Speak Like This at Work, It'll Get You Promoted

Over the last 15 years, I've advised thousands of CEOs, executives, and founders through some incredibly high-pressure situations. These are the folks that are leading rooms where not just millions of dollars but billions of dollars are at stake, and what they say can make or break their career in a heartbeat. And the ones that walk out with more than they thought possible, well, they share 7 unmistakable characteristics. Use this framework and you'll build unshakable confidence, You'll speak as clearly as you think, and ultimately you'll go from being overlooked to commanding the presence and the outcome in any high-pressure situation. Step number 1 is presence. Now picture this: 2 executives walk into a boardroom. They have the same resume, the same experience, and the same numbers, but within seconds it seems like everyone in the room knows who's actually in charge. Neither one of them has even said a word, but you can see this very clearly. That one's the leader. And that one's the follower. How can that be? Now, I've watched this scenario play out in real time. There were 2 division presidents. They were presenting to the same board. It was the same day. I was an observer, a fly on the wall, if you will. The first executive couldn't seem to stand still. He shifted his weight, shuffled papers, touched his face kind of awkwardly. You could tell there was some nervous energy there. When a board member pushed back and started challenging some of the work that he had done this year, he stepped back, he crossed his arms, he sort of started talking faster and explaining himself. Hey, look, like, This is what happened this year. It started to get out of control. And when the other executive was challenged in a similar way— and at the end of the day, in all of these boardrooms, if you're not prepared to get challenged, then you don't belong there in the first place. The second one, she's getting challenged by the board member, and she just takes a breath. She held her ground, and she answered really slowly. While it seemed like the other executive was getting grilled, she walked out of that meeting with more funding for her department. That's the power of presence. It's the authority that people read before you even open your mouth. And it comes down to how you move and how you sound. Here's how you can build it. Number 1, don't be afraid to slow down. Walk at about 80% of your normal speed. Speak at about 80% too. It might feel painfully slow, but to everyone else, it will appear like you have more control of your words and your thoughts. Step number 2: End your sentences on the way down. I think I'm ready for a promotion versus I'm ready for the promotion. Now, one of these approaches asks for permission while the other states a fact. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, I was on stage in front of dozens of Silicon Valley's top product executives at a venture capital headquarters. Now, I'm on stage being asked questions off the cuff in front of all of these very professional, Well-known, highly affluent folks. And to be honest, I didn't know how to answer every question on the spot, but I took a moment. I did some gestures that showed I was deep in thought. And later I got feedback that, Jacob, I appreciated how mindful you were about your answers. So it wasn't about just sharing the first thing that came to mind. It was about being mindful, and I was perceived better because of that. Don't be afraid to take a moment and pause. Presence helps get you into the right rooms, but the second you speak, your words are either keeping your authority or you're handing it straight back. Step number 2 is rhetoric, and this might not be what you want to hear, but we can't help but be surrounded by rhetoric every day from other YouTube videos, from politics, from our bosses, from our colleagues. But there's a hidden language that separates people who speak from people who are actually influencing others to take action. So picture this, you finish presenting your idea, the room goes quiet. You spent weeks preparing for it. You know the data is solid, the plan is airtight, but nobody's really listening. They're not leaning in and asking you questions. It almost feels like they're hesitating before they kind of help you out. And you're just up there kind of sitting in that moment, maybe panicking a little bit. And the worst part, it seems like you had a colleague who maybe even tried half as hard and got an idea that was kind of similar last quarter, and it got approved on the spot. Your strategy didn't fail you, your language did. Now, rhetoric isn't about sounding clever. It's about precision and framing, saying exactly what you mean in a way that makes it easier for others to say yes to you. You have to cut the hedging language. Listen to this weak versus strong approach. I was sort of hoping we could maybe talk about my salary at some point. Versus: I'd like to talk about my salary this week. Every time you hear a sort of, maybe, I think, any of that passive language, that hedging language, once you hear it, you won't be able to unhear it. But every time you hear that, you're just communicating to others that you're not sure about yourself. So why should they be? When you can, use specificity and real numbers. So for example, instead of saying, I've been helping out a lot, which is vague and forgettable, say something like, I've covered 3 people's workloads since March. That's hard to argue with. Frame your asks as investments and not costs. So for example, a weak frame would be saying, I know budgets are tight, but I'm hoping for a raise. That's passive. You're using hedging language versus strong. Keeping me