Why Trying to “Sound Smart” is Losing You the Room with Strategic Story Producer Rob Willis

0:00Simon Sinek:The way I define charisma is believing in the thing that you're talking about. It's not about jumping off the walls and energy. There's some very quiet speakers who have unbelievable charisma. And the charisma is you can tell they really believe in the things they're telling you. I heard a great definition of charisma. Charisma is empathy and authority. Someone who cares about you and someone who can look after you. because you wouldn't want someone who's just very, very capable but doesn't care about you. Equally, someone who cares about you but can't do anything. That's true. We all want to be credible when we speak.

0:38Simon Sinek:We want people to think we're smart, that we know what we're talking about. So what do we do? We do more. We provide more data, more slides, more proof that we're the expert in whatever we're talking about. But it doesn't work. Because then we see the speaker who comes right after us, with few if any slides, and they can't remember the exact dates of things, and they get things wrong, and yet they hold the room and everyone talks about their talk after the meeting. That's why I invited Rob Willis on the podcast. Rob calls himself a strategic story producer, and I first discovered him on Instagram, where he breaks down how great speakers actually speak.

1:21Simon Sinek:and he actually did one on me. But it's how Rob learned what it takes to be a great speaker that I find fascinating. He was a tour guide in Berlin and not a very good one, it turns out, at least not at first. He started doing what most of us would do. He loaded up on dates and facts and the more impressive his knowledge, the less money he made. And so he studied the guides who made the most money. Those guides actually gave less information, but the information they gave, they communicated those points through a few brilliantly told human stories. Whether we're pitching an idea or leading a meeting, our job isn't to prove how much we know.

2:05Simon Sinek:It's to give our audience something they can relate to, something they'll remember. And Rob is so good at explaining how we can do that, unsurprisingly. If you like this episode, please do remember to subscribe. This is a bit of optimism.

2:27Simon Sinek:This episode is proudly brought to you by SAP. Change used to take years, then months. Now it seems to happen in weeks. And in a world moving that fast, the winners are the companies that have figured out how to adapt at the speed of change. That's why I wanted to talk to David Robinson. As the North American president of customer success at SAP, he spent more than two decades helping companies keep up with the pace of change. And he has a surprisingly simple idea about what it actually takes. You can learn more in the middle of this episode. To learn more about SAP, the AI cloud ERP for businesses of all size, head to sap.com slash grow.

3:12Simon Sinek:Rob Willis, thanks for coming on A Bit of Optimism. thank you for having me um so i learned about you when my friends all started sending me your video about me uh telling people uh my rhetorical device for how i start my talks and we thought wouldn't it be fun if we just invited you on the show to talk about how to talk give people advice on how best to present yeah i noticed you you liked it and for me it was a very meta moment my video about simon sinek liked by simon sinek that was good yeah yeah i thought it was good so you've only been doing this a very short period of time about a year right yeah making videos and you're a thing like my friends all know you and many of them follow you um and your your videos they sort of go viral quite frequently how did like when how what a year is really quick to to sort of to pop like that yeah now i've been i i'm also quite surprised by all of this.

4:09And I got into it because I have a friend who's also does Instagram videos. He's one of the big creators about Berlin history. And I saw him doing it. And he was like having a good time was getting lots of work out of it. And he said, Rob, you've got to do it. And I was a corporate trainer. And I thought now we've got to do LinkedIn, LinkedIn's the place to be. But then eventually, I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. And I thought I'll do 100 videos in 100 days because I saw a video from another personal brand expert and they said like just resign yourself three months see what happens and I gave it 100 days and then it began to get that momentum and you know that momentum is the kind of thing that keeps you going isn't it like as long as you can see momentum there then you keep going with the thing and then one thing leads to another

4:55Simon Sinek:and now I'm here in Los Angeles so 100 videos 100 100 days that's a hell of a commitment and you literally made one a day or did you make like four in one day it depends on like time like if you have a workshop or you know a family event or something or it's the weekend my my wife would not let me work on a sunday smart yeah and when did you realize okay this is a thing like i'm i'm i'm now i'm a i'm an influencer i'm a content producer i'm a thing i think the first video that really took off was I broke down a scene from a film called Margin Call, which has this amazing scene where Jeremy Irons guides an analyst, a junior analyst through the questions that you need to answer in a kind of executive presentation.

5:44And I made a video about that. And it just kind of popped off. And then people started like, writing and comments and then writing messages to me and so on and saying that they were getting value out of it. And it's kind of bizarre the first time it happens. I'm sure the same was probably true for you when you first begin to get the breakthrough and people read your books and they're like, I've got so much value out of this. I don't know if it's imposter syndrome, but it's certainly weird when it starts.

