Recently on LinkedIn, a post by my dear friend Alex Barker (previous podcast guest on WhatComesNextLive here) brought up the quote from Audre Lorde:
“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”
Alex then went on to say:
There is a great temptation when you’re presenting to hide behind facts and data, but an informed audience will have probably read or heard them elsewhere (and the informed audience is what we’re afraid of..). In fact, hearing rinsed and repeated stats from HBR or the like, is quite boring.
What we actually crave, is what’s real.
Yes! As my late mentor Ed Percival would always say “Never make a point without telling a story”, and, as Alex highlights, make it real!
A little while before reading that post from Alex, I heard something which was a new way of making me feel that idea. I then shared this with Alex:
I’ve often said, “there is no such thing as an original idea” (at most iterations and evolutions of existing ones) but there are indeed new ways of making them felt. Totally!
As an example, recently I met with a client who is a very senior leader and a woman in an industry dominated by men. Their company is growing fast, though are still a “chalenger” brand in their industry. I then reflected to them that, in order to compete with the larger brands, they have to be better than the bigger competitors.
I went on to draw a parallel to their career as a woman leader and said “you must have had to be twice as good in order to progress simply because you are a woman?”.
She paused, then said, calmly and matter of factly: “twenty times”
Gulp. I felt the barriers of gender bias in a new way in that moment.
What you have to say may not be a new idea, but you can always find a new way to make it felt.