#131 Why Nobody Listens To You (And How to Fix It)

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It's actual structure and psychology of the way you speak. It is learnable, but most people never study because we weren't taught how to have conversations this way. You're going to fix that. By the end of this episode, you'll have a toolkit for holding attention in any room, a one-on-one, a meeting, a dinner table, a pitch, and you'll learn how to avoid the 4 forgettability traps that make most people stop paying attention to you. I'm Codie Sanchez. This is The Big Deal Podcast. Let's get your points heard. Part 1: The attention problem is physiological. Here's something that should humble all of us. The average human, they speak about 125 words per minute, but the human brain processes language at roughly 400 words per minute. So there's a really big gap, right? And your listener's brain, well, they fill it with grocery lists, whatever happened at work, whatever they left the oven on, the door open, because They're not just not paying attention to you. Their brain isn't being lazy. It's literally just efficient running in the background and it's using all the unused bandwidth your voice isn't filling. So Harvard psychologist Matthew Killingsworth tracked what people were actually thinking during their daily lives. So he used an iPhone app and it pinged them at these random intervals. What did the data say? People's minds were wondering 47% of the time. So that's almost half of your life, your brain is distracted. And here's the part that actually matters. They reported being less happy when their minds wandered, regardless of what they were thinking about. So it actually makes you happier when you are present. Presence feels better than absence. But presence requires something to hold on to. So the question is, what holds a brain in place and how do we use it so that other people are enraptured by us and we can take up the entirety of their brain processing so that they will hang on every single word? Well, in the '70s, there There was a psychologist, Lowenstein, and he was at Carnegie Mellon. And this is interesting. He developed what he called the information gap theory. And this is the theory of curiosity and the gap between the information you present and what other people are piqued by. The idea is really simple. Curiosity isn't triggered by knowing nothing. Nope. It's triggered by knowing almost enough, like a partial answer, a question, but not the resolution, a setup. No payoff. The brain experiences this as a physical discomfort. So a gap, it's like, I gotta close this. I know just enough, I gotta close the rest. And you've felt this too, like the cliffhanger ending of a TV episode. That, that's the thing that keeps you from going to sleep, right? It's also the thing that brings you back next week. Or the, the song lyric that you can almost place the name on the tip of your tongue. Those aren't actually accidents at all in the entertainment space. They're engineered tension. Great communicators, we steal this, and you can use this to engineer tension deliberately. You see, when you're a great communicator, they don't deliver information immediately. They withhold it strategically. So they kind of temporarily hold back to create this pent-up momentum. Think about how the best storytellers open. Do they just tell you what happened? Of course not. Do they give away the hook? Do they tell you all the context and backstory? No. Maybe they start with a question that can't be answered yet. Sometimes I think we worry about 452 things we could do to drive other people to pay attention to us. But what if it doesn't even have to be that you're so brilliant or you pause perfectly or you use the uptick perfectly, and instead it's literally a sentence? So here's the practical rule: before you explain something, Create a reason to care about what you're explaining. I do not want you to lead with the answer. I want you to lead with the gap. Let's give some examples. Let's say that you're in a meeting and you want to answer a question that your boss is asking you. And they say like, "Hey, why haven't we hit our 2020 revenue targets?" And you could just start answering. That's what 99% of people do, but you're not going to be a 99% communicator. Instead, you might say, "Have you ever wondered why?" 96% of our leads don't close. What are you doing? You're about to tell him your answer, which is, hey, actually, we don't have a revenue problem from a lead problem. We have a closing problem. The salespeople aren't closing. You could have just said that. But instead, you're asking an interesting question. And he's going to think about that. Now, what does that do? He's like, now I need to know the answer. Now I'm really paying attention. Now she's given me something interesting. And so they're going to lean in.. And I bet you, you get listened to more often when you do that. Now think about it even just in a conversation. How many times have you fought for attention? Maybe you're at a dinner, you're with a group of friends, and there are some people that just feel naturally they're storytellers. Maybe they feel more communicative than you do. So let's say that you have something that you wanna talk about. You just read something titillating on Twitter, right? You're like, oh, I just listened to this podcast episode from this incredible guy on AI. I wanna tell them the story about it. Your natural inclination, inclination is going to be you just start talking about it and you're going to lead with that. I just watched this incredible podcast