The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Point: How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications by Steve Woodruff

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

The Point: How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications by Steve Woodruff https://amzn.to/47ElCcm Is it possible to grab an audience’s attention in this noisy, confusing world? According to Steven Woodruff, the solution can be summed up in a word: clarity. Clarity-fueled communications is the practice of using the fewest words to make the biggest impact. The Point unveils how the overloaded human brain wants information packaged, and how to craft brain-friendly messages that break through the noise. From email to sales pitches, from workshops to resumes, Steven Woodruff’s Clarity Fuel Formula is the universal recipe for communications success. The Point includes four simple actions and eight compelling shortcuts that can be used by anyone to get to the point and get others on the same page.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys having you you guys come by remember the chris vosh show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law and we all know how she is but you know you probably deserved it anyway guys uh we have an amazing gentleman on the show today we are welcoming a uh royalty we have royalty on the show now we've had uh presidential advisors white house staff billionaires uh we've had uh but we haven't had royalty on the show and we we did have that queen elizabeth chick booked uh but she bailed

on us um i guess she had you know after 100 years whatever she had someplace else to go uh and uh we're not really interested in interviewing the new guy he seems a little decrepit but i mean look at me um but we have a king on we have a king on today and i think you're gonna be impressed he's the king of the domain called clarity so we have uh the king of clarity on the show uh unlike what most people call me the king of obscurity which is the opposite of clarity according to i don't know whatever shit's on the internet uh but as always we have an amazing show for you today and you don't want to miss out because if you do miss out you're just going

to live with fear of fomo for the rest of your life you're going to just be up for the all the nights of the next week going i miss that show with the king of clarity and chris voss and i'm not sure that i'm ever going to be able to i've never but you know what it's recorded for all time in principle and you can watch it for billions of years from now because it's on google uh so there you go but in the meantime this is a great point to remember that one of the best things you can do in life to improve the quality of your life is to go to give a five-star review on chris voss on itunes once you do that and you write out how much you love the chris voss show give those five star points there you will feel a wash of accomplishment love joy fulfillment

over you and if you don't uh call me and i'll yell at you for five minutes and uh use four-letter expletives and you'll probably feel something. Okay? All right. So go to Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss. YouTube.com for it says Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com for it says Chris Voss. We're finding interaction on the TikTok. Go see the cool AI videos we're putting up there. Chris Voss won the Chris Voss Show podcast.

He is known as and regarded, and probably across the realm, his servants approach him and kneel before him to yell uh king of clarity steve woodruff joins us on the show today for his amazing new book that's coming october 17th 2023 uh his new book is called The Point, How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications. He'll be talking to us about his amazing book. And as mentioned before, he's known as the king of clarity. He doesn't have his robe on today. I'm not sure what's going on there.

Maybe he's dressed down on, maybe it's one of those casual Mondays at his office. 37 years in the front line of sales, marketing, consulting, and entrepreneurship has uniquely equipped him to guide others in the principles and practices of clear and effective communication. I'm also going to see if I can get a Clarity Knighthood from him. Steve has had deep experience in corporate training and workshop facilitation for a wide variety of companies from startups to top five pharma, and he's the author of Cl uh clarity wins in 2018 and this new book the point welcome to the show steve how are you chris i am doing great i can't say i've ever been introduced like that before and i should have brought my crown for crying out loud yeah it's it's in the

dry cleaner on monday so oh it's in the dry clear yeah that's how mine is too yeah uh you need to have like a staff and like the crown and like a robe and you just need to go full prince charles and just be a crotchety asshole no after that inauguration i decided i ain't touching any of that stuff that looks horrible wasn't that wasn't that didn't that way you want to claw your brains out like i watched that thing and I went like, okay, so this is why we left England and started our own country. Fuck that noise. That's annoying. That's annoying.

Now we're just a bunch of drunken asshole Americans. Anyway, speak for myself. Steve, give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs. So I'm at stevewoodruff.com. That makes sense. And I am easily found on LinkedIn of all the different platforms I've been on for social media. That's the one I'm most active on because a lot of my clients are in the business realm. There you go.

And let's have some fun with this King of Clarity. How did you assume your fiefdom of the land of clarity and rise to cover domain over it? I don't know. Well, you can't pronounce yourself as the king of something. Somebody else has to do it. So sometime about six, seven years ago on Facebook, my buddy Chris Brogan wrote on my timeline, happy birthday to the king of clarity. And Chris is a marketer. And I thought, man, that is great branding.

