The five dimensions

• Intent

  What you want the moment to do. Everything downstream is aimed at nothing. You wanted to sound competent, to be liked, to get through it. No amount of polish fixes aim, and a well delivered sentence pointed nowhere still arrives nowhere.

  5 sub-dimensions. Aim, The ask, Deciding, Refusal, Retrieval. Open Intent.

• Message

  What you say, and what you leave out. Prepared people ramble, competent people bury the point, and the listener works harder than the speaker did. The information was all present, which is exactly why nobody found it.

  5 sub-dimensions. Selection, Order, Compression, Structure, Language under pressure. Open Message.

• Delivery

  How the words leave you. People hear that something was said without feeling that anything was meant. Attention slides off a voice that never changes.

  6 sub-dimensions. Pace, Pause, Fluency, Articulation, Tone, Breath and stamina. Open Delivery.

• Presence

  What you say before you speak. Your words argue with your body, and the body always wins. The content can be correct and the room has already discounted it.

  5 sub-dimensions. Stillness, Space, Eyes, Permission, Composure. Open Presence.

• Connection

  Whether it reaches the person in front of you. Technically excellent speakers wonder why perfect words changed nothing. The room agreed and nothing followed.

  5 sub-dimensions. Attention, Reading, Relevance, Exchange, Consequence. Open Connection.

How to read these pages

A dimension is where it breaks. A sub-dimension is what breaks there. Naming the dimension is useful and naming the sub-dimension is what makes a prescription possible, because Delivery covers six different things and no single piece of work treats all six.

There is a second axis that matters just as much, and it is not on these pages. The same sub-dimension breaks four different ways depending on whether you do not know the thing, cannot yet do it, default away from it under pressure, or are stopped by something. Those four are on the method, and they decide the treatment.

Three of the five cannot be observed from the inside at all, because nobody hears their own pace, sees their own stillness, or watches a face while they are still talking. What your own answers point at is what The Signal is for. What is actually happening is what The Diagnosis is for.