My Theme of the Year + My Biggest Note to All My Clients
This piece was originally shared to my newsletter, Playing Favorites. Subscribe for free using the box at the bottom of this page or the big button at the top.
Welcome to the first edition of Playing Favorites in 2025, and Happy New Year!
Each year, I pick a theme for myself as a kind of North Star for my work. Typically, the theme is a reaction to something I feel is either a strength I haven't pursued fully just yet or a foundational piece of my work-specific identity I need to access again because it's slipping away.
For instance, after the first year of the pandemic, I became so reactive and stressed out, I stopped telling the kinds of stories you may have come to expect from me and had started sharing so much basic How-To nonsense to scramble for attention and revenue, I didn't feel like myself anymore. So my 2021 theme was "return to story."
This year's theme was inspired by a crystallizing moment I experienced working with a client on her signature speech and signature stories. I briefly reference that moment in the essay below, but for now, here's the theme:
Feel of the flour.
This goes right at the top of my Notion page for 2025—the framing for the page which itself frames my entire year. Here's a screen shot:
Thank you for being here to start your year. I'm honored to support your speaking and storytelling in 2025, whether here, through my show, or through my 1:1 consulting and bootcamps.
Here's this week's essay:
Spoon Feed and Signpost
I want you to watch me deliver the line below, as if I were giving a speech (in this case, virtually). The video is less than 30 seconds long.
Then I want to break down the problems with this common way a lot of business communicators speak. In fact, this issue leads to the most common note I give clients and peers when workshopping their speeches.
It seems small, but it prevents a story from landing and a message from sticking.
* * *
Sometimes writing well makes it harder to speak well, especially if the way you write is more academic than colloquial. You're trying project to others that you're an expert, rather than communicate from a place of quiet confidence that the material itself (the stories, ideas, and even the performance and style) are enough to provide credibility and earn trust.
Let's say, like me in that video, you wanted to transition from teaching something to your audience in plain language to then share a story illustrating your point. The moment you transition into the story might sound like the line I delivered in my video:
"Back in 2017, British author, astrophysicist, and Nobel laureate Dr. Jane Doe learned the same hard lesson about Named Concept that we're learning in our work today when she left academia to start her own business, Acme Inc., a consultancy offering corporate trainings and one-on-one coaching."
That's fine, if a little wordy.
But it's only fine in writing.
It falls apart when speaking. When an audience reads something from you, they're in control. They're in charge of the pace. That simply isn't the case when they hear something from you, and because we don't consider the difference, we often communicate less effectively through the spoken word, whether you're giving a talk, recording a video, hosting or guesting on a podcast, or even talking shop in-person.
The difference between reading and hearing
When your audience reads something from you, they're in the driver's seat. The text isn't scrolling by them automatically, forcing them to keep up. They're the ones physically moving things forward. They can go as fast or slow as they need to go.
They also benefit from certain visual cues unique to writing, like line breaks, front-caps on proper nouns, punctuation, bolded or italicized words, and more. Even if all those things don't aid their understanding and they started feeling confused, they can still scan back a few words or lines and re-read something.
But when you speak to an audience from a stage or through a screen, those things disappear. As a result, you need to make the switch from writing well to speaking well. They two don't always translate one-to-one, so I recommend starting your transition from writing to speaking with a simple concept:
Pace it down.
I don't mean "speak slowly." Nobody likes an idea drenched in molasses. The trick is to avoid handing the audience the full meal (as you do in writing) and to pull up a chair, take out a spoon, and give them tiny bite after tiny bite. You have to spoon feed them bite after bite so they don't choke on too many details delivered too quickly. In podcasting, we also refer to a term that assists the spoon feeding: signposting. That's when you use verbal cues (or even moments of silence or physical movement) to isolate and highlight a forthcoming moment or an idea you just delivered.
A clunky if useful signpost referring backwards in this very essay of mine would be to say to you, "Again, I said spoon feed. That means one detail at a time, NOT a sentence chock full of description." A forward-facing sign post would be to say something like, "Let me show you what this looks like," or even, "Let's revisit that line from my video above."
So, um...
Let's revisit my line from the video above. It works okay when you read it quietly in your head.
"Back in 2017, British author, astrophysicist, and Nobel laureate Dr. Jane Doe learned the same hard lesson about Named Concept that we're learning in our work today when she left academia to start her own business, Acme Inc., a consultancy offering corporate trainings and one-on-one coaching."
But now recall the video version. It felt rushed, overstuffed, and confusing—at least by comparison. (Keep in mind, I do this professionally. My performance of that line was probably a bit more polished than the average bear. Mostly because bears are too intimidated by home office equipment to record much video. But also, I'm very practiced. Still, the line was pretty convoluted to hear in a way it wasn't to read.)