It's ballsy. It's kind of really forward. But I decided I was going to run with it because there's only one king of something. There's one thing I want to be known for that's clarity and sure enough that has really taken off and uh people just whatever they don't remember they do remember this guy thinks he's the king of clarity there you go people do that to me on the chris fosh show they run up to me the chris fosh show that singing part.

And so we have to keep doing it, which I find annoying. And then after that, they're like, who the fuck are you? But no, I love the king of clarity thing. So if anybody ever declares themselves the king of clarity, do you have to go take your armies and go have a medieval battle with them? Is that how it works? No, I have quieter methods. I've learned from Vladimir Putin and the Russian guys. They just disappear.

Yeah. Can I get some different water than this one? He sent this bottle over. All right, guys. So give us a 30,000 overview, if you would, of the book, The Point. So The Point addresses something that's huge, which we all have experienced, which is we're sitting there, we're either reading a long email or in the middle of a presentation or in a long meeting, and we're saying, will you please just get to the point? One of the biggest challenges in communication, especially in business, is people don't know how to get to the point. They either don't know what their point is or they don't know how to get to the point. They either don't know what their point is, or they don't know how to get there quickly.

And what happens is we lose the audience. We cannot sit there forever and ever waiting for the point. And our brains are far too busy for that. So this book is all about why that problem exists and a very simple formula for how anybody any human being can get to the point quickly there you go and and so you wrote uh your earlier book on clarity um what made you feel that this one was you know important to write is an expansion it sounds like maybe a like maybe a part two of that book or how did that work work out it was a part two in 2018 when i wrote clarity wins i focused that book on having

a very clear message for your brand your company your career and kind of pigeonholing or niching yourself but i knew there was more the story. There's this whole other realm of clear communications in collaboration, skills, project management, all this other stuff. And I had this drive. I thought, you know what? What if there's one formula for all communications, marketing, sales, operations, advertising? And that's what i kept driving at and this book is the explanation of that formula that any human being can apply to be a better communicator there you go now evidently your uh kingdom had something uh that was running rampant in it which is you know typical for medieval i'm not i want to call you medieval kingdom i'm just having fun with the analogy um but you had you had the you're you're one of your biggest

problems that you're fighting against and trying to educate people is about the plague of vague yes what is that is this is this something that like should i be checking them by uh i don't know my rats in my cellar or something like that because I really like them. They're cool. They keep the company. Now, vague is the human tendency to really not plainly, specifically say what we mean. Could you be more specific? Yeah, exactly. I just said I'd do that.

So the plague of vague would be if somebody came up to you in a bar and they said, hey, Chris Voss, what do you do? And you say, I do media production stuff or like only fans yeah yeah what's media production stuff there's no specific category there's no way to to get an accurate picture in my mind there's no way to refer you. And so we all have to work at being very specific and clear quickly so that people can process what's going on. If we leave it vague and confusing, the human mind shuts down.

I don't want any more confusion. I don't need any more confusion. And so is there a plague of it going around? Is that the big problem? People are just basically diarrhea spouting everything? Oh, yeah. One of the worst parts of the plague is a plague of jargon. Jargon?

Buzzwords? Jargon, buzzwords. So here's one for you and i want you to you and your listeners to think about as i read these words and i'll use a dramatic reading voice to make it better all right what is this company doing okay we design core solutions that fuse chief marketing officer and chief information officer agendas into new market visions. It's not cheap or easy to make technology upgrades flexible enough to ingest an infinite accelerating cascade of digital applications. Yeah, this goes on and on and on. Ideally, it is change designed collaboratively with customers or partners in adjacent market.

And this is one of my favorite websites. It's called bluespoonconsulting.com. This guy is actually serious. But it's the best collection of vague, confusing jargon and technobabble I have ever seen. I quote it all the time because it's wonderful. It should come with a side of personal live because that's what it sounds like to me.

It's just a lot of whatever that means. I don't know. No, but I'm laughing so hard when you're reading that because, yeah, I've read mission statements like that. I've read PR statements like that.'ve read pr statements like that i've read you know who are you what do you do and you're just like you know it's it's like no you just sell widgets man like like that's really it you know i mean no we're no no no no we're here to create aligned business results for a range of stakeholder entities in the marketplace chris

we do sell widgets though So range of stakeholder entities in the marketplace, Chris. We do sell widgets, though. There you go. You know, why do we do that? Why is it that we do that? Is it some sort of fronting or some sort of, I don't know, we're just trying to pump ourselves up to be more important. Does it increase shareholder value by putting out a line of bullshit

that will get Wall Street to invest in or what? Yeah, jargon is a cheap way to sound like you know what you're doing. And most businesses are specialized in this. And then if you just ask, what do you mean by results? What do you mean by these expectations? What specifically are you talking about?

