Check it out! Check it out! Welcome to the Art of Coaching Podcast. I'm Brett Bartholomew and at a young age, poor communication nearly calls 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 the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use 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 into it today We're gonna talk all about over explaining something that is very easy to do especially if you're somebody that is just a passionate person or you like getting into the nitty gritty about stuff or sometimes maybe even if you just feel like you lack a little bit of confidence conveying a point clearly and concisely can be something that we do accidentally Sometimes you can make the argument that there's actually a benefit at times. We talk about this often. Everything has a duality when it comes to leadership, communication, coaching, any of those things. So this is going to be today's show. Now, quick reminder, we have a couple of things coming up. There are two or last three workshops of the year. Speaker school here in Phoenix, Arizona in May. What's you're going to learn? How to clarify your message? How to better relate to your audience? How to get out of your own head? And you're going to have a hell of a lot of fun. This is one of my favorite workshops to teach. It's very straightforward. Two days here in Phoenix at my house, very small cohort, and we practice, given talks, and we practice teasing out the core message and we do so under constraints and we give each other helpful feedback and we normalize failure and experimentation. How crazy, right? This is not a place that is stiff or you're gonna be bullied or you're gonna be made fun of. You could absolutely bomb in front of everybody in a three minute practice talk and we're all gonna clap for you and cheer you on and you're gonna

Get back up and do it again If you feel like you need a break you can take a break you're gonna get helpful advice You're gonna give thoughtful you're gonna get thoughtful feedback more importantly like we talk about with all these live events You're just going to get around people. I think something that's really concerning right now Now, brief soap boxes, I don't know what if the world's all gone still to online learning

or everybody thinks they can get all their answers from chat GPT and Claude. But for me, there's still something about being around other humans in small tight knit environments. So speaker school is a great option. The non superficial bullshit conference, real simple one here. Who's this for? Anybody who has things in their personal life or their professional life, they're still struggling with or want ideas of how to strategize against. Are you reinventing yourself in your career? Do you have a boss that is bombarding you with bureaucracy? Are you trying to figure out how to reconnect with your spouse? Are you trying to figure out how to balance time with building your business and your kids? Are you just wanting to get around other people that have been through the suck and the shit and everything else and you'd like to pick their brain? Great, that is what the non-superficial bullshit conference is. It is for anybody who has questions of, hey, how did you person who's gone through this navigate that? How did you navigate this? Anything goes, we're going to talk about a wide variety of subjects. It's myself, Jason Leiden, Kelly and Juliet Staret, who are absolute legends. My friend, Missy Mitchell McBeath, Stu McBillan. My my friend, Jevers, it's people from a wide variety

of backgrounds who have all made a lot of mistakes

and just wanna share them.

And then finally our apprenticeship in Connecticut.

It is our last course of the year

on how to deal with hard conversations,

understand behavioral psychology, behavior change,

how to build buy-in, how to get more effort out of folks,

and how to just be able to deal with the power dynamics we all face, okay? Well, that said, let's get into this. Why does over explaining deserve its own episode? Well, I think we all know it is one of the most common ways that smart, capable people can accidentally undermine their own impact. I certainly do it sometimes. I understand that my habit with over explaining came from my background as a strength coach. You know, I would lead large groups of athletes. I mean, we would have groups, it could be 20 to 70 people sometimes. Then inherently they're all gonna understand things in different ways. Some of them are more analytical, some of them want more metaphors, analogies, some of them, you know, it's like,'d talk about an episode of The Wire and that I'd use that to relate a concept or we'd talk about Game of Thrones. I had to coach large groups of diverse audiences and so I got in the habit of explaining things like 20 different ways. That was really helpful in that context. A context that might not be helpful is when I'm doing certain interviews for my next book, or sometimes even when I do podcasts, I'll get in the habit of, I wanna get so much to you guys in terms of value that I'll start explaining it way too many ways and I've failed in the past sometimes to recognize how quickly my mind works. And in my desire to give you as much value as possible, I've now overwhelmed you accidentally. So I think the biggest myth about it is people can think if they're around an over explainer, that person just likes to talk. That person has an ego. That person wants to talk down to me. And they can think that that person wants to be the center of attention. That's very rarely the case. Over-explaners typically think they're being thorough. They typically think they're being helpful. They don't know that the other person checked out 45 seconds ago. So none of the core reasons people over-explain are mutually exclusive. It can be a fear of misunderstood. They've been misread before. Maybe that was painful. It cost them credibility. It cost them something in that interaction. And so a lot of over-explaners try to preemptively close every gap, every interpretive gap before the other person even gets there. So it's like they're playing defense against somebody that doesn't even understand that, you know,

