When you can articulate your thoughts clearly, everything else gets easier. Your decisions get better because you understand your own reasoning. Your relationships deepen because people know where you actually stand. Your work gets more focused because you can explain what you're trying to accomplish.

The best communicators, Tsar says, constantly leave space for uncertainty. Not because they're unsure of everything, but because they're sure enough of some things to be honest about the things they're not sure of.

Martin Heidegger had a fascinating way of thinking about this. He argued that we don't really possess language; language possesses us. Most of the time, we're not speaking our thoughts; we're letting cultural patterns and inherited ways of speaking think through us.

In his 1947 work ‘Letter on Humanism’, he said,

"It is language that speaks, not man

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Tsar talks about interrogating your thoughts, and the questions he suggests are ruthlessly simple:

• What do I really mean by that?


• Where did that idea come from?


• What would make someone disagree with this?

When something triggers a reaction in me now, I don't rush to put words to it. I sit with the fuzziness for a moment. I let myself feel confused or uncertain or contradictory. Because that's where the actual thinking lives... in the space between the trigger and the response.

Your first reaction is data, not conclusions. It's telling you something a... See more

The best communicators, Tsar says, constantly leave space for uncertainty.