6:10Simon Sinek:Where did your interest come from evaluating and sort of breaking down how people speak? Well, I love seeing patterns and things. So I've got one of my job titles, as I like to call myself, as I say, strategic story producer, because I used to work in music and work as a music producer. And the work I do now is very, very similar to what I did back then, which is a songwriter would come to me, they'd have a song that would be eight minutes long, have no hook, there'll be nothing to latch on to. So my job was to identify what's working in this and make it shorter usually, and make it connect with their audience.

6:51And I thought, you know, I see this in films happening. I see it in people's speeches, you know, speakers like you. How do they do what they do? So I just apply that natural pattern recognition that I kind of do. I'm not really following a framework. I'm just seeing what feels right. What do I think they're trying to do here? And I'm very sure that probably a lot of the speakers are not even doing it consciously. they just have a way that they like to to speak it's just how they communicate steve job's a great example i don't think that he went to some amazing speech coach and learned to do it i think he just that was him that was how he got ideas across when you were studying your own speaking i imagine it feels very you the way you communicate is that something you arrived at quite quickly or did you did it or was it something you had to work on or was it something just through trial and error and you never really knew what made it work but somehow it seemed to

7:51Simon Sinek:work and you kept doing more of the thing that worked so i get a kick out of when people make videos telling people the things that i'm doing because i they they make some of the videos that i've seen they make as if like i studied this and structured it that way which is not what happens i learned a few things on purpose and some by accident so i'm very good on my feet like extemporaneously. Like I can show up without a plan. I've given entire speeches before. There's a few speeches that are online where literally somebody said to me before I went on stage, what are you going to talk about? And five minutes before I'm like, I haven't decided yet.

8:30And they giggle thinking I'm joking, but I'm being deadly serious.

8:33Simon Sinek:I haven't decided yet. The funny story is, and I don't really talk about this publicly, so it's fun. I learned a skill by accident. So I used to pay to go see my favorite speakers years and years ago when I was a young marketer, you know, folks like Seth Godin and Jim Collins, and I'd go see them in these big events. And I was always struck by how brilliant they were off the cuff, and how spontaneous they were and relaxed they were. And I thought to myself, I want to be able to do that, you know, and not because I wanted to be a speaker, I just wanted that skill, you know, even just presenting for work.

9:07Simon Sinek:And I practiced. And basically, what I did is I would get presentations work all the time you know pretty traditional here's my powerpoint i'm going to walk you through my powerpoint like many people i'm going to read most of the slides you know and i got better at i put fewer words on the slides so i had to kind of know my stuff i couldn't be too reliant on the slides and then i went to just a couple of slides and then i went to no slides and then i went to like very prepared to less prepared and i would i would sort of practice being less prepared so that I could, I knew my thing. It's like people are always amazed.

9:41Simon Sinek:How do you talk about your thing without preparing? I was like, could you just start talking about your kids and tell me about, you know, about your kids? And like, people are like, of course. I'm like, yes, because you know. I don't have to prepare to tell you something I know. This is my life's work. I know this, you know. People just freak themselves out, which is why they memorize and overstudy. And so I got really good at just walking up and being able to share what they're asking me to share, what I know extemporaneously. And then years later, I met some of my heroes who I used to go pay to see on the stage.

10:15Simon Sinek:And I learned that they rehearse and study and practice and memorize. And I completely got it wrong because they were so good. I thought they had a skill that actually they didn't. And so I practiced something by accident and got good at something by accident. But it is a process. That's what happened. But it's also a process. like i mean if you see remember that film eight mile with eminem i never saw it but yes you never saw it okay well there's a bit it's about freestyle rap and there's a bit where he's writing down lines on the bus and these are lines that he always will use and a lot of freestyle rap they're uh they're putting together material that they've already got yeah so it's like modules in their heads and it seems like complete magic in the moment but it's just putting together what you know yeah as you say and i think that people can also compare themselves unfavorably to people like you people like seth godin you know amazing speaker amazing speaker yeah he's given that speech a million times yeah and to expect that your average person in their tuesday morning presentation is going to deliver something with that kind of ease and fluency is just not going to happen, but you can get better for sure.

11:30I think that's 100 % true.