this issue hasn't happened yet or they're not playing, they're playing a game against

an imaginary opponent. You know what I think of it? I think of over explaining oftentimes

to somebody that they pack, they're going on a trip and they pack for every possible weather

condition. It's like, well, this might happen and that might happen. And well, I might

work out and then we're going to go to a nice dinner and all of a sudden it's like, yo, you got like two, you got two check bags for a weekend trip. You know, and you have like all these suitcases and you're going to wear the same outfit multiple times. So that is a big reason why. And it's always helpful to understand first principles. the expertise trap trap a lot of folks just know too much so their brain sees the full complexity of it every variable every contingency Every angle this is something that writing my neck my newest book the anti-hero advantage help me with and Thank God my publisher penguin random house will report fully. Oh, like helped with this. be like, Hey, just a reminder your audience doesn't need to know everything. You need to know same for any of you. It doesn't matter if you teach yoga or Pilates or if you're the head of a construction crew or you got you've been in firefighting 26 years. Right? Like a surgeon doesn't need to explain the entire cardiovascular system to tell you that you need surgery, right? They need to give you some understanding. They need to give you some kind of base, where is base camp? What's this scaffolding here? But a lot of experts struggle with this because every little nuance they leave out feels like somebody could call them online. You're lying or you don't know how much you say you know or you're a charlatan. And then they start self editing. They start self editing and they get out in front of it. And a lot of that can also come from a fear of control, right? A fear of control disguised as communication. It's like, well, do you really not trust the other person to handle the job or handle the information? Right? Or are you is this now about you making sure that if something goes wrong, you've covered your bases or you just can't delegate it? That's where you have to understand. It's like you're not explaining thoroughly. You're kind of prescripting every response, right? You're playing tennis against yourself again.

So a lot of times people are like, they're scared of somebody making a mistake. And I get this too as a boss that sometimes didn't want to delegate not because I didn't believe in the people that worked with me. But because I felt like I had to have extreme accountability of the process and make sure that no stone got left unturned. And sometimes that's valid because you know the stakes can be very high and you need to cover all your bases

So you could make the argument that in some instances over explaining a process is like, yo, I'm gonna go in the weeds here because I wanted on record that we went in depth. I wanted on record that we covered these bases. So later on, you can't say you didn't know. All right, I'm gonna cover both sides of that. But oftentimes again, it is control a little bit of fear, conflict avoidance, general insecurity about credibility. The conflict avoidance one is a very sneaky one because people can't over-explain because they're scared of pushback, right? So like all if I explain more, maybe it'll make them less likely to disagree and this will feeds into the other ones that we talked about because there's gonna be nothing left to argue about, they're gonna see the big picture but that's not how most people work. Then this is what I was telling a recent client. You can tell everybody everything and you could state it perfectly. There is still going to be horrific misinterpretation. Communication does not work because you've told somebody something. Communication works when somebody else understands it, right? You have to put it in terms they understand. That's the issue. People think why I told them I said this, I explained it thoroughly. Therefore they think they've communicated. But communication is a shared process of meaning making. You did not communicate just because you told somebody something. Communication happens or communication has done well when there's a clear mutual understanding of these things. And so that's something that most people struggle with from a miscommunication and over explaining standpoint. It's not, it's not something that you just deal with. Oh, I have to be more thorough. No, you have to kind of get to the need to know for the now because where overexplaining becomes a real big issue is because people will just stop listening to you. to you and not because they don't respect you, but because their brain literally can't process that much input. You know this. Attention is a finite resource, right? And if you're spending it before like if you are, let me rephrase this, okay? Attention is a finite resource. You know that. So what you have to think about is what matters most to this other person. If you don't know that, you have to get to know that. If you do know that, it's all about, even if you did over explain, you can fix it by saying, listen, I know I just said a lot. Here's what I'm trying to say and here's why I believe it matters to you. And boom, hit that. Or here's what I'm trying to say. And this is why it matters for us. You have got to get better at designing that billboard. This is also an issue with over explaining people. I mean, put enough forethought into what they're trying to say. So they start talking and explaining and then the clarity comes as a result of that. When there's something you have to explain, think first, what do I need to get out? It would be easy for me to over explain this episode. So what I think about is, well, I always want to start the episode with first principles. Why do we over explain? What are the core reasons? Because for me behavior is very interesting

and behavior is important.

When somebody acts a certain way,

I'm always wondering,

what's at the root cause of that?

...