costs a lot less than replacing me. The first makes you sound more like an expense, whereas the second makes you sound like the smart decision. Ultimately, you need to be thinking about the motivations behind the people that you're working with. So that you can make the decisions easier for them to say yes to. When you disagree with someone, you should ask a question instead of straight up telling them. Instead of, that plan won't work, you should say something like, what happens to this plan if our biggest client says no? A statement will make people defend themselves. A question makes them think. And when they reach the answer by themselves, it's theirs. It's their idea. We just help them get there. Now, precise language is much easier said than done. It's very easy to write down, to prepare ahead of time, but it's a lot more difficult to recall what it is you were going to say when your heart rate just doubled and somebody challenged you. That brings us to step number 3, emotional control. The enemy here isn't the person across the table. It's not your boss. It's your own biology. You know, I had a client a while back who won a deal that I think most people would have lost. And here's what she did. She was going to be the CEO for the first time. And she was telling me after the fact that a board member leaned forward in her final presentation And said to her, your approach is fundamentally flawed and shows a concerning lack of understanding about our core business principles. First, wow, that was quite direct. She told me, Jacob, I felt my face getting hot. And every instinct that she was battling was that she needed to defend herself. But she said, Jacob, your voice was in my head and I took a pause. She looked him in the eye and said, honestly, I wasn't expecting that. Which part of my approach concerns you and everyone else the most? That one answer flipped the room. Instead of being challenged, she got to go up to the whiteboard and draw new solutions and start working with the board in the conversation. She ended up getting that job, and the board member later became one of her biggest supporters. And afterward, she got on the phone with me, and I could tell that she had been crying. And I think this is an important point because a Emotional control doesn't mean you feel nothing. You're not a robot. In this case, I know she felt all of that, and I'm sure that it brought up some emotions that she didn't even wanna deal with. But what she battled was that when our bodies are under pressure, we flood with hormones, those stress hormones, and that almost turns these situations into fight or flight scenarios, and our breathing will get more shallow, our thinking will narrow, and right when we need our brain the most, it's betraying us. You can't stop that feeling from happening. Or that biology from bubbling up and creating all that stress, but you can choose how to respond to it. And here's how. Know your tell. A flushed face, a tightening of the jaw, maybe you're talking a little bit faster. For me, I get tunnel vision and a little dry mouth. Everyone has a tell. You need to learn yours so that you can catch it and catch your reaction, feel that stress bubbling up before anyone else notices. Write and practice some of your escape lines in advance so you always have a fallback. Look, you know the moments that start to get a rise out of you. Maybe it's being blindsided, being talked over, or having your judgment questioned. For each one of those, you should have some type of line ready. Something like, this is new information, let me take a moment with it. Or perhaps, you brought up a point that I hadn't considered before. You're not stalling, you're buying time so that your brain can respond in a more positive way and show that you're more articulate and you don't get rattled under fire. When the pressure goes up, You calm down. That means behaving slower, a lower voice, less movement, fewer words. When everyone else speeds up and there's chaos, you're the calm person in the room because the calmest person in the room is the one that everyone listens to. You know, that reminds me, I, I once had breakfast with a Hollywood agent friend of mine, and it was one of those kind of exclusive invite-only places that you have to leave your cell phone at the front of the table kind of thing. And we were just being inundated with celebrity after celebrity, like, kind of walking by. And that's a moment where it's pretty easy to be excited or enthusiastic. I could definitely feel my heart beating, going, Jacob, what are you— what are you doing around all these people? It seems a little weird for a Silicon Valley negotiator to be in that room. But so we're sitting for, for breakfast, and you can tell she's like, oh, look who just came in, and getting excited and kind of darting around and And I just knew in that moment I had to be calm. I had to take up space. I wanted to show the world that I belonged there. But I will tell you that between you and I, like, that feeling internally was definitely— my heart was beating and I was feeling all the things that you would expect to feel in that moment. So just know that you will battle how you naturally feel in order to have more emotional control. Once you've stopped feeling the need to defend yourself, there's a new temptation. Of course there's a new temptation, and I'm sure you felt this too, but it's about going into a room and having to prove how smart you are. That's a trap that we gotta stop. That leads us to step number 4, credibility. And I want you to stop performing intelligence. I call it an expert trap, and it quietly wrecks your credibility. We're not trying to be something we're not. I once worked with a chief operating