Episode 59: Mastery — The Performance Loop | Elevated Communicator Series, Part 8

You've done the training. You know the frameworks. But why do most people slip back into old habits? In the series finale of the Elevated Communicator Series, Sam introduces the sixth and final pillar: Mastery.

Sam shares the story of a former coaching client who had all the right tools — and still relapsed. Then he breaks down the four levels of competence and introduces The Performance Loop: Prepare, Perform, Review, Refine — a repeatable system for sustaining growth as a communicator.

The key: don't try to fix everything at once. Pick ONE improvement — the biggest bang for your buck — and let the rest follow.

Key Takeaways:

• Most people relapse after training — a system prevents this
• The Performance Loop (Prepare, Perform, Review, Refine) is your sustainability engine
• Pick ONE improvement at a time — overwhelm leads to inaction

Take the free Competence-Communication Audit ⇒ samuellinton.com

Join the Elevated Communicator Cohort ⇒ samuellinton.com/cohort

Take the confidence audit here ==> samuellinton.com/audit

Transcript

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Alrighty, we've got the new digs. Well, they're not really the new digs. I have removed, and notice I said removed because I moved my podcast studio into the basement a year ago. And now I removed it back into the attic where my office is, my bedroom office, because I felt isolated. I don't know what else you want me to say. Well, I do know. I think you want me to say, well, why would you just not leave it in the studio that you have down there? Because I have three children. And if you know what three children's feet sound like above you when you're trying to do something beneath them, that's all you need to know about why I moved my podcast studio. Um, but I want to tell you a story, a heartbreaking story, before I start. The story is of a lot of people who have gone through my coaching, gone through programs, and they get tripped up because of what we're gonna talk about today. Um, because in all sincerity, all of the things that we've talked about are not rocket surgery. Like, this is not, you should not be surprised about body language. You should not be surprised about magnetism being in the room. You shouldn't be surprised about any of those things. However, you can know all of that, and you could end up like this person. I had dealt with them um through a workshop that I had done. This is before I started my own company. And I ran into them and I asked them, yeah, how how are things going? And they were like, Oh, good, good. And I said, You still killing it with your presentations, you still focusing on all of the mechanics and intentionality and all of that. And they got really awkward. Kind of, I ran into my ex-girlfriend awkward, that awkward. And I'm not saying that it was just because I asked them that question, but I suspect that they had this feeling when they saw me. It's like it's weird because people's reactions when they see me are usually one of two. I I the church that I'm the pastor of is pretty large. So I run into a lot of people around the city. And so a lot of times what'll happen is I will run into people and they quit going to the church for a while. And when they see me, they instinctively want to tell me all the reasons why they don't go to church, and they want me to be excited or not angry or some sort of way. And the only comparison I've ever been able to make is it's like running into your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend or boyfriend with somebody, and you're like, Oh, you know, I I used to love you and I know I wasn't ready for a relationship, but now I'm with this guy, and I am not, you know, whatever it is. It's just awkward. And so I didn't think that my corporate training would share that kind of awkwardness, but it did. And this young lady, um, when I ran into her, she just kind of nodded and said, Well, I, you know, I I I do a lot of meetings and I run a lot of presentations, and she basically was letting me know that she had relapsed, for lack of a better word. She had gone backwards in her presentation journey, and it left her feeling awkward. And I want to bring this to you. If we know all the right things to do, and if we practice those things on a regular basis, then we'll keep doing them. However, if we know all the right things to do and we practice them for a short amount of time and then we stop, what inevitably happens is we will end up right back where we started because it's where we were most comfortable. You before you ever started doing the stuff that you're doing to become an elevated communicator, you were communicating constantly. And now you know the right things, and you have gone into the land that I call conscious competence. And you know, there's levels of this. And one of my uh former Dale Carnegie um coaches told me this. There's the four different levels, and I'm I'm gonna you'll see how this all ties in. You might think I'm meandering because I told you the church story, but I'm not. I'm I'll I'll explain to you. When you first start trying to do something new, you are unconsciously incompetent. Meaning you don't know if it's working or if it's