Episode 63: 5 Lessons from a Room Full of Executives

At the top, fear doesn't disappear — it gets louder.

Back from a stretch of Vistage workshops in Alabama, Sam shares five lessons he took from rooms full of high-pressure executives — leaders managing hundreds of millions in revenue, big payrolls, and startups chasing their next raise. As always, the person who learned the most was the one at the front of the room.

In this episode:

• People are wired to want to see themselves improve — the motivation is intrinsic

• Your success is determined by how quickly you implement

• Choose your "moat" — decide what you'll be bad at on purpose

• Leaders don't need convincing they have a problem; they need a system

• The higher the climb, the louder the fear — competence raises the stakes

He closes with the one talk that scared him more than any boardroom: his first-ever commencement speech.

Take the free Competence-Communication Audit at samuellinton.com — or reach out directly at sam@samuellinton.com.

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Transcript

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Did you miss me? Did you even know I was gone? I hope you knew I was gone. This is the longest break I've taken. I've had I had one week break before, I think, and this is a two-week break, which it was not ideal, but I'm gonna explain to you why, and I'm gonna explain to you why this is beneficial for you. I have five insights that I received learning from close to 70 of the most highest-driven executives in Alabama. I, of course, because I did some workshops for uh Vistage and working with them, and I was able to do some workshops. I every time I do and facilitate workshops for any group, and I've done hundreds and hundreds over the years, anytime I get a chance to be in a room with other people, the one who learns the most in those rooms is me. And the beautiful thing about doing this for as long as I've been doing it and working with leaders and working with people who have a ton on the table is I get to learn very expensive lessons in short bursts of time. So I want to tell you I worked with some amazingly high-profile executive leaders in Alabama. And I took notes every night on things that stuck out to me about my interactions with them. Because when you're in this kind of let me let me back this up. I've been in different kinds of rooms, completely different kinds of rooms in my workshops for a long time. But when you're in a certain kind of room that has a level of, and I don't like using this word a ton, but a level of exclusivity, meaning I don't just get to go into that room. You have to be invited. There's a threshold of income, there's a threshold of responsibility. When you're in that kind of room, the conversations are vastly different than if they were in a room where you're forced to go there. Like picture high school gym or study hall versus high school AP chemistry. Both valuable, but you could see the people in those groups have different priorities, which is appropriate. That's the same way it is when you're working with people that are leading at this level. And my ideal group to work with are leaders because I get the best results changing the culture of companies when I work with leaders, because leaders have their hands most of the time on the pulse of everything that's going on in those companies. So I learned a lot this week, and I've been compiling this after preparing those. So I took two weeks off to essentially get these workshops ready, decompress, and prepare the workshop. So I'm gonna share with you the insights, the lessons that you can learn that I learned and I'm gonna be implementing. So the first one is universal, and this is regarding speaking, this is regarding everything. People want to see themselves do better. People want to see themselves do better. There is no person that I know of that likes knowing that they are doing poorly. And to put that in a positive way, at the most primitive level, we want to see ourselves doing something where there is a result. I'll give you an example. My kids, my children, in one way, shape, or form, are all starting to demonstrate various levels of competitiveness. Now, because of their ages, at this time, 10, 8, and five, I've gotten to see firsthand how that has changed over time. And what's fascinating is the kids will gravitate to the areas where they think they can win the most. So, for instance, my son, Levi, he would he would be the one that I would say is on the most competitive spectrum. He doesn't want to play if he knows there's no chance of winning. He's not into exploring something for the fun of it. He wants to see if there's something he can conquer. I I would take a venture to guess that a lot of young men are like this. Whereas my daughter is more okay with kind of seeing how things are, trying things out, might not be good at this, might not like this. Whereas my son, if he thinks he's not going to do well, he doesn't want to do it. Well, the one of the benefits of competitive sports is you immediately get to see like, did I score? Was it right? Did I do well? And you get that instant benefit. Well, in our careers, we don't get to see how well we do. We don't get to see, like, we don't know yet, like there's some things right now I'm working on at the church that we're trying to implement, but it's going to take years before I know if the fruit of this is really working. And the same is the case with our professional lives, if you're not in ministry, but any anything, you tend to want to see what you're doing, and you need some sort of success metric. So, part of the things in my workshops is I get the participants to take a look at how they present and examine it objectively. And people want to see, they enjoy seeing themselves do