and this is what happened and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they may or may not be interested in it. But instead, if you think about what piqued your curiosity in that conversation, you might say, have you ever wondered when AI will turn into AGI and if there will be a day in which we have no jobs and thus the government has to pay us? People are going to be like, what? Why are you? Let me— I want to know more about that. Or if you want to be more, you know, easy and straightforward, you could just say, have you ever wondered if the people who created AI are scared by it? Both fascinating questions. And then it might be like, yeah, I have kind of wondered that. And then bam, you give them the answer. So a practical rule is just start with a question. Part 2, the 4 drivers of forgettability. Now that we, you know, know attention is a resource with real neurological limits, brain-based limits. Let's talk about how most people burn through it without realizing it. I've found in studying communication and our CEOs and tons of research on the subject that there are 4 drivers that kill conversational presence, and they're all invisible to the person doing them. And we've seen all of these people, but we've never been able to name them. And you cannot not be them if you can't name them. So the first driver, If you want to be completely forgotten and have nobody listen to you, you should do this. It's called the context dump. So it's the habit of frontloading everything before you get to the point. Have you ever heard somebody go, so, okay, a little background. So I've been working on this for a few months and there's a lot of history here, but basically what happened was back in 2019, I was starting to think about a subject. Oh my God, I am so bored. What happens is your listener is waiting for the payload. And you're still loading the truck. So the journalists have a phrase for this. They say you're burying the lead. Have you ever heard that before? Like newspapers, they learned fast that readers are going to bail if you don't get to the good part fast. So what do they do? The solution is a technique called the inverted pyramid. Both pyramids usually start like this. We're going to go upside down. The most important information, it goes first. Everything else descends from there. In conversation, this means starting with the conclusion. Than walking backwards through the evidence. And your brain, it actually resists doing this in storytelling because our brains are made to chronologically order the events. That feels natural, but natural to you is torturous to your listener. Do not context dump. Be short, be sweet, and start with the spice. Driver 2: Semitic energy. Flat delivery creates flat engagement. Now, it doesn't mean what you're saying is flat, but because the brain actually uses variation in voice as a signal, meaning something has changed, something changed means something matters, something matters means pay attention. So if you're monotone in your delivery, that actively disables this signal. And in fact, it's sort of fascinating if you go and you look at different languages and how they're created. Some languages are really guttural, you hear them back in the back of your throat, that's like German, for instance. Language have a lot of tonality in it, for instance, that would be like Chinese. One word can actually mean 50 different things. It's like ma, ma, ma, ma. You could have an entire sentence with that word, but it's the way that you deliver it, the tonality that changes the signal. So the brain actually deprioritizes constant frequency information. It becomes sort of white noise, right? That's why lullabies work if you wanna put somebody to sleep. You just don't vary your tone. It's like why some people watch golf. You just listen to Jim Nantz talk about hitting down the fairway. It's beautiful outside today, right? It's very calming. But if you want them awake, you gotta vary everything. Speed, volume, pause. The pause especially. Most people I think are terrified of silence in conversation, and I get it. It takes work. It feels uncomfortable. Somebody can steal your spotlight during it, you know, but whoever comes or whatever comes after a well-placed pause, it actually hits with 40% more impact. And that's from real research on speech at the University of Amsterdam. So try really hard to do one thing. If you get silence, use it and allow it to sit there for a moment. Driver number 3, the abstraction ladder. So every idea exists on a spectrum from concrete ideas to abstract. Concrete would be like, She slammed her laptop shut and didn't say anything for 20 minutes. Abstract: The meeting didn't go well. Both sentences are the same thing. That is like literally what happened in both situations. But one of them you can remember more. You're like, what? She slammed her laptop shut and then she was quiet for 20 minutes? You're going to immediately get a conversation back and forth as opposed to like, the meeting didn't go well. You're like, oh, okay, well, whatever. One of them you are going to remember and the other is forgotten before the next sentence even lands because the human brain actually doesn't care about abstractions. It doesn't store them. In fact, the human brain stores images, stories, specific moments. In fact, one of my executives constantly does this. He really likes to talk in theories. This is a huge mistake you make in communication if you're smart. Smart people like to use big words, and abstractions. They think that it makes them sound smart. What it actually does is make