Dale Dixon:
[0:13] I know this material cold, so why am I nervous?
Dale Dixon:
[0:17] I've been hearing some version of that sentence from very capable leaders for 24 years. The obvious answer is that the stakes went up. Bigger room, more important people, more consequence, and more adrenaline. That's part of it, and it explains less than it looks like it does. The rest of it showed up somewhere I was not looking for it, which was on a motorcycle. Hmm. So I've got somewhere around 40 or 50,000 miles in the saddle on a motorcycle. A lot of pavement, a lot of dirt, enough time in and on that seat that I stopped thinking my way through every input a long time ago. It's riding. It comes naturally. Here's what I cannot explain. Put a good rider right behind me in a group ride, and a second voice starts to show up inside my helmet. I come through a rough section of dirt and instead of reading the next 50 feet of trail in front of me, I'm wondering what the guy behind me think of the line I picked. I take a fast sweeping corner and half my attention is back there with him watching me take it. He's not riding my motorcycle. He can't see what I'm seeing. He doesn't know what the front tire is telling me and he has no idea what I decided about traction two seconds before I committed.
Dale Dixon:
[1:37] I'm pulling him anyway. Then there's a ride where I'm running sweep, back of the pack, nobody behind me at all. 20 minutes in, I notice my hands are loose on the bars, my shoulders have come down, and I'm reading the trail instead of reading a review. Nothing about that ride was easier, and nothing about it was different. Same dirt. It was the same corners, the same rider, the same motorcycle. One thing changed. It was the job. I'm Dale Dixon. This is The Presence Lab. I spent 15 years in television news, 24 years since then coaching executives in front of a camera. I've watched a lot of very competent people come apart in rooms where they knew more than anybody else sitting at the table.
Dale Dixon:
[2:27] Now, by the end of this episode, you're going to be able to answer that opening question with something better than it must be nerves. You're going to have a name for the second job we pick up on the way into the room. You're going to have a three-way distinction the research actually supports. And I'm going to tell you right now that the villain in it is probably not the one you're expecting. You're going to have a test you can run on your own sentences. We're going to run it on two real moments from the last month, one that I missed badly and one that got it right under a lot more pressure than most of us will ever face. Then, three moves that are small enough that we're going to actually use them. There is a field guide that puts all of it on two pages, and I'm going to tell you where to grab it at the end of this episode. Now, the easy explanation for the nerves is that the stakes went up. There was a bigger room, bigger audience, more consequence, and more adrenaline.
Dale Dixon:
[3:26] Now, I understand that explanation completely because I ran it on myself for most of my career, and it has the considerable advantage of being partly true.
Dale Dixon:
[3:35] It's not that the stakes got bigger. It's that we quietly took a second job. So there's the job we were invited to do, which is to make something complicated, understandable, so a group of people can make a good decision. Then somewhere between the parking lot and the chair, we pick up another job. Make sure they think I'm smart and look like I belong at this table.
Dale Dixon:
[4:03] Don't get caught without an answer. And whatever else happens, don't let the CEO watch me struggle. Two jobs, one brain, same 20 minutes. So picture the agenda everybody else in that room is working from. Now picture a second document nobody handed us and nobody else can see. And every line on it is about us. That is the grade. The grade is the reason a leader who could explain the same material at a whiteboard over coffee to one person in about 90 seconds cannot find the first sentence in front of 12. Nothing about the material changed on the walk down the hall. The assignment changed. Once we know what the second job sounds like, it starts turning up in places that never looked anything like public speaking.
Dale Dixon:
[4:57] It's in the question we answer for four minutes when the honest answer was 11 seconds long, because a short answer might look like we hadn't thought about it. It's in the slide we keep in the deck for a question nobody is going to ask, carried there as insurance against looking unprepared. It's in the skip level where a young analyst asks something genuinely good, and instead of saying, that's a great question and I want to sit down with it, we manufacture something on the spot. It's in the investor update where we soften numbers that are already down in front of people who can read. So the only thing the softening protects is us. The hardest version comes when a board member asks something about something that we honestly don't know. And there is a five word answer available. Here it is.
Dale Dixon:
[5:49] I don't know. I'll find out. Most of us can't reach it because saying it in front of 12 people feels like handing over a data point about us. We build an answer out loud instead, and everybody in the room can hear the construction. Here's the question, and I want the honest answer rather than the flattering one. What are you trying to prove when you talk and.