not working. You might think it's not working, but you have no idea why. Then you get training by somebody like me. Maybe you take a program somewhere, maybe you go to Toastmasters, whatever you do, whatever your thing is. And you come to find that you become consciously incompetent. Now you don't know what you know you don't know. You know what you don't know. You're like, ooh, I should have been better about my pacing. Ooh, I should have used body language. Oh, I shouldn't have paced back and forth without being intentional. You you now know. And that awareness is painful, but it's the necessary part, which leads to the next one. That is conscious competence. That's where you begin to do things that are right, and you're thinking about them because you were told to do them by maybe somebody like me who's standing in front of you saying, say it like this, don't make your message like this, don't do that. And I come in and I'm not afraid to say those things. But we are now in the land of conscious competence because you're aware of all of those things. Now, on the final level, which is a level where most people don't get, it's where you're unconsciously competent. That's where you've been doing a certain amount of things for so long that it's second nature to you. For instance, for those of you that drive a vehicle, driving. I'm pretty certain that when you get in your car, you don't sit there and go, okay, do I have to put the key in? Or if you have a button, do I have to press the button? Do I have to put it in drive? What do I have to do? And you're researching the night before: should I be in drive when I'm on the highway or should I be in reverse? Should I be in park when I want to uh stop at a stop sign or should I hit just hit the brakes, right? Like you're not thinking of any of that. Like you, in fact, if I started to coach you while you were driving about the way you're driving, it'll probably mess you up because you have an unconscious competence about driving. I mean, I hope so. And or where you have a lot of moving violations, which is also possible. And I love you if you do, but stay off of my streets. Um, but your conscious or your unconscious competence is what gets you from point A to point B. Now, the reason why I gave you all of those levels is most people, when they get training, they don't get to that fourth level. What they do instead is they know the things and then they quit doing them and then they slip backwards into, ooh, I should I went too fast, oh, I should have made eye contact, oh, I don't know why. And you're become consciously aware that you are doing the wrong things. But it's easy because you're comfortable again. You're like, oh, I don't have this dude with this amazingly charming personality, of course, who is telling me that I should or shouldn't be speaking a certain way. Um, and he's not in my face as much. So I'm not gonna do the things that I'm, you know, trained to do. So I have a solution for that. And it's the final phase of the elevated framework and the the phase that I right now find myself in because I, like you, if I don't do these things and practice what I preach, pun moderately intended, if I don't do them, I can slip back into the habits that make me most comfortable as a presenter. All right. So the final level of the elevated communicator is a level that I call mastery. Mastery. By way of recap, we started off with mindset about owning your confidence. Then we got into the message about being specific about a message that actually connects to the people and not just to what you want to say. If you remember, we graduated one more step up to movement where our bodies mattered. And what we did matter, that's where we got the command triangle, posture, pacing, right? Uh, pauses, the fact that those things factor how people perceive us. Next up, we had momentum. This is where we use things like tone and volume, we change it up, we speed it up if we are trying to get people to just get through our story and we slow down to get them to lean in. We talked about all of that. Then we move into magnetism. That's when we are so audience focused that we are trying to win them over. We talked about what happens if maybe things aren't going well in the room, and we talked about how we got thrown off kilter and how we redirect and we get people back on our side. We talked about all that. So now we're into point six, pillar six, which is mastery. And if you've gotten here, like New York City, you can make it anywhere. Mastery is the difference between experimentation and repetition. It's the difference between experimentation and repetition. Don't know why I emphasized experimentation as if it was going to rhyme with repetition. Experimentation, experimentation. Now I'm gonna say it weird all the time. But experimentation is where we're just trying something and we're we're not sure. We're spaghettiing at the wall, we're not sure if it works. Hope it works, might work, but repetition is when you're doing it and you have some things in mind. So this is the framework that I use for mastery. And I'm gonna kind of just give you the words. It's better on a chart, but you'll get the words. Prepare, perform, review, refine. Prepare, perform, review, refine. Those are