The Gap No Leader Talks About

You've built the career. You've led the team. But when you step up to speak—something doesn't match.

Welcome to The Gap: the hidden divide between your competence and your communication. And nobody's talking about it—until now.

In this premiere episode of The Elevated Communicator, Sam Linton introduces the six-pillar system he developed over a decade of coaching executives, drawing from his own raw experience with panic attacks in ministry leadership.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What "The Gap" is and why it's silently undermining your leadership
• Why the people around you won't tell you the truth about your communication
• The six pillars of the Elevated Communicator framework (Mindset, Message, Movement, Momentum, Magnetism, Mastery)
• Why communication is a trainable skill—not a personality trait

About the Host:

Sam Linton is a certified Dale Carnegie instructor, executive communication coach, and author of Kill My Fear. He helps leaders communicate with the same authority they lead with.

🌐 https://glintstorytelling.com
📧 podcast@samuelllinton.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right. Welcome back. It's been two weeks, and I have never taken a hiatus from our show since I started back last year. So this is actually the one-year anniversary of when we launched the Sam Linton show. And I thought this would be an appropriate time to examine specifically where we're going. Because I've done a lot of shows, I've done a lot of different things. And the truth is I have kind of reached the peak of where I wanted to go with the show in terms of the individual scenes of different types of things for communicators and executives. And I'm not moving from that space, but what I'm doing is I'm refining what I'm doing. And I spent the last couple weeks preparing what I believe to be the best and most revolutionary content that I have ever talked about in the show. So let's get into it. Alright, so two-week hiatus. Hope you were okay without me. Those of you that are listening, I don't know who you are. I'd love to know who you are. But I'm kicking off this series, and this is going to be like a 10-part series, it's going to all connect in the end, of a new program that I've developed for my clients called the Elevated Communicator. It's closing the gap between your competence and your communication. And I want to start with a scene. Here's the scene: a man, we could call him John C. E. O. Not to be confused with John Cena. John C. E. O stands in front of shareholders, investors in his company, and his team. And he has just had a record year. He has everything in front of him in terms of his talents, in terms of his accomplishments. He's even got a really nice wristwatch. One of those ones that it's not a smartwatch, but it's more expensive probably than some of your cars. He stands at a podium filled with a room of not really much more than 50 people, but to John CEO, he is overwhelmed with one thought. What am I going to do when I stand in front of these people and have to make an announcement? And what happens is he gets up, and instead of leading like he led through the year of transitions and unbelievable profits at his company, instead of joking the same way that he jokes with the mailman that comes and delivers mail in his business, instead of showing his personality, what he does is he picks up a piece of paper and he reads a pre-written script. Wasn't even written by him. It was generated by ChatGPT, or he had his assistant write it. And if we're being truthful, he most likely probably just got it there. He takes a glance at that wristwatch, thinks about his accomplishments, and then he staggers through this miserable speech filled with filler words, filled with unemotional connection. And when he exits the stage, it's too applause, but it's more platitudes. John CEO wonders, did I do good? Did I do good at reading those things? Did I do good at emphasizing how important the company is to me? What did I do? How well did I do? He doesn't know. He can't know because of the gap. It's the gap. You don't know the gap, but I know the gap. And this is the gap that every executive leader that I've ever coached has had to face. And no one tells him about it, but I'm here to tell you about it now. You have worked your entire life, sacrificed time with your children. You have even spent a lot of extra time on LinkedIn. Ugh, gross. But no one ever told you that you could completely kill it when it comes to your executive function and absolutely bomb at your communication. No one told you that you had to spend all of your life learning how to do a career, learning how to manage people, learning how to build a tech team, learning how to have a profit and loss that you can tell to public shareholders about what you've done. And no one tells you that at some point you also have to learn how to communicate what you're doing with that team. You think you're good at communication. Every executive does. You think you're okay at it, everyone does, but you don't feel that way. And the reason why you don't feel that way and you don't know if it's good or not is because the people around you, they're afraid to tell you. I'm afraid to tell you. Because you write their checks that pay their bills. I'm not telling you. So how do you know how you're doing? Well, I'm telling you, you're not doing as good as you are competent. You have uncovered, uncovered the gap. The gap between your confidence and competence, I should say, and your communication. And in the middle, there seems like a Grand Canyon size of distance between where you are and where you want to be. And it's my job, it's my vision, it's my mission to help you to get to the place where you can stand on top of your communication with the same level of competence that put you in the position that you are today. That is the purpose of the elevated leader. I want to close that gap. You have worked too hard to be where you are, to communicate the way you do. Those two