officer who was asked about the technical work that he did in front of his board. And previously he had said like he had extensive experience. When the questions started to flow from the board members, even basic ones, he couldn't answer with a lot of confidence. And what happened was the board didn't just start doubting if this guy was technically knowledgeable, they started doubting everything he had ever told them. And the lesson is that one bold overclaim, one exaggeration, and suddenly all of your credibility is questioned. In a room full of smart people, the person that pretends to everyone else that they know everything is the one who's the biggest risk. And real credibility isn't about having every answer. It's about being trusted with the ones you don't have. Instead of saying, I'm an expert at, start saying, based on my experience with. It's a very small tweak, but it claims what you know without overreaching your skill set. This one should be an aha moment. When you don't know, Just say you don't know and move on. An answer like, I haven't done that before, but here's my thoughts on it. An answer like that builds more trust than any bluff ever could. This one's one of my favorites, and that's to be more curious, like adopt a childlike curiosity mindset. You know, a client of mine recently got a pretty disappointing lowball offer. I want to say it was 40, maybe 50% under what we were aiming for at the start of the negotiation. But instead of being offended or even pushing back on the hiring manager in a confrontational way, we simply asked, you know, I'm curious, like, how did you arrive at that number? And it turns out that this was a senior director role that they had scoped to a senior manager compensation. And so when they had to justify where the comp came from, they recognized the mistake. So it turns out they compared her to the wrong role entirely. That helped us reset the entire conversation And then we ended up at an offer that was 20% above what her original target was. And all of this without being confrontational. So the lesson here is that one honest question did so much more than what an argument could do. It turned a confrontation into a collaboration, and it helped salvage a relationship and build an opportunity that a lot of others would have given up on. While credibility helps get you trusted, it doesn't decide how much you're worth. How you're categorized does. And that brings us to the next point, intentionality in your positioning. Here's the uncomfortable truth. Your great work doesn't speak for itself. It gets interpreted, it gets categorized, and it gets valued by how well you're positioned. And that's either gonna happen by you or it's gonna happen by someone else. And I'm willing to wager that the other person is rarely gonna pick the version that pays you the most. Now, I once worked with a VP of technology and he had been with this company a little over 5 years. Everyone called him just the technical guy, the tech guy who puts stuff in place. Not the best framing, so to speak. He was paid about 30% below what he was worth on the open market. The only thing we changed was how he described his work. He went from the, I implemented systems, or the tech guy, to the guy who drove $42 million in growth through his technology and software implementations. It was the same work for the same person, But within a handful of months, we had 2 offers that were now in the top 10% of pay for the role because we talked more about the outcome and less about the specifics of how we got there. You know, and this is an important lesson to not just lean so heavily on your resume. Your resume tends to be a timestamp of who you were in the past, whereas positioning and personal branding starts to tell people where you're going next. It helps people decide who you are becoming. So that you don't have to defend yourself later. Here's how you can do it for yourself. Swap any of the task words for more outcome-oriented words. For example, words like managed, supported, coordinated— those describe how you spent your time. But when we use words like drove, grew, delivered— those describe why it mattered. You should introduce yourself by what you make happen, not just your job title. So for example, a weak introduction— I'm sure you've seen this when you're out networking— I'm an operations manager at X, versus, I'm the person people call when a project's about to go sideways. Which one would you rather want on your team? There is power in omission. Not about being deceitful, but in omission. You should leave out the details that can cap you. I managed a team of 4 quietly tells people that if you manage a team of 10, it would be a stretch. Instead, you would say something like, I led the team through our busiest year yet. That doesn't put a ceiling on anything. So ask yourself, does this detail make me look bigger or smaller? Now, you can position yourself perfectly and you can still lose plenty of deals, and that's because decisions are often made in rooms that you weren't in. That brings us to our next point, strategic influence. Strategic influence is playing to win before anyone else knows that they're even playing. A client of mine was looking at a senior director role, and the pay for this role was advertised about $600,000 a year. Now, honestly, she thought the role was a little bit beneath her because she had been at her current company for a little over a decade and she was on the fast track to VP. Now, while most people would have walked away, we saw this as an opportunity. So we started doing our homework. We talked to some of the board members, we talked to executives on the team, we talked to the recruiter, and we'd even talked to other