better. They love chasing a better version of themselves. And this motivation, it's not an external reward set by somebody else. It's something that they see in themselves. That's one of the most rewarding things about what I do. Because when you're working on your communication, you become better and you instantly become better at what you do because everything kind of lifts. It just pulls other things up. They all connect. And so people enjoy at any level, especially at the executive level, they enjoy seeing themselves do better and improving. Next, leaders, people that are in positions of high authority or high pressure, high responsibility, they don't tolerate substandard well. They don't tolerate doing things substandard. They don't tolerate winging it. Um, and I'll I'll tell you this: I've worked with groups from, you know, laborers, truck, trucking companies, car contractors, carpenters, and I've worked with high-level executives. And the leaders in all of those organizations, all of those different areas, all of those different fields, from the most heavy-duty laborer to the most refined white of the white collar worker, all of them despise doing something in a substandard way. They hate it. Now, you might have outliers, and you know, the Times leaders will intentionally say, well, we're gonna do a minimum viable product and do the as little as we can to get the most results. That's not what I mean. The leaders in those organizations despise knowing that they're doing something wrong or that it's not meeting a standard. They despise it. And I didn't realize that until I saw these groups. I mean, I didn't wasn't able to articulate it. And then it just was one of those light bulb things. So one of the ways that you're a leader is you have, and this is where I bring the Christian stuff in, uh I would say you have an unholy satisfaction. I'm sorry, an unholy dissatisfaction. Um gosh, let me let me say that again. You have a holy dissatisfaction. You have this thing from God where you know that things could get better, and God puts it in your heart to change things. So this holy dissatisfaction is what I have seen a lot of times in people that are gifted by God in leadership. And the men and women that I worked with this past week, they have those giftings that are there. They just don't like doing substandard things. And the the thing about speaking, the problem with speaking is they don't get a chance to refine that as much as they get a chance to refine their businesses. They don't get a chance to refine the way their goals are and their revenue goals and their personnel goals and their dreams about what would happen if they would buy this business and take over this system and do like they don't have that kind of time because it's so inward. So the moment that people see I'm not doing this, well, they instantly want to improve it. And this gives people a kind of a two-edged sword when it comes to speaking. Number one, if you feel like you're not at the top of your game when it comes to communication, you will most likely avoid it. You'll outsource it, you'll hire that out. Hey, I can get Deborah to come in and do that training. I could get her to come in and do that thing. I could hire a consultant to come in and do all of my SOPs and train the whole company. I could pay for that, I could hire it out, but you're leaving something on the table. What would it look like if you were the best speaker to your people? So that avoidance thing is the one side of the sword. The other side of the sword is once you recognize that you're not operating at the standard that you might be accustomed to, oh my goodness, well, you're gonna tackle that, just like any problem. Just like you would tackle a problem with a hire that is causing culture problems and removing the cancer from a workplace situation, which I heard a lot of the those conversations this week. I had the privilege of listening and being a fly on the wall and talking about terminating people because they knew that it was genuinely destroying the company's camaraderie. Well, that's what leaders do. When they see there's something broken, they proactively attempt to remove that problem. And when the fix isn't somebody else, but it's us, and if they see something they can do, they immediately want to do it. So the application, the shortness of application is frightening. Um, I've said this before, this is an aside, and I know I've gotten this from you know, there's some leaders that speak about this all the time. Cody Sanchez, Alex Harmozzi, I believe Tony Robbins even said this. These this is a consistent thing. You will be, and and I'm butchering the quote, but it's been said so many times. Your level of success is determined by how quickly you implement. That's it. Your level of success is determined by how quickly you implement. So, for example, your distance between idea and execution, the shorter that gap, the greater your chances are of success. Because what you have is you have a lot of people that are their idea gurus. They're great at ideas. I should try this. I could do that. But what if we redesigned her, you know, I saw somebody, they redesigned their entire business structure using Claude, and Claude now basically runs their internal infrastructure, which they implemented immediately. As soon as they saw what Claude could do, they put it into practice, they changed the way their business runs. They didn't sit there and go, well, I'm gonna learn a little more and I'm gonna maybe meditate on it, maybe I'm gonna think about this a little deeper. No, they immediately tried, they immediately got a results, they failed fast, they brought in help. So the quicker that you implement anything that you know is the right thing to do is the better your chances of success. And leaders don't