Communication Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Rebecca Okamoto
Thank you very much, Pete. Super great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. And you have a bit of a claim to fame. You are known as the 20-word person. What on earth does that mean?

Rebecca Okamoto
It means that I teach people how to introduce, market, and promote themselves in 20 words or less.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I didn’t count those words, but it feels like you just did that to us right now.

Rebecca Okamoto
I did. It was less than 20 words. Trust me on that.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Okay. Well, I mean, that sounds catchy. But, Rebecca, tell us why is this an important skill? Why does it matter?

Rebecca Okamoto
Well, I think it matters because we live in a multitasking, attention-deficit, highly-distracted environment right now, and introducing yourself is super important and making a great first impression, I think everyone knows, is important. But in this day and age, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, what a great fit you are, how much value you add, if no one’s paying attention. So, you have to be able to grab people’s attention in as few as 20 words.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you maybe tell us a story of what’s the impact of being able to do that versus not do that? Have you seen sort of any cool dramatic before-after transformations when people really master this skill?

Rebecca Okamoto
So I had a client who really struggled with explaining what made her unique. So, the reason why she came to me was to say, “I know people’s eyes are glazing over, I know I’m going into the weeds, and I just can’t explain what makes me unique, and I can’t stop myself.” So, we just worked on how to introduce yourself in 20 words.

So, I don’t know, a couple months later, she writes to me, and she says, “Oh, my gosh, I was at a networking event. Everybody went around the room and introduced themselves. I went the 20-word route.” Afterwards, some CEO comes up to her and says, “Man, you really stood out compared to everybody else. I’d like to talk about opportunities to work together.” Two weeks later, they’re meeting in New York to discuss those opportunities.

So, she went from zero opportunities and people saying no and, “I don’t understand,” to, “My gosh, everybody gets the value.” The thing that she loved was, “People get the story I’m trying to tell.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, so tell us, can we maybe hear a demonstration of what’s a typical, “Oh, so tell me about yourself,” or, “So, who are you or what are you about?” So, people give you that invitation, the prompt, like, “Do the thing now.” And what’s sort of a typical answer versus an optimized Rebecca-style 20-word or less answer?

Rebecca Okamoto
I think most people try to explain all of their qualifications and experiences, “So, I’m a 20-year supply chain professional, and I worked for Procter & Gamble for 15 of those years. And I worked in Singapore. I worked in New York. I worked in all these different locations. And I managed many, many, many people, and I started a plant.”

So, what people end up doing is they just talk about themselves. And, in my case, when I used to do it, I would go on for like three minutes, thinking that was an optimized pitch.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I remember. I remember the corporate days. I’ve been sort of on my own for a long time here, but I recall many meetings where like, “Hey, we’re doing a kickoff. It’s an interdisciplinary team with representatives from different functions and business units, and we’re getting together.” And so, we all go around and say the thing.

I remember finding that so boring, and maybe it’s like, “Oh, maybe I’m just selfish because I don’t care about what these people are saying to me right now.” But, Rebecca, you’re making me feel comforted that it sounds like this is the default way people feel when they hear most people’s introductions.

Rebecca Okamoto
It is. And I used to go, I had large organizations when I worked for a large corporation, and people go around the room like that, and I’d have to say, “Thank you,” because the first person goes on for 10 seconds and the next person does 20, and then 30, and then 50, and then two minutes, and all the time gets sucked up, and I still didn’t know what anybody did.

But if you say something more like, “Well, I help organizations struggling with transformations engage and embrace change with excellence,” so really helping people understand the value that you bring or the difference that you bring.

A really simple example I typically tell people is you’ll say something like, “I’m an award-winning bestselling author,” which is I describe myself. These are my accomplishments. But it leaves the listener to kind of guess, “What does that mean for me?” But if you said, “I help new authors get published faster,” “Oh, I get what you do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Rebecca Okamoto
So, the reaction you’re trying to get instantly is someone saying, “Oh, that’s me,” or, “I know someone who needs that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as you say these things, I’m thinking, I see a lot of LinkedIn taglines that sound exactly like this. I’m imagining, in an interdisciplinary team assembling kickoff at a corporate environment, if you were to say that in that environment, they might want more. I mean, it’s intriguing.

Rebecca Okamoto
That’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s like, “Yeah, okay, but, like, so which department are you with? And what are you doing for us here in this team?” Do you expand upon that and sort of that’s your starter, and then you add in different contexts? Or, what’s the strategy?

Rebecca Okamoto
I think it depends on your environment. So, if you’re in a corporate setting and everyone’s just going around the room and the leader’s just sitting there, you don’t just, it’s just like, it’s just you one way. So, you just give a simple introduction, “So, I’m Rebecca. I’m from the Demand Planning Organization. And I tell stories with data that turn forecasts into actionable, profitable insights.”

So, now they know where you work, your name, and what you can do for them. Instead of, “I have 15 years with Procter & Gamble, and I did demand-planning, but before that I was a market planner. Before that I was in a plant. Before that I was an inventory planner.” That’s what people normally do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I wonder what’s behind that? Maybe just because that’s what we’ve seen. But, in other ways, it’s almost like, “This is my only opportunity.” It’s like a little bit sad in terms of like the human need, you know, for validation, for acknowledgement, for mattering and significance. It’s like, “This is my time that I get to share my career arc, journey, history, because most people don’t want to hear it. But now is my moment.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Yes, or, “I don’t know what else to say. I saw everyone else doing it,” or, you just think, “I’m hoping that you understand that this is impressive and I’m impressing you.” And what you learn, instead of trying to impress people, “I’m smart,” is trying to tell people, “Here’s what I can do for you.” They remember that. It’s like, “Oh, wow, she can help me, like, with insights or with profit.” You want to be remembered for that. Not with, “Well, she worked in a lot of places. She sounds smart.” And then forgettable.

Pete Mockaitis
“I hope you understand that I’m smart. That’s like, ‘I’m kind of a big deal,’” Anchorman style.

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, but, you know, I was someone in a corporate career who started off super timid and I longed to be recognized. So, when I had an opportunity, I was just like, “And I worked here and I worked here and I worked here,” and I just assumed they would know that made me valuable. It made me forgettable, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so now it’s not just a matter of thinking, “Okay, Rebecca said I should do it in 20 words, and word count 18. I guess I’m done.” You actually have a process or a sequence that you walk people through in order to land on a winning 20 words. Can you share that with us?

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, I will say the most important thing about your introduction is that you want the person on the other side to visualize that you can do something for them. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, we were just talking about that,” or, “Oh, I know someone who needs that.” Here’s a framework that I didn’t share, I don’t share a lot, but I tell people, “Just describe your audience really clearly.”

So, for instance, a friend of mine is an excellent executive coach, and she tells people, “I help high-potential leaders who find themselves in high-stress, high-stakes or no-win situations.” And people are like, “Oh!” And then she said the first time she did it, people are like, “Oh, my gosh, you have to meet so and so. She’s in a no-win situation.”

It makes it so clear, you just say, “Here’s who I help.” And if you’re vivid, “I help women over 50 rebrand and relaunch new meaningful careers.” “Oh, I know someone who’s just trying to relaunch their career.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Rebecca, what I really love about that is this is clicking for me because I recently listened to Dan Allison. He since moved on to new ventures, but he achieved great renown and fame amongst financial advisors as the guru who told them to crack the referral code, because financial advisors, they always want referrals. And this guy figured out in great detailed studies what leads clients to refer and not refer and some of the key things.

And that was one of the big ah-has, is that, from a financial advisor’s perspective, it’s like, “Who do we help?” It’s like, “Well, anybody who’s got $2 million in investable assets.” It’s like, “But that’s not very helpful in terms of being referable on the client side,” because like, “Well, I don’t know how much assets my brother-in-law has. That feels rude to ask.”

But if you describe that audience very clearly, such as, “I help doctors and lawyers in their 50s figure out how to make their money work for them,” or something like that. It’s like, “Oh, I know a doctor, a lawyer, in his 50s and he actually seemed to have some questions about how to make his money work for him.” So, now all of a sudden, it’s become super-duper clear, “Oh, you two perhaps need to know each other.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Right. I work with a lot of law firms, and some of the law firms are like, “Well, okay,” or they’re lobbyists and they say, “Well, it’s not good to say you’re a lobbyist.” And I said, “Well, can’t you say something like, ‘Well, I help companies who suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the national conversation’?”

So, like you’re the ship that just ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and you suddenly find yourself on the wrong side of that equation, like, “Oh, yeah,” you can describe your audience’s problem. So, that’s one way.

Pete Mockaitis
“I help corporations rewrite the rules so they make more money.” That’s, like, that feels a little off-putting to most. Although if you run a corporation who wants the rules rewritten to make more money, then you would like to be talking to that lobbyist, I guess.

Rebecca Okamoto
Well, I think you want to say it in whatever they’re looking for or saying, but I normally say, “Like, I help my target audience achieve a benefit they desire.” That’s the easiest one. “And the benefit they desire is something that they say they want. So, I help worried job hunters confidently explain why they’re the ideal candidate to hire.”

So, I interviewed a lot of, when I started my career, like job hunters, and they always use the word worried, confident, not confident, and struggle. So, I decided, “I help worried job hunters confidently explain why they’re the ideal candidate to hire.” And people are like, “Oh, my sister is really struggling,” “Oh, my kid is really struggling.” They can identify. So, that’s a really effective way of introducing yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
It is really good. It reminds me of some kind of basic core principles associated with copywriting, is that, ideally, if you know the words people use, when you speak them, it’s like, “Oh, this guy is for me. That’s how I think about it. That’s what I’m looking for.” Even though you might use perfectly valid synonyms, but it’s like, “Well, that’s not what I…and I’m not sure if that’s for me or not.”