11:32Simon Sinek:What is the most common mistake people make when they're trying to be better speakers or presenters? Some of the most common mistakes. Well, I think the core challenge, which I think people often have, is what scientists would call the knowledge deficit model, which is people just lack the information if you gave them the information then they would think like you and i was the same actually so the other reason i got into doing communication was i was working as a free tour walking tour guide oh yeah yeah and you know you've heard about the free tours you go on a tour there's no payment for a ticket but you give a tip at the yeah at the end yeah and i started that and i really struggled at the beginning to make any money not because of stage fright or anything like that.

12:21But because I thought it was all about knowledge, dates and facts, and I thought if I know more, then people are going to be impressed. And they didn't, they weren't, they made no money. And I then started to, like you did, go on the tours of the guides who I knew were making good money. And I started trying to work out what are they doing, and I would copy them. And so I started this process of tracking what I was doing, and mapping it out on a big spreadsheet, worked out what made more money, what made less money. And the thing that worked was actually less information, not more information.

12:55And just distilling things down to a few human stories that people can actually latch onto. And I think the challenge, to go back to your question, that people have is they think it's about the big abstract content. It's about the data, whereas really it's about connecting with one person.

13:12Simon Sinek:What a great analogy, the tour guide, right? Because if you're giving any kind of presentation, whether it's a sales pitch or a presentation internally to your own company, you know, it's a bit of a tour. You're taking them, you are the guy taking them through the information, through the history or the future or the ideas. And you're 100 % right. Having been on many walking tours before, the people who just overwhelm us with data and facts, it's too much. We're bored, we're tired, we're exhausted by the, I interrupt and go, let's go to the next thing. You know, you're trying not to be rude, but you really want to move on.

13:46Simon Sinek:you know we're the ones who are funny and charming and tell you a couple of brilliant stories they make it i don't want i don't want to they make it entertaining and i think people are very afraid of this word entertaining because they think entertaining means telling jokes and sometimes it means that but really entertaining just means i mean i'm enjoying getting from point a to point b you know you're putting it beautifully i'm getting them from point a to point b it's another big mistake I think people make is they they don't think about taking someone from one place to another they think about okay this is what I've got to say right not what they need to hear right and so it's just a list of facts and information and it's not really a journey in any sense and it's not a story I know journey is kind of a story I guess yeah you could say um so if people can work out okay i want to get people from point a to point b be that literally in terms of a tour or metaphorically in terms of a presentation and then work out like what are the what are the bits that they need to hear to get from point a to point b yeah and you won't always be successful like i think another thing i realized from my tours is that the people in front of you and what they're turning up to the tour with have as much of an impact as anything you can do you know you can be better i don't get me wrong i'm not saying that this is all hopeless and you should never do it but the conditions around the story that you tell are as powerful in some cases more powerful than the words that are coming out of your mouth i'm sure you've been in some presentations in some speeches where people just turn up with crossed arms yeah they're not into it they're passive They're thinking, entertain me, Simon.

15:33But then there are some people who are like, tell me more. And they're leaning in and they give you energy as well.

15:39Simon Sinek:Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that when people ask me for advice, I always tell them, which is, you know, people focus in on the people crossing their arms who are disinterested or angry or don't want to be there or whatever it is. And they focus on them, which is demoralizing because you think it's personal, which it may or may not be. and then they make it their job to try and convince those people and get them to change their attitude and i find the opposite to be much more helpful which is focus on the people who are leaning and smiling and enjoying themselves a it makes you feel good and you're not trying to convince anybody you're just sort of going along you're you're you're in the flow just you're with them as opposed to at them yeah and turns out that's the best way to inspire other people to change their minds about how you're presenting anyway yeah you're building energy have you ever advise people who are trying to become better presenters better speakers to go on walking tours no but i think i might i think it's because i think it's whether they go well or whether they go badly i think this is i'm the this is a huge takeaway which is the the what you accidentally learned like it's it sort of opened up your career right doing the stuff that you're doing now i mean that's the origin story it came from you being a guide and i think being a guide being a tour guide is so perfect to learn how to present because literally your job is to hold people's attention and especially on a free tour, they can just walk away because they haven't paid any money and they're not trying to get their money's worth.

16:58Simon Sinek:They're just saying, if this is interesting, I'll keep doing it. Many times have I, in a museum, just sort of sidled up to a tour that was happening and I either stayed for one picture or I left. And it wasn't about how smart they were. It's about how good they were telling me stories and keeping me engaged. Writing is the same, though the techniques might be different. Writing is like, my goal is, if I'm in chapter one or section one, my goal is to take you to chapter two. And I have to give you, I have to make it interesting enough in what I'm saying and how I'm saying it. So that when you get to chapter two, not only do you want to be there, you really want to get to chapter three.

