What Voices Who Resonate Do Differently
Last week, I wrote about a visual tool we can use to differentiate our work more strategically and with less stress. To illustrate, I plotted where two friends of mine were stuck and what they could do to break free. If you're looking for a more passionate response from your work without resorting to engagement-baiting junk, you might find the article helpful.
Today, two simple questions:
Why do some folks seem to connect instantly and deeply, everywhere they show up?
What do memorable communicators do differently — which we can try too?
I've spotted a subtle thing I don't entirely understand yet, and I want to make sense of it. As always, writing is thinking, and you're invited to my thought process...
* * *
I've been creating things on the internet since 2005. That means my body of work is now 20 years old! (My actual body feels ... I'm just gonna say "not 20.") In all that time creating all those projects, I've learned there are very few things I can say with total certainty about this work we do.
But here's one.
My first-ever article was published online on a sports blog I ran called All Star Blog. I used Blogger to host it, which is the internet writer's equivalent of an 8-track or VHS tape, I suppose. The site was a side project I loved tinkering on between classes at Trinity College.
Before my last year at Trinity, I was preparing to move into a house just off-campus with six friends, and in addition to cramming graphic tees and baggy jeans and my trusty Knicks hat into my bag, I was also begging my mom to teach me how to cook some of my favorite dishes. I knew that once we all moved back to school, I'd get to play a role I love: house chef. So I wanted to up my game.
In speaking with my mom and her mom and my dad's mom, I never got an exact recipe for things. Instead, I watched as they used their taste to add palmfuls and pinches of ingredients to their dishes. But in every case, they would say things to me that sounded less like cooking instruction and more like life advice — advice, it seems, we all really need during this era of the internet.
"You only ever want to use just enough."
"Now you add the next thing — but not too much. Just the right amount."
"This dish is about a few good ingredients, cooked just right."
They were talking about basil and oregano and garlic, but they were also talking about writing and speaking and podcasting.
Just enough. Not too much. A few good ingredients, cooked just right.
The underpinning lesson was subtle but memorable:
More doesn't mean better.
Someone should tell the marketers.
When we show up publicly, we tend to think MORE means BETTER. More content means a bigger audience, more followers means stronger influence, more marketing means better results — or so we assume. But is that true? Because all I see are people spinning on the hamster wheel, doing more but not seeing anything better. In some cases, I think "more" is now squarely opposed to "better." For instance, I know so many people in the marketing industry who have tons and tons of LinkedIn followers. They don't have more influence. They have hardly any. They got there by posting basic copywriting tips or big brand breakdowns—catnip for marketers. But they struggle to monetize, and struggle even more to resonate with decision-makers who see past their gimmicks.
Because more doesn't equal better.
BETTER means better. Yes, I'm talking about being better at your craft, but when I examine the high-impact storytellers of our time, I also see another form of better.
Better arguments.
That's what memorable communicators and differentiated voices seem to do when they reject gimmicks and push further towards substance. They stand out by sharing their expertise, yes, but they don't just share more stuff. They make a better argument. Everywhere they go, in everything they do, they aren't just teaching us. They're making the case to us. They don't just tell us to care. They show us why we should.
Don't just share your ideas. Argue for them.
Everywhere you go, every time you show up.
That's what high-impact communicators do.
* * *
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with an incredible entrepreneur named Mary Knox Miller on her premise, her IP, and her signature framework. Central to this work together was developing her core argument—the defensible assertion she's making everywhere she shows up.
Mary Knox runs Thought Leader Media, where she consults on content strategy and produces video content for experts in academia who want to make an impact outside their universities.
When we began working together, her message was simple if common: you need to "speak human-first." Most academics are trained to communicate a certain way, and most of them therefore write and speak in ways that feel dense, dry, or frustrating to "regular folks." This means their intended audience feels confused, frustrated, or apathetic. This is a big problem. These are the academics who desperately want to communicate with laypeople and want a seat at the table and want to do things like guest on podcasts, speak at events, and generally help decision-makers outside universities change the world for the better. So these researchers and professors MUST learn to "speak human-first."
I agree.
But Mary Knox's message wasn't quite ... it. Not yet. Because it was unclear how to argue for that idea beyond merely pleading for it. Like many of us, she was stuck telling others to care, and we needed a way to show them.
So here is the structure we used to figure out her core argument and make the case for her command to "speak human-first." This argument not only grounds the idea in reality (because the phrase could cause some eye-rolls), it combines elements of good storytelling with logic to make Mary Knox's message irresistible.
No clickbait required.
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"Speak human-first" as a premise: the core argument of Mary Knox Miller
I've added bold subheaders to illustrate the structure so you can use the same template to craft your own argument.
Who they are and what they want:
You're an accomplished academic doing great work at your university, and you're ready to be known by leaders running organizations away from academia. You want to influence how they make choices, do their work, and shape the world. So you're trying to get outside of the university walls and become known more broadly.
How they try to get what they want:
You're creating lots of content online, maybe writing articles and newsletters, contributing quotes or guest columns to media publications for laypeople. You're pitching yourself to events to give talks at industry events. You're on social media more than ever before. All of this has led to some traction, some notoriety, but not the impact or influence you were hoping to have yet.