Like, I remember, one time I was doing a lot of Myers-Briggs trainings, and so, you know, I could call myself an MBTI practitioner because that’s what we call ourselves when we get certified. But most folks are just like, “Oh, what I want is someone to do a Myers-Briggs workshop for me.” It’s like, “Oh, well, I do Myers-Briggs workshops. So, then we got to talk.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Right, exactly. So, then if you’re talking to your peers, it’s different than talking to your executive, for instance. And when you’re pitching to them, you’re talking about, “What I can do to help you with your margin improvement.” But you might be telling your boss, “I can save you money.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good thought.

Rebecca Okamoto
So, your introduction changes depending on your audience and what they say.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rebecca, you make it sound so quick and easy. Is it so quick and easy or is there a bit more of a deep research process underlying the landing on these up to 20 words?

Rebecca Okamoto
It’s quick and easy now, but I will say that when I started, funny you should say copywriting, because I am obsessed. I’m not a copywriter. I’m a mechanical engineer.

But engineers like to figure out how things go together and I’m obsessed with the concept of copywriting. Because to me, they had to be persuasive with words. And how do you give a headline that grabs someone’s attention to get someone to want to click? So, I learned about persuasion is a journey and it’s about getting someone to want to know more. That’s how I designed my frameworks.

And then I always thought, “Well, what if you don’t have work experience? What if you’re my nephew and he’s just starting off work, and he doesn’t say, like, ‘I’ve done all these things and I can tell stories with data,’ what should he say?” And I go, “Maybe you should use your passion or your mission or your strengths.” But it’s all about getting someone to say, “Oh, tell me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like these rules of thumb. So, we want them to say, “Oh, tell me more.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. So, we want to clearly describe, “I help target audience get the outcome they want.” Any other rules of thumb or things you have in mind as you’re crafting these?

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, I would say think about your introduction answering the question, “What do you do? And how does it help me?” So, “I help my target audience achieve a benefit they desire.” Because a lot of people say, well, 20 words, they completely miss any of my frameworks, and they’re like, “Ask me to find your purple unicorn.” “What? What’s a purple unicorn? Like, why am I asking you that?”

Because they think it’s most important to think to be clever, “I’m a process architect and I help calm chaos and spread glitter.” And I’m like, “You spread glitter? I’m sorry, why do you spread glitter?”

Pete Mockaitis
“I got to clean that up! That’s going to be a hassle. I don’t want you to spread glitter.”

Rebecca Okamoto
But they’re trying to be clever. So, it’s like, “What do you do and how do you help me?” And I’m pretty sure people are not looking for some, “Well, in the context of process engineers spreading glitter.” So that’s the other thing to think about is be clear. You don’t have to be clever.

Pete Mockaitis
“You spread glitter in our manufacturing plant that’s going to be…”

Rebecca Okamoto
That’s a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
“…problematic for our processes, in fact.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I think that’s really good to think about it for in terms of their word choice and selection because “spread glitter” might be super resonant for you and, in a way, you know, a very lovely little motto or inspiration, you know, print up accessory for your office wall. Cool beans. But to share it with others who don’t have that same perspective is just going to fall flat.

Rebecca Okamoto
Right. Or, you could just say, “I solve your problem.” Someone from 2018, he came to one of my workshops, and he said, “I read your blog and I redid my entire introduction. It’s now in six words, ‘We make Salesforce easy to use.’” And he said, now, when he introduced himself, people would stop him and say, “Hey, Bob, come over here. This guy makes Salesforce easy to use.”

It was so easy for them to understand they were recruiting people for him and they were able to repeat his personal brand, and it’s six words. So, I tell people it’s not about 20. It’s about the fewest number of words that makes the person go, “I know who that is,” or, “I want that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. Well, Rebecca, it feels like you are a master of concision or a succinctness. It seems, like, understood. What else do we need to say about this matter?

Rebecca Okamoto
So, the first thing is, then, remember it’s about your audience not yourself, and don’t try to be clever, and then you have to practice. So, I have a lot of people tell me, “Oh, yeah, I’ve worked on my introduction. Wait, let me…It’s in my phone.” And I’m like, “Okay, that’s actually not going to work.” You have to memorize it and then you practice it, because you want the intonation to sound confident. You want to be able to say it anytime someone waves a microphone in front of you.

I’ve had people try to, like, sneak up me and say, “Introduce yourself” at a lunch thing and say, “Stand up and introduce yourself.” And I’m like, “That’s never going to be my problem because I’m always going to be able to introduce myself because I practice.” And first impressions really matter. So, I would say practice, practice and practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. To the point about practicing, we had a previous guest, Laura Sicola, on the show, and she made a phenomenal point, is that we know our names so well, or maybe anything that we know super well. We have a tendency to speak it super-duper fast.

And I think I’m guilty of this in my own podcast intro, like, “To check out the show notes, or the transcript, or the links to the items that we’ve referenced, go to awesometeourjob.com. So, I was like, “Okay, hold up. If it’s a new person, like, ‘Oh, what, what, what, what, what all is there? Huh?’” It’s, like, I have to continuously remind myself, and sometimes I fail here.

It’s to think about them hearing it for the first time. And she says, many of us were saying our names wrong, like, “I’m Pete Mockaitis.” Like, “What? What?” It’s like, “I’m Pete Mockaitis.” So, there’s the pause, and then the intonation movements, that the name itself is heard very clearly, which is actually a genuine risk because we know our names so well, we might spit it out too darn fast.

Rebecca Okamoto
Right. And people tend to go, like, “My name is Rebecca Okamoto?” Like, you’re asking a question, “You don’t know your name?” You’re not realizing that you’re just saying it so fast. Yeah, so I tell people record themselves. That’s what I do. I practice all the time to get that muscle memory, because introducing myself is important and I do it for a living. So, I do that.

And then I always say the last tip is test it out because it makes sense to you, but it may or may not make sense to someone else. So, a different executive coach, I was in a workshop with, and he said, “Oh, I have one. I help high-potential managers having problems right now.” And I’m like, “Well, what does that mean having problems right now? What kind of problems?”

And he said, “You don’t understand?” I’m like, “No, I don’t understand.” He goes, “Well, that’s because you don’t understand.

Pete Mockaitis
Health problems? Money problems? Marital problems?

Rebecca Okamoto
I know. Exactly. And I’m like, “I think it’s unclear.” And he goes, “It’s not clear. You don’t understand.” I’m like, “That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t understand.” So, he was angry at me, and I’m like, “I’m the listener. How am I supposed to recommend you to someone?” So, if someone tells you it’s not clear, you get defensive. It’s a sign that it probably isn’t clear. Just because you understand it, your introduction is for the listener, not for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Certainly, because, in a way, I’m imagining that that could become super resonant shortly, it’s like, “I help managers who have problematic employees they’re worried about firing or something,” or something. Or, “Who may need performance improvement plans.” It’s, like, that could be like, “Oh, my goodness. Thank you. I’ve been worried about this and didn’t know what to do about it. And here’s a guy who can help.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Right, yeah. And what you find is, if I tell people, like, “I help new entrepreneurs introduce market and promote themselves in 20 words or less,” people say, “Well, do you help, like, not new entrepreneurs?” They’re like, “Who else can you help? Can you help students?” If you’re really clear about your audience and it makes a very clear impact on the person, the chance of them saying, “Do you help someone else go way up?”

But if you’re like, “Oh, I help this group, that group, and the other group,” when people say, “Oh, I’m the,” – what is it? – like, the generalist or whatever, or, “I’m some kind of, I don’t know, multi-tool,” and you’re just like, “It’s too broad, and no one can envision what that will do for them.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes, the visualization point, again, coming back.

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, “I’m a jack of all trades,” and you’re like, “What would I do with a jack of all trades? Can you help me troubleshoot this type of problem within 90 days or less? Can you help me get this result without, you know, using a lot of capital? That’s what I’m looking for.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk a bit more about when we do the practice, we talked a bit about the pacing. And then we talked quite a bit about the actual word choice themselves. Can you give us some perspective on tone, rhythm, body language, anything else when it comes to the delivery of these up to 20 words?

Rebecca Okamoto
Laura Sicola, I’ve seen her TED Talk. I actually heard the same advice she gave in her TEDx Talk from a Dale Carnegie class, which is saying your name is really important. And as someone who have been on the receiving end of people from all over Asia, where I didn’t know their language, you don’t want to be like, “What was your name again? What was your name again?” So, saying it slowly and practicing is really important.

And then from the pacing standpoint, you don’t have to say it super-fast, because you’re trying to get a conversation. So, it’s like, “Here’s what I do.” And I like to say mine with a lot of confidence. So, it’s just like, “That’s what I do.” And I make my tone bend down at the end, “I help people introduce, market, and promote themselves in 20 words or less.” And just give it a pause.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, hey, facial expressions, hand gesture, posture, anything to think about there?

Rebecca Okamoto
Well, I guess if you’re just sitting, you know, you can only do so much. I would use your hands. Palms up is a very famous one, where speaking with your palms up. Smiling is a really big deal. It’s been shown that people who smile are, like, just genuinely more likable from a first impression standpoint. So, you want to sit up straight. You want to have good posture. If someone told you have good posture, it makes a difference.

I also think that if you’re standing, that whole thing about eye contact, but if you’re on a Zoom call, you want to look into the camera and you want to simulate what eye contact is so that it looks like you’re looking someone in the eye.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I was just about to ask about this in the digital world, any perspectives on making great first impressions when you do have that digital domain going on?

Rebecca Okamoto
So many people turn their cameras off. You want to have your camera on.

Pete Mockaitis
Whole time?

Rebecca Okamoto
Yes, whole time. And you want to look into, when you’re speaking, you want to look into, whatever, you have a red dot or a green dot, whatever you want to look into that camera. A friend of mine is a coach for people who do a lot of things on Zoom. And one of the things he told me to do is stop using big hand gestures and moving back and forth.