Dale Dixon:
[6:38] Here's the question, and I want the honest answer rather than the flattering one. What are we trying to prove when we walk into that room? Let's watch it happen to somebody else because it's much easier to see from the outside. So there is a company called Flock Safety that makes automated license plate readers. More than 120,000 cameras, 49 states, thousands of police departments, and private customers. Now, before I go one sentence further, I want to be clear about what we're doing here. You may believe those cameras make your town safer. You may believe they should not exist anywhere. Now, I do have a view, and I'm not going to share it because it has nothing to do with what I want you to see. We're looking at one answer and nothing else. So the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged or accused of using the license plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including tracking women without their knowledge. That is a question about a mechanism. Who can run a search under what oversight with what record? The company's answer from the CEO in an interview with Bloomberg was four words.
Dale Dixon:
[8:02] We're not big brother. He added that the company is focused on protecting people, and in other interviews, he described the public reaction as a misunderstanding.
Dale Dixon:
[8:15] Nobody asked whether the company was Big Brother. The question was about who can run a search. The answer was about the company's character and the audience's comprehension. And once you hear it, you can't unhear it. There's value in dissecting this case, so it's not a cheap shot at a stranger. They did the work. The company actually shortened how long it holds footage by default from 30 days down to 7 and started requiring police customers to run an audit tool that flags unusual search behavior. Those are real operational changes aimed squarely at the actual question. The operations were about the mechanism and the talking was about the reputation. Same company, same week, two completely different jobs. That gap is this whole episode, and most of us live inside of it. We fix the thing and then defend ourselves. And we walk out wondering why nobody seemed to notice.
Dale Dixon:
[9:21] That we fix the thing, which gives us a test that is easy to use. Take any answer given under pressure and ask what the sentence defended, the mechanism or the reputation, the recommendation or the person who brought it. You can run it on other people this afternoon and running it on yourself,
Dale Dixon:
[9:42] oh boy, it's considerably harder and worth considerably more. Here's what many of us think, and it's wrong. You can say the problem is ego, wanting the room to be impressed, wanting to look good. That is not what the research shows. Researchers who study achievement separate the goals we carry into a performance. The first one is about getting better at the thing itself. The second one is about the judgment that comes back. And that second one splits into two different animals. One of them is reaching for the win. I want to be excellent in this room. I want them to see it. I want to be the best one in here today. The other one is bracing against loss. Don't be exposed. Don't get caught. Don't hand anybody evidence that I'm not as good as they thought. Reaching for the win comes with some anxiety. Bracing against the loss comes with considerably more, and across the literature, it's the most reliable companion to anxiety of any of them.
Dale Dixon:
[10:49] It is an ambition that's expensive. Ambition is fine. Competition pulls good work out of people. And a leader who wants a room to see excellent work is not suffering from a character defect. The expensive one is defense. Defense is the version that disguises itself every single time as a responsibility, and it never announces itself as ego. It announces itself like this. I should know this. I can't get this wrong. They're expecting me to have the answer. Now, those can be high standards, and often they are exactly that. But listen to what they're asking us to protect. Not one of them is about whether the room understands the recommendation. Every one of them is about what the room concludes about us if the moment goes sideways. The grade is always defense and that's its whole nature. Nobody carries a secret grade sheet into a room because they're excited about the work. There is a second finding that leads us from psychology into communication.
Dale Dixon:
[11:54] Speakers carrying the most anxiety pay less attention to the room in front of them and more attention to their own performance. The more attention turns inward, the less of it is available for the people we came to serve. Now, those are patterns across studies, and the effects are modest. The specifics and the citations are in the show notes of this episode. The reason that one is meaningful for me is that attention is finite. Part of it is on the room, part is on the material, part is on the question we were just asked, and part is running a private poll on how we're doing. Something has to come up short, and it's almost always the room, because the room is the one that never tells us we stopped paying attention to it. We're reading a face while wondering what that face means about us. We're listening to a question while also listening to ourselves answer it. We're giving the presentation and reviewing the presentation in the same breath, and then we blame the nerves for a performance that was actually running on a quarter of the available attention.
Dale Dixon:
[13:07] Put that in a real room for a second. A board member asks why margin missed the forecast. There's a version of that moment where the whole job is the question itself and nothing else. Listen carefully. Make sure I understood what they're actually asking. Give the clearest answer I have. Say plainly where the number is still soft. And note what I want to prepare better before the next meeting. Then there is the other version. And it sounds like this. Don't look surprised. Don't pause too long. Don't let them think this caught me off guard. Say something. Same question, same executive, same 20 seconds, and a completely different use of attention. By the way, if this podcast is helping, take a moment right now and follow the show. Hit the like button, subscribe. Better yet, I would love to hear from you. Drop me an email, info at daledixonmedia.com. Even if it's just to say hello, ask a question, propose a topic for the next episode. So here's the objection I would expect to hear from you. You want me to stop caring what the board thinks or what the important people in my life think. The board approves my budget.
