Luke Murray shares why his clear instructions to an employee about helping a customer with an oxygen mask didn't work: the employee had social anxiety and needed step-by-step guidance. He uses a six-question checklist and the medical mnemonic OLD CARTS to break vague directions into concrete micro-behaviors that actually get executed.
Have you ever explained something as clearly as you thought was possible to explain it and found out that your employee didn't turn that into the actions that you expected? Well, if so, this message is for you. In this video, I'm gonna tell the story about how I instructed one of my employees to treat a customer and assumed that he would understand all the implications of that suggestion and how I was completely wrong and what I then mapped out I would do about it to fix it. If you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Murray. I have been a former physician, an entrepreneur for about 20 years. During that time, I've done about $100 million in revenue. I currently have a portfolio that does about $3 million a year, and I make these videos because I would like to have ambition without the bullshit, and I'm hoping you would too. Let's go ahead and go to this meeting, and then I'll wrap it up at at the end.
I'll give you one other example. Austin, uh, where it has the thing on her face, and I was like, hey bro, if you came into the bedroom and your sister had a thing on her face that was cramming air and she woke up, what would you say? And so he— so I was like, you'd ask, what the fuck happened? Why do you have this on? Are you okay? How long has it been going on? Like, you would have a lot of questions. He struggled to even do that. So I sat down, so I went and got, I sat him down, I sat her down. I said, fuck, what's going on?
She said, I'm sleepy.
And I just waited for Austin to say some shit. I was like, and I just, and I'm standing here serious. I was like, sister, what if she was your sister? Not listening as much. And he is like, how you feeling? I'm like, you wouldn't ask that. But my point is you're trying to tell me, hey Luke, don't be a dick. And I need specifics. And I'm thinking, hey, act like it's your— ask her questions. What does that mean? More good, less bad. What does that mean? And I was like, act like it's your sister. You're like, I don't know how to say to my own sister, right? So we'll get— don't worry about remembering this, but who, what, when, where, why, how, like, would be questions you can ask. So that's a thing you can put in your brain that we haven't put on the sales skeleton. Also, In medicine, we use something called OLD CARTS when you're doing history of present illness, which is— and you guys aren't gonna remember all this, so again, don't worry— but onset, location, duration, associated symptoms, aggravating symptoms, alleviating symptoms, radiation of the pain or the thing, the timing of it, the severity. So like, I can't just say, like, more good, less bad, ask your questions, treat her like it's your sister. I gotta be like, onset, location, duration, character, everything aggregated, like who, what, when, where, why, how. Um, and so I wasn't even trying to do that. That just comes naturally to me. Just like for some of you guys, you could just walk into a room and like make friends, or you could just walk up to a fucking basketball goal and just shoot. I've got to break it down into micro behaviors with specific wording so that you can replicate me or your own version of me, which by the way, guys, I want y'all thinking about that because you're all-stars. But like, you know what's more valuable than an all-star? An all-star maker.
So as you can see, I thought that by saying, hey, imagine that you walked into the room and your sister had an oxygen mask on. What would you say? I, I could not imagine in a million years that he would struggle to come up with questions. Now, this particular employee is pretty socially anxious. Uh, I mean, I'm a super intense person, so I'm right there, but I thought I was just making it so easy. But what I needed to do is to break down, and I will go back in and teach these things point by point, but who, what, when, where, how, why. Who gave you that mask? What is it for? When did you put it on? Why did you put it on? Where do you have any kind of pain? How does it work? And then the old carts analogies, which is straight from A History of Present Illness, a physician thing that we do. So when you have that as a checklist, I would think that that would be good enough. But honestly, that might not be good enough. I might have to say, because for example, like who, I mean, I just now had to recognize how would who apply. I might need to spell that out to him and say, who did you get that from? So if you think that you've done a good job of communicating and the person isn't executing, then it is your job as a teacher to understand why. Hopefully this is helpful, and, uh, I'd like to know if maybe you've done the same thing, thought you've broken it down as elementally as possible and been wrong. I'd like some company here, if you don't mind. Thanks for watching.
