Say Less, Get Asked More

There is a kind of person I meet constantly, and if you're reading this, there's a decent chance you're him or her. You know exactly who you are, what you represent, what you value, and what you bring to a room, because you have done the work and are living the career. The questions underneath are answered. I think of it as settled, and being settled is an accomplishment most people underestimate. Last week I wrote about the in-between moments where reputations quietly form, and about the two very different problems that hide under the same silence at a dinner table, a cocktail party, or a pre-meeting introduction in the corner of the conference room. For the settled person with the first problem, the identity is somewhat clear, but the words are failing them, and everything true comes out sounding like a job title with adjectives, or worse, a résumé recited at conversational speed while the listener's eyes politely glaze over. The good news is that words are the fixable part.

I'll show you mine, because I built it the hard way. When someone asks what I do now, I say: "I help successful people get talked about accurately in the rooms they're not in." Then I stop talking.

The stopping is the precise trick, so let me sit in that silence with you for a second. Every instinct you have will tell you to keep going, to add the credentials, to explain, to fill the air, to nervously chatter like a buzzer will go off and you get points for how many words came tumbling out. Resist it. It is oh-so-hard. The silence does the work you cannot do for yourself. It pulls the question out of them, and the moment they ask, everything changes, because now they are inviting the story instead of enduring it. The same words, requested, land completely differently than the same words, volunteered.

What the pause buys you when the question comes is that I get to tell my larger story to someone who asked for it. I spent my career learning how to capture an audience's heart, in stadiums, arenas, and theaters.  I did it in countries where I didn't speak a word of the language and had a few minutes of production to win over thousands of strangers. Emotional architecture was my job, memory was my deliverable. That is exactly why I know how to make a person memorable, because I've had to do it at an industrial scale, without words, across every culture you can name. My proudest credentials arrive as the answer to a question, and by then they sound like evidence instead of a brag. A credential offered before the point sounds like name-dropping. The same credential offered after the point sounds like proof. The facts don't change. The order changes what the facts mean. You didn't get the fancy title before you proved the skills that earned it. The skills and the talents that make you good at what you do are who you are, and that lands and invites curiosity.

The other thing my sentence contains is a small amount of nerve, maybe it's even a little cocky, and I know it, and I deliver it with the smile of someone who knows it. A safe sentence gets a safe response, which is to say a nod and a topic change. A sentence with some edge to it gets a follow-up question, and the follow-up question is the whole objective. You aren't closing a transaction at that dinner. You're starting a conversation that someone repeats later, accurately, to a person you've never met, and eventually may lead to a transaction.

Claudia Amalia Photography

I'd love to tell you I drafted my sentence one clear-eyed morning and it worked at the affair I attended that evening, but you've been reading me long enough to know better. I have tried on answers in public for awhile now, and some of you watched me do it (cringe). The transition answer, the overexplained answer, the modest answer that undersold everything, the clever answer that impressed me and confused everyone else, the long answer that lost people at the second clause, the fun answer that invites a conversation that maybe I don't really want to be having at that moment. I fumbled and stumbled through more introductions than I'll admit, and each awkward sentence taught me one thing the next version kept. What I landed on isn't a costume I finally got comfortable in. It's my actual voice, arrived at by process of elimination, and the elimination took years. So when I say rehearse, I'm not preaching from the director's chair. I'm reporting from the stage floor. People assume rehearsed is the opposite of natural. A lifetime backstage taught me natural is what rehearsal produces, and it's as true at a dinner table as it is under a spotlight.

So this week, build yours. One sentence that leads with the idea of you, plain enough for a dinner table or the sideline of a soccer game, with the credential held in reserve, and just enough nerve to invite a question. Say it out loud until it stops feeling like borrowed clothes. Your dog has already heard the quarterly presentation, he can hear this one too. Then practice the pause with a friend, because the pause is the part everyone skips, and the pause is where the other person decides to lean in.

This is the exact muscle I love watching a room full of accomplished people build, and the moment someone finds their sentence remains one of the most rewarding parts of my work.

Next week, the harder problem: what to do when the sentence can't be written yet, because the person underneath is still working through who they are and how they want to show up.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole

P.S. I want to hear your sentence! Or help you build it. Comment and I'll read every one.