In giving you the written line out loud, I could feel myself pacing things up because I was worried about losing your attention. I could sense myself thinking, Ah, crap! This is how I write, not how I speak! Who speaks like this? I bet they're sensing my stress and getting confused too. Wait, get out of your head, Jay. You're still speaking to them!
I could even feel my breath running out. I think you can catch a second breath partway through it.
The worst part of the delivery is I'm asking you to hold in your head far too many details to inform the subsequent story and understand the more crucial details, like peaks in the action or lessons learned from the piece. So now, instead of experiencing flow with me, absorbed in the story, you're noticing my speaking. That's because I'm creating confusion and as a result frustration in the audience with the way I constructed the line. (Even the line I just wrote and you just read would be miserable if spoken out loud. Try speaking it out loud. Weird, right?)
You're struggling with basic comprehension or worried you're going to miss something, so now you're not paying attention and internalizing anything. All of this is my fault, not yours. I need to modify how I deliver the same line when moving between mediums, and I didn't.
Pace it down, please and thanks
My clients are mainly executives, entrepreneurs, authors, and creators who work with me on their messaging, their big idea or premise, and their speaking. That group tends to write a lot more than they speak, record video, or podcast. Even when they DO those things, they don't have someone telling them where the audience is getting frustrated or confused. They just see worse results than they'd hoped from all things spoken word, and they don't know why.
Well, lots of reasons, but inside the flow of an experience, it's often because they've frustrated or confused their audience due to the lack of good structuring and arrangement, whether across the entire talk or video or podcast episode, just a single moment or story.
What you gave the audience was a wall of smarts, a cascade of description. What they needed was:
One or two details at a time, tightly delivered.
A sequence of forward action, plainly stated.
A flurry of specifics, beating back all generalities. (Saying "Jake missed making pizza" isn't as effective as saying "Jake missed the feel of the flour.")
Zero leaps in logic. (I hear a lot of this from clients in first drafts: "We tried for months to get the attention of our audience, but then we launched a newsletter to showcase our expertise. Suddenly, we had brands like Apple and Airbnb in our inbox, and we went from a struggling startup to a scaling company." You made two huge leaps there, maybe three. Pace it down.)
Pace it down. Plant me there. Move the action forward, one step at a time. Spoon feed me details. Make the specific. Signpost the important bits, isolating them to ensure I don't miss them.
You're too eager to prove you're credible, too excited to project your expertise. As a result, you're killing your credibility and frustrating them with a tornado of techniques and tactics.
Pace.
It.
Down.
This line needs to change:
"Back in 2017, British author, astrophysicist, and Nobel laureate Dr. Jane Doe learned the same hard lesson about Named Concept that we're learning in our work today when she left academia to start her own business, Acme Inc., a consultancy offering corporate trainings and one-on-one coaching."
When moving from writing to speaking, I might deliver the lines below instead.
This ... is Dr. Jane Doe.
She's an astrophysicist, an author, and a Nobel Prize winner.
And back in 2017, she learned the same hard lesson about Named Concept that we're learning in our work today.
It all started when she left academia to start her own business.
It's called Acme Inc.
It's a consultancy, offering corporate trainings and one-on-one coaching.
(And away we go, in-flow together with the story and subsequent lesson.)
Here’s my video performance of the line, with a side-by-side comparison of both versions:
After breaking apart the details to the more bite-sized list above, I can now step back and decide where it needs to improve. Maybe I need to take you inside the moment she left academia. She didn't just "leave." She had a ton of moments of thinking and agonizing and deciding and discussing, all with various people. Maybe there are quirks about her I can describe and use as a callback later. Maybe there's a bit of advice that can echo my own for the audience, given to Dr. Doe or shared by her to others. I can even treat the story like an accordion, stretching it out over more runtime of a speech or a piece, so I don't deliver one contained sequence of action but rather step out of the story to teach something directly to you or take a quick tangent before stepping back into the story and concluding it.
The possibilities are endless, and all of them might work—but not if I take a well-written script and slap it onto the stage or onto my microphone.
Your ability to grip audiences and to move them often comes from your quiet confidence in delivering your material piece by piece, beat by beat.
It's excruciating to do this work, I know. Maybe you aren't quietly confident. Maybe you feel pressured to answer a question on a podcast quickly for runtime. Maybe you're giving a talk with a timer blinking in your face. Whatever causing you to rush, I'm begging you to resist.
Pace it down, and watch their eyes light up.