You are likely not running out of ideas, but you are running out of time. A lot of us have goals where we want to help more people, we want to get our message out there, we want to be useful. But it's very easy to overthink and over schedule ourselves and ultimately not do these things that we know could help make a bigger impact. This is one reason speaker school exists. We do not run speaker school for just perfect TED Talk style speakers or people that have their topics figured out. Speaker school is for anybody that just wants to refine how they get their point across, whether you want to be a better storyteller, whether you do have a presentation coming up, it is for anybody who knows that there is value in sharing your story and value in helping others, but you just got to get over yourself and commit to it, right? It is a two-day event that we're going to do here in Phoenix, Arizona at the Art of Coaching compound. And we have had people that have social anxiety come to this, we've had practice speakers to this. Bottom line, we get a bunch of misfits together and we work on how to make our message more clear how to get ideas out of our own head, how to more intentionally get our message across to those who need to hear it, and ultimately just to improve as humans, there's no area of your life where becoming a better communicator, a better speaker does not provide massive return on investment. And if I have to convince you of that, you're probably not the right fit for our services, right? But knowing how to get your point across and decrease the risk of misunderstandings, help save you time, help save you money, help save you energy. And it can also help your reputation. You know, like we say the wrong thing sometimes, which this episode and many episodes are gonna talk about how to recover from

and how to manage, that can have pretty nasty effects.

So come get better with us.

It's a fun environment, it's creative environment.

Go to artofcoaching.com slash events.

Now there are student discounts available

and early discounts available, early purchase counts available,

and then also first responder discounts available. Artofcoaching.com slash events and look up speaker school today. Welcome to the Art of Coaching Podcast. I'm Brett Bartholomew and at a young age, poor communication nearly caused me my life. Now I help others navigate the great area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can become more adaptable leaders regardless of their profession, age, or situation.

This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems.

So if you're in the no-nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advise you can put

to use it immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership,

you're in the right place.

I'm glad that you're joining us.

Let's dive in. All right, let's get it going. Welcome back to another episode of the Art of Coaching podcast. Today's premise is really simple as is the topic. What is the most important thing if you had to Gun to your head come up with the most important thing to keep in mind, to know, to act on in order to become a better, more convicting, more compelling, more helpful speaker? And the reason we bring this up is it's one of our most common topics. How do I find my voice?

How do I do this?

Hey, I've got lots of knowledge.

I've got lots of insight and people don't say this from an egotistical standpoint. It comes from I want to help. I want to share. I believe I've lived a life. I believe I've had some experiences and I wanted to come across a certain way, right? of our previous speaker school attendees have said, I feel like this has kind of gotten

to the point where I'm at with my career now.

It's what's holding me back.