you bored. And that is why a bunch of PhDs often have a really hard time getting people's attention, even though they're probably the person you should be listening to on most subjects. But how you'll know you talk in abstractions is when somebody goes something like, theoretically, when we're talking about this from an enlarged perspective, what we really need to ponder inside of our heads is the ability for the outcome to have a different effect. You're like, what the fuck, Todd? What are we talking about? Instead, I want you to speak in those specific moments because when you speak in abstractions, like, we need better communication, even the culture is the problem, it's a trust issue, the brain really has no idea what you're talking about. So you gotta descend the ladder is what we call it and name the specifics. So cite the particular moment. The concrete detail is what is important, not all this abstract decoration.. So for instance, we need to have better communication. That's a terrible sentence. What does that mean? Who defines better? Who defines communication? I have no idea what you're talking about. What would be better instead? We need to have a 5-minute download at the end of every day about what happened and then figure out our plan for the next day. Okay, concrete. We can do that. You know, I'd like you to be nicer to me. Okay, what is nice? How do we define nice? Instead, it'd be better if you said, you know what? I love it when you give me compliments. And when you're upset at me, I really love it when you talk in a very calm tone with me and you give me specific feedback, but you don't raise your voice. That makes me feel like you're being nice to me. Do you see how much more useful that is? I think this is also a big flaw. Sorry, ladies, in our female communication, a lot of times we'll be like, be nice, you know, I just want you to be kind. And men are like, I don't. Have the same definition for the word as you. Because we might say, "Hey, I really want you to express all of your feelings and tell me everything and we could talk about it in detail." And the guy's like, "Please God, don't do that. That is not kind." So be concrete and do not talk in abstraction. Driver 4, the false finish. This is where you signal the conversation is winding down. You do it through your tone, through the words like, Anyway, so basically, the bottom line is, and, but then you keep talking. So it's like you're closing the conversation, but you don't close the conversation. The listener has already checked out. They heard the landing gear, they're ready for landing, and then you're like, nope, back up again in the air. Do this once and they start to lose trust in your structural cues really entirely. Every anyway after that triggers early checkout. So you really need to say less, finish cleaner, and when you signal the end, end. If you're a salesperson, this is really important. I think we were sold a big lie as salespeople with this one sentence: you'll sell more if you keep them talking. That is not true. You will annoy more people if you keep them talking in this generation. So don't do the, oh, let me just add one more thing. Oh, let me just add one more thing. You know what's going to happen? They're never going to pick up your phone call again. The only way you're going to sell them is if you get them in that conversation, and then you're probably going to have a really high refund rate. So just make it the end when it's the end, for the love of all that's holy, for all of us, please. Part 3, the mechanics of memorability. So holding attention is one problem, being remembered, totally different one, and they require different tools, but we're going to give them to you. So by the end of this, you can make people pay attention to you and then you can keep them. You know, there's a study in, in 1885, this guy by the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus published what became known as the forgetting curve. He basically tested his own memory. On nonsense syllables over time and found that within 24 hours, people forget roughly 70% of all new information. With a week, 90%. It's almost all gone. It's almost all gone. So most of what you say, it's, it's, it just evaporates. And it's not because the listener isn't even listening. It's because the brain is running constant triage. It's, it's figuring out what's worth keeping because everything you keep costs some type of metabolic energy to store. So the brain is not going to store something unless you give it a reason. And there are now 3 proven mechanisms that interrupt the forgetting curve. The first one is emotional encoding. This is fascinating. So the neuroscientists— Joseph Ledoux at NYU has spent decades basically mapping how the amygdala— so that's the brain's emotional processing center— interacts with memory formation. Basically, TL;DR, emotional arousal triggers the release of norepinephrine, which essentially flags to the brain, this is important. So the more emotion, the more you're going to trigger a chemical that says, keep this shit. This is why you remember exactly where you were on certain days with, like, unusual clarity, such as if you're old enough, where you were when JFK died. If you're old enough, where you were at 9/11. If you have a scent of your grandma, what her house always smells like. If you had a traumatic event, you might remember weird smells, weird, weird sounds, weird people. And that is why we can remember very odd, spiky events, but you can't remember what you had for lunch yesterday. And this is really emotionally neutral