things need to align. And it's my job to give you the confidence to display that competence and communicate it with the same way that you do everything else. I was when I was um a couple years back in my ministry career, I'm a pastor, as you might know or you might not know, and I manage a pretty large church. We're in the middle of a multi-million dollar, over a$20 million building project. We're finishing that. I was responsible with the other pastor of negotiating the um the different terms of that project and having to go to different public hearings about zoning and things of that nature, all of it. None of it bothered me. I was never, I never had a problem in front of a group of people until one day I had a panic attack in front of the church that led me to nine months of panic attacks. Here's what happened. And if you've read my book, Kill My Fear, you'll know this story because the whole book is about this story and the nine-month experience. But I'm not going to talk about that. I want to talk to you instead about this one moment inside that moment that really shaped how I look at executive level communication. I was having a panic attack. It was inside the stairwell, right outside of where I come out to preach, right outside of the altar, the platform area. And I was trying to gather my thoughts. I couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't see even to think through what I was talking about. And I was sitting on the steps, and there was a church administrator there, a coordinator, that was helping us with baptisms. Now, he did not mean anything by this. I know him and I've told him that I've mentioned this story, but he had no idea what his statement did to me for months. It kind of messed me up. And of course, I'm to the other side of it now, but here's the statement that he made, and this is essentially summing up every single thing that an executive experiences. He looked at me and he said, You better get it together. You got to get out there. I said, I know, I'm just, I'm having a panic attack. And he said, if you don't get it together, what hope do the rest of us have at getting it together? And all of a sudden, this immense pressure just felt like an anvil hit me right in the face. I was sitting there and I was experiencing pressure from the panic attack, which I never had a panic attack like that. And then on top of that, I'm thinking about how I'm the leader. I'm the guy that is on the stage. I'm the one that's supposed to be there encouraging the church people. I'm the one that's supposed to be the one that can handle these kinds of things, and yet here I am. And I'm unable to get it together. I face the gap. That gap was there. And the thing about executives is every single time we stand before people that we're accountable to for serving, we fall into that gap. And it's my job to get you to experience what it's like on the other side of that gap. So, what I did in a nine-month period is I did a bunch of different things. I became a certified Dale Carnegie instructor, and I learned everything I could from them about communication, about interpersonal relationships. What I also did is I started to examine myself and things that I learned about myself over the years and what I felt as an executive. And I came to the realization that if I was going to overcome panic attacks, if I was going to overcome this imposter syndrome, I was going to have to figure out how to navigate that gap. And it took me the better part of 10 years to be able to pull that all together. Well, that's the system that I built that I'm delivering here to you for free. Because you're listening to this and because you're a part of my audience. I want to help you to have that moment when you realize the gap isn't as big as it as you think it is. It's not as big as you perceive it to be. You, in fact, are able, competent enough and able to get to the top of that gap and destroy it for good. The higher you rise, the higher you advance in terms of your levels of communication, the stronger you're going to become about who you are. So you have to realize that if you don't navigate this gap, it's going to cost you things. So let's talk about what happens. Some many of us, we say, well, I'm I'm good at leading, I'm good at uh finance, I'm good at um, you know, fill in your executive function blank. I'm good at teams, I'm really, really good at casting vision, especially clarifying vision, not necessarily communicating vision. But here's what's gonna happen. If you don't close that gap, you're gonna be like I was sitting on those steps. You'll lose influence because your team isn't going to follow someone that they can't trust that can articulate the vision. You're gonna miss opportunities. You're going to look for reasons to not speak, and you're going to fail to rise to the occasion when they need you. You're not gonna get the trust and the buy-in from the people around you, and they're gonna feel like you're disconnected from them because you are, because you're disconnected because you can't communicate that way. So here's my promise, all right? Because everybody needs a promise, and this is the promise. You don't need to become anybody else. You don't need to be Tony Robbins. You don't have to find yourself in a place where you completely just destroy your communication style and become a completely different person. No, no, no. You need to become the best version of you, and that is something that you can do. Communication is a trainable skill, it is not a personality trait. Confidence is something that you repeatedly adopt and adapt to. It's not something that you're born with, it requires you to do some work. Now, there's six essential pillars of this type of elevated leadership. And I broke this down real simple because I'm a preacher, everything has to have alliteration. So the first one is mindset. And that's where we're gonna spend this week and a little bit of next week. We're gonna talk about how to get that confidence. We're gonna talk about the confidence