Most of them know the sets and reps or exes and knows or techniques and tactics of what they do, but it's how they're dealing with people getting their point across, presenting, conveying information that's keeping them held up. So there are many things that make a great presenter, speaker, compelling educational. We've done many podcasts on this. A lot of ink has been spilled on this as well. But if we had to come down to one thing, it is simply know your audience, which is also one of the hardest things for many people to do. They, it's not necessarily that they don't do their homework. It's not necessarily that they're rush. It's that they want to speak to everybody. They want to help so many people. They want to get this information out that they don't get surgically deep on who their audience really is. Now, I've fallen into this as well, especially when I was crossing over in my audience. I used to speak mainly to strength coaches, people in the performance profession. Then I realized, you know who I really wanna help are people that are just straight up coaches, leaders. Anybody that's a guide, I don't care what industry they're in. What I care about is that they hold themselves accountable, wanna get better want to actually improve, which was better for me admittedly. There was some selfishness in this mainly because, and no offense to any, any strength coaches listening to this, it's still a wide range in my audience. But when we would reach out to strength coaches who said they wanted help, a lot of them would spend most of their time and investment and all that on things that only were related to their credentials. And so the NSCA, the CSCCA, and if you're not familiar, these are just industry credentials, industry norms. Hey, this is easy to sell to my boss. So when we had workshops like speaker school or our apprenticeship works, which about conflict resolution and and negotiation. I guess some of them those things felt self-indulgent or they were worried that if they asked their boss for a con-ed budget to that they'd get told no. But for me a large part of our audience in art of coaching now and as it became where people people that they didn't think that way, no matter what industry they were in, they knew that not working on these things is a form of like professional, or working on these things, rather it's professional risk management. You know, how well you speak relatively, is gonna impact on how you show up in interviews. So if you fundamentally think, okay, I'm already, and this is a sound bite, we're freezing and hearing and listening to, right? When we talk about communication, it is not about how we speak in our vocabulary and things that are just that simple. Communication is the act of not only sending or conveying information. It's how we receive interpret, decode it. If we don't work on those things or we think we're already good enough at those things, that is going to show up in how you approach a job interview. That's going to show up in how you approach, however you address leadership, your personal relationships, gaining trust or buy-in from folks, and just your day-to-day life. And so we talk about this a lot. I think so many people think, well, I'm already good enough at communicating. I'm already, but they don't actually audit, okay, where are the areas that this actually shows up? Where are there some times where I'm dealing with, there's wasted time or an idea or decision didn't get passed on the right way? It is not about how great of an orator you are. Your upward mobility and your ability to manage conflict and relationships are predicated on so much more of that. That was our audience. People that didn't think that a speaking skill or improving their speaking skill is a nice to have, it's more of, yeah, I can understand where this costs me. And there are certain people that are notorious for underrating communication because they think their competence speaks for themselves. And the loudest person gets the room and what have you. And so what I had to really think about is who is our audience? What am I speaking to? And this applies to even when we go to workshops now. So when I say, no, your audience, there are so many permutations of this. And there's a lot of ways you can do this. When we get hired to do an end service, or when I say know your audience, there are so many permutations of this.

And there's a lot of ways you can do this. When we get hired to do an end service, or when I go speak, there's a range of questions that I ask. I try to get an idea of the demographics of the room. And that can be age, that can be gender based, that can be anything related to the culture, jobs, that can be related to experience level. We have a whole list of questions and it's on our website when people request us to come speak and the idea is that we care enough to do our research to know who's in the room so we can tailor the information. It's basic consumer psychology. It is targeted communication. Now, I did this the same way when working with athletes. How do you choose what information to convey? How do you know when you're conveying too much information? Well, fundamentally, you think about what's practical. I'll never forget, and I've talked about this in our Mighty Networks group, and I'll probably do a social media post on this. But I'll never forget when I was a strength coach, I saw two highly educated people on stage and people had paid a lot of money to go to this conference. And they were getting in an argument about what they both perceived to be the correct empirical definition of velocity. And it had gotten to the point where this person cited this paper and this author and this person cited this paper and this author and this was kind of going on for five to ten minutes and it's side-tracked from the original question and I thought who the hell is this for? Like listen, academic rigor, scientific rigor, the words we use are important but they should always be in service to an outcome. The people in that room wanted something practical related to a certain question and pain point. They did not wanna watch a bunch of intellectual masturbation between two people to see who was right. That is a great example of not knowing your audience. It shouldn't have been about those two. It should have been about what is the most practical point I can make for right now. The other day I was coaching somebody and I used what some people could perceive as lazy language. He understood exactly what I meant. Okay. This was also something that was pernicious when strength coaches used to be like, oh, you know, I don't use the word core. It's torso, it's trunk, it's pillar, it's whatever.

An athlete comes up to you and they say they want to do core work. What do you really get out of being like, we're not going to call it the core. We're going to call it the pillar in the trunk. Awesome. You get the blue ribbon for self-righteousness. And the meantime, this guy could give two shits. So knowing your audience comes down to fundamentally figuring out what they care about, what they're

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