Alright, if you didn't know it yet, my new book, The Antihiro Advantage with Portfolio Penguin is here and it is available on Amazon, Porchlight, Barnes & Noble, Booksellers, Everywhere. Now if you don't know what this book is about or you're confused about the title, right? The book and the title speak to people who feel like maybe they've had some flaws, doubts, demons, or they didn't fit this sterilized mold of what a leader or leadership is supposed to look like. So a big part of this book is about helping the listener or or as a sorry the reader, you, understanding that great or effective leadership isn't about pretending to be perfect or having it all figured out. It is learning how to leverage those same fears, doubts, scars, and so-called flaws, and how being able to do so is what makes you a better leader. The book is also about primarily how to navigate the darker side of leadership, especially the parts so many books do not cover. How do I deal with defensiveness, conflict, egos, power dynamics, difficult personalities, resistance to change? And because so much of leadership is a messy social process at its heart, the book gives strategies for being able to overcome a lot of those internal and external conflicts and hopes you become more socially agile and self-aware. The goal of a book was simple. I wanted to create something that I wish I would have had when things didn't go as planned. I wanted something that was like this black book of secrets that I could hand to anybody that felt like, man, I have this boss or I deal with this bureaucracy or my kids struggling with getting bullied at school. And I wish I had a resource to give him a rehearsal. They could understand people and how to get around this. We are so grateful to be able to have this support of folks like General Stanley McChrystal, the legendary Stephen Pressfield, and so many more. Because why in today's world more than ever, we need to know how to deal with the gray area and the messy realities of leadership in life. So please go to artofcoaching.com slash book now to get your copy or to get discounted copies for your team. And you can reach out to us for that info at artofcoaching.com. So artofcoaching.com slash book and make sure you're on the newsletter because we are going to do a lot of cool pre-order bonuses. In the next few months, I can't wait to share this with you. 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 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 non-sense type who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use immediately and learning how 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. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ All right, dive in. How's everybody doing? I really appreciate those of you who responded to our latest newsletter and my story about the woman in New Orleans and how she went on to lead literally what I believe to be one of the most amazing staff meetings I've ever seen. And it's something that's hard to put into words. But if you're not on the newsletter, just a reminder, I know people consume information in a lot of different ways. But go to artofcoaching.com slash begin. I always try to share a wide variety of leadership lessons, books, tips, things like that. Sometimes they're very much in line with the things we talk about in the podcast, but often it's very different. And yeah, so just make sure that you're getting kept up to date there as well. Today case study, I always try to bring you guys something that's very practical. And this is interesting because we talked about this this past weekend at speaker school. If you weren't able to make it out to this year's speaker school, please reach out to us. We run one every year. We used to run two and then full transparency. It just got tricky. We ran one in the spring and one in the fall and it ended up being something where we'd market against ourselves. There'd be people that wanted to come in the spring and then the fall and then no, I'd rather come in the fall in the spring. So now we run it once a year. It is never online because frankly the whole point of speaker school is to get better at speaking in front of people. And that skill is only developed around people. Very small cohorts we try to do anywhere from five to 10. It depends on what we're looking at that year. But what that means is you get a lot of feedback, you get a lot of practice, it's a lot of fun. We normalize failure. It is not some tense prove yourself what an idiot you are if you stumble kind of environment. And what a gentleman who reached out on our newsletter had said, another member of our community and somebody in speaker school is one thing that I struggle with is I feel like sometimes I come across as frantic when delivering information. Not frantic in the sense of unstable or incoherent. I know what I'm talking about. Other people would tell me I know what I'm talking about. I just seem very, I process very fast. And they essentially went on to say they can feel insecure about this because in the age of social media where people cut things out and they do jump cuts and it seems like nobody else really has those kinds of delivery issues obviously because they're edited. They feel like they're essentially looked over and they're not as polished. And so what we talked about is how if you are somebody who stacks ideas rapidly, right? You're juggling a lot of balls in your head no matter what the topic is, and this is often tied to your expertise. So you stack a lot of ideas rapidly. You speak in a way where you anticipate objections almost before they arise. I've certainly been guilty. You add context inside of context and you find yourself almost refining while you speak, that's tricky because that's a hopeful in many environments, right? I would argue in workshops that can be helpful. I certainly do this because there's so much to cover and it can be a little bit more organic. Podcasts because this is a high context medium, live coaching, I think it's really helpful because people see you working these things out in real time. Of course, higher level strategic conversations that aren't boiled down the sound bites and negotiations. In those circumstances, people can often feel your engagement and the mental horsepower, but in written communication especially, or in a lower context medium, like social media, it can create the perception of, wow, this person is tense or trying to do too much or they're overwhelming. And it just comes down to you seem to be carrying a lot at once. And I want to be clear, that is not because, for the most part, your ideas are bad. It's because you usually have too many ideas competing for airtime. And I'm certainly guilty of this. Communication is super nuanced. And so whenever one of my least favorite questions, though I understand it, is when people reach out and say, Hey, I have a boss or I have somebody at work and they do this, what should I do? And it's like, oh my gosh, this is so impossible to answer because I don't know you and I don't know this person. But I also know that they don't want that kind of answer. So you've got to find a way and I always have to find a way to help them, but also help them understand our answers are going to be within a certain kind of vacuum and constraint, But also, still make sure that they feel accountable for that because I always just say, hey, as you know, it doesn't come down to one thing. I can give you some basic advice on this and an attempt to be helpful, but without knowing you and what you've tried in this other person, just keep in mind, right? I can't just diagnose somebody or a situation that's not what I can do. But here are some things you don't want to do or here are some things you. So I try to make sure that I can siphon that down. Where you lose track is if you start thinking that your job is to know, oh yeah, I'm juggling all these balls in the air, trying to figure out which one to deliver. I know exactly which ball matters. You're not going to. But you also don't want to kick all 12 of a row. And so you have to think, if you think in systems, and whether you know a lot about nutrition or engineering or whatever, there is a lot of stuff that you're inherently going to think about. Okay, well, what are the contradictions of this? And second order effects and all that, but not everybody needs to know these things.

