Intent and preparation

Intent clarification

Identify exactly what you want the communication to accomplish, before you begin speaking.

The gapYou start speaking without a clear objective.

Intent · Habit gap · 5 minutes · on your own

When to use it

Before a meeting, a request, an explanation, a feedback conversation, an interview answer or a difficult discussion.

The steps

Write down the situation. “I need to speak to my manager about my project delay.”
Complete this sentence: after this conversation, I want ______.
Make the outcome observable. Not “I want it to go well”, but “I want my manager to agree to the revised timeline.”
Identify what the listener needs to understand for that outcome to become possible.
Identify what you need them to do, decide, or feel.
Reduce the whole intention to one sentence.
Say it aloud before you begin.
Communicate.
Afterwards, check: did what I said actually serve the intention I chose?

You know it worked when

You can state the intended outcome in one sentence before you speak, and you notice when the conversation starts moving away from it.

What else it works, and why

Message: The intention decides what belongs in the message and what is left out.

What usually goes wrong

Confusing the topic with the intention. The topic is the project delay. The intention is agreement on a revised timeline.

If it did not work

If the intention was clear and it still failed, look at Message, Delivery, Presence or Connection rather than changing the intention again.

Which drill is yours, in what order and at what dose, is not something a page can tell you. That is what a Discovery Call is for.