like doing substandard things, they like to implement and move. Third, nobody can spend time on everything. Nobody can spend time on everything. You're going to have to choose what you're going to be exceptional at, and you're going to have to choose what you're going to have to fail at. Now I've I'll I'll use myself as an example, and I'm going to tell you how my dealings with these leaders brought this out. I have made a joke over the years of being sports illiterate, and I am. I am sports illiterate. It was a problem of embarrassment for years, because many people that I went to college with and people that I spoke with when I was in high school, they would be having these conversations and they might as well have been speaking in another language, honestly. And I felt bad about that because I felt like, well, at some point, I would say in my 20s, I'm going to get good at sports and understanding sports. Then my 20s were coming and going. And I said, look, when I'm in my 30s, after I get out of grad school, yeah, I'm going to become really good at it. I'm going to learn sports. I'm going to figure out what this sports ball stuff is all about. Then when I was approaching 40, I said, you know what? I'm not going to ever be good with sports. It's just not my thing. I'm not going to do it. So now I don't care. And I didn't realize it was a superpower because it is, because that is not prohibiting me from other areas of growth. Wow. And I'm not against sports at all. I have my, I like I like to read more. I'm a reader. So I like fiction. I've I'm always in between novels and I like that type of thing, which is in my equivalent the same as sports. You're like, well, no, sports is more team effort and all that stuff. And yada, yada. I get it. It's recreation. We could call whatever you want. I'm not paid to read novels. Let me just put it that way. There's no intrinsic benefit or no financial benefit of reading novels that's intrinsic only. Now, I say all that to say I look at it now as it's not a bad thing. It's a superpower. I know that I'm choosing to be bad at something. In his most recent book, speaking of reading, I told you, uh, John Acuff, he has a book called Procrastination Proof, one of the best, the best book I've read so far this year, and one of the best books maybe I've ever read. I can't emphasize how important that is enough. It's a really, really good book. But in his book, he calls this putting a moat, and I'm butchering his illustration, but putting a moat around your execution. Because there's some things you just choose not to do. And the illustration that he uses is he's never been good at video games. He's never really played video games. And people will try to get him into video games, or you should play Xbox, or you should go and try this. And he said, if I play video games, I'm gonna be that person that plays video games for 15 hours a day. That's what's gonna happen. I know me. I know that I'm not gonna. And then somebody said to him, why don't you play Xbox for just like 25 minutes a day? And he said, Do you know any human being who plays video games that plays for 25 minutes a day? If they exist, most people don't know them. The people that I know that are into video games are very into it. They're into, they, I mean, they'll spend time, they'll take time off to do it. And again, none of this is wrong. I'm not saying it's wrong, but what he said is that he put that moat out there that he just was never gonna be good with video games because he was worried about, not worried about, but he was focusing on the priority of being successful, right? He was focusing on the priority of being a New York Times best-selling author and building a multimillion dollar speaking business and speaking on some of the biggest stages across the largest corporations in the world. And that was his, he put that moat of I'm bad at video games around his success. And I'd like to say that's kind of what I did with sports. Also, I don't have the body type for being good at sports. I had somebody that they wanted, they were after a coaching program that I was running, they were gonna bring me into a game of frisbee golf. Golf, frisbee, frisbe golf. I and I had no problem running the program, but I was more anxious about the frisbee golf than anything. So don't invite me to frisbee golf because it's sports and it's my moat. So nobody can be good at everything. And there are things that I saw that these leaders were talking about that I'm not good at this. I have somebody who's really good at this. This person's good at operations, I'm good at visit vision, this person is really, really good at vision. I'm good at execution and putting it together and getting resources put to that. I'm good at fundraising, all of that. And I recognize nobody spends time on everything. Nobody. You have to choose what you're gonna invest in that's gonna get the most amount of your time. For me, the best thing that I've always done is when I'm working with people and in front of people and coaching people, that's it provides the greatest resource. That's how I built the church, the staff at the church, and having good people and working with people over the years, the leaders we have at the church. It's all because I love seeing people do that thing. I and I didn't realize that not everybody cares about that, but I do. I care about seeing that, I care about those processes. And it's the way I also run my business. So nobody can spend time on everything. And you don't need necessarily more hours. You need to be deliberate about the hours that you spend. And communication, fortunately, is one of those things. If you spend a little bit of intentional hours on it, you could pay dividends for the rest of your career. It's iced coffee action there. All right. Next thing. This