You have to peel back all these layers of vague, cloudy garbage. And people get so used to spewing them because it becomes part of the tribal lingo in business to just spew this stuff. And then you say, well, what do you mean? And that's when you find out people don't know what they mean. Yeah, they're like, I don't know. And you're like, what do you do? And that's when you find out people don't know what they mean. Yeah, they're like, I don't know. And you're like, what do you do?

And they're like, I actually have no idea. I just made this flowery language. I love how you used the word cheap at the beginning of that line a couple lines ago. Because, yeah, it is. It's, you know, and people, I like your thing, how to get to the point, which, you know, people who see my show right now, we've been with him for 15 years. Sometimes he does not get to the point or he gets eventually there. But there's too many segues, which I'm doing right now.

Too many segues. So how do we, how do we get to the point better in communication as a leader in companies, in interpersonal relationships? Because, you know know i've had quite a few relationships where people talk too much i think we know what that's about and you're just like you're gonna get to the point so how do we fix that the first step is going to sound so silly and obvious you're gonna just crack up you're the king of clarity. The first step, which is part of my four-step formula. Punch him in the face. No, I'm sorry. You've got to have

a point. You actually have to define where you're going. Believe it or not, and I know you believe it, a lot of people have not clearly articulated to themselves what the point is. What's the destination or purpose of this communication? Yeah. So I advocate for an extremely simple formula in the book for defining your point which is this right now my audience whether it's

one person a group of people or even your you know vast global intergalactic audience chris because i know this goes out past jupiter and it's like five people or something yeah right now that audience is thinking a certain way feeling a certain way and acting a certain way, feeling a certain way, and acting a certain way. As a result of this communication, this talk, this email, this book, this show, how do I want people to think differently, feel differently, and act differently? When I can articulate that shift, that's the point. So if I'm a parent and I'm looking for a behavior and attitude change in my kid, what's that point? What's that shift? And that will control how I communicate.

If I'm a teacher, if I am a pastor, if I am a podcaster, if I am a salesperson, what's the shift? So the first thing we need to do is be quiet enough to say here's the destination then when you know the point you actually can get to the point there you go sometimes the point i've had a couple friends and god bless them they're wonderful people but they're you ever had one of those people that they will trap you if you get in a conversation with you. Yeah. And they will, they will just go on a marathon thing and it becomes an endurance race where you're looking at them going, what point does he start to breathe? He hasn't stopped to breathe for like five to 10 minutes.

And, and they know that if they stop, you're probably going to interrupt them and walk away. Yeah. And, and, and God bless him. I suppose they're in such need of attention.

You know, I find this, you know, some guy's telling his life story to somebody at the grocery store and you're like, Hey man, the rest of us need to check out, buddy.

Um, you need some friends. And, uh, just trying to scan these mushrooms. Yeah. We're just trying to buy some goddamn mushrooms, man.

Get the fuck out. Um, you know, this isn't the friend zone, like go to aa or something like fight club just join a group and go talk to them um but uh i've had some couple friends they just run on and they run on and you just cannot it's like an almost an art firm to try and cut them off um and they don't have a point and so you know how do you how do we deal

with those people right um do you just rudely say do you have a fucking. So, you know, how do we deal with those people? Do you just rudely say, do you have a fucking point, or can you get to the point? Depends on the relationship. You know, if it's a good enough relationship, that's one way to do it. It's usually not. Hey, you know what? I've got one minute. Tell me, get me the point.

I like that. You give it a time. You give it a time. You've got to be specific. And I'll sometimes, when I meet with people, for the for the first time networking meeting i'll meet them over coffee i'll say give me your story in 60 seconds and they're taken aback a little bit and then they try to do it and what you find out is what's really important in their story by asking for yeah asking for just a limit and then i ask more questions and i do a lot of i interview people basically my way of

networking is i i do what's called story asking i make sure people tell me their story so i just ask question after question i pull people out we'll be sitting there for an hour and they'll realize they don't know nothing about me i've just been pulling them out the whole time. And it's one of the best ways to create a relationship with people. If you blab at people in an uncontrolled fashion, you're pushing them away.