He said, “So, you want to sit and ground yourself. Think of it like a close-up on a camera.” So, he said, “When you’re on a stage, yeah, big arm gestures, big, bold gestures are good. But when you’re sitting there, moving around is very distracting. It makes you look nervous.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah. Oh, I have one other tip from an introduction standpoint, which is I have multiple introductions for people. You have different audiences. They’re at different levels, if it’s in one organization. You don’t need one introduction that fits for everyone. You have an introduction for the type of people that you’re meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, in a social environment, in which you are not expecting to generate business or professional anything, we would be going in a totally different direction.

Rebecca Okamoto
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I wonder, is this, so we probably no longer use the formula, “I help target audience get result they want”?

Rebecca Okamoto
Sometimes you can, it kind of depends on what you’re doing, but you might want to do like your passion, mission, or strength, you know, “I work in the healthcare field and I’m passionate about helping people in need, creating opportunity for vulnerable communities.” You might want to talk about it that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Rebecca Okamoto
Who you serve, so they’re like, “Oh, I love that you help people in need.” But again, it’s all about creating a visual in your audience’s mind so they can be like, “That’s really great. So, tell me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about purely social?

Rebecca Okamoto
Well, I mean, I still tell people what I do. So, it’s like, well, you know, if I’m sitting on a plane and I don’t know the person, and they’re like, “What do you do?” “Oh, I work with…” I’ll just pick something that I think is generic, because I’m just looking to, well, I’ll say spark a conversation, “I work with personal branding and I help people introduce themselves in 20 words or less.” So, it just makes it clear what I do, whether they say, “I know someone,” or not. I just want them to be like, “Oh, that’s interesting,” so they can see what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Got you. I guess I’m imagining, so we’re at a barbecue and it’s, “Oh, hey, what’s going on?” “Oh, hey, I’m Pete.” “Hi, Pete. What’s your story?” Like, “Well, there’s many ways I could go with that, sir.”

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, I mean, you could say like, if you want to talk about your work and then you want to put it in like, “I work in the supply chain and it’s like being a…” well, maybe this is not a good example for today’s environment, which is like, “I’m like an air traffic controller that helps, you know, products go from A to B, crossing the country,” something like that. Or, “I make things make sure that they show up on your shelves on time.” Really generic, the way you would describe it to your seven-year-old nephew or niece.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly.

Rebecca Okamoto
Yeah, that’s a good way of doing it so that if you’re like, “If I could explain it to a kid, it’s probably a generic enough one to use in a social environment.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Rebecca Okamoto
No, I think that that covers it. I just really love it when people tell me that it made a difference where they felt seen and heard. That’s the greatest part about having a great introduction.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rebecca Okamoto
I say that my favorite quote is from JFK’s “moon talk.” So, at Rice University, 1963, he said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” So, I find it very inspiring that, and he said something similar when he gave a, I think it was at a prayer meeting. He said, you know, “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.” I think it’s really important that we try, and I think that adversity is a good thing. So, I find it very inspirational.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rebecca Okamoto
I’m obsessed with the dilution effect, the dilution factor. So that is, it means that the more you speak, the more you try to explain, the less impact your message has, which is just another reason to say why you want it in 20 words or less. You don’t need a lot of things. You just need one thing for someone to grab ahold of.

So, I’ve been studying a lot of the dilution effect. And then I try to tell people when I coach them, “You’re diluting your message. You’re making it hard for me to understand. So just give me one thing and let me ask you about the rest.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Rebecca Okamoto
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, who I believe was one of your guests, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
He sure was.

Rebecca Okamoto
I mean, I recommend his book because then you can help people with the intonation and they can understand how important it is to get someone to say, “Oh, my God, that’s me.” And that’s what your introduction is, very similar to that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rebecca Okamoto
I’m obsessed with copywriting. So, the tool I use when I work with people is it’s called problem agitation solution. So, when you’re pitching yourself, you give them the headline, which is, “I help people with something to say, but struggle to say it.” Then you talk about a problem that people have and you sort of agitate it, and say, “Here’s how I solve it.” So, I love that tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Rebecca Okamoto
I have a new habit. I have been working on using rituals. Rituals are a sequence of things that you do to focus yourself and really imbue purpose to the activity that you’re doing. A really famous person that does this is Rafa Nadal, a tennis player. Like, before he serves, he goes through a sequence of things to get himself ready. He sits down between points, and he like straightens his water bottles, and he’s just ordering his mind and he’s getting himself set.

So, I’m like, when I write, instead of procrastinating, instead of getting popcorn, I’m going to have a ritual that makes it really meaningful for me to sit down and, whether it’s 20 minutes or two hours, focus and purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is the ritual?

Rebecca Okamoto
I grab a mug of a hot beverage, I take a few deep breaths to center myself, and I ask myself how I’m feeling, because if I’m feeling purposeful, that’s good. If I’m feeling overwhelmed, nervous, whatever, I ask myself, like, “Hey, what’s going on? Why do you feel that way?” And then I tell myself, “Be grateful for the moment and the opportunity that you have, that you get to write, that you get to help people. And what is your purpose?”

And when I center myself on my purpose and who I’m trying to serve, all of that stuff goes away. And it takes me – what? – two, three minutes, kind of center myself. But it always starts with a mug of like a hot beverage. I don’t know why, but I just like that. And now every day, and I used to do it randomly. Now every day, either at 7:00 a.m. or 10:00 a.m., I have a mug of something and I start my day really focused.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, and they quote it back to you often?

Rebecca Okamoto
So, since I gave this TEDx talk about how to introduce yourself and get hired, people play it back to me all the time. I didn’t realize that it’s about you versus about me. So, I tell people about me is something like, “I’m an award-winning bestselling author.” About you is, “I help new authors get published faster.” They play this back to me all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rebecca Okamoto
They can come to my LinkedIn profile, which is just Rebecca Okamoto, or they can go to my website, which is 20Words.com, the number 20, words.com, or Rebecca@20Words.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome with their jobs?

Rebecca Okamoto
Yes. So, I will tell you my challenge to them is to think “What if?” What if that inner critic inside your head is wrong? What if that inner voice is wrong? So, when you introduce yourself before, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m no good. I shouldn’t have even tried,” what if the only thing, the only difference between that being seen and heard and recognized was your introduction, was your ability to be clear? And it’s a skill, not a problem – “What if?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Rebecca Okamoto
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, welcome!

Mike Cisneros
Hey, thank you very much. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be speaking to an esteemed data storyteller. And we’re going to hear a lot about that. But one story I got to hear right away is what’s up with you and Jeopardy?

Mike Cisneros
Okay, so throughout most of my adult life, I have occasionally tried to take the Jeopardy test to see if I could get on to the program. I’m currently in the active contestant pool for Jeopardy, which means I’ve gone through a few different rounds of practice, of trying to get further along in the process.

I’ve done the in-person interview with the producers, which means that me and a few hundred of my, hopefully, future contestants, competitors, let’s say, are just waiting to get the call to see when and if we’ll be invited to appear on the program.

So, it is exciting. It is about, I would say, a one-in-five shot at this point, but it’s much closer than I’ve ever been to date. So, keep your eyes and ears peeled.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m imagining, with data storytelling, you could make quite the slide revealing what your odds were at each stage along the path to now.

Mike Cisneros
You would not be surprised to find out how many people are invested in tracking and analyzing the data of the games over the course of history. There are sites that track every single question, every contestant, how well they were expected to do, how fast they are on the buzzer, what they could, theoretically, be. It’s a whole universe.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, that is, I did not know, but now that you mentioned it, it seems like, yeah, that feels about right. So, let’s hear about your book here, Storytelling with Data: Before and After – Practical Makeovers for Powerful Data Stories. What’s the big idea here?

Mike Cisneros
Everybody loves a makeover, right? It’s fun to see when something starts from kind of a jumble and we put it into order, we organize it, we make it work in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, that is functionally pleasing. And Storytelling with Data is all about helping people to communicate more effectively with their data. And that oftentimes means putting it in the structure of a narrative.

And so, over the course of years, what we’ve seen is there are a lot of different challenges that different companies and people face, but they’re very rarely unique to a single organization. So, it’s, “We don’t have enough time,” or, “We don’t know what level of detail to get things to,” or, “We don’t have one specific audience. We have to consider multiple different groups of people. How do we use the tools that you’re teaching us about in your workshops to achieve these different goals?”

And that’s what our book is about. We’re using different case studies, 20 different case studies from our real experience with clients on how to apply these techniques that we have taught over the years to specific goals, to specific areas where you have different challenges or things that you’re trying to achieve.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, being in the trenches like that, I’d love to get your hot take in terms of what’s the median level of data storytelling ability in corporate America nowadays? Is it okay? Is it shockingly terrible? Is it excellent? Where would you put it?

Mike Cisneros
What I would say is that there is a facility for data out there. People tend to know, especially people who are data analysts by trade, certainly know how to work with data. They know how to analyze it. They know how to explore it. And almost everybody knows how to tell a story. It is a natural function of being a human being.

And this is how we have taken in information throughout most of recorded history. It’s when you’re at a barbecue, that’s how you build social connections, is you’re telling one another stories, and it’s a very natural thing. But for whatever reason, we don’t seem to be able to mesh those two things together to figure out how to take these data that we have acquired and analyzed, and tell an efficient and effective story with it.

I guess it’s because when we were in school, nobody taught us to do these things at the same time. They always taught one thing or the other thing. You have English class and you have Math class but you never have something that combines the two of them.

So, to answer your question, I think that people are good at data analysis, people are good at storytelling, they’re just not good at getting used to doing these things at the same time, which is a shame because you do all of this work as a data analyst to find interesting things, to find stuff that you think needs to happen in order to make not just the company more money or make a bigger benefit for your team, but to, generally speaking, make lives better.

Because all of the data that we work with, in some way or another, I think, represents a human being, an aspect of being a human being, or something that affects a real person’s life. So, you don’t want all of that effort, all of that enthusiasm, all of that energy, emotional investment to go for naught.