The problems with that current approach:
But we have to remember: it's about more than being known. It's about becoming the go-to expert in your space. You can know someone you dislike or don't trust, so purely being "known" isn't the endgame. The true goal is to be known favorably enough, trusted deeply enough, remembered and valued enough, that others give us a seat at the table and we earn a position of real influence. We don't want to be known. We want to be picked, again and again. So how do we close the gap between being known and being picked?
Diagnose the illness, the root of those problems:
Consider for a moment how we communicate, and how we need to change it so we close this gap.
The foundation you need to establish before anything else can happen is trust. Let's call trust a combination of credibility and consistency. In other words, trust is about who you are. You've got a fancy title, at a fancy school, and you've done it over a number of years. Immediately, just based on who you are, you are to be taken seriously and considered worthy by the folks around you. And although you're not done yet, and although your peers can make similar claims too, the fact remains: who you are, and all you've learned and accomplished, is pretty darn trustworthy from the jump. That's a huge advantage! Not everyone can say that.
But the next layer sitting on top of the foundation of trust is connection. That's the next thing you need when you communicate. The previous layer of trust was really about you and who you are. This layer is about how you say things. Someone with your title, from a respected school, with the same track record and years of experience, might be trusted by others just as you are. But if the way you communicate can connect with them emotionally? They're picking you over them. This can come from any number of sources: your childhood memories turn into a source of great metaphors you use to teach; your tone of voice is approachable and warm, maybe funny or just refreshingly clear and concise; and a long list of ways you can communicate. It's not just what you know or what you say but how you say it that helps create a connection, because connections are much more about others reciprocating your words with their intentions and emotions. Trust is one-way. You show up, they trust you, and you may never even realize it. But connection is two-way. you show up, they trust you, and then they also come back to you. They reflect emotions back, share their stories or ideas or questions, or they ask for simply ... more of you. They engage.
And finally, if they trust who you are and they engage with how you show up and say things so a connection forms, you might just be able to reach the part you started out hoping to reach:
You influence them.
Influence is the capacity to have an effect. It's one thing to get picked in theory (I trust you and feel connected to you). It's another matter for them to USE you and your ideas. They take action because of you and through you. They improve their work and the world thanks to you. Trust can form inside their minds only. Connection forms between you and them. But influence happens when you stand shoulder-to-shoulder to face the world and go make things better, together. This is what we most want. We don't want to merely be known. We want real influence. We want to be the go-to expert in our space.
Think of it this way: trust is about who you are, connection is about how you say something, and influence is what you say. They won't change their world based on what you say alone, they won't be influenced based on your competency. They also need trust and connection. Who you are and how you communicate are foundational.
Now here's the problem and why it's not happening: academia removes the bottom two layers. Who you are and how you communicate are not considered worthy ways to separate. Even your writing is used more to assess your ideas than it is to form trust and connection. Opening a grant proposal with a whimsical childhood story isn't just ineffective, it's actively decried as bad. Academia has given you a pass on trust and connection in most of the places you share your ideas, so you can merely and only share the ideas. You can focus on what you say, not how you say it or who you are. That's wonderful ... in that setting.
But that's not what humans need. Those bottom layers aren't just important to your cause—they're the drivers. They're foundational after all. Trust and connection are the two human parts, BEFORE our ideas can take hold and influence others. But academia has either discouraged you from thinking and communicating like that, or just given you a fast-pass to speed right past them. "We trust you and we have a set way of communicating, now influence us with your ideas." You're judged based solely on what you say in far more cases than the real world.
Assert the premise, the idea being argued for:
Put back trust and connection.
Put back the human layers.
Speak human-first. Then and only then will they understand, care about, and actually use your ideas ... and you.
We need to put CONNECTION before CONTENT. We need to put HUMANITY before COMPETENCY.
We need to speak human-first.
* * *
THAT is a powerful way to go beyond a pithy maxim to actually defend the idea, and Mary Knox won't stop there either. She can use that same argument to craft signature frameworks (we worked together on hers, shaped like a pyramid, which she can now use to assess her clients' communication styles and move them towards better with concrete methodology). She can use her argument to find and build signature stories too, identifying the moments in a person's work where they moved through the same beats of the argument: starting with the same desire, trying the same approach, encountering the same problems, then making the switch to put trust and connection at the fore, and what happened next and what we can learn from that person.
Mary Knox no longer needs to brainstorm "content." She merely needs to explore her premise and continue to defend it. This process helps her then OWN the concept publicly. Because remember, you can't "own your audience," but you can own an idea in their minds.
Mary Knox and I were able to take a nice-sounding idea that's easy to ignore or sounds overly trite and turn it into the engine of her entire public platform, informing messaging, content, storytelling, frameworks, client assessment tools, and her sales and marketing efforts. It's all built on a core argument.
Make the case. Make them care.
More isn't better. Better is better.
What high-impact communicators do differently is simple to say, urgent to execute: they make the case for their ideas. They don't just share their expertise. They argue for something.
Something better.