Story asking is a wonderful way to encourage good storytelling, but sometimes you've got to put limits on it. Tell me the most courage good storytelling but sometimes you've got to put limits on it you've got to say tell me the most successful story you can from the past 10 years in this job make them narrow it down and usually it's going to be a really interesting story really wow i think i might do that on a show because we like to have people give us short answers so we can have banter and have jokes and

you know do all the things. But every now and then somebody decides to do a TED Talk speech for half an hour. And I think what I'll start doing is when someone has a writer on show notes and is doing that, I'm just going to start doing what you recommend and say, give me the 30,000 overview on your book in 60 seconds or less or something like that. Yep. Exactly. I love it. people have to respond to a deadline and we are able to control our verbal expressions if we're given the impetus to do so uh and so i mean here's the thing you talk in your intro to your show about the human brain. I talk about the human brain a lot in my books because that's the key. Our customer, your customer, my customer, everybody communicating their customer is the human brain.

And the human brain, we all have one customer. The human brain is processing 11 million bits of information per second from all five senses. That's what we're up against. 11 million bits of info per second. Now you and I talking to each other, focusing on each other, that's 60 bits. That's all we can do. We can focus on 60 bits. Out of all that. So our competition as communicators is we've got to win the 60-bit battle, and we've got 11 million bits. So if we're not relevant, if we're not getting to the point quickly, if we don't have a what's in it for me for the person that matters to them,

they're going to shut us off. There's a thousand other things to do. There you go. And then I have like 66 million because I have six different personalities. Whoa. No wonder I've been invited to six links to your show. Holy cow.

I'm not sure I want to meet that number three one though. He was a little... The one that says kill, kill, kill all the time? Yeah, very flaky. Very flaky on that. He's on parole or probation or one of those. I don't know. It's a great callback joke. So I love the clarity of this.

See what I did there and how that breaks down. And let me ask you this, because I've been single all my life. Anytime the girlfriend says to me, we need to talk. Can I do the same thing where I say to her, okay, great. We're going to talk. Give me your talk in 60 seconds. Is that going to work? Probably not.

Damn it. Because you put the 60-second limit, you're about to get some real talking going, and it's going to be one way and probably loud. This is why I just say, we'll just break up up and you just send me a memo of whatever it was you're going to say and that usually renegotiates everything because usually it's you know if you don't do this we're going to break up as well uh so uh let's see here uh let's cover some other things about your book i love love the plague of vague. I often am trying to get to the point, although sometimes I segue for entertainment,

but usually when I'm talking to people, I try and get to my point. But you made me focus on it much more. And you talk about being brain-friendly. I think we covered that in the show. Who's the audience for your book? Is it pretty much people for business? Is it pretty much human beings for everything? Or what do you think?

My primary audience has always been business people, leaders, people in sales, marketing, training, commercial aspect, people that rely on communication for their living. And so that's always my low-hanging fruit audience. But when I developed this formula with the four rules and the eight brain-friendly tools, it's really completely universal. So any human being can read the principles and the practices in this book and become a better communicator. So, you know, what kind of person writes a book for the entire planet? Well, I kind of didn't mean to, but

it is what it is. The human brain has an operating system. It does what it does. The forms of communication, stories and snippets and specifics and statement, they work across all cultures and all times and so this is really for anybody that wants to be a better communicator there you go uh so let's talk about those four points you just alluded to them that was my next uh question out for you so we've talked about two of them you gotta have a point you've got to quickly get to the point because you've got to win the 60-bit battle and that's the uh the part of the brain that's fascinating about this is called the reticular activating system and that's our neurobiological filter and the ras every moment

of every day is filtering through all this input and deciding, what am I going to focus on? And it's tuned to one radio station, WIIFM, what's in it for me. Everybody that's in sales knows about what's in it for me. You have to get to the benefit. You have to get to what is in it for the customer. Well, in fact, for all communication, whether it's opening an email or whether it's listening to a talk or whether it's going to a podcast, there's very quickly got to be what's in it for me, or I have plenty of alternatives.