the four parts. Those are the four components of mastery. And these are the components that I go through every time I give a presentation. I just gave one yesterday. I spoke to a group of realtors, um, coached some of them. I spoke to a CEO at the earlier part of the week. I am going to be speaking. Uh I spoke last night at the church, uh, doing an event for the church. So I always have these opportunities to stretch my presentational legs, if you will. But it comes down to prepare, perform, review, refine. Here we go. So this is the loop, the loop that we have to go through. This is the performance loop. So we'll start with prepare. Prepare is when we go back to those fundamentals. So, first of all, we're going to examine again our confidence audit and ask ourselves how confident are we about speaking? How good do we feel about these areas? If we aren't confident, what do we do? We have to open up the confidence bank and make some withdrawals. We have to find out how we can become more confident, how we belong in that room. I just took a group of realtors through this exercise yesterday, and you accumulate confidence on demand based on your previous wins. Now, on the next part of the prepare, you're going to plan physically what that looks like. This is where you're going to think about the message itself using the audience takeaways that we talked about and the three practical things and the the message framework that we talked about, the audience focus times three memorable things equals a powerful message. We talked about that. Go back. If you missed that one, that's the audience framework. But you want to make sure all that's firing. And then you plan out, okay, what's this going to look like? So this is where you don't take for granted the planning, but you plan on the right things. This is where a lot of folks will spend copious, unnecessary amounts of time on the message itself, and absolutely no time on how it's going to be delivered or the context or the audience. We're just worried about the words. And again, like my writing mentor says about the words on the page, we have to remember that there are people on the other side of those words that are coming out of your face. So you want to make sure that you're planning in a way that complements that connection. So you want to prepare and you want to make sure you have the content. You make sure you run your confidence audit and you're golden. All right. Then deliver it. Deliver it with intentionality. Give yourself some time. I already told you that you can become a way better speaker, devoting less time, but just more time to the things that matter. But you want to be intentional about what you're doing. Just like with your body language, you don't want to be just reading the words. Heaven forbid, if you read, if you read, if you're on a Zoom call and you're reading something on a screen, like right now, I have I have some notes. I have like two or three words each point. But if I start reading to you, my computer's gonna shut down. It's programmed to shut down when I'm reading. It's and you want your computer to be that way too. You don't want to read to your audience. They're not there for that. They're there for you. They're there to connect with you. And so when you're delivering, you're delivering with intentionality. You're delivering with an emotional connection. You're delivering with a story. You're using a framework. You're connecting to them in a way that matters most. And so it's really important that you deliver with intention and don't just throw it away as I just got to get through this. Remember, you want to go from I'm gonna get through this to this made an impact on my team. Especially if you're an executive. You want your communications to make an impact on your team. Next, almost nobody does this. Almost nobody does this. Review. Review. Military has a term. The after action review. It's after any type of activity that they engage in. They do a debrief. How did it go? What went right? What went wrong? What can we do differently next time? And then they rebuild their plan based on the AAR. Same as what you should do to the degree that you can. So I'll tell you that I've been doing this for at least about 14 years. Every single no, I'm not gonna say every single week, because that's probably a lie. But I will say that the majority of every week that I speak at the church, every single message that I've ever preached is on the internet for the last 15 years. So you can find them all on there, and I'm it's easy to search. Every weekend, just about, after I've settled down, I will be doing something else, and maybe cleaning or doing the dishes or something or walking. I'll throw my sermon on and I will give myself a review. I will listen to my intonation. I will listen to my pacing. I'll go, ooh, you were really rushed here. Ooh, you weren't quite quite clear on that point, or uh that didn't really have a lot of application. That was a little indulgent, right? And so I will review how it went and I will think about my next presentation. Ooh, you were kind of swaying a little bit there. Why were you doing that thing with your hands? I'll look at myself and I'll do this. Now, I don't necessarily have to watch all of it. I might