What exactly makes a description unpicturable?
A description becomes unpicturable when it names a category of improvement without naming what changes. "Helping teams have strategic conversations" describes real work and leaves the listener with no image, because a strategic conversation could be almost anything and lead almost anywhere. That's the level most consultants answer on when somebody asks what they do.
Compare two descriptions of similar work:
| Nothing to picture | Something to picture |
|---|
| Helping leaders build happier workplaces through mediation and manager training | I help leaders develop an unshakeable core to navigate change with more ease |
| Coaching leaders to achieve goals for greater impact | I help unfulfilled high achievers find work they love |
| A diagnostic process that gets you where you want to go | Never worry again if your US expat taxes are done right |
The right column works because a listener can feel it for a second. My favorite version of this isn't from consulting at all: a construction site near my house has a sign saying their number one priority is to send workers home safe to their families. They could have written that safety is their priority. They wrote the thing you can see.
That's the test. Can somebody rehearse it, even for a split second? If they have to do any assembling to get there, they won't do it.
Which words should I stop using?
Six words do the most damage, and they're the ones that feel most professional: thrive, accelerate, impact, success, growth, and transform. Each names a concept and no end state, which is why I keep them in word jail.
The problem isn't that they're vague. It's that they require your listener to supply the content. "I help companies accelerate growth" asks them to decide what growth means, how much, and by when, and a busy person declines that work without noticing.
The same trap has a corporate-speak version:
- Marketing language: helping teams thrive to build profitable business growth.
- Aspirational language: break through their blocks to gain clarity in their soul's purpose.
- Over-reach: our number one goal is to help you restore your world.
That last one costs you credibility. Go far enough past what you can plausibly deliver and a reader stops believing you at all.
The fix is the same in every case: say it the way your clients would say it. If you wouldn't use the phrase standing in a grocery store line, it doesn't belong in your description.
Here are the steps to find your own:
- Paste your description into a blank document and read it out loud.
- Circle every noun that names no visible thing, starting with anything ending in -tion, -ment or -ity.
- Replace each one with what would physically be different for your client, and keep whichever version you'd say to a friend.
Does listing several outcomes help or hurt?
Listing several outcomes hurts, because a list asks a listener to work out which item matters and a single clear end state doesn't. This is the trap I see most in consultants who are good at a lot of things.
A real example of the shape: "I help business owners define what they do, focus their niche, find words with confidence and attract clients." Every item on that list is accurate. Together they read as a menu, and a menu is something you skim.
What to do with the other items
- Pick the one your clients name most often. That's the one to lead with, and it's usually the one they said out loud in your last three calls.
- Keep the rest for later in the conversation, where they become evidence of range and stop competing for attention.
- Use one of them as proof, never as the headline. "I did this by doing X" reads well; "I do X, Y and Z" does not.
The alternative is what I call the side door: go straight to what clients say they want, in their own words. Ask what a win physically looks like for them, and use their answer. Building the sentence deliberately usually comes down to one question like that one.
Is my jargon really the problem, or is my work just complicated?
Your jargon is a bigger factor than the complexity of your work, and there's research on it worth knowing about. Complicated work can be described plainly. Plain descriptions of complicated work are what expertise sounds like from outside.
Hillary Shulman and Olivia Bullock ran an experiment with 393 US participants across three topics and measured what jargon did to comprehension and persuasion. The pattern split by how urgent the topic felt:
| How urgent the topic felt | What jargon did |
|---|
| Low urgency (flood risk) | Significantly harder to process, and less persuasive |
| Control (emergency policy) | Significantly harder to process, and less persuasive |
| High urgency (a live pandemic) | No measurable effect |
Their explanation is that motivated readers push through language difficulty, because they're focused on the substance rather than on how the sentence feels.
Read that against your own situation. In a first conversation your listener is almost never at maximum urgency, which is exactly the condition where jargon cost both comprehension and persuasion. Their caveats are worth carrying: one message set per topic, an online participant pool, and the authors calling for replication.
There's a related reason you can't see your own jargon. You can't read the label from inside the bottle. The words that lost your listener are the words that stopped registering as words to you years ago, which is why describing the problem in your client's language is the reliable way out and self-editing is not.
Leah's take
I want to be careful here, because this is one of those problems where the cause looks like a personal failing and it isn't.
The language that makes eyes glaze over is, almost always, the language somebody was trained to use. In corporate, abstraction was safety. Saying "we drove impact across the portfolio" got you through a review; saying "we got 200 more people to renew" invited questions about the other numbers. You were rewarded for words that couldn't be checked, for years, and then you left and started a business where the same words cost you clients.
So the fix isn't to be more interesting. It's to be more specific, which feels riskier and is the opposite of risky. Concrete claims are the ones people believe.
One more thing about the glazed look itself. It's information, and it isn't a judgment. Somebody's face going neutral while you talk is the cheapest feedback you will ever get about your messaging, and it arrives free, in real time. Most consultants respond by talking more. Write down what you'd said in the ten seconds before the face changed, and you'll usually find the abstract noun sitting right there.
