it so there are places people can interrupt and engage. Consider that you are listening as much as you are speaking or writing.

Jorge: I was using AI for some consulting and it was so rigid. I had to realize, painfully, that rigidity doesn’t work in the real world, because my clients aren’t thinking like that. We make decisions with emotion. So I’m trying to be more human in my interactions and follow my instinct a bit more.

Dawn: Use AI for what it’s good at. People say you should treat AI like an employee. When you have someone working for you, you identify their strengths and assign tasks accordingly. AI is really good at the rational evaluation of an argument. Really good at crunching numbers. Really good at some kinds of background research — “tell me the ten issues in forestry right now.” But you have to realize: that’s in its job description. It’s not good at other pieces, so I’ll do those, or I’ll ask another human to help. AI is rational, but it’s not reasonable — it can’t reason as a human, because it isn’t one. And it can’t create the way a human does.

Jorge: I recently did some facilitation training with the Center for Courage and Renewal — founded by Parker Palmer, the Quaker educator. One of the things they emphasize is that silence is part of the conversation. Making space for silence matters.

Dawn: So important. We live in a really noisy world. It’s counter-cultural, but it’s important.

Jorge: What’s the best way to reach you if someone wants to work with you?

Dawn: LinkedIn is a great way. Our website is clarityconnect.ca. Email is fine too — dawn at clarityconnect.

Jorge: Thank you so much. I always enjoy our conversations.

Dawn: They’re fun.