Five Common Communication Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

This is a guest post by my friend Matt Abrahams, host of the Think Fast Talk Smart podcast and lecturer of Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Give him a listen here.

We’ve all suffered through disengaging, ineffective presentations and meetings that felt endless—dull slides, rambling points, and little-to-no impact. Most speakers fall into the same traps again and again. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With just a few simple shifts, you can transform any presentation you give or meeting you run into something engaging, memorable, and productive. Here are five practical fixes that will elevate your communication and help your message truly land.

1. Starting

The most precious commodity in today’s world is not gold or cryptocurrency, but attention. We are all inundated with a tremendous amount of information every day, all vying for our focus.

Why then would so many people squander away an opportunity to gain attention by starting presentations or meetings with: “Hi, my name is … and today I am going to talk about …”

Not only does this lack originality and intrigue, it’s downright silly since most speakers are standing in front of a slide displaying their name and the title of their talk.

Rather than start on a routine, boring note, kick off your presentation like a James Bond movie—with action. You can tell a story, take a poll, ask a provocative question, or show a video. Starting in this manner captures your audience’s focus and pulls them away from other thoughts, people, or devices.

2. Ending

Psychology teaches us that people tend to remember best what we hear first and last rather than what comes in the middle (also known as the primacy and recency effects).

You would expect that speakers would dedicate more time to how they conclude their talks and meetings. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Instead, common wrap-ups go something like, “I guess we’re out of time and someone needs our conference room.” This is such a missed opportunity!

Mindfully plan out and practice how you’d like your presentation or meeting to conclude. A great way to end is first to express gratitude, such as “Thank you for your time” or “I appreciate your attention to this.”

Next, simply state your communication goal, or what you want your audience to know, feel, and do as a result of your content. Be concise and clear because you likely won’t have a lot of time. Once you signal you’re winding down (e.g., “In conclusion”), your audience disengages and begins to focus on what’s coming next.

3. Transitioning

In college, I was a tour guide for prospective students. During training, they told me that, above all else, good tour guides never lose their groups. I like to think that the same standard exists for presenters and meeting facilitators: Never lose your audience.

The weakest link in any tour or presentation often occurs during periods of transition—when moving from one place/portion/topic to the next.

This is when you might lose someone to their phones or friends because people are most likely to get lost, distracted, or confused during change. Thus, you must spend time planning and practicing robust transitions that go beyond “next” and “so.”

In any typical business communication, several potential transition points must be bridged successfully:

Moving between points in your talk or meeting
Entering and exiting slides
Going from presentation into Q&A
Switching from one presenter to another

A successful transition includes a concrete wrap-up or takeaway of the prior topic/slide/person that then bridges to the next topic/slide/person.

These transitions can be statements (e.g., “With a clear understanding of the current problem, we can now address one way to solve it”) or questions (e.g., “With a problem as substantial as this, how can we best solve it?”).

4. Hedging

Too many leaders today negatively impact their credibility through their word choices. “I think we should sort of enter this new market.” Hedges are these phrases—I think, kind of, sort of, maybe—that litter much of our communication.

Repeated use of this language can damage your perceived competence, softening your assertiveness, reducing your clarity, and making you seem wishy-washy and unsure of what you’re saying.

The best way to address hedging is through substitution. Find stronger, more powerful words to replace these less assertive ones. For example, “I think” becomes “I believe” or “I know.” “Kind of” and “sort of” can be replaced with “one way.”

Finding more assertive substitutions allows you to make your point more clearly and definitively. However, before you can substitute, you must first become aware of your hedging language. Thankfully, apps such as Orai, LikeSo, Ummo, Ambit, and VoiceVibes can provide helpful, personalized feedback on your language use, along with pacing, pauses, variation, and tone.

5. Memorizing

We all fear standing in front of a group during a high-stakes presentation and forgetting what to say next. Many people try to address this ubiquitous fear by memorizing their content. Unfortunately, memorizing often increases the likelihood of blanking out. How do you escape this fate? Simply put: Avoid memorizing.

If you commit your script to memory, you create the “right” way to speak your content. This approach only increases the pressure you feel because you want to say things precisely the way you previously memorized.

This pressure increases the likelihood of making a mistake due to increased cognitive load. Also, speaking to your audience “through” your script causes you to be less connected and engaging, hampering your ability to adjust and adapt to the room’s needs.

The key to remembering your presentation while remaining connected and engaged is to create a comprehensive outline of your content. Outlines allow you to tweak on the fly based on how you feel and how the audience responds. This flexibility reduces the likelihood of blanking out when compared to the more rigid memorizing approach.

Take the time to thoughtfully apply an audience-centric structure to your presentation content, such as:

Traditional outline: Leverage an indented, hierarchical listing of your points. Provide key phrases or words.
Question-based outline: List questions that spark specific answers in the order you intend to cover your content.
Illustrated/picture-based outline: Graphically map out your ideas using icons, pictures, and words.

Practice your presentation from your outline and allow yourself permission to change it up; your wording doesn’t have to be the same each time. A structured outline provides a map for both you and your audience. With that map in hand, it’s hard to get lost.

Strong communication isn’t about perfect slides or memorized scripts—it’s about clarity, confidence, and connection. So, before your next meeting or presentation, revisit this list.

Choose one improvement to focus on, practice it, and watch how your audience responds. Step by step, you’ll transform not just your communication, but the way people experience and remember you as a leader.

ON THE SHOW

How to Speak as a CEO So People Actually Listen

I do a weekly show to help you become a top 1% communicator. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Youtube.

As a leader, it’s hard to sound truly authentic – to be real, relatable, and trusted. Some messages may come across as too corporate, others as too casual.

The result is the same: there’s a gap between what you want to say and what your people hear.

To close that gap, I’m joined by David Shelley, CEO of Hachette Book Group, one of the biggest names in global publishing, with more than 220 million books sold annually.

He’s raw, real, and incredibly believable – and he shows us what authentic leadership communication sounds like at scale.

Give Matt a listen here:

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Geeks Do it Better – When They Open Up

McAfee’s point: the biggest revolution in business today isn’t what you make. It’s how you make it.

And the companies that thrive are the ones that open up – information, decision-making, communication.

The “Geek Way” is not just a special kind of company culture, but a complete operating system for businesses. It rests on:

Science = not gut feelings but evidence and experimentation.
Ownership = truly empowering people, cutting chains of command, making every team accountable.
Speed = not just moving fast, but iterating, learning quickly.
Openness = sharing, debating, making information common knowledge.

Let’s double-click on openness, which is all about communication: