Say More by Saying Less | The One Thing Rule Explained

In this practical and insightful episode, we explore The One Thing Rule—a simple but powerful approach to improving communication and getting better results.

The idea is straightforward: focus on one clear message at a time. When communication becomes too complex or overloaded, it’s easy for the main point to get lost. By simplifying your message, you increase clarity, understanding, and impact.

This episode breaks down how the One Thing Rule can be applied in business, leadership, presentations, and everyday conversations. Whether you’re speaking to a group or having a one-on-one discussion, clarity and focus make all the difference.

If you’re looking to improve your communication skills, leadership effectiveness, and ability to connect with others, this episode offers a practical tool you can start using immediately.

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

**Check out NEW upgraded website with FREE offer!!
Visit: https://theWilsonMethod.com 

Try Larry's "5 Day Challenge" via his web site.

Link: TheWilsonMethod.com

Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:02

Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned from 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Hi, I'm Larry Wilson. Thanks again for joining me on this podcast episode of How to Talk to Humans. I was in the frame of mind of remembering funny, odd events from my strange and storied career. Some of it, as I've told you before, um my producer commented on the fact that it seems like I had no idea what was going on. I think that's a very accurate appraisal of my career. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on. I tried to learn as much as I could. I tried to remember as much as I could. I tried to uh do new things and learn new things and experience new things, but most of the time I was clueless. I things fell in my lap frequently. However, the more communication techniques I learned, it seems like I suddenly got luckier. Now, I don't really think it had anything to do with luck. Oh or as Michael Scott, the character on The Office would say, I'm not superstitious. I'm just a little bit stitchious. It's just one of my favorite jokes hearing him say that. And of course, that's some writer's joke. But um I'm not really a big believer in luck, although I think such a thing exists. I think there's so many random events that are taking place all the time. There's bound to be some that are better than others, and maybe that's what we consider luck. But I do know the people I've studied in this life, the people I've worked with, some of these superstars. You might say they make their own luck, which anyone can do. I think part of that is a function of doing everything you can to weight the scales in your favor. Then if an opportunity presents itself, it may seem like luck, but it may be because you've taken the time and effort to prepare yourself. Maybe that has to do with your diet and exercise. Maybe it has to do with your communication skills, whatever it may be. I think that's what we sometimes uh think of as luck. And I was thinking I worked on a very strange job one time for the uh premiere of a film that uh very odd film uh that the actor Bill Paxton was in. Now, I was already a huge Bill Paxton fan. Um if you don't know his name, believe me, if you saw a picture of him, you go, Oh, that guy! Of course. Uh Paxton was in all these James Cameron films like Aliens and uh True Lies, and uh he's he's everywhere. He was starred in a HBO show, Big Love. Um, I'm particularly fond of a movie he did called Near Dark, which in some ways I thought was one of the most interesting and scary vampire movies I'd ever seen. And uh I don't want to give too much away, but uh Paxton had a magnificent quality of bringing almost to every role he did where his exuberance and his surprise at learning new things comes through so clearly. Uh in in near dark, he uh plays a vampire who's with a group of vampires, but they look like regular people. They look a little um trashy, they look a little low class and a little scary, but they look like regular people. And at one point there's a new guy who they've just turned into a vampire who's still very unsure about the whole thing. They go into a uh some kind of sketchy roadside joint, jukebox joint, and there's some very dangerous-looking characters in there. But of course, the vampires are all kind of cheerful and oblivious because they know they're vampires. You can't hurt them. And at one point they start to make trouble, and the the barkeeper pulls out a shotgun from behind the bar and shoots this new guy in the stomach. And the new guy looks horrified, but then he looks down and realizes, yeah, it's blown a big chunk out of him, but he doesn't feel any pain. And Paxton, who's standing next to him, looks at him and goes, It's a kick, isn't it? And from that moment on, of course, I was a Bill Paxton fan. But when I worked with him, he had to get up at this premiere and introduce the film and say some things. Now, I'd seen Paxton in all these films. He's always fantastic. He always does a great, great job. But I guess the reason I was brought in is because Bill was not comfortable with getting up in front of a live audience and talking. And so we worked on some stuff and we talked on some stuff. And I was, you know, uh I have a tendency to try and uh bring a lot to the table when I'm working. Well in this is, of course, long before I had ever thought of synthesizing everything I learned into Wilson Method. I was simply uh uh I was often hired to work one-on-one with people. And also uh they didn't want to advertise. Um the studios didn't, the individual actors sometimes were very generous, sometimes uh would prefer that I stay in the shadows. Because I understand that. It's, you know, they they would like to be presented as uh all these skills they were born with, you know. That's okay, I understand that. Uh but Bill was uh charming and open and down-to-earth and just a lovely guy. And uh he went up and uh spoke in front of this group at uh the New Art Theater in Los Angeles, I recall, and he did great, as I fully expected him to, but he seemed surprised. And afterwards he was saying, you know, of all those things you talked about, he said there was this one thing you said, and uh I'm gonna really hold on to that and keep that in mind. And uh I said, Well, uh, you know, I really appreciate that. And we had been talking in the course of working together, and he said something about uh about uh hand gestures and using his body and stuff, and I'd said something about I thought he did that really well. And his animation on camera, his physicality always looked really authentic. And he said, Well, you know, I found that when you use your body, when you use your hands and gesture, it makes people pay more attention to what you say. And I said, Really? I said, Bill, do you do you think it's really as simple as that? And he said, uh, yeah, I do. Well, I turns out I have to agree with him. I think he is right. Because we're used to seeing people use their bodies when they gesture with their hands. You know, there's some cultures where we think of this as very predominant of people gesticulating, and it brings so much semiotic, unspoken information to the communication, to their message. In uh I I don't wanna I don't want to resort to uh cliches here. I know that you know when I refer to different cultures, I know that you know what I'm referring to. And what was so funny for me, as always, I was trying to keep my ears open, learn things. But uh Bill said something that I thought was so interesting. He just said, you know, I frequently uh find, you know, in a situation like this, if I can just learn one thing, I consider that uh a real win. And I thought, oh, that's really smart. That he wasn't the slightest bit anxious about trying to learn everything. He wasn't somehow focused on the idea that if I don't get every single thing, then this is gonna be a tremendous failure. No. Now, I also think this may be um emblemic of working actors who frequently have to learn a lot of things new, whether it's a physical skill, they need to learn how to fence or ride a unicycle or whatever it is. And they also have to say their lines and they have to hit the marks that are on the floor so that they're in the right camera position. They frequently have to learn a lot of crazy things, and they have to learn them fast, really fast. So I shouldn't be surprised by that, but the more I thought about it, the more useful I realized that attitude was. In my Wilson Method training, I have uh online training that's available. I have corporate events where I'll do a half-day training for large groups of people, and I'll do my two-day boot camp. But that's limited to just 10 people. And that's very intensive. It's immersive, it's a very full two days. And sometimes I think that people are nervous about boot camp because they think, well, there's so much going on. I can't keep up with it. What if I don't get everything down and learn it perfectly? Well, no one can. I couldn't do it. I don't know anyone who could learn it all perfectly. I'm hoping that you learn a lot. I provide so much follow-up contact with students and continue to send them materials and um trainings on video so that they can keep referring to things they learned and practicing, getting better. But it makes me think of that one thing idea. And I foolishly call it the one thing rule, but it's not really a rule, it's just a suggestion. Because I've had the experience on more than one occasion where someone offered a tremendous panoply of delights, uh, whatever it might have been education or training or a skill or something, and I just would go into it with thinking, if I can get one thing out of this. I remember at one point uh I had hired um some specialist in uh uh technological stuff for the internet and paid him a goodly sum of money for some consulting on some very complicated, intricate internet sort of thing. And uh he didn't really deliver on almost everything that he had promised. And the people who work with me who are on my team were very angry about this and were like, this guy didn't do what he and I said, no, but you know what he did do? And there was one little thing he did on a website that we were concerned with with a certain name. He came up with a much better idea that was clearer, easier to remember, and had a real uh evergreen quality to it, that it was not gonna go out of style. It was not a fad, it was not a passing fancy. And I said, think about it for a second. What if he just said, yeah, you have to pay me that amount of money, and I'm gonna give you this really great website URL? And everyone sort of thought about it and they kind of nodded, saying, Well, yeah, I thought that's the one thing. Now, obviously, if you if you invest in Wilson method training, I want you to get a wide variety. I want you to get a lot out of it. But I also had another good friend who was a very talented uh uh visual artist. And he he also, it's funny, he had a background, uh, he actually had an engineering degree before he got into visual arts. And he loved buffets. He that was to him the greatest thing in the world. Now, I must confess, I'm I'm not a huge fan of the buffet because I feel like there's all this stuff and I wind up eating more than I really need to eat and probably more than is good for me. But this friend of mine, his theory was if he could find one thing on the buffet that was great, that was worth the price of the buffet, then everything else was like it was free. And the more I thought about it, I had to agree. I I couldn't really find fault with what he was saying. I think it's a really smart way to approach any kind of training, to focus on the idea, to go into it knowing that it's impossible for anyone, if you're going into intensive expert training, which Wilson method certainly is. But whether you're doing Wilson method, whether you're doing um musical training on an instrument or your voice or writing or construction or whatever it is you might be doing, you have to go in with the understanding that it's impossible to absorb every detail of something that's brand new to you. But go in with the idea that you want to find one thing that is really worth the value of everything you've invested for this training. And then everything else you get out of the training is an unexpected bonus. And if you have a particularly strong trainer, like I like to think of myself, you can get a great deal more than just one thing. You can come out with a dozen things or two dozen things, which I think is more than a normal person can process on a regular basis. Two dozen things? Why that means you could be practicing one of them a day for almost an entire month without repeating them. That that seems like perhaps too much for anyone to absorb. But a dozen things, well, now maybe you can practice three a day and work on them. And invariably you'll find that there's some that speak to you more than others. There's sometimes we'll say something uh came to me naturally. I think what that really means is it resonated with you. It may not be that it came to you naturally, it may simply be that for whatever unknown reason it made sense to you, it resonated, it seemed particularly appealing. And so things that are appealing are very easy for us to do and do regularly. You know, nobody has to be tricked into eating chocolate. It's delicious. Well, I'm sure there's someone out there who probably is allergic to chocolate, but for those of us who love chocolate, you don't need any excuse. And so in the same way, when you find things that resonate with you, I've said this, I think, in other places on this podcast. I don't think I'm the perfect trainer or mentor in communication for everyone. I can't imagine there is anyone who's the perfect trainer for everyone. I'm the perfect trainer for the person who feels my message resonates with them. That's who I'm the perfect trainer for. Because then you're going to invest yourself in the training with everything you've got. And hopefully anything you choose to pursue is as easy to do as Wilson Method. I've said this also before, but I'll reiterate everything I teach is simple. Everything I teach is easy to do, it works, and you can do it. I don't know what other criteria you may be looking for. I hope that those of you who are interested will pursue Wilson Meta. And I hope that for those of you who enjoy this podcast, you'll share this with everyone you know. I'm dying to find a response from some listener outside the United States. There have been a couple of people in Europe I know, but I'd love to find someone in Fiji who's listening to this podcast, uh, or in Botswana. That would be so exciting for me. So help me out, would you? I hope that you find this information valuable because I sincerely think this is some valuable information I'm presenting here. I've seen the extraordinary results that it's produced in my own life. And more importantly, I've seen what it did for my students. I am of course enormously proud of them, but but really it's more exciting for me to see them do things whether it's for business, whether it's for relationships, whether it's for unexpected endeavors that they didn't plan to do. And so I welcome the opportunity to share this all over the world. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.