You want to make sure that all that stuff that you’ve done, when it comes time to tell somebody who can do something about it, you want to make sure that it resonates with them, that it gets them motivated to do what you think needs to be done. And that’s going to be much more likely to happen if we master these storytelling techniques and figure out how to connect with our audiences that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, you got me fired up. Preach it. I’m totally on board with that message. And I would love it if you could make it all the more real for us with a story. I think some folks might say, “Well, you know, hey, the data is the data. Those are the numbers. They show the numbers. We have a meeting about the numbers, and then we do what we do.”

Can you tell me what really happens when we tell a disappointing to mediocre data story versus an outstanding data story? What really is possible when we do that makeover, that transformation?

Mike Cisneros
When we classify something as a mediocre data story, a lot of times what we are saying is we assume that the data is going to tell the story for us. And this is natural because, when you are an analyst and you are working with this data all the time, it makes perfect sense to you. And the more you work with it, the more you feel like it’s super obvious.

And you imagine that you’re going to show it to somebody else, you go, “Here, see?” And they’re going to just be wowed by exactly the same things you were wowed by. But they’ve never seen this before. And they honestly don’t care about it nearly as much as you do. They have lots of other things they care about.

This is just the way that organizations work, is that if you don’t have the authority to do something, you’re probably moving up the organization to get the authority or pass it on to somebody who has the authority to do something and they don’t have the time. So, you have to make it matter to them in this way.

And this is something I wish I had known when I was a younger data analyst, by the way, because most of us don’t get into this field because we love talking to people. Most of us get into this field because we like the cold comfort of numbers and of objective analysis. But it is that figuring out how to communicate effectively with people that’s going to make the difference.

So, I had an example that… it was for an organization where they were doing investments in a country. They were doing development loans and that sort of thing. And they had ran some models on, “Here’s how much we think the imports are going to be. Here’s how much we think the exports are going to be over the course of the next few years.” And by few, I mean like 15 years. And then something unexpected happened. There was regime change in the country.

So, they had to redo all of their models. They redid all of their models and then they re-delivered their projections on a single slide. And it looked like they had gone into their statistics tool and had just regenerated the charts, and there were dozens of lines, and they were all overlapping one another. And the names of the models…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, like the before versus after, all the stuff?

Mike Cisneros
It very much was like a before versus after, but to our eyes, this is the before. This is, “You’ve done so much work. You’ve figured out what it is that we need to do.” We figured out that even with the regime change. We figured out there are ways that we can see, “Oh, here’s how they can drive up exports. Here’s how they can drive up imports. Here’s how we could invest.” But it wasn’t clear in the way that they were showing it.

So, instead of just putting the data out there and saying, “Here’s what we think is going to happen,” you have to say, “Okay, let’s walk you through step by step. Here’s what we thought was going to happen.” And you show sort of one thing at a time and walk people through it, “Here’s the range of what we think could happen. Now here’s one specific thing. Like, if this happens, our model believes X. And so, we have the opportunity to invest in this because this will make something else improve.”

People can take in complex stories, nuanced stories, but, honestly, not all at once. We are good at learning things step by step, building on what we’ve learned. And this is one of the reasons why I’ve never been a fan of the phrase, “Explain it like I’m five,” because I’m not five. I have the ability to understand a lot more things than a five-year-old can.

I’m not stupid. I’m just uninformed. I can understand a lot if you just let me know how to do this piece by piece. So, one of the things that we encourage people to do, in this kind of transformation, is make sure that those key points, if there are a lot of points you want to make, don’t do it all at once, because it’s overwhelming to people.

Graphs aren’t poetry. You don’t have to say the most with the least amount of words or the least amount of pixels or, you know, ink on the screen.

Imagine the meetings that you have been in, where somebody comes in and they’re very proud of what they’ve done, and they put a slide up on the screen. And the same slide stays on the screen for five minutes, 10 minutes, and they’re talking you through it, but none of it changes.

And when it first came up on the screen, it was so overwhelming, you thought, “I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” And you tune out right away. And then you’re forced to stare at the same thing for the next 10 minutes, and it is death. But if you, instead, were the person who was going to present the same information, you can reveal it piece by piece.

Give somebody an idea of what the context was. Give somebody a baseline. Add things to it step by step by step. And so, by the end, you can have that same complicated view, but people understand it because you built it for them piece by piece.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. This brings me back to my Bain days. We used to say, “One slide, one point,” was a mantra that was mostly followed with some exceptions. Is that something that you agree with?

Mike Cisneros
I think, in principle, yes. It’s also kind of one graph, one slide, if possible, especially if you are presenting live. Now we all live in a world of constraints, where sometimes you have to listen to what you’re being told and they say, “This is going to be part of a bigger presentation. You’re only going to get two slides. So, figure out what to put on it.”

And most folks just jam as much information as they can all at once, lots of words, six-point font because they have to get all the details in, all the caveats. And I got to tell you, the older I get, the higher my minimum point size is for acceptable fonts. I used to design much, much, smaller type, and now I think, all right, 14 points if you’re going to present it up on a screen, 14 points or higher please, because I cannot read that, especially from the back of the room.

Generally speaking, yes, you want to minimize what you are asking people to look at in a live setting because you want them to listen to you. And guess what? People cannot read and listen at the same time. It uses the same part of your brain. It’s that verbal part of your brain, verbal processing, which is why I try not to put tables up in front of people when I’m in a workshop or when I’m in a meeting because everybody starts reading the table and doing math at you, and trying to fact-check you.

And you might be saying to them, literally, “Here’s what I want you to look at,” and they are not listening to you because they’re trying to figure out what to look at. So, yes, making sure that if you’re presenting live, making sure that you are the thing that is the presentation and the slides are just there to support you.

This isn’t the case if you’re going to send something around where you have to have a lot of words on the screen, but that’s where the difference comes in of making sure you have a story that you can write down in words and be present on the slide that you’re sending out to everybody or the takeaway, the memo, whatever it is that your organization does so that it is clear and there’s no room for misinterpretation as to what you want people to take away from this and what you want people to do with this.

Because if you don’t want people to do anything with what you’re sharing with them, honestly, why are you sharing it in the first place?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, well said. Okay. Well, so now we talk about a story and data. For folks who aren’t even sort of fundamentally, principally, grasping, what is a data story? Can you maybe give us an example of what that might sound like in terms of, “Hey, we have a narrative, and then we have some data that fits in there”?

Mike Cisneros
Sure. I can give you an example of data versus a data story. Data is, we have some call center data. We keep track of when calls come in. We keep track of how many we get on any given day. And we can look through this on a daily basis, on an average, across days, on a days-of-the-week sort of basis.

And sometimes there are days where there are more calls, sometimes there are days where there’s less, sometimes there’s times when we see atypical numbers of calls. I can put a graph in front of somebody that shows a day where those numbers of calls were just unusual. There was a lot in some minutes, there was zero in other minutes, and it would just look confusing. But, “Oh, that’s probably bad data.”

Or, you could tell the data story of, “What we are normally expecting is to see this two peak, this bimodal distribution over the course of a day. We see peaks in the morning on the East Coast. We see a little peak around lunchtime on the West Coast. On this one particular day, we saw these weird drop-offs where it went to zero, and then it spiked all the way up to like three times as many calls. And then it dropped to zero and then it spiked up again. And this happened three times over the course of an hour.”

“Why did this happen? Well, we didn’t know at first because the people who worked in the call center didn’t report anything was unusual. We only found this by looking at call logs later on. And it turns out that an engineer, who we spoke to had the answer, said that there was call tracking software that had crashed and rebooted three different times during that hour.”

“So, what had happened was that each one of those calls wasn’t being tracked for a certain period of time. And when the software came back on, it said, ‘Every active call, it starts right now.’ And so, it went zero, zero, a bunch of calls. And then it went zero, zero, a bunch of calls. What this tells us is that we do need to address a problem that didn’t seem to be a problem in the data because this system failed.”

“And even though it failed gracefully this time, it doesn’t mean it won’t fail catastrophically the next time. So, what we need to do is investigate why this happened and what we can do to mitigate this problem in the future.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, I mean, in a way, call center volumes might be among the most boring things around. And yet, when you put it in this format, it’s like a mystery, like, “Ooh, what happened? Let’s find out. Let’s see. Oh.” And then, catastrophic, I mean, it could be, in terms of, “Who knows what that software is attached to and what that’s going to mean for people?”

So, I really appreciate that example in terms of night and day, with the first one being, “Hey, here’s some funky call numbers. How about that?” As opposed to the taking us through the step-by-step sequence narrative of, “Oh, we’ve got a mystery. Oh, and here’s what’s going on. And here’s the implication of that.”

Mike Cisneros
And moreover, “Who are you talking to? Who are you telling this story to?” If you’re telling the story to the person who’s in charge of customer service, then they’re going to care that there’s a chance that they’re going to have an outage for hours and hours, where their customers aren’t going to be able to get involved or able to get service at all. So, they’re going to want to do something about it.

So, you deliver this information in a way that’s going to mean something to them and motivate them to take action. Whereas, instead, if you just looked at the data and didn’t bother to talk to anybody else about it, you might say, “Well, this data is clearly wrong. I mean, I was in the call center.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, just ignore it and move on.

Mike Cisneros
“Yeah, everything is fine. It was just a fluke. Like, just leave it out of the report. Just leave that day out of the weekly report. We’ll average the other days and it’ll be fine.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, Mike, could you share with us the most common and destructive mistakes you see, and give us the better way?

Mike Cisneros
So, the common mistake I see is when people come to us and they learn how to improve their communications, how to clean up their graphs, use color differently, think about their audience, all of the things that we teach them to do. The most common mistake is folks try and change everything all at once, and try and do everything in every communication that they ever build. And that is counterproductive because you do not have time to do this.

All of the things that are going to improve communication, they do take time. Now, the more you do them, the more you get practiced at them, the less time they do take, but cleaning up a graph takes a little bit of time. So, if you’re just firing up something to send out to your colleagues really quickly, don’t bother making it look as pretty as you possibly can. But if you’re going to be presenting something to the C-suite, then, yes, absolutely.

