How exceptional leaders communicate when the message has to land. Plus bi-weekly premium essays on “What the Best Leaders Say” in those moments.
Boring or not? What your audience thinks about repeating your core message
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THIS MOMENT COUNTS · 22 Think about “We Will Rock You” by Queen. But what about verse two? Can you sing it? Most people can’t. No wonder. A refrain consists of only a few words that allow everyone to join in. And it’s repeated over and over again. While verses are usually much longer and hardly ever repeated. Let’s put it this way: The verses give you something new. Now think about the last strategy presentation you sat through (or gave yourself). Chances are, there were plenty of verses. The market has changed. Here are the numbers. Here’s what we’ve done. Here’s what we’re going to do. And here’s how each department contributes. All important things. But what was the refrain? The line the team could have come back to after the announcement? Quite often, there isn’t one. Just more verses. Worse. Even when we’ve found a line that captures the idea, we seem strangely reluctant to repeat it. We’ve said that already. We don’t want to bore them. Surely they got it. We have higher standards for our talks. Noble. But. Imagine Queen deciding they’d sung the refrain once and that should probably be enough. No one would sing their songs today. Here’s what the noble take completely misses: In between the refrain come the verses. With new material. And so, each time you come back to your line, it can mean more. In We Will Rock You, the meaning changes with every verse. It becomes more nuanced. So, while you use the same words repeatedly, they have more meaning attached every time you say them. Even though you use the same words twice, you don't say the same thing twice. After the numbers, they understand why it matters. After the story, they feel what’s at stake. When you get to the decision, they see what it asks them to do. It becomes more nuanced, richer, and ultimately more meaningful. So, if someone says they have a high standard and never want to say the same thing twice, I say the higher standard is that the audience gets more from it each time you say it. That’s what a great talk does: it gives your audience a line they can come back to and pass along, filled with meaning. What’s the line you want people to come back to? Keep lighting the path, PS: If you want my help crafting a talk that has a strong line people can come back to, consider a 1:1 Talk Lab. |
This Moment Counts
How exceptional leaders communicate when the message has to land. Plus bi-weekly premium essays on “What the Best Leaders Say” in those moments.
What the Best Leaders Say Issue 22 Every once in a while you listen to someone giving a talk and it doesn’t feel at all like they’re giving a talk. It feels more like they’re simply telling you something. Like you’re having a conversation with them. But still, everyone’s glued to their lips, nobody's checking their phone. It all feels so natural. So effortless. Though you can't really say what they do differently. It’s definitely not a performance. There’s nothing particularly fancy about...
THIS MOMENT COUNTS · 21 Every talk has two risks: Someone misunderstands a detail. Everyone misses the point. The more you try to prevent the first, the more you risk the second. Which is exactly what most speakers do when they’re facing an important talk. They add nuance and facts to make the message more and more bulletproof. But with each bit of detail, the point becomes harder to see. The opposite is usually the better choice: protect the point and risk the footnote. Here’s what that...
THIS MOMENT COUNTS · 20 Sometimes you have to explain something that’s genuinely complex, maybe a new business idea, a technical process, a decision that affects the whole company … and whenever you try to leave something out, it’s immediately incomplete. It feels like there’s no way to simplify without losing meaning. So, what do you do? Leave it in and hope people will tolerate it? Or cut it and leave out the difficult parts even if it costs meaning? That’s exactly what most people get...