Communication for Powerful Thought Leadership | Jane Hanson | 464

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Jane Hanson, and Jane is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and a coach, and she has spent over 30 years helping people learn to communicate. She's won 9 Emmys. She was Correspondent of the Year. She has been involved in lots of charities, including the March of Dimes, Susan B. Komen. She was co-anchor of Today in New York. And if I continue to read her bio, we would run out of the 20 minutes that we have. So—

And I don't know, I don't want to hear anymore.

And Jane knows all this anyway. So Jane, if you want to—

Yeah, I do.

I do. Right. Go Google you when we're done here. But anyway, welcome aboard. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so very much for being here. This is one of my favorite subjects, talking about thought leadership and leveraging and what is thought leadership and how do you communicate well and all those things. Because in today's world, it's such an interesting place to be.

Yeah, no, exactly. So I, I wanna— here's a thought I was having getting ready for today. So a lot of people think thought leadership and they get a little bit overwhelmed. Oh my God, I've got to write an article. Oh my God, I've got to write a book. You know, like, it's a heavy lift, right? It's almost like You know, if you started to work out and the first thing that you did was a marathon, it's gonna be exhausting and overwhelming. But I think that there's lots of opportunity to use thought leadership in terms of talking points, bullet points, conversations, et cetera. So maybe connect the thread of your work and mine of sort of how do you use thought leadership and, and communicate that effectively in, in a natural way?

Well, thought leadership doesn't magically happen because one day you say, I think I'm going to be one. Thought leadership is— it's building upon who and what you are. And I believe at the heart and soul of it is good communication, because I, I've talked to a lot of people that are called thought leaders in whatever expertise they're in, and we discuss how did you get to that place where you're considered the woman, the man, the expert, and To a person, they say, it has nothing to do with me aiming to become something. It's just that I got really good at telling this story and doing it in a way that has confidence and yet knowledge and all of that put into a place. We might call it wisdom. Perhaps that's true. But each one—

But stay there a minute because I think there are some folks that are really awesome, amazing, wise thought leaders, but because for whatever reason, they're researchers, they're academics, they're introvert, whatever the, the reason is, and it doesn't matter that they communicate best via words on a page, right? They write really well, they research really well, but then you ask them to bring it to life either conversationally, something like this on a podcast or, or keynote.

Mm-hmm.

And they're awful, right? It's just not who they are or what they're about, or they, those muscles aren't developed.

It's interesting. You know who Simon Sinek is? Yes.

Yep.

So Simon has got billions of viewers of his YouTube videos. He's considered to be one of the best communicators in the world, but he has been known to say that he's a total introvert. And if he's at a party, he'll be the guy sitting over the, in the corner waiting for somebody to come to talk to him. Sure. So here's the, the thing is that in our world today, people don't take a long time to read a white paper or to read a book or to read anything. I can't tell you the number of authors I've interviewed who I'll ask them and say something like, you know, I don't understand what you meant on page 64 when you said this. And they'll go, you actually read the book? And they're on a speaking tour all over the country. And I'm like the first person they've encountered that's actually read the book. So, and that has to do with attention spans, which on average in the United States today are 8 seconds. And we've got this, this overstimulated world with the social media and with everything being so immediate and so quick. So if, you know, first of all, you gotta think what's the purpose behind becoming a thought leader? And if your purpose is really true, it's about taking the information that you have and getting it out into the world because there's an importance to it. There's a significance, there's a need for it.

Yeah.

You're a researcher and you've got something that's got amazing information about a, a medical process or a technique, right? Then you gotta get it out there. But if you can't communicate it, then it's gonna sit where it is and nobody will ever know. And we're missing out on an opportunity to cure a disease or something.

What, what are some of the tips, suggestions, advice, whatever you might have for someone that is really good at communicating for example, in the written word, but when they bring it to life conversationally or, you know, uh, public speaking or, or, or whatever, it's just not their thing.

