Have you tried writing ‘dessert’?

Picture this.

You’ve gone all out on a blowout restaurant meal.

So much that you’ve had to surreptitiously loosen a button or two under the table.

You turn to your fellow guests and say, 'I'm absolutely stuffed! I couldn't manage another thing.'

And yet. And yet…

When the waiter drops by ten minutes later and asks if you'd like a dessert, somehow you find room for the triple chocolate fudge cake with salted caramel ice cream.

Hey, listen, there’s zero judgement here. (This chain of events might, ahem, be somewhat familiar to me.)

But it's interesting, isn't it, how our main-course stomach is different from our pudding stomach?

We can't possibly manage another bite of ravioli or one more carrot, but we can somehow find room for a whole sweet course.

And this applies to our communications too.

All too often, we try to stuff already sated people with more information.

Forks loaded with more, we plead with our audience: ‘Open up, let the choo-choo train in’

But they just don't have room for more of the same.

Now of course the right answer is usually to stop. Pick it up again another day.

But occasionally we have just one shot to get a lot of information over.

And a change of tactic might just sweeten the deal.

For example:

• In an email, add a P.S. rather than squeezing another point into the body of the email.

• In a presentation, demonstrate your big final point with a video or photo, not more words.

• In a report, could you turn your conclusion into an infographic?

(And by the way, AI is your best friend when it comes to reimagining information in different formats. Claude’s recently released a new explainer video function which looks interesting…)

So next time you're struggling to get your message across, try switching things up.

You might find your audience has more room for what you're saying than you think.

After all, there's always room for pudding…*