just watch five or 10 minutes of it. And that's a win for me. That's a review. Just want to see how it went. Just pick, I go right into the middle of the message and see well, how did I land with this? Or I'll go to maybe the closing, how did that close? And I give myself permission to be objective and look and see what I need to change. Um, I just spent a lot of time with a group of people in Nashville called the Brand Builder Group. And there is a speaker who's phenomenal. His name is Rory Vaden, and he talks about the different ways that you review yourself on video. I'm gonna quote him and I'm gonna butcher it. But essentially he says, number one, you should watch your video with no volume on. So you should watch and just look at what your body language is conveying. Second, you should watch it without watching it, meaning just do the audio. So listen to how you sound. Um, the third one, I believe he said you should watch it in fast speed. This will get you to be really aware if you're doing weird things with your body language. It'll come up very, very rapidly. Like, ooh, why am I raising my hand so much? Or why am I shaking my head so much? And then the last one, I think I I could be wrong, but I think it was just you watch it as it is, like just watch it as it is and get like a good feel for how it landed. Um, so you want to do it differently because each one is going to represent different things. And watching them this way will cause you to become critical, but don't be too critical. Remember, you already are killing it at your job. Go back to the confidence bank. You're doing if you weren't doing well, you won't be speaking anywhere. Like on my worst day, like you know, uh the worst talk I gave, it wasn't the worst talk, but I was okay. I was I felt okay. I never feel great, like, oh, this was awesome. But the I gave a talk at our church's one group, and it was okay. I mean, it wasn't a whole not everything you do is a Hall of Famer, but I'll tell myself, look, you're there because you're giving these people value, or else they won't want you to speak. Like, why would they want me to speak? So I have to be bringing value. So the value you bring isn't just in how perfectly you land the delivery, the value is in you caring about the people, caring about your team, caring about your audience. So when you're reviewing, give yourself the grace that you would as if you were reviewing a colleague or me. Give yourself grace. So review. And then lastly, refine. Now, I've seen people take this to levels of super unhealthy planning where they will look at their stuff and they will say, okay, I just got to rebuild all this. And I'm I'm sucky with the message, I'm terrible on my timing, my pacing is off, and they become their worst critic. They're awful, it's just a nightmare, and they want completely a redo. They're like, this is just bad, all of it's bad, take me home, I'm done. I want to caution you never to do that. Because number one, it is a when you see yourself on video, and when you see a million things to correct, you are either going to never speak again. You're just like, I'm never doing this. I'm just gonna delegate this out. I'm gonna bring somebody else on the team who is obviously way more competent than I am at speaking. Or the opposite side, you are going to do nothing because it's too overwhelming. You're gonna do nothing. If you're like, okay, I gotta work on my open. Okay, I gotta work on my pacing. Okay, I gotta work on my message structure. Okay, I gotta work on, and then by the end, you have a 25-page bullet outline of all the reasons why that talk was terrible. You're not gonna do any of that. You're not gonna do any. I'm not being, I'm not saying you're not a hard worker. Obviously, you are. You're in the role that you are because of how hard you've worked, but you're not going to do any of those things at all. None. Because it's overwhelming. So you're like, Sam, well, what's the point of doing any of it then? Like, what why why are we reviewing? Because you're gonna pick one improvement. You're gonna pick one thing. You're gonna take a note card and take the biggest bang for your buck. If I did this on my next presentation or on my next meeting, or on my next Teams meeting, what's this going to next? Me and you want to pick the highest net item, the biggest one. So if it is your speed and you have to turn that dial down, then slow down. Work on your speed. That's usually what most people do, is you know, they're talking too fast. So that might be the only thing you need to change. And then what's going to happen because you've watched those other things are going to start to level out as well. They're going to start to become a little bit clearer because you have shown yourself a little bit of an improvement, and your muscles will take over and you'll start to improve in other areas. Then you're going to repeat the process. You know, you plan, you do it, you review, and you refine. You plan, you execute, you review, you refine. What was the second word? I just went out of my head. Perform. Plan, perform, review, refine. Plan, perform, review, refine. So you're going to have more opposite. This isn't going to be the only opportunity you have to speak. Like this, I'm speaking in