So we as communicators have to front load what we say to make sure that it's interesting and relevant. So that's getting to the point. The third thing is we also have to get the point across. And that means that I can't assume when I use certain words that you have the same meaning in your mind for those words or that you've had the same emotional experience connected to those words. We might speak the same language, use similar words, everybody's nodding their head, and we're not communicating. So that means we have to illustrate, we have to define, we have to simplify. This is where you get away from all this jargon nonsense

and you really start getting into, okay, what do you really mean by that? And then the fourth step is ultimately the goal with our communications is we want to get on the same page. We want to reach agreement. We want to say, here's where we're moving. Here's what this meeting was all about. Here are the action items. Here's the direction. If we leave all that floating up in the air, undefined and unsummarized and unwritten, there's no guarantee we've actually communicated and gotten on the same page it's true it's true so you're gonna have a point get to the point get the point across all to try to get on the same page and if you look at everything from a 30 second ad to a full-blown

book to a movie all of it follows that flow you know we've talked about these 11 million things going on in the brain, the 60 bits and all that sort of stuff. Is there, in pitching something or trying to get to the point and get to that final getting on the same page, is there a good time delivery of that? You know, we've joked about the 60-second thing. Is there a concisement limit, I guess, of time is what I'm asking. of that you know we we've joked about the 60 second thing is there you know how do you she is there a concisement limit i guess of time is what i'm asking yeah it varies a little bit but

one of the things that i talk about a lot one of the lowest hanging fruits is email if you're going to send an email to somebody you are in a battle with their inbox that has all kinds of emails flowing in. And the most important visual real estate of your email is the subject line in the first sentence because that's what people preview. That's what makes them decide whether they're going to act and open or not. So you have to bring forward the most interesting point or maybe an action item or a deadline or something that's going to grab attention instantly on email. Instantly. And so we can't just bury people with a whole bunch of details in the email and then finally, after 24 paragraphs, say, oh, by the way, this is what I want you to do.

We've already lost them at that point. It's done. So you don't have any time with an email. Same with a website. If people get on a website, they don't see what they want to see, they don't get a clear message, they're off instantly. You might have three minutes in a talk, in a presentation where people are sitting there.

But the fact is, all of them have this in their hands. And if they haven't gotten to some relevance in a few minutes you're gone definitely definitely and so timing is everything uh well you've struck a chord with at least one of our listeners adam just uh he was asking uh what the title of the book was so i sent it on the comments and he's going to pre-order your book up so he loved your book thanks adam good Adam. Good job, Adam. Way to get to the point, Adam. He just gives that short thing there.

There's another thing you talk about in your book called the eight tools that are brain friendly shortcuts that anyone can use. I think those are good because I need as many shortcuts as I possibly can for what's left of this old brain. Do you want to tease out a couple of them or however many you want?

I know eight's a lot, so maybe we'll just get to the point. Yeah, we'll get to the point with a few of them. So one of the things that is important to do in sticking in people's minds, all of these are meant to turn the light on. Quick understanding, quick memory. That's what we're after, okay? So one of them is specifics. And I noticed that you

in marketing your show use numbers very effectively. Number one of this, this many views, these number of streams. You do a great job with specifics. It just said Chris Voss, I'm a big shot in podcasting. Well, that's

not convincing. We tried that. But specifics are. Another thing is stories. The human brain is hardwired for stories. And so if we're going to try to get a point across, we want to wrap it in a story that people will remember. So giving them the sterile facts is nowhere near as effective as wrapping it in a story that illustrates that fact.

And then one of my favorites is symbolic language using metaphors, using analogies, using word pictures. So if I leave this interview today and I say, man, that Chris Voss, he is the Mercedes of podcasters. What am I saying with that one analogy? High quality, exclusive, expensive, great, top of the line. If we can take an existing memory hook in somebody's mind and attach what we're trying to get to, it sticks. So, now you might... Now, is this the Mercedes after Chrysler bought it

and kind of ruined it there for about 10 years? I was going to say the Yugo. If you've been around long enough, you know, some of your listeners don't know what a Yugo is. I'm a Yugo podcast. No, there are no Yugo podcasts after 14 years. It doesn't... it doesn't sure i'm still an old

jalopy i'm the old jalopy of podcasting i think that's probably that's where i'm at well if that's if that's the image you want to portray that's just how i feel uh chris voss is far from a yugo the comments are just saying thank you thanks for boosting myself i just went in today for my first uh beard uh trim and we're trying to grow one of those alpha viking type beards that it looks like i can cut meat with it when it's you know all cut and sharp so i'm definitely feeling the old uh geezer vibe basically so my old son oldest son has the viking thing going he is does he he's got that alpha beard oh yeah yeah he's he's a whiskey influencer uh oh there you go he's a consultant and he's on his own he's out in wyoming and and he's got the beard thing yeah i'll i mean any

calling for some tips yeah i've got a i've made the first foray and it's going to be like a while but we're trying to make one of those beards that i don't know it makes it look like i need to start a a colton 1800s or something um i live in utah somebody already did that with the church but i'll probably end up looking like some church member in fact i probably shouldn't do that here come to think of it because everyone's going to think i'm like i don't know an apostle from 1900 1800s or something. All right. So let's see.