audit. We're gonna talk about how we need that confidence bank. I've I've talked to you about this before about borrowing confidence from other areas. That's a part of this system. Next, we're gonna talk about the message. What is it that we have to say? And more importantly, who are we saying it to? Why does who cares what you have to say? That's a part of this. Movement. What is going on with this body? Are you John Legend and your body is a wonderland? Or are you actually taking your body and using it as your greatest visual asset when you're communicating, whether digitally or physically? Momentum. Are you communicating in a way that shows emotion and inspires action? Or are you communicating just like I would read the phone book? Well, here we are today. I'm just here to get through this so that I can get to the other side of the weekend. I'm gonna talk to you about what most executives miss. One of the greatest things is magnetism. It's not being able to read the room. They're so concerned about what they're presenting that they forget that there's still other things going on in that room that is affecting the presentation. And then finally, we are going to look at what I believe to be something that can transform your outlook on communication, and that is mastery. How do you master a skill that you're using all the time and not just get stuck in the same ruts? That's what we're going to examine when we examine mastery. Now, if you do these things, and this is a big if, if you're willing to spend time with us over the next several weeks, you're going to have authentic confidence that matches your competence. You are going to be, maybe for the first time ever, able to start to see what it looks like to actually communicate at the same level that you compete in your business. You don't realize how much your team needs this. I didn't realize how much the church needed me to be able to tap into this despite how I felt. None of this is a feeling thing. Some of this, this is a lot of muscle. This is a lot of training, but it doesn't take a whole lot of time. One of the craziest things that I've learned in my over 10 years of training people in communication and executive strategy and how to handle these kinds of situations is communication doesn't take very long to improve, but it takes a lot of effort for you to start to realize that you have to do things differently. You have to look at where you are and where you want to be and change the direction. So this is my promise to you. And if you've been with me, hopefully I have enough credibility to show you how important this is. And you see, you know, if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please go back and listen to the first 51 episodes because I've talked about communication now for a year. So there's hours and hours and hours you could spend about that. But right now, if you think that this is something that you need, my promise to you is I'm going to give you every single thing I know about elevating your communication for free for the cost of your time here. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell you all the distillations of all the different executive things that I've taught in the last 51 episodes. I'm going to show you how to get confidence. We're going to talk about that next week with the confidence audit and the confidence bank. I'm going to explain again the importance of what it does to your team when they see a polished version of you walk into a room where somebody doesn't agree with what you're saying. I'm going to give you the opportunity to actually have a vision for who you are as a communicator, maybe for the first time. And then you're going to get something else. You are going to get the runner's high of actually starting to practice communicating with the same level of competence that you have led your team with for all of these years. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, join me over the next several weeks because you don't want to miss this. I'm going to go through all of these pillars. I'm going to give you some visual, you know, I'm going to describe them because it's a podcast, but some visual aids to help you to get it. But in the meantime, I want you to answer this question. How much has the gap been affecting who you are? How much has your sheepishness about communication been keeping you back from going for that interview, reaching for that promotion, building that business, maybe even asking out the love of your life because you're afraid that you can't communicate your feelings? How much has your insecurity about how you handle your words kept you from going to bed at night, feeling that you've conquered the day, that you've crushed the goal, that you've killed it, that you've slayed, as the kids are saying, and that you know that when your team looks at you, they see a man, they see a woman who is resilient enough to communicate with the same level of credibility and command that they lead their company with. How much has the gap robbed you of your dream? Well, I am a professional certified gap killer. And together, you and I are going to bridge that gap. I'm going to give you the steps, the different levels, the different pillars, and we are going to come to a place where you are going to be the best and most energized version of yourself. Now, I say this in every podcast, and this one is no exception. If you right now want to fast track this and you want to work with someone that knows how to get that version of you, I want you to simply reach out to me. Podcast at samuellinton.com and I would love to be your coach. Podcast at samuelinton.com. I have different products that will help you to get there. But in the meantime, look at that gap and ask yourself this question: how much longer am I going to sit and watch this gap rob me of my dream? Until next week, thank you for tuning into the Sam Linton Show. We're going to teach you how to destroy that lack of confidence, and we're going to bring you to a new vision of who you really are.