Dale Dixon:
[14:18] Correct. And in most companies, that is exactly how it works. Reputation is real. Judgment has consequences. And there is no version of senior
Dale Dixon:
[14:28] leadership where the room's opinion is weightless. We don't fix this by caring less. We fix it by deciding what gets our attention while we're in there. It can be done in public, under more pressure than most of us will ever stand in. Last week, Georgia Tech lost a Thursday night football game to Colorado. The following Tuesday, head coach Brent Key walked into a press conference full of people whose job is to evaluate him out loud in print for a living.
Dale Dixon:
[15:01] He didn't wait for the hard question. He opened with it. He said the team looked, and I'm quoting him, poorly prepared, poorly coached, poor disciplined, soft football team. Then he said he takes full responsibility and that there was accountability to go around. Now run the test on that. Every one of those words defends the standard rather than the coach. Poorly coached is not a phrase a man reaches for when he's protecting his reputation. Then he told the room that the loss wasn't the reason for any of it and that if the kick had gone through the uprights, the same conversation would be happening anyway. The problem was not playing to the standard the program had built over four years.
Dale Dixon:
[15:48] Read what he just did with the scoreboard. He refused to let the result be the grade. The result was information about the work, and the work was the thing being measured. That's mastery orientation, spoken out loud by a man in a headset with his own
Dale Dixon:
[16:06] job security sitting in the room. Which brings us to three moves, and they're small on purpose because the ones you'll actually run are the small ones. The first move is naming the second job, and it belongs in the hour before we walk in.
Dale Dixon:
[16:23] Say the unflattering version out loud in the car, in the elevator, wherever we happen to be. Not the polished version, the real one. I'm trying to prove I deserved this promotion. I'm trying to prove the CEO was right about me. I'm trying to prove I'm the smartest person in that room. I'm trying to prove I'm not nervous. Naming it doesn't delete it, and it isn't supposed to. It moves the second job out of the driver's seat and into a place where we can see it. The second move is writing sweep, and it's for the moment we cross the threshold, trade one question for another. For years, before I walk into a room to speak, I've asked myself how I can serve the audience, and I always understood that as an audience-first principle. It's also an attention move, and it hands the brain a job that competes directly with self-evaluation. If I'm working on what these people need, I have to watch them, listen to them, make the complicated thing plain, and answer the question they actually asked. That work is very hard to do while staring into an imaginary mirror. Say it out loud on the way in. What does this room need from me in the next 20 minutes?
Dale Dixon:
[17:42] The third move is grading the work instead of grading yourself, and it belongs within an hour of walking out while we can still hear our own sentences. Most of us skip it, or we run the useless version, which is deciding whether we did well. The useful version asks what to practice. Where did I lose them? What made me defensive? And did I catch it in the moment or an hour later? Was there a stretch where I stopped listening because I was busy building the perfect answer? Then take the three or four answers we gave under real pressure and ask what each one was protecting.
Dale Dixon:
[18:22] If the honest answer is that most of them were protecting me,
Dale Dixon:
[18:26] that's not a character verdict. That's a practice list. I'm still working this on the motorcycle, which is probably why I wanted to make this episode. I can explain the entire mechanism. I've got tens of thousands of miles behind me, and I will still come through a corner once in a while wondering...
Dale Dixon:
[18:45] What the guy behind me think of how I just handled that. The work is catching it sooner because the best line through that corner was never the one that makes the rider behind me think I'm good. It's the line that fits the motorcycle, the surface, the speed, what I can actually do and what I'm trying to learn out there.
Dale Dixon:
[19:06] Speaking works the same way. The room can judge us and it probably will. And their judgment still doesn't have to become the thing we're doing in there. Our job is to communicate, to listen, and to keep getting better at both. So when you catch yourself trying to prove you belong in the room, that's the cue. Come back to the work. So the field guide for this episode is two pages. Page one walks you through the naming the second job. Page two has the sweep question, the debrief, and the defense test written out so you can run it on your own answers. It's free, so grab a hold of it at daledixonmedia.com slash grade. That link is also in the show notes. I'll send it to you if you want to just drop me an email. If this gave you language for something you've felt and never named, follow the show and send it to one person you know who does high-stakes work. And if you want somewhere to practice this instead of a place to think about it, that's what we're building inside the Presence Lab community. It's free, and you're going to find the door at daledixonmedia.com slash community. The room is allowed to have an opinion about you. You don't have to make their opinion your job. I'm Dale Dixon. This is The Presence Lab. I'll see you next week.