What else haven't we covered in your book we want to touch on and tease out? So one of the things that I think that it's really important for every communicator to realize is that our biggest competition, yours, mine, and everybody's, is the noise. It's everything else that is grabbing at attention and distracting people. So people are in front of screens now from 7 to 10 hours per day. Is that all? That seems low. Well, it may be low for some cases. We're looking at anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. We're hit with 75 to 200 emails a day.

We all experience 10 to 20 hourly interruptions. People are checking their phone anywhere from 100 to 350 times a day. I was looking up these, and these statistics go up every single year. So when we think, think you know what's our competition the competition for you isn't six other podcasters the competition for you is all the noise everything else and if we can't break through that noise with a differentiating interesting message we can't win and that's true of any brand any message anybody that's in career change any author you gotta break through noise and so we have one customer the human brain and one competitor

the noise what if i'm just like that uh who's that one guy who uh who uh it's not the jello brand but it's the kool-aid i don't just think the Kool-Aid guy just blow through a wall. Yeah! That's what we're going to break through. It might break through in a pleasant way, but that's okay. Well, there's insurance for that. So there you go. You know, it is interesting what you talk about

because we've been searching forever to find an AI that will take the 1,500 episodes of content, God knows how many hours that is, and start cutting it for short format because, God forbid, it should read a book or go along on anything. I mean, I love audiobooks. I love listening to audiobooks.

I love long-form books and everything else, but I guess I'm old. But, you know, we've seen kind of, so what we did is we found a company that's cutting everything up for us. It does an amazing job because it's all done by AI. And it's interesting because it's particular to what you were saying about giving them that that that nice formulated uh condensed version that cuts through the noise people can see the the screen when they first look at it and decide what they're going to do you know one of the problems we had that we had trouble adjusting to and still do is is you know we used to put our great videos that did really well on youtube

and then you know you had to put these, these, uh, clickbait sort of stupid screens on them. And we never really ever adapted to that. I'm like, I just really don't care. Um,

but you know, people, people like that. So they like the condensed version and then they'll buy into it and then they'll click on it and listen. You know, we have, uh,

our audience members tell us they'll listen to the first five to 10 minutes of show. And it all comes down to the guests, how much energy they have and how interesting they are. And then if their message kind of applies to them. But they love energy. They love somebody who's interesting as opposed to somebody who's boring, which is why we have guests on the show because I'm the boring one. So, you know, it brings it all down to that. And I really see that in what we're doing with TikTok and stuff. And it seems to be working

because we're starting to get really consistent views across all of our stuff now and trying to grow the channel. But just being able to have that concise clarity as you are the king of. So there you go. Do you ever uh do you ever see a point where uh you're gonna have a prince of clarity do you have how many kids yeah i have five five grown men uh five boys we brought up uh and are they fighting over uh inheritance of the no no i'm i'm kind of wired in a very unique way and none of them are wired the same way i am as far as the analytical part and the writing part uh and so you know they

they understand dad's got his thing you know dad's got his obsession with clarity and and uh but it actually it helps me because in working with them as they were growing up one of the determining factors for my wife and me was let's figure out what these kids are really good at and give them the self-awareness and the freedom to be real clear on who they are instead of trying to force them into some preset mold of you've got to go to college you got to be a doctor you got to blah blah blah blah blah and so we applied this in bringing up our kids that a good part of clarity is you've got to understand who you are as a person just as a company and a brand has to understand what are you really all about then you put it into words so clarity of thought clarity of direction precedes the clarity of expression there you go there you go and i imagine with children

uh it it can help by being uh clear to them and have clarity because um that way they understand what you want out of them as opposed to, you know, I don't know. My parents used to just scream at me endlessly for hours, but I deserved it. But sometimes you would just be like, I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do with all this. I don't know. What do you think about that? Well, my wife and I have, we both graduated college.