I recently worked with a woman who wrote a book, and she was about to go on a tour and scared to death. And she said, I've never spoken in public before, I've never done a video. I've never been in front of a microphone. I've never been in front of lights. I've never talked to a reporter. And she goes, I am absolutely scared to death. What do I do? And I said, we're going to start really simply. And the first thing we're going to do is you have a lot of information in your book, which, which had a book about, you know, medicine and women and that sort of thing. I said, so first we need to think about who you want to reach. And she said, my book is really about helping women manage their health. I said, Bingo. That's where we start. So the first thing we did is help her create really good messages that she could repeat over and over and over again, that she got truly comfortable with saying.

So is it that repetition gives them the comfort to then build on it? And, and so it's kind of baby steps. Yeah.

And by the way, 87% of the people in this country suffer from something called glossophobia at one point in their life, which is the fear of public speaking.

Right, right.

So a person like this woman I worked with thinks that she's alone in this feeling, but she's the only one, right?

Right.

But she is not at all. Most of us have it at some point in our life. And if we don't, maybe we're dead because, you know, because there's gonna be a situation. There's always something happening. Maybe you get up to give a speech and the mic doesn't work, or you blank out, or you get really nervous, or You're in a, a video situation and the tech goes down. Are you doing a virtual? I mean, all kinds of crap can happen. And so there's a lot of things that you can be afraid of, but if you stick to your purpose. So my work with her was A, really creating some solid messages that she could then repeat over and over with, cuz, cuz this isn't, it's not brain surgery. You're good. If you're out there talking about a book, the message is consistently going to be the same. It's the audience that changes.

When you do that with the spoken word, or not even something as formal as a presentation keynote, but just in conversation, you're meeting somebody someplace, you're at a cocktail party, whatever, the words that are on the page are different than the words that one uses to speak. Sure. So you have to sort of play with it and say, ooh, does that like, wow, that's the best chapter in my book. And that's an awesome opening couple of lines. But when I say it out loud, it's artificial, it's clunky. It doesn't sound like the way someone would make a statement such as that, you know?

So you change it up to make it colloquial.

Yeah.

And, and for example, if you've written a book about, let's just use that medical thing about medicine and you're speaking to doctors, you can use some big multisymbolic words about a drug or something that they're gonna understand. But you can't do that if you're speaking to a group of, you know, college students that haven't studied this stuff. So you really have to focus on who am I talking to to make sure the message is clear. And then it has to be in your own words, in your own voice.

And so if you're enjoying this episode of Thought Leadership Leverage, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast.

And then you also have to remember that the questions you're gonna get are always pretty pretty much gonna be the same. Like, why'd you write this book? Or what's your purpose? Or what do you want somebody to take away from this? Or tell me—

Well, stay on that point for a moment, Jane, because one of the things that I see a lot with my clients is they're launching a book as an example, right? And because we all have— I mean, you mentioned the 8-second thing and, and, you know, everybody's attention spans are short. By the way, thought leaders are human, so they're a subset of that. So therefore they suffer from that as well, right?

Absolutely.

So they go out to do a a book launch or book tour, and they're going to do whatever, pick a number, 100 podcasts or keynote or whatever to promote that. And they get so bored with their own stuff, right? That they keep switching it up, which is actually somewhat selfish and really doing a disservice to the audience, right? Where you move to a role of your job now is to not intrigue yourself, but to be the evangelist and the messenger of the message. And to find the best way to get it out there over and over and over again. And quite frankly, it's okay. It may bore the hell out of you, girl.

But here's the trick. Think like a comedian.

Okay.

What do I mean by that? So the last show I did at NBC, Joan Rivers was a frequent guest. And so I have been to these little tiny comedy clubs in New York City with Joan, where she would try out material, new material. And she would do it over and over and over and over again. I said, what are you doing? And she goes, I gotta get my timing right. And I gotta get this joke.

Every word. Heard every nuance, right? Seinfeld.

Exactly. And I said, why? And she goes, because it has to sound fresh and new with every audience. She's telling the same joke 100 times, 500 times, a million— every single comedian you've ever listened to, you hear them and you go, oh man, they just made that up, it's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Bottom line is they've already told that same joke 500 times. They find a way to make sure that even when they're using the same thing over and over, that they can make it sound fresh and new and like spontaneous.

Well, and I think that holds true for amazing keynoters, right? So in my universe, almost all of my clients speak, and one group of speakers I call it the drive-by, right?