information, doesn't get the flag, it doesn't get stored. So what does this mean for you? If you can use emotional cues in context, it is going to have a much higher shelf life. Like, you don't need to be dramatic, but you do need to give the listener a reason to feel something about what you're telling them. If you can connect to the info you want to give them with an emotion that they care about and you slap them together, that's going to make them remember. And so some of the questions you could ask yourself is like, what changes if they get this right? What goes wrong if they don't? Have you ever noticed in podcasts— it's a, it's a new thing I've seen lately— where people say, can you tell our listener how their life is going to change by listening to this podcast today? What are they trying to do? They're trying to get you right now to have an emotional change, an emotional cue, before they give you a bunch of information. They're telling you why to care. And so the response might be like, well, everything in their life will change. Well, they'll never get divorced. Well, they'll make more money. Well, they'll do what happened to me and they'll become happier, right? Whatever. And so I want you to ask yourself when you're speaking, how can you not just rattle off dates, names, numbers, but tie an emotion to them? Let's say you want someone to remember something very specific for you, like a birthday. I have a terrible memory, so I have a hard time remembering things like dates. So one of the best things that my husband does about it is every time he wants me to remember something important, like potentially his birthday, he will tie an emotional cue to it. He'll tell me a story about how when he was a little kid, his birthday was so close to Christmas that he was always sad because he only got one present. He always only got a Christmas present, not a birthday. He never had a birthday party because Christmas was so close. And so he was always a little sad that these other kids got the opportunity to have, you know, Christmas parties and birthdays and he never got both. And he would like show me a picture of, Lil Christopher. And that tied to the picture and this image of a little lonely boy and, uh, somebody who never got a birthday and a Christmas makes me remember the date, even though typically I'm not going to. By the way, December 16th. And it took me a while because I literally cannot remember numbers for the life of me. So when you want somebody to remember something specific, tie emotion to it. Mechanism 2: the peak-end effect. So this psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who's incredible, he's run some of my favorite experiments. And one of them that he ran was in the 1990s, and, uh, it's kind of a funny one. It involves patients undergoing colonoscopies. Not the most glamorous research, I know, but I like also who comes up with this stuff. But the findings changed how we think about memory. He found that the patients remembered the experience of the procedure was determined almost entirely by two moments: the most intense moment, the peak, and the final moment, the end. Just those two. So what does this mean in practice when you're not getting a colonoscopy? People don't remember the totality of the conversation almost ever. They're not going to remember what you said in its entirety. They are going to remember the sharpest moment and the last impression. So if you have a conversation and it's genuinely surprising, insightful, or you have a moving moment and it ends cleanly on a high note, that other person is gonna remember it as a great conversation, even if in the middle you kind of bumblefuck your way around and it's kind of mediocre. But the inverse is also true. So a strong conversation, you have like an amazing date, it's an incredible evening, but then it ends badly. That is most likely what you're gonna be remembered for, the bad ending, not the 99% of the conversation. So what do we do? Well, there's two ways to think about it. You could be like, oh my God, now I'm so stressed. I gotta just nail some highlight and the end. Instead, I like to think about it There's only two things you have to care about. One, you got to end deliberately. The last thing you say is disproportionately what gets stored. I think about this in speeches all the time. I always try to end my speeches on the highest note that I possibly can because they're almost going to forget all of it. It's fascinating. I've given maybe thousands of speeches now. Almost always they quote back to me whatever was on my last slide.. And just think about now, if it's you, when you're having a conversation, imagine what the end of the conversation is like, a last slide that you're going to leave them with. Mechanism number 3, the self-reference effect. This one is super underused, but it's not going to be by you because it is almost universally effective. So basically what happens, in the '70s, this guy, T.B. Rogers, found that information is remembered way better when it's processed in relation to the self. So basically, when somebody asks, how does this apply to me? And if you do that while hearing information, the other person who's listening is going to remember it at a rate dramatically higher than when they receive the same information neutrally. It's actually fascinating. We see it a lot here with, with the guests we bring. We're always trying— I'm always trying to get them to like talk to you. I'm like, imagine it is about this one person. A lot of times guests come on podcasts and they're like, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff about me, here's my history, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't matter to you. You're like, man, what is in it for me? Am I going to get richer, hotter, smarter, happier, make more of an impact listening to you? If not, beat it, right? So I want you to think about the practical application. Don't just make your point, make it about them. You're not doing this in a manipulative way, but in a relevant way. Connect the information you want to share to their situation, their goals, their specific problem. And there's lots of ways to do this, but let's say you're like, you know what I can't stand? 