We both did graduate work. She has a master's in education. And yet out of our five kids, only one of them is finishing up a senior year in college. And they just weren't the academic types. They're all very smart. They're bright. But working with their hands, working with their minds, doing the things, college wasn't their deal. And I feel real bad when I see people pressured into things by their parents and shoved into boxes they don't fit in. That's a horrible, horrible stewardship of people's development.

Yeah, it is. I mean, they get pushed into social boxes. I've talked about this before, and, you know, one of the things I saw when I was young, and it was Billy Joel's song, My Life, that inspired me. And I remember being young. I was like 10 or 11 or something, and I loved Billy Joel's albums. And I remember thinking, why are these people having midlife crises?

Why do men have midlife crises? And you hear all the hate about how, oh, man, you know, he gets his midlife crisis, he buys a car and goes off and marries a young girl. And you're just like, so why does this happen? And, you know, it's a fight clip scene where Brad Pitt's in the bathtub and I think what's-his-face is shaving and they're like you know so I called up my dad and I said dad what do I do he goes go to school and I go okay so I went to school then I got out graduated and he said what do I do now he says go to college and so I went to college

and then and then I got out of college so what dad what do I do now he goes get a job and then you know what I do now go get married and he's like the point is you're living someone else's life you're living uh some societies pre-formed you know a lot of society comes to you and goes you need to do this if you're a man or woman you know here's your here's your things you need to do now there are biological aspects of men and women i want to make that clear that's very different um but there are there are kind of social constructs of what we're what we're supposed to do or or different kind of quote-unquote rules and and so uh trying to get to the point on this if i can segue a few more times is um it's really important not

to buy into stuff i didn't go to college i started my first company at 18. And I don't know, if I go back, I go be an attorney. So I would have to go to college. But that's another story. Oh, I think the sooner somebody can get in touch with how they're wired with their DNA, the better. And I was partway into a career in sales before I ran into the StrengthsFinder book. And it helped me really understand who I am, and eventually led me to grasp the fact that I'm a consultant. That's who I am. I'm a problem solver. And that's what brought me 17 years ago to start my own company, is I realized nobody's going to make the ideal job for me unless I make it for me. So I've built my company around me, my DNA, my wiring, my desires, and I've coached a number of other entrepreneurs and solos and consultants and people in career

transition, helping them get a hold of their DNA and their words so that they can make intelligent decisions. And that's one of my great passions not only that people learn the principles of the book and become better communicators but that people get a hold of who they really are and be able intelligently to say this is where i'm going and these are the words i can use to express it there you go uh and i imagine when you say the words to express it the language that we use and being concise with that language or economic or have an economy of it that's shorter, but still communicates in effective ways is probably important as well. It's one of the hardest things. People think that's easy.

It's hard. You know, Abe Lincoln spoke for two minutes at the Gettysburg address. Two minutes. And Edward Everett, the great orator, well-known orator, spoke for two hours beforehand before Lincoln. Nobody remembers anything about Edward Everett. They remember the guy that got to the point. There you go. And it's way easier to say too much information. It's way easier to spew a bunch of jargon.

It's way easier to fill the airwaves with noise than it is to be precise and definite and succinct. It is really, but it's crucial because look at the competition we're up against. Is there a point where you could be too succinct or too short where you're not communicating effectively i guess that's the point you need to do it in such a manner an economy of words and communication that you you can get people on the same page yeah i mean you can't be just you know some kind of abrupt individual that has no emotional intelligence and doesn't know how to, you know,

use the lubrication of just regular talk to people. But eventually, you know, you gotta say what you're going to say that I say, have something to say. And, uh, and so it's not just a matter of insensitively dumping bombs on people,

truth bombs, but it's getting there a lot quicker than most people do. There you go. I'm going to need to use this in my personal life. Whenever people are going on and on, I'm just going to be like, hey, can you get to the point? Not sure if this is going to work out for my dating life. So give us a final thought as we go out, Steve, final pitch on the book, et cetera, however, whatever you want to throw out there. So here's the final thing. And this is one of the strategies I advocate for, and you can use this, anybody can use this. It's called stratification. If you've got a block of information, what you want to do to present it to somebody is think of a pyramid

with three levels, okay? The very top level is the distilled essence, the point. Out of all of that stuff, what's the needle in the haystack that I really want you to know? If you can articulate that, you've now won my 60 bits. You've got my attention. You've won the right to get to the next level, which is a few bullet points, a little more background, a little more context, then you've won the right to get to the details. So we have to stratify, and that includes starting with emails right up in the subject line. If we stratify our information, we make it easier for the human brain to go down the trail with us. If we present unstructured information, the haystack instead of the needle we lose it