Hopefully, you’ve practiced and done this a few times before so that when it comes time for that big high-stakes communication, you’re ready to do it. But you can’t spend all of your time doing this. I would just ask that people spend a little bit more time than they tend to doing these things, thinking about what your audience is going to see versus what you are used to seeing because people do this.

They spend almost all their time exploring their data, and then it comes time to share it with somebody else and they’ve run out of time because, like you said, it’s a mystery. We’re trying to figure out what happened. We are curious people. That’s natural. But you have to remember that that final thing that you share with somebody else is the only part of your work that anybody ever sees. So, it has to represent it as well and as persuasively as it possibly can. So, take a little bit of time to make it better, but you don’t always have to do everything every time.

And the consequential mistake, the most damaging thing that folks can do is, in their enthusiasm to change the way their organization communicates is to take away the things that other people are used to seeing because that is the best way to get things to not be adopted, “Hey, what happened to the weekly report I used to see? Why does it look different? I don’t like this because it’s different.”

It might be objectively better, but it is not familiar, and there’s a much higher hurdle to overcome that unfamiliarity than we think there is. So, when you’re trying to change, this is a change management thing, of course, is you want to make sure that you are trying out new techniques, maybe on lower-stakes things, with people who are already on board with the idea of doing something new, on projects that are one-offs rather than things that everybody in the organization is used to seeing.

Or, maybe just augment what you’re used to doing with new things rather than replacing what people have come to rely on. And I’ll be honest, most of the things that people have come to rely on, we don’t need. They’re just safety blankets. Do you need all of these tables of data in your weekly reports, in your monthly reports? Do people look at them?

No, they don’t. They just want to know that they can if it comes time to be questioned on them. So, that’s what I would say is make sure that you are being conscious of other people’s need to have what they are familiar with and adding new things rather than taking away what everybody is used to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now this, this reminds me again, I’m thinking about Bain times with the appendix. It’s like all the stuff is in the appendix. So, is that an appropriate tactical approach you like? Or, are there others in terms of, “I am giving you the familiar thing you’ve come to expect and I’m also doing it better”?

Mike Cisneros
I like an appendix. I like, “I can send you this data separately.” I like a, “We can talk about these details offline.” I’m also a huge proponent of having your actual presentation be shorter with a few backup slides ready to go, because I hate pre-answering everybody’s possible question. If you imagine you’re in a room with 20 people and somebody has a question, well, now you know that 5% of the people in the room have that question.

So, okay, fine. You can answer that question. If you have pre-answered it, 95% of the people didn’t care and they’re sitting through something they’re not interested in. But when somebody asks a question and you say, “Oh, we looked at that. I actually do have a slide I can address that with,” and you bring it up, it looks like a magic trick. And people assume that any question that gets asked, like you’re going to be Johnny-on-the-spot, ready to show them another slide.

And if you can’t, you just say, “We did look at that. I don’t have the slide with me, but I can talk with you about that after the fact.” And what happens is you get shorter, focused presentations, everybody’s happier, everybody thinks you’re a genius. And, honestly, it’s no different than what you would normally do. It’s, just, people aren’t bored. They’re excited, especially because the presentation is shorter and everybody likes that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right. I like that a lot. It’s win-win. So, it’s shorter meetings if no one asks. And if they do ask you look even more awesome than if you just anticipated it in advance.

Mike Cisneros
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess, I’d also love to get your take on where, so there’s your book, of course, but what are some top resources that you might recommend for where can we behold? Because, I think, many of us maybe have never seen a masterful data story ever presented in their life, unfortunately.

So, where might you point people to, where I can look at examples of, “Oh, okay, that’s an amazing data story. I think I get the memo and what Mike is talking about versus the stuff I’m seeing at work every day”?

Mike Cisneros
One of the places that I learned to hone my own skills in data visualization was, believe it or not, the software product Tableau has a public-facing aspect to it, where people can do data analysis on their own data. And for a while, and I think still to this very day, people create their own data stories using this ostensibly dashboarding tool, this BI tool.

But you can wrestle it into being able to tell, essentially, any kind of story you want to do if you put in the time and the effort and the creativity to do it. So that’s where I learned more about how to investigate things, how to present them to an audience in a way that is more narrative, more story-like, and that is Tableau Public is what it has always been called.

But as far as a professional organization, more in the data journalism space, the website called The Pudding is really good at this. And their URL is Pudding.cool. And they do an excellent job of investigating more not just pop culture but socially relevant stories that are data related.

And they have great narratives that they can deliver in this scrolling web format or interactive web format so you can see not just the story that they have curated for you but, oftentimes, you’re able to investigate and play with the data and see how does this relate to you specifically, and I’ve always been a fan of their work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. One of my favorite resources in terms of, I just found myself randomly looking at slide deck after slide deck, which doesn’t happen that often in terms of, “These are riveting and I want more,” it was the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and we’ll link all these in the show notes, their slide share.

They had all these decks in which they were, well, now they’re so old, I’m pulling it up right now. But the principles still apply in terms of we’ve got a headline, we’ve got a clear data, a picture that connects to that headline, and then we go, “Oh, okay.” And then one connects to the next, connects to the next. And I thought that was excellent. Do you know of any others in the business-y realm?

Mike Cisneros
The unfortunate answer is I don’t because I don’t think the organizations that do that, or that are focusing on that are putting a lot of them out. Like, you said, like you’re looking at maybe they’re like pitch decks for instance. And that’s just not my world. Like, I’m not really looking at that for pleasure anymore. So, my answer is I don’t. I don’t have a resource for you there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. Well, can you tell us any top things we should do or not do as we venture into this world of improving our data storytelling?

Mike Cisneros
One of the most important things you can do as a storyteller in all facets of storytelling is to practice. Every time you’re going to give a presentation and you’ve got your materials, maybe you’ve got them updated and cleaned up and optimized the way that you want to optimize them, don’t assume that, on the day you are going to know what you are going to say in front of an audience just because you have put the slides together for them.

You never want the first time you say the words you’re presenting to people to be in front of those people. So, taking that time to practice. And I believe that people are more comfortable practicing out loud than they used to be because we do a lot more talking to our computers and our webcams than we used to, you know, five, 10 years ago. But it still requires you to practice if you want to get comfortable at what you’re doing.

And this, I’m speaking to my fellow introverts out there. This is what makes you more comfortable is practicing. I don’t believe that being introverted means that you are shy and that you don’t want to speak in front of people. I believe it means you like to be in control of the situation. And what better way to be in control and confident in the situation than to practice it so that you have been there before.

So, practice what you’re going to say, think about it, think about it even without your slides because what if, “Uh-oh, the projector doesn’t work today,” and you have to give your presentation anyway. If you have practiced without your slides, you will be able to do that. And, by the way, that’s always a good idea, practicing without your slides. It forces you to remember what it is that’s going to come next.

It lets you free up part of your mind to actually look at your audience while you’re talking and get a sense of, “Are they tracking with you? Do they seem like they need you to speed up? Do they seem like they need you to slow down?” This is an excellent way to improve your data storytelling.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I got to ask, what about AI?

Mike Cisneros
“What about AI?” It’s the question on everybody’s mind all of the time. I think we get caught up a lot on algorithms and on LLMs. You never want to forget that the point of what we’re doing is making people’s lives better. So, algorithms, LLMs, AI, that all is going to help us think through what needs to be said. But ultimately, what’s going to happen is a human being is going to have to convince another human being to do something.

I don’t think the best LLM in the world can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Like, somebody still has to actually physically do the things that are going to take place in our physical world. And that’s what all of our decisions kind of boil down to is what’s going to happen in our world. And, nowadays, think about how we’re already starting to realize that there is a version of fingerprinting that you can do for, “Oh, this was written by an AI model.”

That’s the whole, “Oh, there’s a lot of em dashes in here. Did you write this?” Or, like the tone and the style is very much starting to be recognizable. You don’t want your work to be pointed out as, “Oh, that’s not yours. You just let the AI do that,” because you’re always going to be blamed or celebrated for whatever you show to people.

You’re not going to have the opportunity to say, “Oh, was I wrong? That was the tool. The tool did that.” You can still use the tools, but you also have to vet the tools, and then you have to bring in the other context that, let’s be honest, none of our tools are ever going to have all of the context we need to put together the most effective communication for another person that we need to. So, they’re good adjuncts, but they’re not replacements for what we need to do in order to communicate.

Pete Mockaitis
And to that point of them being good adjuncts, are there any best and worst practices you’ve seen with regard to their use when it comes to slides and presentations?

Mike Cisneros
I think they’re good now for helping you to think through different ways of saying what you want to say, or, “I have something I want to say, I need to say it more succinctly. Maybe show me different ways of visualizing this data set. Show this to me as a bar or a line or a dot plot or different ways.” And maybe that will help you to iterate more rapidly. And that’s always good.

It’s always good to do that kind of iteration in the early stages of your process. But at the end stages of your process, it honestly has to be you and your expertise and your confidence and your knowledge of your audience that makes those final decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Mike, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Cisneros
One thing that I wanted to mention, following up with this, because it’s authenticity that I think people are going to value. I mean, they’re always valuing authenticity, but I think that’s going to become even more valuable in the future. And I was at a conference a few months ago where this topic came up, and the moderator was asking these people, it was literally on a panel about AI adoption, and they were asking them, “What makes you likely to trust a visualization or a report or a news story?”

And two out of the three people said, “If I’m familiar with the creator’s body of work, that’s what’s going to make me feel like I trust it.” And the other person said, “If I can see and verify the sources and methods used by the creator, that’s what makes me trust that work.” So, if people can tell that the work is not authentically 100% you, why are people going to trust the machine over you, the credible human?

So, that’s why, I think, we need to practice being compelling and meaningful and creating those engaging communications in that authentic manner to build up the credibility that is very hard to gain, but it is very easy to lose. And if you have that, then your voice and your reputation will end up being the most persuasive one in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Cisneros
So, I always liked this quote from Peter Shilton, who was a goalkeeper for the England National Team several years ago.