So if let's say you are delivering something

on social media or you have a very short talk

you have to give, it is helpful to have a central theme.

What's one central theme or what's one central strategic point

or one memorable frame?

And if that's still overwhelming, that's okay.

We often do a game called Half-Life,

Your Message, where we tell somebody, okay, like get it out in three to five minutes. Get out whatever you want to say. Let's record it. And then let's listen to it. Now let's try to get it out in a minute. Let's record it. Let's listen to it. Now let's try to do it in 30 seconds. Then they could often think, well, that's impossible. Well, yeah, we're not literally trying to get it all out in 30 seconds.

What you'll find is when you get more and more compressed,

even now, Then they could often think, well, that's impossible. Well, yeah, we're not literally trying to get it all out in 30 seconds. What you'll find is when you get more and more compressed, even down to 10 seconds, it makes you have to whittle down your core message or at least face the fact that you know you don't have one yet, which is OK. That's all right. What I want you to steer away from is these people who can do this are smarter than me or they know what matters more than I do. That's not the point. A lot of these people on social media have optimized for efficiency where many of you because you're so knowledgeable, optimized for high fidelity and complexity because you're out there actually solving a lot of these problems daily and These folks aren't always now they could make the argument well if you know What you're talking about you should be able to simplify yeah But and I've said this before in the podcast like let's in my case right I I used to coach a lot of athletes all once or I just spoke to I I don't know, 40 people over Zoom the other day in a presentation. Sometimes I have to over explain because there's so many different people on the call that I'm trying to address and find what they, they're gonna learn in different ways or people might need to hear different examples. So I might make a core point and then explain it in three different ways. I clearly can't do that on Instagram. That's not going to go well. You don't have that much time. And if you do do that, and I've been guilty, golly, look back at my feed, you end up speaking really quickly. And so in my case, in many of your cases, your background is trained you to account for confounding variables. Let's call it edge cases. And then as I mentioned early, earlier secondary and tertiary consequences at nuance. And in social media audiences don't reward that. They reward reduction. And the stuff that actually works in reality is not often rewarded on social media because people want to feel, you know, remember, they go on to that medium to feel relaxed, to feel engaged, to feel entertained, to feel justified. They want echo chambers. And so you're operating with, I want to help you understand this problem as your core directive. They're operating in, tell me something simple so I don't have to thank that much. And on the other end of that, I also don't want you to think that I'm telling you to always reduce complexity, or that you're gonna have to, let me put it this way, that reducing complexity is always a bad thing. You have to have some accountability over this, right? And don't think that reducing something is the same as oversimplifying. In my newest book, there's a lot of subjects there were big topics that I had to reduce the complexity of those subjects, because this is a mass market book meant to help a wide array of people. But you have to be really careful not to oversimplify that. And I think that's where a lot of your revolutions lie. Don't try to preserve, if I could give you one tip, it's don't try to preserve the complexity of everything you're talking about simultaneously. You have one core point. If you need to go into the weeds in one aspect of it, do it, but put a cap on it, whether that's 20 or 30 seconds, and then make the core take away easy. Because what you want is you wanna find that balance of things that are intellectually honest, intellectually honest, but not overbearing. What's intellectually honest, what's the biggest truth I'm trying to convey without it being overbearing? And sometimes it's super small. Giving an example, let's think, which example could I give? Well, a gentleman at speaker school was like, I'm trying to make the

point that if we just adjusted blank, it would do why. And I said, well, why don't you say that? And he said, well, I thought I was. I go, well, let's go back and listen to it. And we listened to that sound by it. And it wasn't that. And I said, can't you just lead with that? And he goes, well, I just feel like I haven't made any core supporting point yet I go that's fine make a headline and then talk about how you're

going to go And I said, can't you just lead with that? And he goes, well, I just feel like I haven't made any core supporting point yet.

I go, that's fine.

Make a headline and then talk about how you're going to go into those core supporting points. But you don't have to have all of them. The point of giving a talk is not to give the one talk that rules them all. The point of putting out a newsletter is not like this. Newsletter has got to answer all your questions or this is the book that asks to have all the answers.

It's to continue a conversation.

It's to engage.

Most major public, let's say you were gonna write a book

on what you knew the most about.

A publisher's not gonna allow you to write

some 600-page manifesto.

You're gonna get 60,000 words, 45 to 60,000 words.

...