is something so unbelievably helpful. And I'm gonna lean more into this now. You're gonna hear me talking like this, but I stumbled into it when I was having these discussions with these leaders, and it's given me permission to talk about it. People don't need convinced of what to do, they need a system. People don't need convinced of what to do, they need a system. The leaders that I was working with, they knew they had communication blind spots. They knew that some of them had problems with filler words, they knew they had problems with memorizing content. They knew they had problems with how to structure their talks. But they didn't need convinced of that. What they needed was a system, right? Call it a framework, call it a map, whatever you want to call it. It's a system. It's something replicable that can be utilized to instantly get other people to change. And one of the reasons why my methodology is successful with my clients, is I don't necessarily everything I do is custom with my individual clients. Sure, it's based on what they're working on. But at the heart of that, I have a system and things that I check off. Like that's why I wrote this my book, The Confident Communicator, which again, best-selling book, you can get it online. Um I wrote it because the whole book and my whole philosophy of coaching leaders on speaking is based on a train. Now, I have that now. This is I'm showing you a picture. It's a junky black and white picture, but it's suffice. It's threaded throughout the book because no matter what I'm doing and what field they're in, I'm working in that train, as what I'm looking at. It's gonna be body language, it's going to be posture, it's gonna be tone and volume, pacing, it's gonna be their level of audience focus. Everything I do, this is essentially my foundation. Now, with the executive teams I work with, I use another framework that I designed. Called the elevated communicator. And that's just a set of steps because leaders tend to move up steps and they're looking to up their game, they're looking to go next level, whatever it is. So it's a lot simpler than the train framework. It's just six different pillars that they have to climb onto to get to that highest level of communication that matches their competence. Now, I'm not trying to bore you with frameworks. I'm just saying that when people see that, when they see that system, they want the system. They know they need it. They don't need as much convinced, like, could you do better at speaking? Could you be a little bit better? They know. But when they see, ooh, if I do this, it'll get better. Yeah. If I try this, if I do, yeah, if I work on my messaging and fuel formula, which we've talked about on the podcast, if I do that, well, yeah, here's how you organize your talk into buckets. Here's how you figure out an open and a close, right? That's a system. So if you're thinking here, excuse me, if you're listening to this and you're thinking here, maybe, maybe I'm kind of broken and I'm not doing well regarding my speaking, well, you might not be broken. You might just not have a system in place that's going to give you replicable results. So anybody, including me, if we're working on a problem, we need a system for it. Now, the last thing that I learned, and this one I didn't learn per se, it's more of what I was kind of affirmed when I was speaking, is the higher the climb, the louder the fear. The higher the climb, the louder the fear. And I don't want to be overly simplistic, but I have to because I've been doing this too long. And I I hope you'll permit me with a quick closing anecdote. I gave my first ever commencement speech on Friday. And I'll admit it, this was my first one. Somehow, there are two things that I've never been asked to do. I've never been asked to give a best man speech. And I realize like right now the likelihood of me delivering a best man speech is so low, and I'm glad. And I think instinctively I only got close to people after they got married that they would even want to consider me a friend. It's easier if you have less friends too, but but that's a separate discussion. We'll talk about social norms at another time. But I I never wanted to do that because that's a difficult speech, in my opinion. No, you could phone it in. You know, you could just not care about it and goof off, but it's a difficult speech. Why? Because nobody wants, nobody cares. Nobody's listening. Like, what is what are we thinking of at the best man's? It's like being a comedian. Like half the people there are drunk, you know, and when you walk in, not at the best man's speech, but as a comedian, and you have to try to engage them with your funniness in like 15 seconds, right? Well, the best man, they have the unique opportunity of being usually the person between a couple hundred people and their rubbery chicken that they paid a minimum of $50 as a gift to the bride and groom to eat. So not only are you having this pressure to be short, but then you have people there they don't really know you. Are your inside jokes outside enough to be funny? Are they funny? Are you going to come across as rude? I was, I was at a wedding for someone, and I watched their best man do the best man speech. And I said, if friends, you have if you have friends like that, you don't need enemies, bro. I mean, his best man speech, I think he was practicing a roast. And it was insulting, it was belittling, it was childish. And I'm not critical of speeches. I'm not. I'm I really don't. I don't sit there and go, oh, this person should be using more body. Like people ask me that all the time. Was my speech any good? I'm like, I wasn't evaluating you. But for this, I wasn't evaluating until I realized that what they were saying about the groom was hurtful and self-centered and