people that have left the team. And what we found by doing all this research is something that nobody would say out loud. While the team was hitting every deadline and all of the goals, The customers weren't excited. They were starting to lose ground to newer companies, particularly AI companies who looked more innovative. So instead of talking about her background and all of her 10+ years of experience in this space and ultimately selling her resume, we focused on selling the company a picture of what they could look like after we became more innovative. As we worked through that process, the role was upgraded to vice president. They saw the value that my client was bringing to the table with this larger vision thinking. And the final deal landed at more than double the original range. I want to say we closed at $1.2, maybe $1.3 million a year, and we had several hundred thousand dollar cash signing bonus because we created so much excitement for bringing her in. There wasn't even any other competition for her because everyone else was a senior director, and she showed vice president leadership mindset. By the time we sat down to negotiate, the company had already made their decision. She was the one. That's the point. The most important influence work happens outside of the meeting room. And here's how you can do it yourself. Find out who actually makes the decisions. The org chart lies. You can map 3 circles. You can map who makes the call, who that person listens to, and who those people listen to. The middle circle is where most decisions really get made. Pitch to their problem, not your needs or your requests. So for example, don't say, can I get another person on my team? Instead, say, you mentioned that we keep missing deadlines. One more person fixes that. Nobody cares what you want. Everybody cares what's keeping them stuck, what's in it for them. Keep that in mind. I call this taking the wind out of their sails. Name the objection before they do. Before any big ask, finish this sentence: if this goes wrong, It'll be because dot dot dot. Then address it up front. Unspoken objections don't fade; they only grow. All that groundwork comes down to one conversation, and that's where most people fumble it. That brings us to our last point: execution. Everything that we've covered so far is at the mercy of a single moment. You might even be picturing that in your head right now because a negotiation, a speech, or a presentation. It's not really where the value gets created. Like, we're not winning in that moment. It's where the value gets claimed from all that work that we had done before. I had a client deep into a negotiation for a big role that he wanted really badly. Every day he sent the hiring team a new idea, a new alternative, setting up meetings, new ways to try to make it work. And he thought he was being helpful, but really what he was communicating is that he needed the job too much. And honestly, I've made that same mistake myself. I've, I've almost had enthusiasm diminish deals. And the day he stopped and just held his position, they came back with a better offer and we just sat on it for 2 days before responding. And we found that, you know, sometimes the strongest move is to make no move at all. Here's how you can execute better in those types of scenarios. I always advise that my clients open with gratitude and assume that a deal is going to get done. Negotiation 101. If the other party doesn't think it's possible, they're not gonna work with you to make it so. So always lead with something like, thank you for working with me on this. There's the gratitude. I've got a few things to talk through, but I expect that we'll be working together in the next few weeks, few days, whatever that may look like. We're assuming the close here. And really what gratitude does is it lowers the tension and it assumes that an outcome is going to happen. So that keeps them invested in working with you and it keeps you motivated to get the deal across the finish line. When you're in a position where you have to say number. One, I want you to anchor high, but when you do, I want you to say your number and then stop talking. So never lead with something like, I was kind of hoping for something closer to $120,000. There again is a lot of that hedging language we talked about earlier. Instead, lead with, my number is $120,000. Silence. There's no, I was thinking maybe— we don't want to express need or hope or want, just the number. Conviction in your number. Then you want to count to 5 in your head. Whoever fills that silence first is typically the one that gives up ground, so let it be them. Now, if you only get one piece of advice from this video that you take away and never forget, it's to never take the first offer. At a minimum, I want you to try the following. I've seen 20 to 40% lifts just on a simple ask, and it will not damage any relationships. Try, what's the chance we have a little bit of room to improve this? At the end of the day, here's what this is really about. You've done the work, you've built the skills, you've earned the seat at the table, but none of that really matters if nobody hears it. And precise isn't about tricks or pretending to be someone you're not. It's not about being manipulative or trying to control every situation or be the aggressor or overly assertive. It's just about making sure that what you say gets heard and what you've built gets valued. Just pick one that resonated with you today. And try it out this week. And if you wanna go deeper, I've put together a free video course that walks through how to execute each one through a job search, through a negotiation, through an interview process. And remember, stay fearless, friends.