'At work when people don't show up on time and then I've gotta wait for them and it's so annoying and that happened to me today.' Okay, fine. Instead, you could say, 'Isn't it annoying when you go to work and you're waiting on somebody else and they don't show up on time? And doesn't it ever make you feel like they don't respect you and that actually they think their time is more important than yours? Have you ever felt like that?' Like, Okay, now it's about your— it's the same story. I'm telling him how I feel in a situation, but it's the here's how this shows up for you that's way more memorable than the general principle. So even if you're going to complain like I was just doing, it's better if you can reference somebody else. This is called personalized relevance, and it's not a courtesy. It's actually a multiplier. The same principle applies to every medium of communication and none more than newsletters. Most newsletters die for exactly the reason most conversations die. 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Go to beehive.com/codie and use code CODIE30 to save 30% off your first 3 months. That's beehiv.com/codie. Go build something people remember. Now, the most counterintuitive point in this entire episode, and the one most people miss completely, is the listener's trap. So the biggest barrier to being memorable in a conversation you have isn't how you talk, it's how you listen. And I know this sounds sort of touchy-feely, like everybody believes this, listen and then people will listen to you, but it's actually true. So most people listen to respond. They track the conversation like just enough to find their opening. Then the moment they can drop the thing they've been waiting to say since 30 seconds ago goes in. The problem is the science tells us the listener feels this. They feel that energy shift when you stop tracking what they're saying. Eyes change, nodding gets slightly ahead of words, body orients maybe away. So what's the trap here? If you wanna be more interesting to talk to, if you wanna be described as magnetic or captivating, almost everybody who is that, they're universally the best listeners in the room, not the best talkers. And so the research tells us from Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago that people drastically overestimate how interesting they are to others and drastically underestimate how much others value being heard. It's the old adage, that we've heard from Never Eat Alone, for instance, or How to Make Friends and Influence People, which is if you want people to remember you, let them talk more. You know, the journalists have known this for decades. You know, before a big interview, good reporters study everything about their subject. And they do this because then when the subject is talking, they can show how much they care about them. But it also gives them the ability to listen. When you know enough background, you stop spending that processing power in your brain reconstructing context in real time. You just hear what's being said. Notice the detail I almost skipped over, the pause before an answer that was faster than everything else, the moment they described as minor, but that actually maybe explains everything. This tool is what therapists call active listening and journalists call staying in the question, which is a great line. How do you stay in the question as opposed to get distracted elsewhere? It means when someone answers, you actually respond to what they said rather than what you expected them to say. It also is how you follow the thread they laid, not the one you brought in. And it takes some discipline, but you will become more interesting by making yourself more interested in them. And the paradox here is to be remembered as a great conversationalist, you actually just need to talk less. And if there's one thing you should walk away with today, it's this: attention is actually biological. The brain is constantly processing info in the background. So if you don't give it something to hold on to, a gap to close, a stake to care about, a concrete image to store, it will go somewhere else. The recap: lead with a gap, bury your deliverability, stay concrete, end when you signal you're ending, give information emotional stakes, engineer one sharp moment per conversation, and that ability to listen genuinely with curiosity without the answer already loaded, that is going to make people remember you from a decade ago. The kicker to all of this is It's way easier to be charismatic than you think it is. And you don't ever have to be in a situation where people aren't listening to you and you want to be heard again. You can learn how to change that. In fact, you just did. You might want to go back and listen to this one one more time. I know I'm going to do that again and send it to somebody who you know has something to say and just needs a little nudge on how to say it better. I'm Codie Sanchez. We'll see you next week.