He said, “As a goalkeeper, you need to be good at organizing the people in front of you and motivating them. You need to be able to see what’s going on and react to the threats, just like a good manager in business.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experimental or piece of research?

Mike Cisneros
There was a study from Michigan in 2008 that’s in the Psychological Science Journal, I believe, that says “If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do.” So, always show things to people in a way that is easy for them to consume because, otherwise, they’ll think that whatever you’re asking them to do is going to be more difficult than it actually is.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Mike Cisneros
For business, my favorite book is Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which is about how things are actually not as terrible as folks would have you believe in the world. Fiction-wise, I really enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Mike Cisneros
My favorite tool, believe it or not, is my Bullet Journal. It is something that has helped me to stay organized, because we are always doing so many different things at once. It was the only way I could keep everything straight, and I still am a proponent of tactile physical ways of staying organized. I have a big whiteboard up on my wall in my home office. That is my calendar of ground truth, believe it or not, is my whiteboard on the wall.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonate with folks, you hear them quote it back to you often?

Mike Cisneros
“The goal isn’t to make your slides look better. It is to make them work better.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mike Cisneros
So, my co-authors and I, that’s Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, who founded and wrote the original Storytelling with Data book, Alex Velez, we all work for the same company called Storytelling with Data, which is at StorytellingWithData.com. You can find Before and After, which is our new book, and all the other books there. If you want to find me, I am @mikevizneros. That’s Mike V-I-Z-N-E-R-O-S on all of the socials. Because in the data visualization world, using VIZ in your handle was the height of fashion in the mid-2000s.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mike Cisneros
Well, aside from the obvious, which is that you should absolutely read Before and After, you had a guest on recently, Ruth Milligan, and it was a fabulous episode on speaking in public. So, my challenge to everybody is along those lines, which is to speak in public in a low-stakes way, in a professional way, whatever it is, especially if you are a self-proclaimed introvert, because this will get you more comfortable at communicating, which is going to be the key to unlocking more success and being more awesome in your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, thank you.

Mike Cisneros
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Ruth, welcome!

Ruth Milligan
Hello! How are you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m good. Very good. I’m excited to chat about speaking. I’m very motivated, if you will, to be discussing it.

Ruth Milligan
No pun intended. There we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear, you’ve been in the speaking game for quite a while, coaching, consulting, curating, speaking yourself. Can you tell me, what’s the most surprising and fascinating thing you’ve discovered about us humans and speaking over the course of your career?

Ruth Milligan
The most fascinating is that we don’t want to hear ourselves talk. And that’s a challenge because we want people to want to listen because that is the number one way to improve.

So, if you can get through that threshold and get through that kind of troublesome sticky spot in your head, that you’re not going to die when you listen to yourself, and that no one actually has to know when you do, it can be very, very, very, very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s speak right into the heart of that. It’s the most effective way to improve, and yet we don’t want to do it. Can you share why don’t we want to do it? And how can we get over that?

Ruth Milligan
I think our perception of ourselves is always different than what we see. So, for instance, I’ll listen back to every podcast, every recording, and I see my sister because we have a lot of similarities. And I think, “Ooh, do I want to be like my sister?” My sister is fine. Don’t get me wrong. But you’re like, “Oh, I want to be me.”

And then sometimes it’s, “Ooh, do I really sound like that?” and we surprise ourselves. And then that’s hard because, at least I believe, we say, “Ooh,” that’s not what we want our audiences to hear. And so, there’s this disconnect that we have to sort of bring together as to, “What do we want to be perceived and seen as? And how are we doing that?” “And are they this far apart or are they this far apart?”

And the best way to do that is habits, practice, watching, listening back. And if you just haven’t done it, it’s a little cringy. Have you listened? I bet when you started your podcast, you started listening back to yourself, right? What did you learn when you started that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I did. Well, it’s funny, well, from lots of keynote speeches, I listened and watched those recordings as well. And so, I’ve had to go both ways. And at times I think, “Well, this is so fun and entertaining. I wish more speeches were just like this.”

And other times I’m a little disappointed like, “Oh, Pete, I can tell you didn’t actually do your research, your homework, your practice as much here, and the audience suffered as a result.” And so, I feel some guilt, shame there.

Ruth Milligan
Correct, because you’re playing through your head, “Oh, I coulda, shoulda, woulda,” and you can’t dial back time. You can’t have that time back.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Although, of course, if you listened to your recordings before the big audience presentation, you can. You can fix it.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. That’s it. And I think you can’t draw it back, and there is a little bit of regret. I don’t live with a lot of regret, but I think that in those moments you say, “Oh, it could have been…” You have to work through those emotions. And so, that’s what happens when you watch yourself is you’re going through a bunch of emotions that you normally don’t experience. And so, it’s easier just to not do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, now you’re bringing me back to, I think, the most troubling recording ever. I remember I did a whole school assembly. It was at Hayworth High School, if anyone was there. And I was just starting my career as a professional speaker. And I had mostly spoken in the student audience context at leadership conferences where they selected one student from each high school.

And in those contexts, I was crushing it. On the speaker evaluations, I was number one out of 20 plus. So, I thought, “I’m great at speaking. I’m down with the young people.” And then in this different environment of high school students, I bombed. It was really spooky. I asked the principal for an endorsement. And then he told me in a lengthy email how terrible I was and how they wish they could have gotten their money back.

Ruth Milligan
In an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Ruth Milligan
Oh, bad practice.

Pete Mockaitis
I was shocked. And so, I shared it with a speaker-mentor friend, Mawi, episode number one. And, really, he’s so good, he said, “Well, Pete, it’s really great that you’re doing this because a lot of people just don’t even ever want to look at it.” And it was very helpful in terms of rewatching it together. And he said, “Well, first of all…” Go ahead.

Ruth Milligan
No, I was going to say together. That’s a very important word.

Pete Mockaitis
Watching it together, it was so useful, he said, “Well, first of all, Pete, we got to take some of what the principal said with a grain of salt, because he said, ‘I heard nothing about bad things.’” This is a direct quote for the email, “And yet I’m seeing multiple occasions of this audience laughing. So, clearly, it was not 100 % bad.” Okay, cool. So, we’ve got some perspective. “And also note…”

And then we really got into it, he was like, “Hey, Pete, they don’t even understand what that word means. It’s, like, you could be speaking gibberish to this audience in this place. Also, tell me about the setup and with the client.” And it’s like, “Yes, no matter what happens, it’s going to be your fault, so you have to grab the context, the information, the goals from them even when they’re being difficult in saying, ‘Oh, I guess that sounds good.’”

And so, it was so useful going through it. And it might have been painful, but, in some ways, I was just so spooked and surprised to have missed the mark so epically, the most ever in my life in the speaking environment that I just had to see what the heck happened here with a pro.

Ruth Milligan
The biggest extra learning that we’ve had, since particularly we wrote the book, was one research study assembled all the other research studies on feedback, like 500, I don’t know, maybe millions, I don’t know. But there was one central thing, and if your listeners are listening to anything about feedback, this is it.

When you speak and someone hears you, you get to go first in giving yourself feedback before they do. Because when they’re giving you feedback, they’re the ones learning. When you are the one first reflecting or giving yourself feedback, you’re learning. And learning is the goal to do better. If I said to you, “Hey, Pete, that really sucked,” like your teacher or your principal, that’s how I feel and that’s my opinion. And you live in choice, like every audience does, to accept or reject it. You can believe it or not.

But if I said, “Hey, Pete, how do you think you did?” You’re forced to think through, “Did I prepare enough? How did that go? What did I feel like?” And I may not have to say anything to you.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So that’s the best practice when giving feedback is to ask first and…

Ruth Milligan
And the person who’s giving feedback actually says, “Tell me how you feel” first. Full stop. It seems kind of silly and rudimentary, but it’s so powerful because 90% of what you’re going to tell me is what I might want to tell you, but because you’ve come to the conclusion, you’re more likely to want to fix it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and if you do discover, “Oh, there’s epic blind spots here,” well, then it’s probably also still effective because then there’s an emotional component of huge surprise like, “Whoa.” And then it’ll probably stick even more, even though you’re sharing the same things.

Ruth Milligan
So, can I tell a quick story?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Ruth Milligan
I gave some feedback to a speaker after a big presentation practice day. We were at dinner. And I’ll call him Tom. I said, “Hey, Tom, do you know what an umm-er is?” And he says, “No, I don’t know what an umm-er is.” And I said, “Well, okay. An umm-er is this, somebody who uses um’s, filler words.” And I said, “Tom, do you know you’re an umm-er?” And he said, “I am?” And I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Like a few times?” And I was like, “Hmm, like every fourth word.”

And he really wasn’t interested in the feedback. And everyone in the room heard it. Everyone in the room looked at me, and said, “Help him.” So, two days later, we come back for another round and he comes barreling in with the same umming, not even attempting. And I said, “Hey, Tom, do you remember the recording I sent you? Did you have a chance to listen to a minute of it?” Because I’m looking for him to hear himself, right, versus me just telling him.

He’s like, “No, no, I didn’t need to listen to that. I just decided I’m going to be more conversational.” “How’s that working out for you?” He was solving the problem he thought he had, not the problem he had. And I couldn’t, at that point, you say, “Okay, I did my best.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s illustrative, because I think we all do that, or can do that, to some extent, in that, being more conversational is a thing that might be effective, but it’s a different solution to a different thing.

Ruth Milligan
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s interesting how in our brains, especially if we’re not a master of a thing yet, we can conflate, because I think, in many ways, mastery of something is largely about the capacity to distinguish between nuances. And if you’re not yet mastering, you’re going to think, “Oh, umming means not conversational.” And I’ve done that in other domains in terms of…

Ruth Milligan
So, what would that mean to you if you heard, “I made it more conversational”? Like, you’re a conversationalist for a living. Like, I couldn’t even make the connection to why he thought getting rid of a filler word would be solved by becoming more casual. Anyway, we don’t have to dissect it, but like it is interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, there’s an interesting link there and…

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I think it’s illustrative of the gap between what we believe we need and what we do. And if we don’t watch ourselves, we’re going to pick the wrong thing.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve come to learn in life, generally speaking, if we want to advance or improve a thing, a domain, we’ll probably require either time and/or money, and/or outside expertise, and/or confronting our own weakness, foibles, mistakes or so.