self-absorbed. And it made me angry because that's not the thing that a best man's speech should do as well. So for that reason, not for that reason, but I've always been glad that I've not had been asked to do a best man's speech because I think it's a difficult speech, is all. I think it's a difficult talk to write. And the second one is graduation and the similar reason because nobody's at the graduate, like, okay, nobody, you're not expecting to come to the graduation and to be won over by the graduation speech, the commencement speech. What do you think about a graduation? Number one, you're there and somebody invited you to be there. And so you're there because you're just there to support them. So you're not really invested. You, you know, the graduation speaker will often say the same canned things that Chat GPT tells them to say, which is, oh, you know, reach for the stars and you might get the moon. Don't give up on your dreams, success is a mindset, all of those things that they've heard, and they say it in different ways, and occasionally they're funny. And even the commencement speakers that spoke at my graduate grad uh graduations and my undergraduate graduation, I don't remember anything they said. So I wrote mine completely different. I wrote advice that nobody's gonna give you that's uh kind of unpopular. And honest to God, you could ask my wife, you could ask the church staff, you could ask anyone. I was more nervous to deliver this commencement speech for the school than I was just about any public speaking thing I've done in the last maybe 15 years. I am not exaggerating. I went over it so many times on the airplane on the way home. I workshopped it with, I was preaching a sermon to like 150 people one night for our church, maybe 100 people, 150 people. And I workshopped it live. I was like, hey, what do you guys think about these points? Because I was more comfortable with them, these people, than I was with the 50 or 60 that were going to be at the graduation. What's wrong with that? It's because it's not, it's new. And also because I have a reputation as a speaker. And what I realize is that the higher the climb, the louder the fear. And at levels where you're managing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, or you have 60 people under you that depend on you and you alone for their livelihood, or you're a startup and you're trying to raise, you know, 10 or 20 million dollars in order to see if your dream has legs and can walk. The higher the climb, the louder the fear. It gets louder as you go higher. It's the same thing as the person who gets up and they're afraid to make a toast, or the person that gets nervous when they have to stand and share what their weekend plans are at the all hands meeting. It's it's it's fear. All of us struggle with it. The higher you climb, though, the louder. Because competence doesn't cancel nerves, it just raises the stakes. And the most senior person in a meeting or in a pitch or on a Zoom call has the most to lose and often feels the most exposed. So that's why I really build their confidence up before I do any of the workshop stuff. Half of my workshop is a confidence bank exercise, which, if you're a friend of the show, you will recognize that we've done that quite a bit, but it's all the things that give you confidence so that you can get on demand confidence because you want to minimize that fear and start to utilize your past success. The commencement speech went about as well as I would think it could go. It was way better than I expected. But I was, I felt like I ran a marathon after that. The commencement speech was 15 minutes. This workshop I'm talking about was three hours. I lost sleep over only one of those two things. And it wasn't the workshop because the higher you climb, the louder the fear. I knew that I felt comfortable in a room with those executives because I'm an executive. I I work, that's what I do. I work at the church and I'm in that level of leadership. I understand the pressure. I've coached a lot of executives. I get that. Put me in front of kids and parents of kids who are graduating and the emotions involved in that and the pressure of that. No bueno. But I still did the best I could. I did all the things I could. It wasn't perfect, but it was as good as it could be on my end. So I feel good about the effort I gave it. I clocked out, done. Don't ask me to speak your commencement commencement speech. I'll purposely say controversial things, and you will never be allowed to pick your commencement speaker again. No, I actually wouldn't do that. But I did do a good job with the speech because I think it impacted people. Because I thought about them and I thought about what would I want to hear in this speech. I wouldn't want to hear reach out for your dreams. I would want something tangible that I could help myself to become a better leader. So, what the heck is all that about? That's all about the things that you teach me. I have the beautiful, unique, and God-given benefit of helping people become better. And I've learned more from you than you will ever learn from me. So I want to thank those groups that let me speak. I want to thank you, podcast listeners, for giving me the privilege of being in this role. It's a wild ride. And every class I've ever been in has made me a better leader. So I thank you if you've ever used my services, if you've ever let me speak to your team, if you let me ever coach you. You've taught me something. And I hope these five lessons resonate with you in some way. Now, if you'd like to work with me, please reach out. I'm gonna tell you to reach out directly on my email address. That is sam at samuelinton.com. If you could. But until next time, what are you learning about who you are as a communicator? Thanks for tuning in.