a couple days. I'm speaking, I'm doing a huge webinar on this coming week. I'm doing a big sermon the following weekend. I'm going to be speaking next week in South Carolina. So I have all those things going on. And there's plenty of time that I'll say, okay, look, this wasn't my best, but I'm going to review and I'm going to refine and I'm going to do it again. And I'm just going to do it again and I'm just going to do it again because I'm in, I'm into mastery. I want to master this. I'm never going to stop learning how to be a better communicator. It's never going to happen. And the moment you think that you've arrived, that's when you start to dwindle when it comes to your competence. And it's my job to say, I know I haven't arrived. I know there's levels that I haven't gotten. I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to keep presenting and I'm going to keep trying to bring value to any audience that's willing to hear this voice, see this face, and hope that there's some sort of value I can bring because I know that I can. I know that I can. I care about the people that I'm communicating to. And so do you. That's why you're listening to this. Could be listening to something else. Listen to Joe Rogan, who is my number one competitor, by the way. Just kidding, my ratings aren't like Joe Rogan's, but I did take a screenshot of our podcast next to each other and say, look, who's in this? Look who's around here. Look who's gaining on you, right? That's not really even close. But my point is, you could be doing other things with your time, but you have chosen to spend time trying to be a better version of a communicator. You have chosen to spend time on yourself. You have chosen to spend time putting the reps in because you care about doing better. And I'm gonna take you one level higher than that. You're doing it because you care about the people that you're speaking to. That is without question. If you do that, if you care about them, if you care about them more, then you worry about how you feel. If you care about them more, then you worry about you doing something that's not comfortable for you, that feels a little awkward. If you care about them more than that, you're going to win. You're gonna become the best version of a communicator that you ever thought possible. And you maybe one day will be sitting alongside somebody else who's new to presenting, and you're gonna tell them these things because they've transformed you, and now you're into unconscious competence where you're caring so much about connecting to people that it happens naturally. And that is my hope and my prayer for you as you listen. So, a couple things. I have two rather big announcements. Number one, I have a book that's going to be dropping in a week. Yeah, it's gonna be a week, and you're gonna hear about that next week. So I really, really would love it if you listen to my podcast. I'm gonna put the link in next week. Um, but it's gonna be a book that I wrote on communication. Uh, I'm doing kind of a launch-ish. So you'll hear more about that next week, but uh please consider uh being a part of that. Second thing, I am gonna be opening up signups for my first ever, not my first ever digital presentation, but uh the first of its kind, an elevated communicator cohort. It is a digital program that I'm gonna take you through for six weeks, about 90 minutes a session. It's going to be coaching on your presentations. It's gonna be coaching on the things that we talk about, body language. I'm going to uh evaluate you. You're gonna be able to speak in front of a group, and it's going to be a smaller group. In fact, I'm limiting it to eight people because uh this is the pilot group, this is the canary group. I've done a ton of these with other organizations, and I am really excited about this. So I'm gonna be opening up signups for that. There's a waiting list right now. Just go to samuellinton.com slash cohort, samuellinton.com slash cohort to sign up for the cohort and be on the waiting list. And I would love to have you be a part of the inaugural cohort. Um, also, I never ask this, but I'm gonna ask today. I'm asking you a lot of things. If you've been following me for a long time and you've been listening, please leave a review and subscribe to this podcast. I know that thousands of people have listened. I pass surpassed a couple thousand downloads already, which is crazy. Thousands of downloads of this. So I know that there are people out there on the other side of this microphone, and I'd love to know who you are by you leaving a review or you even sending me an email at podcast at samuelinton.com and say, hey, I've been listening and I love your stuff, and you're really funny, and you give me the warm and fuzzies in my tummy. No, don't write that because that would be weird. But do tell me that you are enjoying things and tell me what you like most. And if you'd like coaching, you could also reach me at podcast at samuelinton.com. And so all that's for you. I have a lot of cool, exciting things coming up for 2026. It's gonna be an awesome year, and you're gonna speak like never before because you are on the right track to becoming an elevated communicator. So, with that said, see you next week. Thanks for tuning in.