So, I would just say that, in a way, humility itself is a resource we can deploy to improve on a thing and sometimes it might be unpleasant but it can save you time and money. So, it’s like, “Humble yourself and watch the recording.”

Ruth Milligan
Exactly. And I promise, no one’s ever died. I mean, there are things that we do that are painful in life. That really shouldn’t be one of them, but it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, right off the bat, that’s great stuff.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. That’s all we got. Are we done? I’m just kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
We could be. But you got a book here, The Motivated Speaker.

Ruth Milligan
We do.

Pete Mockaitis
And you start the book, The Motivated Speaker, by discussing, this is so meta, the concept of a threshold concept. So, what do you mean by this term? And why is that important?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. About 10 years ago, two guys, Meyer and Land, put a label on the thing that is recursive, troublesome, sticky, and when you encounter it, you can’t go back, you don’t unsee it. It’s that transformative kind of liminal space, you have to reach for it. And when you’re on the other side of it, everything else you do becomes better.

So, to the title of your podcast, How to be Awesome at Your Job, there are threshold concepts about business. There are threshold concepts about podcasting. There are threshold concepts that you had to learn certain things in order to be really good at this podcast game. And if you didn’t learn them, you would be average at it.

Our mentor who named the concepts for learning to write, we asked her, we said, “Does anyone ever name the concepts for learning to speak?” And she said, “No.” So, she took us under her wing for the better part of a year, and the only thing we wanted to do was just be better coaches. We wanted to understand, when somebody called us with a problem, we had an anchor to say, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Not just, “What are you doing wrong?” And those are two different things.

“I can hear you say ‘um,’ but what haven’t you learned yet? You haven’t learned that breath is a central character in the story of getting rid of your filler words. You haven’t learned that the habit of working out of that is the threshold concept for replacing your filler words.”

So, we cut the cloth a little differently on this communicator versus communication, the book is about the human as the communicator, not about the thing that you’re doing, like producing. It’s not about presentations. It’s not about script writing. It’s not about slide design. It is about the things that you need to do to be an awesome speaker.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really an interesting distinction right there. It’s, “Hey, knock off the vocal pauses. Cut it out.” But rather a threshold concept, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Like, the threshold of a door, it’s like, “Oh, once I enter through this, this has been opened up for me.”

Ruth Milligan
It’s a portal. Totally, a portal.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, could you give us an example of a threshold concept, like a there’s a time before we learned it, and then we had to get it, and then we got it, and then it’s transformative?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. These are things that we have encountered forever, but they just haven’t been organized or named in a way that they’re easily accessible. So, we didn’t create them or discover them, but we named them. Very big distinction. And so, here’s an example. If my client, the umm-er, had understood that nobody’s a natural speaker. If he said, “Ruth, you’re a natural speaker,” I’d say that’s BS. I’m actually not a natural speaker. I’m a well-practiced speaker.

Nobody comes out speaking out of the womb. We all have to learn the habits of speaking. If he had appreciated that he has to work out of that habit, like he worked into it, he would have taken the few tips I gave him and walked around saying, “Okay, I have to do this thing.” I gave him a specific thing to do. He didn’t do it. And that’s the habit.

So, the first one is speaking is habitual, not natural. We don’t just become a speaker because our mouth is open. We become a speaker because we practice at our genre with our audiences, to our goals, with our content, with our story.

So, there are six of them. They’re all in the same sort of category of things that you obviously have to encounter. And once you do, things become a lot clearer as to how to become that great speaker you want to become.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, a threshold concept, speaking is habitual, not natural, that is a threshold concept insofar as prior to internalizing this, you are kind of stuck.

Ruth Milligan
Right. And I might say, “Oh, I can’t be that speaker.” Like, you might say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, that person is such a natural. I could never be that way.” And our argument is that’s a lie. It’s a myth. And with the right practice, like anything, you can become better at it.

And so, to dial down that, like, “I can’t do it” to “How can I do it?” well, the first thing you need to do is realize that if you practice. So, here’s a good example. We did like a practice podcast about five months ago, and I came out with, like, a bunch of ums. I was mortified. This is my business. And I walked around for a week and I just did the trick that I know that I need to do and I’m happy to share it with you.

Every time I spoke, I worked my way out of it. A few days later, it was good. What is it, 21 days to a better habit, generally? But if you don’t know you have the habit, and you don’t know how to get out of it, then you can’t practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that, well, I believe that, that great speaking is habitual and not natural. For those who are skeptical, can you prove it, Ruth? I mean, you’ve got many clients who have improved, but let’s just imagine, who were some of the greatest speakers throughout history, or in our modern era? And did they, in fact, have to build up a lot of habits?

Ruth Milligan
I’ll give you one. Nikki Glaser reported, before she gave her opening monologue at the Golden Globes, she practiced 94 times. I forget how long it was, six or seven minutes. She counted 94 times. She shows up and she doesn’t miss a beat, but she doesn’t want to take any risk.

Even though she might’ve even also been on a teleprompter, she still practiced 94 times because, in comedy, and her genre, this is a genre, us speaking on a podcast, Nikki has got a genre, timing is everything. And if she’s not practicing that timing, she’s not going to land the joke, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Ruth Milligan
Martin Luther King, actually, his talk, most consequential talk, I believe, punctuates with the right timing to make the points, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the oasis of freedom of tomorrow.” He didn’t say, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the…” It has intentionality. It has stickiness. It has suspense. It has inflection. I promise you he practiced that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think comedians are a great example because, in a way, they do seem very natural to us, “Oh, they’re just so funny. That guy, he’s just so funny.” So, how much are they practicing those sets?

Ruth Milligan
Here’s a good example. Last month, I saw Tina Fey and Amy Poehler together in their tour. And at one point, Amy came out on stage and said, “Okay, everybody, this is the point where I’m working out some new content.” And she stopped a few times, and, “Oh, got to work on that. That’s not working out.”

Like, she’s trying to see if what she’s saying will land. She is writing in the moment. So, I think that humor is one of the hardest genres to write or deliver, personally, because there’s so much expectation from the audience to get the joke, to get the context, and to say, like, “I’m smarter because I got it. I feel smarter because I understand the humor and it made me laugh. It me feel a certain way.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard anecdotes that it can, indeed, be well over a hundred times of trying, cutting, refining, refining the material.

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. And so, to think that somebody can show up on a Monday, and say, “Oh, let’s give a talk on a Tuesday and wing it and make it work,” is a little bit of, “Oh, you must be superhuman because I don’t know anybody that can do that,” unless they have been spending, you know. Here’s a good example. We’ve been spending the better part of 20 months with our content. I should be able to, and can if you’d quiz me, I have one line for each of the concepts.

It took us months and months to write and refine, and write and refine, and get to that quick point that you would understand that still gets to the point. So, we can’t shortcut these things, is the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so there we have it. First and foremost, habitual not natural. Can we hear the other five concepts?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. And I will do it with one sentence each to see if I’ve got this down. Ready?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ruth Milligan
Speaking is social. Your audience is always making meaning of what you’re saying. You’re rarely ever just talking to yourself, and if you are, it’s probably before coffee and it’s a babble. If your audience speaks Spanish, they don’t want to hear it in French. That goes for jargon. It goes for acronyms. Your audience is also, it’s fleeting, meaning your audience is there and then they’re not, meaning your words are not going to stick. They’re going to fade. Speaking is social.

Speaking is embodied. If I asked you to pick up the book and read a sentence, which I’m not going to, you would be reading the written word, versus embodying it, delivering it, speaking it. My favorite embodiment is, if I said to you these words, you would know who the speaker was because he embodies this pace and tone and rhythm, “Last night, Michelle and I, we went to the movies.” You know who I’m talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
So, Michelle, so I will go with Barack Obama.

Ruth Milligan
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I remember most about Barack Obama is that he’ll go slow and then he speeds it up.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. If somebody had written that script for him, which would have said, like, “Last night, my wife, Michelle, and I went to the Lennox Theatre to see ‘The Terminator’ movie and we had a great time.” That would have been what somebody might have written. See the difference?

So, anyway. So, number three, speaking is embodied. We have to bring our whole, and we have to get it off the page. We can’t just, like, if reading it is not speaking it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
The AI will destroy us all.

Ruth Milligan
Next one. Speaking comes in many genres. This is a genre. Podcasting, keynotes, convention speeches, they’re all different genres, and they have different rules and conventions. And for the most part, the host, you, are setting the rules. So, you tell me how much time we have. You tell me what channel we want to be on. You tell me what topics we want to discuss. Same thing with any conference, any event. So, speaking comes in many genres, and you need to know the conventions to be successful.

Speaking is messy. So, if I ask you, Pete, “What’s your life story?” You might say, “Oh, where should I start?” And the problem is there are many places to start and many places to finish. The iteration of your content, what to get in, what to get out. “How do I take that 100 pounds of information and shove it into a 10-pound bag?” requires the iteration.

Speaking requires feedback, and yours first, mainly first. And if you don’t want to listen to yourself, then you’re going to probably not hit that threshold of true learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, each of these are threshold concepts insofar as, if we continue to live in the alternative, the opposite of them, we will stagnate. If we reject that speaking is embodied and we live our lives reading scripts, then we’re stuck.

Ruth Milligan
We are stuck. I think you may be stuck, your ideas will get stuck, your pitches will get stuck, people won’t want to listen to you. I’ll tell you a very quick anecdote. I coached a big tech guy, last month, foreign country, heavy accent. Got him to make some better enunciation so he could be understood.

