Practising This Skill Makes You Smarter

A daily writing practice makes you a smarter, more precise communicator and can help you be emotionally resilient.

You’ve heard or read that “writing is exercise for the brain.” While speaking skills are important, it’s writing that cognitively powers you up! The more you write, the sharper your rational and logical thinking. The more you put pen to paper, the better your mental gymnastics.

?So Dear Reader, why aren’t you practising writing every day?

Is Writing An Act Of Pleasure Or Pain For You?

I don’t know what it is about writing, but there’s a lot of resistance to doing it, which means that when people are forced to write, it’s frequently not very good.

Have you sat in meetings where clever people (you might be one of them) are bandying about clever ideas for days on end, but when asked to commit them to paper, struggle, and then spend most of their time looking for ‘source’ material?

What’s going on here!?

Most people in B2B IT either hate writing or resentfully tolerate it; they certainly get no pleasure from writing. (I admit this is my opinion based on my experiences, but I challenge you to disagree) :)

Contrary to the hype that it’s all about visual communications today, I think it’s about being able to craft a cohesive and coherent narrative, particularly in B2B IT, where we have to easily explain complex and difficult things without dumbing down our message.

And sure, that’s not an easy thing to do. It takes effort.

It's Not About Using A Lot Of Words, It's About Editing A Lot

Here’s another interesting thing in B2B IT. People don’t like writing, but when we ask for some words, “just three pages please”, they give us ten. And, it’s ten pages of content that hasn’t gone through any rigorous thought process or time spent reviewing drafts to assess the validity of ideas and how they link to support the central premise. Instead, there’s a tendency to throw up on the page and pad out the mess with boilerplate.

Yet, if you wrote what you were thinking, then conscientiously read back what you were thinking, your thinking and writing would evolve. If you did this for several drafts, I guarantee your assertions or arguments would shape up nicely.

But that rarely happens, with the excuse, “I don’t have time.”

I don’t think it’s a time problem; I think it’s a belief problem. There aren’t enough people in leadership that believe writing impacts business success one way or the other.

Dear Reader, what about you? Do you believe that the ability to write well is a competitive advantage while poor writing equals lost opportunities and profits?

If you believe it’s of minimal importance, then you might want to think about one of the most successful entrepreneurs and e-commerce pioneers in the world. He well understood the connection between writing and developing innovative ideas.

How Jeff Bezos Used An Old-Fashioned Method To Rule The World

When Jeff Bezos ran Amazon, he did away with PowerPoint as the tool to talk about ideas. Instead, he installed a practice whereby his leadership team had to write a six-page narrative memo before they turned up to meetings. Writing complete sentences and paragraphs forced his people to think more critically about their ideas, chew over them longer, and hone their rationales. Jeff Bezos has cited this as a reason for Amazon’s success.

It makes me wonder if we could apply this writing process in B2B IT? Instead of the usual sales pipeline meetings, we could ask salespeople to turn in a six-page narrative about their opportunities. (Humour me). What about the technical team on a bid? What if, after several days spent whiteboarding, they handed over a six-page, thoughtfully articulated and well-edited memo, precisely describing the what, how, when and why?

I can only dream.

Writing Helps Exercise Your Executive Function

Writing things down also helps us better manage our behaviour or assess future actions.

One of the most important cognitive processes in business is risk assessment. If we act without proper analysis, we stand to lose a lot of money.

When it comes to assessing risk, writing it down helps to answer better: “Should we go this way to expand our territory or that way?” It also helps us better assess the risk to a client when proposing something new. We don’t want to lead them in a direction that will break their business.

And that’s why ideas that are only spoken mean little as they tend to float in the air and disappear into the ether. But writing grounds our words, especially narrative writing. When we see our thoughts on a page, we suddenly notice the weakness of our logic or the lack of our understanding.

Something Else: Writing Is Better Than Taking Drugs

People take all sorts of drugs to help them feel better or think better. Less of that and more of writing things down. Benefits include:

• Improved memory and ability to learn. Do you like taking notes by hand in meetings or when attending training? I do and have since discovered that when you take notes by hand, it improves knowledge retention. Hopefully, you have better handwriting than me. I sometimes struggle to read it back, but I figure out the scribbles with my memory. :)
• Better concentration and focus: Feeling distracted? Do a writing exercise. Pick a word representing the theme of whatever it is you’re supposed to write about and start freewriting, which is when you write whatever thoughts come to you without stopping to fix grammar or assess the narrative structure. Keep at it, and you’ll notice your mind will snap to attention and begin to give you lots of ideas to play with. Just don’t hand that in as a finished piece to the reader! Freewriting gets your neurons firing; it takes a lot more to get them wiring.
• Improved emotional state: Feeling anxious and stressed? While some of the research is not definitive, writing is used a lot in therapy and can help you de-stress. Here’s the thing though, try to write about the positives of the negative experience: what you learnt. Or write about your negative experience in the third person, as though it happened to someone else. Doing it this way will help improve your mood.

Conclusion

Want to be the saviour, navigator, disrupter, or interrupter in the new, post-COVID world of B2B IT? You can’t just talk a good game; you have to know how to access the full scope of your creativity and analytical reasoning. And the best way to tap into the amazing power of your brain is through writing practise.

Do you have an inkling of a possibly good idea? Check your thinking by writing a six-page memo to yourself. Read through it slowly. If you’re not an ego-maniac, you’ll poke holes in it, so keep writing and editing. Eventually, a pure seed of an idea will form itself on the page. Test it with others and continue writing until the seed sprouts, grows and comes into full bloom. It might not be perfect, but it might just be brilliant.?

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This article was originally published on the now-retired relatable.IT blog.

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