even if there's incredibly important information there no one can find it we've got to do the work to design it so people can find it it's probably some people doing upside down triangles where they feed you the mass up front kind of like you were reading with the with the whole thing, the jargon and stuff, the buzzwords. But I'm glad you're addressing this because enough with buzzwords. I think maybe we should outlaw them in corporate world or something. Yeah, I've got a few I would love to get rid of,

especially stakeholders. You know, most do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but stakeholders. Yeah. The flower language, you know, I know we wrapped on the final thought but you know george carlin kind of this thing that i always i always go back to that i think of and he talks about how we take like words that communicate effectively and and how we really flowery them up to where they don't have the same sort of power and they don't have the same sort of impact. You know,

one of the things he talks about is battle fatigue, you know, becomes PTSD and we have all sorts of ways of taking the emotion out of it and it takes the value out of it. It doesn't have the same impact, but having the same impact is important to get across to people. You know, if,

if, if I tell somebody to go fuck themselves it's much different than i just say if i say fu um you know and i like the first one better anyway it feels good uh so there you go i don't know what that means well being being succinct and getting to the point is one of the most important things for a brand because you don't have much chance to to make an impression. Here's a final challenge for you and all your listeners. In 15 years, nobody has

ever, ever won this challenge. You ready? Go. What are the words on the side of a UPS truck? UPS? No. You know the parcel service logo they have the logo

but there are two phrases and you'll see one of two phrases and sometimes both on these 120,000 billboards wandering the world every single day nobody in 15 years has ever remembered

what those words are because they're so vague and so useless. Okay. So what it says on the side of a UPS truck is worldwide services. Oh, my God. What's that? Worldwide service. Now, worldwide, yeah, okay. But what's services? That's like saying, what do you do? worldwide, yeah, okay. But what's services?

That's like saying, what do you do? Oh, we have products. Yeah. We have solutions. We have services. Those are garbage, garbage words. But the second phrase is even better. It's called, it's synchronizing the world of commerce.

And what they're doing is they're selling their supply chain capability, which for 0.001% of the population would get that message synchronized yeah people that are in charge of supply chains but they're advertising it to every human being on the planet and nobody knows what that is there's no what's in it for me there's no relevance it's totally unclear it's vague it's jargon so ups for me is the's no relevance. It's totally unclear. It's vague. It's jargon. So UPS for me is the worst marketing center in the world because nobody knows what's on that truck

and you've seen it a million times. There you go. You know what's on the side of you, U.S. Postal Service trucks? Not much. We lost your mail. Sorry, dude, but the price is going up again. Yeah, exactly. your meal. So you don't go down there, sorry, dude, but the price is going up again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there you go. That's been going on since I was

a kid. Well, it's been wonderful and insightful, Steve, to have you on the show. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. So stevewoodruff.com, that site's in the midst of a rebrand and refresh, so it'll be a little bit different in about a month and a half. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you can find the point already there for pre-order.

And then find me on LinkedIn, Steve Woodruff, King of Clarity, something or other, you know, you'll find me. And I have a LinkedIn newsletter that I put out every week, which all discusses these themes of clear communications and gives examples and that kind of thing. So those are the best ways to find me. There you go. I'll be subscribing that because I clearly need to be more clear. Of course, sometimes I'm stalling and producing the show in my head,

but sometimes I'm wandering because I'm trying to find which tab has the questions I'm looking for and stuff. So there's a little chi behind the Wizard of Oz here going on. But thank you very much uh for coming on steve we really appreciate it i'm glad to be here chris thanks for having me there you go uh thanks for tuning in as well order the book you can order it's available october 17th 2023 uh get like a billion copies give it out over christmas it's one of the great christmas lineup books if you will coming out right there uh called the point how to win with clarity fueled communications by steve woodruff it'll be available then and uh we have an audible and uh all that good stuff going on uh there will be a

uh audible version in about six months my publisher uh likes to do the audio version after release to the bookstores. So that will finally let me use my radio narrator voice for a good purpose. There you go. And people can pick up your prior book. What was the prior book again? The prior book is called Clarity Wins. That's also available on Amazon. It was self-published on Amazon. And if you are looking to do good branding, good networking, get your message straightened out, a lot of very practical tips in there as well. There you go. So thanks, everyone, for coming on. And if you're not smarter by now, you better go just listen to the show again

so you get some clarity. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.