We worked hard, content, three or four sessions. He did really well. Two weeks later, he gets invited to an internal audience of executives by someone else. He takes none of that practice or habits with him, and he completely fails. And the executive that invited him said, “I’m never inviting him again to anything.”

So, the downside to not really embodying what he had learned and taking it into practice was you don’t even get invited anymore. And, therefore, then your career, “Oh, I can’t put him on stage.” It’s actually what I call a shaded habit. You have something in a small dark room that you do and everyone goes, “Oh, that’s just Pete. He just does that.”

And then you take Pete to a big illuminated stage without support, and Pete’s still doing that, and you say, “Oh, my gosh, didn’t we want to give Pete some coaching before that?” Because now everyone sees it and that’s hard to unsee. And that bridge between sort of the shaded and illuminated is the space that most people don’t appreciate. That’s where you can go through the thresholds, literally, figuratively, and find better practice so that you are invited back and your career doesn’t get thwarted.

I have coached, Pete, many, many, many dozens and dozens of executives whose careers have been largely thwarted because they ignored how hard this is and they didn’t prepare. And they showed up not prepared and embarrassed somebody. Most of the calls I get are from CEOs that say, “That guy didn’t do so well with my client. Can you help?” because the CEO is embarrassed, and they’re feeling a risk for that relationship because that person, who they put in front of that client, true story, the client is very bristly, didn’t like the information, wasn’t a good quarter.

And the executive just keeps throwing more and more and more data at him. And I suggested, “Maybe he just wants to be heard. He doesn’t need any more data. So, can you just maybe stop talking for a minute?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m supposed to, like…” And you can tell he’s like one of those guys with, like, a briefcase full, decks and decks and decks of data.

And so, he tried it. He said it felt uncomfortable, but the client calmed way down, felt heard, and actually didn’t need anything more. Just needed some space. So, sometimes we don’t read the room right. Sometimes we just need to stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, careers thwarted. Well, to the point about, well, I guess now I’m just thinking, like, it’s a little spooky because often we never get the feedback that we need. And so, our career can be thwarted, we don’t even know why. We find ourselves on a performance improvement plan or fired with very vague feedback, which you can’t even call feedback, like, “You know what, it just wasn’t the right fit.” “You know what, we’re trimming costs.” It’s like, “Well, why am I being fired, not the other guy?” “Well, you know, we got to downsize.”

Ruth Milligan
I’ll add this. What about the interview that they give you no feedback on? And they just say, “No, thanks.” And you say, “I got to the third round. Something happened.” I have a son who’s starting to interview for internships, and the first round they gave him no feedback. It’s like, “Well, how are you supposed to learn? You know, you’re 19, how are you supposed to learn?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it could be pretty brutal in that context, if the interviewer is like, “Not my concern. Our concern is picking a winner. We don’t care about you and your life and what happens to you.”

Ruth Milligan
“Even though we just put you through a month of interviews and we just told you, you know, like…” And so, the learning, I think this goes back to, like, “What can we learn in these moments? And are we open to it?” And it’s tricky when you’re really busy and you have a thousand applicants, you don’t want to take time, “Ah, not my problem. Not my monkey. Not my circus. Just don’t want you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just as a side note to that, I would say I’ve been in both sides of the interviewing table and I, well, I’m into learning, so I love it when they ask for feedback because then it’s like, “Oh, well, first of all, I know that you want it, because I can’t just assume that everybody wants it. And it is time consuming.” So, one of my favorite instances, I rejected someone for a role. This was in college. And it was for a student consulting organization, because I’m cool like that.

And he asked me for feedback. I was so glad he asked. I gave him lots of feedback. He returned to get into that group the following year, and then went to consult at McKinsey. It’s like, “There you go. That’s hard to get into those consulting posse.” And it was awesome because he asked and I was glad that he asked. So, I guess that’s a tidbit right there. Go ahead and ask.

Ruth Milligan
And I do think, by the way, just to this point, we actually coach people to say, ask for the feedback you want, “How did I do in that opening? How were my transitions? Did it go too long? Did the story work?” I’ve had to give people feedback, like, “You’re a little tone deaf. Like, that story is not good for this audience. You might want to pick something that’s a little less, I don’t know, privileged or a little less offensive.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Something a little less offensive.”

Ruth Milligan
A little less offensive.

Pete Mockaitis
“Not zero offensive but just a touch.”

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. Like, coaching so many years of TEDx, we’d have people with such good ideas, and every now and then you’d get somebody who’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had a lot of feedback lately, I can tell. Okay, we’ll go there. It’s okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so key to ask. And I think you’re right in terms of being more specific about your request, it’s like, “So, how did I do?” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know if you actually want to know, or if you’re just looking for some affirmation, validation, because you’re nervous.” So, I’ll be like, “Ah, good job.” So, it’s hard to know if that’s even sincerely what they want. But when they ask it specifically, it’s like, “Oh, okay, you’re actually keen to know this, so we can go there.”

Ruth Milligan
So, Pete, here’s a question I’ve asked a few podcast hosts. When you have to edit out, your editor has to do an extra big job of editing out filler words and what we call disfluencies, a fancy term, do you ever want to tell the speaker how many you took out?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I don’t even think about it now because my editor just does it and we just go.

Ruth Milligan
Well, it’s just a curiosity because you actually have data.

Pete Mockaitis
I do.

Ruth Milligan
You have real data. And then I suggest that maybe you send them both versions. You say, “Here’s your before and here’s your after. If you want to watch, you can.” But at least, that to me, like, the before and after of any recording is the money shot because I can hear what I sounded like here, “Do I want to be in audience A or audience B?” But in these moments that are recorded and you have data, it’s always curious, like, “Does anybody care?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so Ruth, we got our threshold concepts and a top thing is watch, listen to the recording. You’re not going to want to, but that’s the thing that’s going to do it. Can you give us any of your other top dos and don’ts before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I guess the other one is, don’t underestimate the power of breath. Everything about breath is what informs pace, suspense, articulation, the ability to finish a sentence strong. If my name is Ruth Milligan, and I run out of breath, I’m going to get really high and then, all of a sudden, I’m going to finish up.

But if my name is Ruth Milligan, and then I get to finish strong because I’m drawing from my diaphragm. So, knowing where to breathe from your diaphragm, not up here. If you breathe from up here, it’s called stacked breathing. I can’t really draw, like, think of it like a crochet hook. I can’t really draw the right volume of breath out.

Breath replaces the filler words. Try to say an um on the count of three while taking a breath. Ready? One, two, three. You cheated.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but you do got to try. I’m no natural.

Ruth Milligan
So, I walked around for that week and I just took better breaths. I was more conscious about my breaths and my ums went away, the ands, the so’s, whatever. So, that’s the collection of things to draw on whenever you feel as if your speaking isn’t as strong, as confident, as measured or inflection. Look to your breath patterns. Look to your breath habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Any other top don’ts?

Ruth Milligan
Don’t think that you write like you speak. I cannot impress upon this one enough. I can tell within about 15 or 20 seconds if someone is reading me what they wrote versus delivering. We don’t ever want to be read to, unless we are like Isabel Allende or one of these great authors who comes to read me a chapter of your book.

I remember going to TED one year and actually Isabel Allende was on stage and she came and read, and I just could not get over, like, how they let her read. They don’t let anyone read anything. There’s no teleprompters, there’s no notes, you know, years and years of being in that genre. And then I thought to myself, “She’s not speaking. She’s actually reading her written words.”

And then John McWhorter was the one who really broke open the threshold concept for me that, like, we write in very long sentences and we speak in very short sentences. And when you are writing to speak, you don’t usually write the right way. And I had a presentation we coached last week, a panel discussion, and someone took, I think, about 10 slides of different, she was working up to talking about jazz in schools, and she was almost poetry.

She kind of showed a progression of what music does, and just used one word per image. It was just this punctuated, like 10 words. And the audience got quiet as a mouse. They were wrapped, because she wasn’t talking on, on, on, on, on. And she grabbed everyone and then she had them for her next four minutes of her presentation. It was really beautiful.

And she used long pauses, very curated imagery, perfect words. She nailed it. So, you don’t always have to be in the prose section. You can pull from things that we’ve learned from poetry, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ruth Milligan
“Don’t make it about you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, my most recent one, for sure, is this one, the intersection between speaking, stress, and time.

Pete Mockaitis
What do we know from that study?

Ruth Milligan
We know that when you’re in stress, when your amygdala has a response, actually, time goes like this.

Pete Mockaitis
It expands and contracts.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. And it gets slower, you’re just, like, “Well, I have a lot more time than I think.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ruth Milligan
It is this one.

Pete Mockaitis
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Ruth Milligan
I just can’t love it enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ruth Milligan
My voice memos. Hands down. Full stop.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ruth Milligan
I actually love to lift weights. It solves so many problems in such a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Ruth Milligan
I think the one I said earlier is the one that I think sticks with me, which is when you’re in front of an audience and you’re feeling nervous, stop making it about yourself. Make it about the audience. And a lot of that anxiety can wash away when you say be of service to them. You’re here to support them. And then you’re taking the focus off of yourself. And a lot of that frenetic nervousness doesn’t have a place anymore.

I had to use it 12 years ago in a sticky situation and it really stuck for me. And every time I have a speaker come in that sort of hamster wheel, I say, “Stop making it about yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ruth Milligan
I would encourage them to start at TheMotivatedSpeaker.com. It takes you to our larger website. There you can find all the links to the books, all of our podcast recordings, including yours soon, all of our blogs, and everything about our training, coaching, and what we do to help support speakers every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ruth Milligan
Go find one thing to work on. Just one. Everyone that we coach, even the most seasoned speakers, have one thing to work on. Listen to yourself. Ask for feedback. Just pick one. We actually can’t do many things at once, improve on many things at once. And it might be that shaded habit, that when it becomes illuminated, it could be the thing that’s keeping you back from being awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ruth, thank you.

Ruth Milligan
Thank you for having me. This was really fun.