17:36Simon Sinek:And so it's the exact same thing in presenting. How did you start a first book? Because it's your, how many books have you written now? Five. Five. five so three really three one's a workbook and one's based on a children's book okay which has a sentence per page you know uh which i highly recommend if you want to write a book write a sentence per page uh it's way more fun um but actually three i've written three books but it's it's a bit like learning a language once you've learned one you kind of have a way of navigating learning another one and it's a little bit easier but what did you find helped you get good at that making people simply want to turn to the next page yeah well um every single one of my books is quite different they're different and and i got more mature both in my thinking more mature as a writer like start with why is a beautiful elegant simple book um but the writing is simple by the time you get to infinite game it's a it's a it's a much more complex concept with much more in-depth complex writing and I would say more mature and I'm really proud of it because it was it's a harder book to write you know um so there's that you know but I I think I got very lucky in that I'm not a reader and I've talked about this before I have really bad ADHD and so I actually struggle to read and so I got to write a book that I had to keep my interest and so uh if things as I was reading it, if I found my own mind wandering from my own things that I like to talk about, I would cut it.

19:14Simon Sinek:And so it's relatively short sections, relatively simple sentences, you know, because there's a lot of jokes. And every time I read one of the jokes to this day, I still giggle, you know. And so I was writing it to hold my own attention. And so I think that was a big part of it and i enjoy i enjoy ideas yeah and i enjoy making ideas um clear i just think it's fun and um and so when i understood something or i discovered a new way to say it i smiled and so i was listening to i was watching my own reactions and it's the it's very similar to what you said about expertise and like how smart you are i didn't read things going good i've got all my points did it smile did it give me goosebumps did it make me well up with tears sometimes did i enjoy getting from a to b or was i boring myself regardless how technically accurate it was so i was reading it very much as a consumer yeah not as a not as a scientist and a consumer wants different things from a book they don't necessarily want the how they want the motivation to go and do the thing which i think your books are very good at doing is it's not it's not a manual no it's not like tick the box then you got your why by page 27

20:34Simon Sinek:instead of doing a straight ad read we're pioneering something called an ad with authenticity we want our ads to have valuable content for you the listener and this ad with authenticity is brought to you by sap the pace of change has compressed what used to take years now happens in months or even weeks. SAP's David Robinson has spent more than 20 years helping organizations prepare for what's next. Sometimes moving forward begins with knowing how to let go. We're going through our own transformation as an industry. In order to get our teams internally to learn what's new, they've had to unlearn.

21:15Simon Sinek:How do you teach unlearning? It's really hard because unlearning is basically saying something that was successful is not what you're going to use going forward. So the mantra becomes what got us here won't get us there. 100%. Your ability to kind of safely let go of the things that you know so well because you need to move into a new world. You can't hold on to the past while you're trying to reshape something new in the future. And that's the only way that you can do that is to let go. I think you may have just stumbled upon the single greatest competitive advantage that companies don't realize, which is the idea of letting go.

21:50Simon Sinek:Timeframes are becoming so compressed that letting go of old systems, old ways of doing things is the single greatest competitive advantage you can have in a marketplace.

22:04Simon Sinek:When I saw the video you made of me, you said I do this thing where I tell people, I sort of I'm sort of self-effacing like you know I'm embarrassed that I have a career and it was I smiled when you made the video and what I say is I'm embarrassed I have a career because there should be no demand for my work I talk about you know trust and cooperation and people shouldn't I shouldn't have to shouldn't have to have this career it should exist I smiled when you made the video because I only do that occasionally and I don't know when I use it. I think it's sometimes when I don't have a lot of time because it's quick and easy.

22:49Simon Sinek:Or sometimes I'm just sort of feeling a little punchy. But it's not something I do all the time. I actually do it now and then. I'm curious what else you, because you said in the video you went down a rabbit hole and watched a lot of videos and you looked for patterns. I'm so curious because I don't have, you know, I have no objectivity on myself. I'm so curious what else you see. so there's actually you are you are featured in in my my workshops because of one thing that i think you have managed to do better than most people which is distill things down to a message or an idea it's very very easy to kind of clip or um turn into a short or anything like that and the the line that i love so much is people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it right and i use that to explain what is the big message of your presentation and i've got some tests that i run people through is it a statement of belief statement of belief could you argue against it you could argue against that for sure um is it self-explanatory self-explanatory and is it just one point that you're making and it's it's one point so i use that as as an example uh i always wonder how do you how do you get to something like so something so distilled was that i mean you didn't just come up with that in the day did you the first time i did it yeah i mean almost everything i've come up with was spontaneous at some point um i i don't have a process where i sit down and sort of like test things so at some point it probably was spontaneous and then I kept it.

