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An article · Intent
Why do I not know what to say even when I know the subject
Knowing the subject and knowing your move are two different things, and only one of them speaks.
You know this subject. You have read about it, argued about it, lived inside it for years. Then someone turns and says, so what do you think, and what comes out is a shrug and a sentence that could have been said by anybody. You walk away composing the answer you should have given, and it arrives fully formed, twenty minutes too late.
This is not ignorance and it is not a sign that you know less than you thought. It is a selection failure, and selection is curable.
Knowing a subject and being able to speak about it are two different possessions. What you have is a library. What the moment needs is one route through it, chosen for this person, in this room, right now. Your mind cannot hand over a library, so when no route has been selected it hands over the nearest safe generality instead. That is the first dimension, Intent, and it is why the people who know a subject best are so often the ones who sound least impressive on it.
A friend of mine had read everything published on her subject that year. Someone asked her at a dinner what she made of it. She said it was complicated, and there were arguments on both sides, and it depended. All true, and all of it the sound of somebody standing in a library with the lights off. She was not being modest. She simply had forty answers available and no instruction about which one this table needed.
The usual remedy is to learn more, which is why this problem tends to get worse with expertise rather than better. Every additional thing you know is one more thing that could be said, and the selection problem gets harder as the library grows. You cannot read your way out of a decision.
Once you see it as selection, the tell becomes obvious. Listen for your own hedges. It depends, it is complicated, there are many factors. Those are not thoughts. They are the noise a mind makes while it is still choosing.
It is worth adding that the route has to be chosen for the person, not for the subject. The same question from a colleague, a client, and your mother has three different correct answers, and none of them is the most complete one. Experts tend to select for accuracy, which produces the answer that would survive review by other experts and bores everybody else. Selecting for the listener feels like a loss of rigour the first few times you do it. It is not. It is the difference between holding knowledge and being able to hand it over.
So the drill is to choose in advance, and to choose only one thing. Take any subject you know and finish this sentence out loud: the one thing they should walk away with is. Not three things. One. Then say it as a full sentence to nobody in particular, and stop. Do this every day with a different subject, including trivial ones, what you thought of a film, whether a road is worth taking, why you switched banks. You are not rehearsing answers, because the answers will never come up again. You are practising the act of picking one route while the lights are still on, so that the picking is fast when the question is real.
There is a Done For You version of this, run against the subjects you are actually asked about. It sits inside the work, not on this page.
If you want to know whether Intent is where yours breaks, The First Call is fifteen minutes, free, and it needs no preparation. You talk, I listen, and we work out together whether this is work worth doing. The locating itself happens in The Diagnosis. One door: saswatlife.com.
Next on the shelf: Why do I say yes when I mean no · or see the five dimensions the articles draw from.
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