Why Speaking Out Works Better Than Speaking
You don’t have to smack your audience to get their attention, but actually you kind of do.
I want you to think back right now to your school days.
Remember the kid who could never do anything right, who bullied others and who never apologized unless forced to?
Yeah, that kid.
That kid for me was Zack.
Every year whenever the homeroom class list was posted in the newspaper, you prayed he wouldn’t be in yours.
On one field trip, we all were stuck with this mean kid in the back of our daycare director’s station wagon. He was pulling our hair, kicking, pinching and anything he could do to get a reaction. Our daycare supervisor witnessed it all from the rearview mirror.
The next day the director made Zack sit on a chair while we all took turns hitting him back one-by-one. His reaction to most of this was to laugh. If the point of this misguided retaliation was to teach him a lesson, surely it failed.
But did it ever teach me a lesson! I never forgot this kid. And I never forgot this incident. And I never forgot the amount of negative attention it attracted. 30+ years later, I still feel viscerally about the incident.
An eye for an eye leaves the world blind, you could say, or to hit another cliché, the squeaky wheel gets ALL.THE.DAMN grease. The kid with all the problems attracts all the attention. The president with the sordid past and scandalous rhetoric overshadows the havoc he reaps behind the scenes.
The same principle applies to your messaging in the eyes of your ideal audience. It doesn’t need to be negative, but it does need to contrast with what they already know.
Because your messaging doesn’t matter if no one can remember it.
And the best way to make something memorable is to make it contrast with what people are already thinking. We’re evolved to pay attention to problems, to what’s different. That’s why you can’t just speak but speak out.
Speak out to be memorable
Your message will be ignored if it’s not different enough. We are trained to tune out what sounds too similar to what we know and are looking for the “danger” in what we don’t.
As thought leaders, we often plan for information before planning for attention, but there’s no way to get to sharing information without attention first. And in an information age, attention is a lot more sparse than information.
That’s why 80% of your article’s success is in the title you choose.
Or why 80% of your course’s launch success is in making the right offer.
And it’s why 80% of your next talk’s success is in how much you’re willing to go against what your audience believes.
Speaking out might mean you’ll be misunderstood or misheard or ignored, the same things that will definitely happen if you just speak.
There’s simply no way to mitigate all the risk of your messaging not striking a chord with everyone. If you do, you can be sure it won’t land on anyone.
On the contrary, my friend
You can’t have a message if it isn’t somewhat contrarian. You have to gain trust and create a shift to build the kind of business that requires people to change. Maybe you want them to stop smoking. Maybe you want them to buy your services.
Most people think speaking out is for troublemakers or anti-social elements. But in today’s world, there is nothing without attention, and there’s no attention if you don’t contrast with the reigning ideas in your field.
Example
Jane and Joe are presenting a new company-wide 5 year strategy. Their audience is warm, 2,000 of their own people (whose salaries they’re paying). Attention is given, or at least assumed to be there. The difference in their main message is this:
Joe says, “We’re going to grow 5% year over year by hiring the best people.”
Jane says, “We’re going to be out of business if we don’t hire the best people,” and paints a picture of the war for talent and what’s at risk.
You immediately pay more attention to Jane’s message, even though at their core they are essentially the same message.
A real-life example
Tim Cook gave a commencement speech at Tulane University where he famously said, “There is a saying that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.”
The person who made that line famous? None other than Tim Cook’s own predecessor, Steve Jobs.
But Cook continued. “At Apple, I learned that is a total crock,” Cook said.
Leaders of the same company in the same position, but Tim knew the stakes of memorability vs forget-ability meant that he had to contrast with not only what the audience already thought but also with what his predecessor put out into the world.
Instead, Cook said that when you find a job you are passionate about, you will work hard, but you won’t mind doing so.
And I don’t think Steve Jobs would disagree.
In this instance, you can have the appearance of disagreement while agreeing with the heart of the message.
And that’s the magical place where sparks light up and hearts open for your audience.
What’s next for you?
If speaking out were easy, everyone would be honest all the time, and we’d never have to dig beneath the surface to find truth.
You could walk into your CEO’s office, tell him the new strategy is destined to fail, and list the reasons why.
But the world isn’t like that. We’re wired to protect ourselves, our reputations and our relationships, such that speaking out sometimes feels like it isn’t an option.
I help my clients find the ways to use boldly outspoken messaging to create deeper connections with themselves, their audiences and their businesses. Doing so leads creates mores space for authenticity and memorability.