24:30Simon Sinek:But I think when you're making the case that the why is the thing that has to come first and if you look at the great brands, I think when you're distilling the idea down to its essence, I think those little clippable, quotable bits become quite obvious. I don't, you know, which is, I'm explaining this thing called the why and that's the thing that motivates the purchase behavior, the vote, the support, whatever it is, you know. and the what is the result, even though you think that's the reason they're buying it. You know, it's clear that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Like it is sort of a, anybody could have, if you go down the logic train, I think you get there.

25:12Yeah.

25:12Simon Sinek:I just went down the logic train, I guess. Such a good question. I don't know the answer. And I mean, do you apply the same thing to your frameworks? I mean, did you just one day draw three circles on a bit of paper and think that's it? that's what I'm trying to get to. I mean, I think visually. And so people think that I have that pad and pen out there as this sort of clever device, but I didn't do it for you. I did it for me because when I'm thinking, and especially if I'm doing something extemporaneously, I need that. Cause like, if you sit down with me and have a meeting with me, invariably, I'm going to grab a piece of paper and a pen to explain my ideas because I think visually.

25:48Simon Sinek:And so that pad and pen is there for me to think. It's really funny. It happened a long time ago. So I don't, and I think we tend to sort of romanticize and rewrite history but i think you know i think the thing that has to that people have to remember is all ideas feel like a bolt of lightning but they're not really you know there's it's like anybody it's like little bits little bits little bits and then the final articulation is the bolt of lightning but it didn't come out of nowhere you know it came out of lots of conversations and lots of thinking and lots of reading and lots of you know sort of trying to understand and then you arrive at what seems to be a bolt of lightning you know yeah i heard therapy described as like a spiral i think it's kind of the same you're trying all these different angles yeah and then bit by bit you're getting closer and closer and closer and then one day finally you get it it's not linear no everybody everybody on the planet has had an aha wait a minute it's this that's all it is like if you talk about something enough and study something enough you too will come to some realization whether that realization is you know original or whether it's shared by others is irrelevant, but you will come to some sort of realization.

26:55Simon Sinek:There's a few rhetorical devices that are really important to me, which is, and it goes back to your idea, do you want to be the smartest person in the room? Look how smart I am. Look at all the stuff I know. And when I write and when I speak, I, it's very, and I love, this is why I'm sort of glomming onto your example, your metaphor of the guide. It's very important to me that I'm not the smartest guy in the room. And I want my audience to come to my conclusion one slide one paragraph one sentence before i do and so i'm feeding them my logic of how i got to my own conclusion and then as soon as i get to people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it or any other sort of conclusion everybody's like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah of course yeah yeah yeah totally saw that coming as opposed to wait for it wait for it look how smart i am And I think a lot of people do that.

27:45Simon Sinek:They try and be the smartest person in the room because they're on the stage. And I think the opposite is more fun, which is how do you guide people through an idea? How do you guide people through a story that they will come to your conclusion before you do? Seth Godin talked about this in terms of education. Too many of us rob our audience or our students of the aha moment. And the aha moment is so much more powerful than any rhetorical device. yeah that you're i mean it is kind of a rhetorical device but any way that you're saying the thing the fact that you've made it inevitable that's what's powerful that's what gets people to to see the world as you do and i think that's maybe another mistake that people make is to use your example they would just go on stage and they would say people don't buy what you do they buy while you do it and then people would be imagine the reaction of the audience they'd be like what what are you talking about yeah yeah um and would actually in some cases produce a kind of reactance people would push back against it it's like actually i don't think i think pretty sure they buy what they do yeah exactly and this is the other thing which is there's no one way to speak you know and i think you know a lot like there are many great speakers they all have slightly different or very different styles and there's no one style that's right who are some of your favorite speakers that their techniques have actually made you better at what you do so for me one of the best speakers of all time probably hans rusling and if you do a workshop with me you're going to see a lot of hans rusling yeah like just ram down their throat because also he doesn't really look like what you imagine a speaker to be when we imagine a speaker we imagine this very clipped perfect the kind of 1980s style you know and that's not what people connect with If people connect with him because he just looks like a regular dude.

29:35Yeah. He's saying, ah, and um, the whole time. He's looking at his computer. He's, but then he's got this amazing energy, this enthusiasm that he brings to it. It's like watching, I don't know why I'm thinking of this. It's like watching like Carl Cox DJing. Someone who's so into the moment, who gives off this vibe, this energy that you just want, you're not even sure what you're saying at first, but you know you want to hear it.