Talk It Out

How often do you get stuck on a problem and simply can’t figure out a solution? Whether you’re trying to create the perfect speech title or come up with a creative way to entice guests to visit your club, it’s vital to get out of your head. How can you get unstuck? It may be as simple as grabbing a rubber duck. No, you don’t need to jump in the bathtub (though that might help too!), you just need a friendly face to speak to.

When we’re forced to verbalize a problem, the solution suddenly becomes obvious. This practice is called rubber duck debugging, or rubberducking, and it comes from Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’ 1999 book, The Pragmatic Programmer. Here’s their explanation of the tactic:

A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. The other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck bobbing up and down in a bathtub). They do not need to say a word; the simple act of explaining, step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself.

In a footnote, the authors explain that they named the practice after a colleague who kept a little yellow rubber duck on their desk for this very purpose.

While this framework is useful for programmers, it’s a tool that all of us can use in our work—especially when we’re writing a presentation, developing a proposal, or designing a new app.

When writing a speech, we often start by literally writing. But speeches are primarily spoken and heard. What looks pretty on paper doesn’t really matter—your speech in Toastmasters or beyond is only effective if it performs in the venue where it’s being delivered. You must work through it out loud, at full volume to a friend, a mirror, or a stuffed animal. By speaking out loud to a supportive “audience,” you can hear where an idea doesn’t translate clearly or workshop a stronger transition that wasn’t coming across smoothly.

Rubberducking is a one-way form of what I call in my book, Simply Put, the “Enlightened Idiot”—a practice of developing empathy with our audience by getting out of our own heads. When we break out of our echo chambers, we can often see things that are otherwise easily overlooked. Hearing your words and ideas when speaking to your rubber duck can allow you to catch an idea that might resonate with your audience better when explained differently and therefore, improves your speech before you take it to the live audience.

When communicating, in a speech or otherwise, we must always remember one thing: We’re not the audience. They live different lives, they know different things, and they want to achieve different goals. What makes sense to us doesn’t always make sense to them.

We’re all biased, and we have to accept that reality to address it. Our insider perspectives and knowledge, if not accounted for, will prevent us from getting our message across. We need to get out of our own way.

Writing about writing, prolific author and marketer Seth Godin says, “No one ever gets talker’s block.” Writer’s block is a problem for many, but we talk every day and never get stuck. Why? He answers, “We get better at talking precisely because we talk.”

Researchers have widely supported the idea that engaging in explanation or teaching doesn’t just benefit your audience but can lead to a better understanding of the material by you, the one doing the explaining or teaching. Dubbed the “protégé effect,” this strategy has now been used in classrooms around the world to improve academic outcomes, and it can be used in your work to become a more effective communicator.

If your work is stiff, take it off the page and talk it out. Talk to yourself in the shower, talk to your spouse over breakfast, or, best yet, talk to somebody who’s close to your audience. By virtue of thousands of daily reps, your talking muscle is probably a lot stronger than your writing one, so use it.

Even if it is just to a rubber duck.

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