Take Home the Aha!
One of the catch-phrases at seminars is The take home message is…
Giving your audience a pithy "take home" message is good public speaking. It can be a memorable way to summarize an idea, merge ideas with action, or put a complex idea in terms everyone remembers after the seminar. The take home message is the punctuation at the end of the speaker's communication. Example: no magic bullet.
But does it change thinking?
The "Aha!" moment does that. This happens when material is presented in a way that suddenly makes a new idea obvious. Recently, for example, I attended an all-day customer service training session that in part reviewed survey data. Two answers to a question about recommending the hospital to family and friends were Probably Yes and Definitely Yes. Suddenly, I understood those answers in personal terms: Would I go back to see Doctor X? is quite different than Would I send my child to see Doctor X? My standards for loved ones are much higher.
Aha! As service providers we want the answer to be Definitely Yes, because then our service meets that higher standard. For me, that was the valuable message of the day, my "Aha!" moment.
An article in The New York Times suggests that "Aha!" moments are not sudden bursts of light in our consciousness but "a slow process of accretion." We often focus on the magic bullet of insight without realizing it was made possible by hard work over time. And so I realized the above thanks to all the recent training in customer service.
This doesn't only happen at seminars. It happens on the bench, too, when years of work and study "suddenly" lets you connect the dots in performing tests and you understand how to relate results to each other, what the doctor is looking for, or how it impacts the patient. "Aha!" moments may be rare, but they are the real take home message.