Yeah.

If you walked in at 3 minutes and 22 seconds, they're talking about, and on my plane ride here today, and it's robotic and it's, and it's, they're, they're not connected to the audience. They're using client instead of customer, whatever. The other one might be at just about the same place at the same time in every keynote, but there's a connection to the audience, there's a warmth, there's a conversational piece to it because nobody wants to be sitting in an audience, feel like, wow, they're, they're just talking to furniture, right?

Well, so you, so that's what I mean. You have to think about your audience. Um, I'll give you, you know, another little example because I just, a client of mine just sent —this speech yesterday that she did, which was utterly amazing. And the speech was in Las Vegas. And she, even though she had practiced and rehearsed her speech dozens of times, she took the very opening. And when she walked out on the stage, she had on these unbelievable— pink dress with these unbelievable shoes that were multicolored. They were just amazing. And she says, she said, yesterday when I was in the session, I heard so-and-so talk about his shoes, so I decided to one-up him. How do you like my shoes?

Ah, that's pretty cool.

And then she said, and by the way, there's one other thing, poker. Now she's in Vegas, right? So she's using what's there. And she said in poker, and she goes, I'm playing the odds here because these shoes hurt and I got 13 minutes to speak. What do you think my odds are that my feet are gonna hold out that long? Then she launched into her speech. But meantime, she's got the audience laughing and connecting to her.

So, but that takes a little bit of work. And I, and I think quite frankly, a lot of folks, regardless of the medium, get lazy and fall back on their stuff, right? Fall back on the comfort zone and say it didn't take her a lot to do that. But I guarantee you over the meal break or whatever, everybody's talking about, oh, so-and-so in her shoes. Oh my God, that was the cutest thing I ever saw. And Oh my God, the lady with— oh, you're the lady with the shoes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right. How do you— do your feet hurt? So that's one of the things I urge people to do is when I, especially, you know, at these in-person events, and you could even do it virtually as well, which is I say mingle with the audience a little bit if you can ahead of time or find out something about them. And I, and then just like, cuz I have done a ton of public speaking in my life and just kind of wander around and I'll say, hey, where are you guys from? And then I'll go, on, you know, oh, it's his birthday today, and oh, there's this happening, and oh, there's this. And then as I come out to speak, I immediately make some reference to what I've learned from my audience.

No, and I think, again, going back to the lazy piece, it takes a little bit of work, but not much, right? If you're, you know, go mingle with the group. Hey, say hello. Oh, what are you working on? What are you struggling with? Whatever. And I was talking to Bob in the hallway, and he told me the big initiative this year is blah, blah, blah. They're like, oh, she's, we, you kind of cares. She hears us, right? She gets it. She cares.

She's relating to us even if you don't care.

Yeah, exactly. Cool. So as we, as we start to wrap up, give a little bit of thought and advice as if you were coaching whoever's listening with regards to how to get the most impact out of their thought leadership from a communication standpoint.

Well, I wanna, I'm gonna say like 3 things. A, it's about knowing your audience, which we've already discussed. Yep. The second thing is with your content, make your content really impactful by the words that you choose to use. And also, I love using this fact, the most impactful speech that Abraham Lincoln ever made was the Gettysburg Address. Right, right. How long was it?

Oh, I think I remembered that. Wait, wait, it was like 87 words or something silly.

No, it's 272 words, 2 minutes long. Most one of them, it still has great impact today. So the value of both brevity and being impactful, that will— you'll always win. And then the third thing, remember that your style and how you deliver. If I say If I say, let's pretend like I'm Abraham Lincoln and I say, we are going to free every slave. Huh? If you say we are going to free every slave and you really, you know, use your own personal style in the right way, then it becomes impactful. And at the heart and soul of all of that for thought leaders is confidence in what they believe, a total commitment to their purpose. And the comfort of being able to deliver it to this audience as if they're sitting in their living room. Well, thank you so much.

Awesome stuff. Thank you. This is one to go back and read the transcripts. Lots of good stuff in here. Thank you for sharing today, Jean.

You're very welcome. It was a delight to be with you.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.