How to Write More Effective CME Content through Conscious Communication
Want to create more impactful CME content? Learn how to speak directly to your audience’s needs and pain points
As a CME writer, being great at your craft goes beyond simply speaking to your audience’s interests, sharing facts and information, or even presenting new ideas and concepts in an easily digestible way. To form strong, impactful connections with your audience through the written word, you have to understand how they feel and speak to their emotions.
Developing your conscious communication skills can help. In this article, I share some strategies that will help medical writers like you improve your conscious communication skills and optimize your CME/CEHP writing.
Special thanks to Crystal Herron, Founder of Redwood Ink for sharing her insights on conscious communication in CME content on episode 36 of the Write Medicine podcast, which formed the basis for this article.
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Communicate Openly and Build Relationships with CME Clients
Open and clear communication is one of the cornerstones of a strong relationship. This applies to the relationships between medical writers and their clients and stakeholders too. To be successful as CME writers, we need to implement processes that encourage open communication and relationship-building with our clients.
As a CME writer, you may thrive when you are working in isolation. And yet, whether you are in-house or a freelancer, you are a service provider who needs to create a positive experience for your clients. Engaging and interacting with your clients and stakeholders regularly will help build deeper relationships with them.
Relationship building also allows you to take your writing to the next level. When you foster relationships with your clients, you learn more about their concerns and can tailor your content to their needs.
How you communicate is just as important. You are likely excellent at the written word. Yet, in client relationships, it’s important to prioritize verbal communication to build rapport and deliver a high level of service.
By taking the time and investing effort in nurturing client relationships through open and consistent communication, you will set yourself up for long-term success.
Additional Resources:
Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White
15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp
Manage Emotions in Your CME Writing
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
These words of wisdom apply to CME writing too. One of the important skills you can cultivate as a CME writer is awareness of how readers’ emotions shape their response and reception to the written word.
You can do this by writing with clarity and practicing conscious communication. Very rarely would you be with the reader as they are reading your writing. This means that you will not be able to assess their facial expressions and reactions, nor will you be able to offer clarifications or explain certain points further. As such, your CME/CEHP content needs to be well-presented, precise, and thoroughly explained.
Medical writing tends to be very factual and information-driven, and it can be tempting to avoid any emotional input. However, your readers have feelings and health professionals often work in high-pressure, acute, stressful clinical settings. Being mindful of the emotions your reader may be experiencing can help you prune extraneous content from your work.
This is also sound advice to carry into interactions with your clients and colleagues. When you are aware of how the other party may be feeling or what they might be thinking, you can approach those interactions with more ease and confidence to create better outcomes for everyone involved.
Additional Resources:
Cultivate an Audience-First Mindset When Practicing Conscious Communication
Being able to understand your readers’ emotions and convey the right tone in your writing starts with adopting an audience-focused mindset. Two simple approaches can help you cultivate an audience mindset to guide your CME writing.
Learn as much as you can about your audience. It is important to know who they are, what their experience is, what knowledge they have, and how they are feeling to be able to write in a way that connects with them. Medical or clinical memoirs, like Jay Baruch’s Tornado of Life: A doctor's journey through constraints and creativity in the ER, are a great way to learn about the messy, challenging experience of working as a healthcare professional. Keep in mind that it is often insufficient to merely read books or consume information from other sources about your audience.
To truly gain insights into their perspectives, attitudes, and even mental and emotional states, you must work closely with people in your audience. Interact with your audience to cultivate an audience mindset in medical writing.
Interview faculty.
Ask your clients or faculty to read your work and give feedback.
You can also ask them questions about specific words you use or language challenges that learners may have in understanding the CME/CHEP content you are creating.
Over time, you will develop a stronger knowledge base about how to write in a way that connects with clinicians. If you have clinical experience and worked in a healthcare setting in the past, you may be ahead of the game here.
Be mindful of writing CME/CEHP content based on the assumption that your audience knows as much as you do about your topic. As an expert in continuing education writing and as someone familiar with adult learning principles, you have a deep understanding of what clinicians need to know about the subject material. But in your writing, don’t assume that your readers will understand the jargon, technical terms, or even specialized concepts associated with the subject you are writing about. Keeping this in mind will help you to write more helpful and empathetic CME content.
Develop Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation in Your Medical Writing
One of the key elements of conscious communication that medical writers often overlook is having self-awareness and being able to self-regulate emotions in their work.
When we have self-awareness, we can better reflect on our mindset and how that impacts our thoughts, behaviors, and actions. We can also have more empathy for others and how their mindset might affect them, which we can harness in our writing as well as conscious communication with clients and stakeholders.
For better self-regulation, there are a variety of useful techniques.
✔️ Meditation is a powerful tool in helping quiet the mind and giving the brain time to process all the information we are inundated with in our fast-paced world.
✔️ Journaling is another technique that encourages reflection and aids in self-awareness and self-regulation. Some journaling options writers have found to be effective are Morning Pages and Five Minute Journal.
Additional Resources:
Let Go of Your Ego
As CME writers, we invest a lot of time and energy in our writing and take pride in our work. That’s why it can feel like a huge bruise to our egos and a personal affront when a client or stakeholder gives us critical feedback. I know this from experience! Releasing your ego is an important skill to cultivate if you want to build a long-lasting career as a medical writer.
When working with editors, it can be disheartening or demoralizing when your work comes back with changes and edits. You may feel like you are not a good writer but oftentimes, this is not true. Let go of the desire to be correct and release your attachment to your work. When you receive feedback willingly instead of holding onto your ego, you will be able to make improvements and create stronger relationships with clients.
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