How to brilliantly articulate your thoughts

A practical guide for everyday use

I was in a meeting a few years ago to pitch our edtech training program for teachers in my community. I knew what I was supposed to say. But when I opened my mouth, what came out was this rambling mess of half-thoughts and borrowed technical jargon. I sounded like every other tech nerd who'd never thought through what they were saying.

On my way home, I realized that I think better than I speak. Way better. And that gap is costing me in credibility, in influence, in my ability to contribute something meaningful to conversations that matter.

Most of us live in this gap. We have rich inner worlds full of nuanced thoughts and genuine insights, but when we try to express them, they come out flat. Like something we've heard a thousand times before.

The problem is that we've never learned how to bridge the space between thinking and speaking.

In this article, I’ll show you the methods I use to not just think clearly but also effectively communicate what you’re thinking.

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This piece draws heavily from Joseph Tsar's thoughtful video "How to Brilliantly Articulate Your Opinions." After reading this article, watch the video for even more insights:

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Starting with the Mess

Every good thought starts as a bad thought. That initial reaction you have to something is not your opinion yet. That's just your brain doing what brains do: reacting emotionally, making quick associations, pulling up whatever feels relevant from your mental database.

Joseph Tsar calls this the "gut feeling or fuzzy thought", and I love that he normalises it. Most people try to skip this stage. They feel something vague and immediately start trying to articulate it as if it's already fully formed.

That's backwards. The fuzzy stage is where the real work begins.

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 about how your mind works, what you value, what patterns you've learned to recognize. But it's not ready for public consumption yet.

The Art of Self-Interrogation

This is where most people stop, and it's where the interesting work begins. 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?

I started doing this obsessively after watching his video, and it was humbling. Half my opinions dissolved under gentle questioning. Not because they were wrong, but because they weren't really mine.

Take something I used to say all the time: "Authenticity is the most important thing in leadership". Sounds good, right? But when I interrogated it, I realized I had no idea what I meant by ‘authenticity’.

• Was I talking about emotional honesty?

• Consistency between values and actions?

• Not pretending to know things you don't know?

Turns out I was just repeating something that sounded wise without ever figuring out what wisdom it contained.

The interrogation process is finding out what's there underneath all the assumptions and borrowed language. It's archaeology, not demolition.

Your Value Prism

This might be Tsar's most useful concept. Everything you think gets filtered through your core values, but most people have never identified what those values are. They just absorb whatever value system is floating around their environment and call it their own.

Tsar lists a few possibilities: simplicity, originality, truth, experience, gratitude. But the specific values matter less than the awareness that you have them.

I think one of my filters is something like "practical wisdom". I'm constantly asking whether an idea actually helps someone live better or work better, or think better. That often shapes what I say. When I ignore that filter and try to sound smart instead of useful, my thinking gets muddy.

Your value prism is like your intellectual fingerprint. It's what makes your perspective uniquely yours. But you can't use it if you don't know what it is.

The test Tsar suggests is brilliant: when you're forming an opinion, ask yourself, "Does this feel like me?". Not "Will this impress people?" but "Does this sound like something I would think/say?"

Most people say things that sound like their Twitter feed or their business school textbook, or their favourite podcast. They're speaking in someone else's voice and wondering why it doesn't feel authentic.

The Secondhand Thought Trap

Tsar warns against parroting ideas from books, articles, or conversations without digesting them first. He calls them "secondhand thoughts", and once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere.

Usually, I'd read something interesting and immediately start incorporating it into my conversations as if I'd come up with it myself. Not consciously. I wasn't trying to plagiarise. I just hadn't learned the difference between consuming an idea and owning it.

The difference is personal engagement. When you own an idea, you've tested it against your experience. You've found the places where it works and where it breaks down. You've made it yours by running it through your actual life.

Borrowed ideas feel hollow because THEY ARE hollow. They haven't been tempered by your judgment or enriched by your experience. They're just intellectual hand-me-downs.

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. Man only speaks if they neatly correspond to language."

What he meant is that when we use borrowed thoughts and conventional phrases, we're being expressed by the collective vocabulary of our culture.

I’m not saying you should escape language entirely. But develop a more conscious relationship with it. Choose your words rather than letting your words choose you.

Power of Not Knowing

Tsar makes a point that completely shifted how I think about conversations: "I don't know" can be the most articulate thing you say.

We live in a culture that punishes intellectual humility. Everyone's supposed to have an opinion about everything. Uncertainty feels like weakness.

But think about the people whose opinions you really respect. They're not the ones who have something to say about every topic. They're the ones who are thoughtful about when to speak and when to stay quiet.

When someone says "I don't know" and means it, when they're not just buying time to think of something clever, it changes the entire dynamic. It creates space for real thinking instead of intellectual performance.

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.

Making It Automatic

All of this is useless without practice. Tsar talks about training articulation like a skill, and his method is simple: write, speak aloud, argue with yourself, record and replay your thoughts.

The more output, the faster the refinement.

His "essence writing" technique is particularly good.

• Take something you're thinking about and write 200 words.

• Then compress it to 100.

• Then 50.

• Then speak it out loud until it flows naturally.

This forces you to figure out what you're really trying to say. Most of us use too many words because we haven't done the work of finding the key point. We're trying to think and communicate at the same time, which means we do both poorly.

I've started doing a version of this whenever I'm preparing for an important conversation. I'll write out my messy first thoughts, then keep distilling until I find the core of what I'm trying to express.

Usually, what survives that process is worth saying. What doesn't survive usually wasn't worth thinking about in the first place.

In a nutshell

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.

But the real change is internal. You stop living in the gap between what you think and what you say. You start showing up as who you actually are instead of who you think you should be.

When you learn to articulate your thoughts clearly, you're becoming more conscious. You're developing what philosophers call "reflective awareness", the ability to observe your own mental processes and guide them intentionally.

Learning to articulate well forces you to wake up. It demands that you become conscious of what you're thinking, feeling, and believing. It requires you to take ownership of your mental life instead of just being a passenger in it.

When you can speak clearly, you can think clearly. When you can think clearly, you can choose consciously. And when you can choose consciously, you become free in a way that most people never experience.

The ability to articulate your thoughts brilliantly is a path to consciousness itself.

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Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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