#162 How to Cut the Jargon and Speak Clearly with Wes Gay

// Wes Gay is a writer, entrepreneur, and marketing consultant. He is a StoryBrand Certified Copywriter and Guide, helping businesses clarify their marketing message and strengthen their position in the marketplace.

While this is Wes’ second appearance on the Voice of Influence podcast, he and I originally connected because I was looking for help with my own marketing efforts.

In this episode, Wes and I discuss what the “curse of knowledge” is and why all experts should be aware of it, why every expert needs to have empathy when it comes to their audience if they want their marketing efforts to truly resonate with them, the importance of giving yourself time and space to think, why it’s crucial that you’re empowering your audience rather than talking down to them, why you want to be as specific as possible when it comes to who the audience you’re trying to reach, the value of creating one central idea you want to communicate, his tips for determining what the central idea should be, his take on how Dr. Fauci handled the topic of facemasks in the recent pandemic, why you should have a clear villain in the stories you share with your audience, and more.

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Transcript

Hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Wes Gay.

Andrea:  Wes, it is great to have you here.

Wes Gay:  Thanks for letting me come…I think I’m coming back.  I’ve been here before.

Andrea:  You have been here before.  You were here in 2017, about almost exactly three years ago.

Wes Gay:  Well, it’s three years ago in real time.  I think it’s, like, twelve years ago in 2020 time, right?  ‘Cause that’s how time works now.

Andrea:  I think you’re right – 2020 time, oh my goodness!  So, originally, I met Wes because of needing some help with some marketing, understanding how to clarify what I was trying to say, what I was trying to communicate to my audience, and he helped me out a lot with that.  So, today, I asked Wes to come back.

Wes, I think people who are really smart, who have expertise that needs to get into the hearts and hands of the people who need it – who may not realize they need it – people who have that expertise, we get confused.  We get confusing, and we say things that are too confusing.  So, Wes, first of all, how would you put what you do, and then let’s get into it.

Wes Gay:  Sure.  So, I run a marketing agency outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and we quite simply focus primarily on helping people get the words right.  Because I’m convinced once you get the words right in marketing, sales, or customer success, or whatever it is, everything else falls into place.  Because if I know what I’m going to say and the best way to say it, then all the other stuff gets simple.  Then the website becomes a lot more obvious what you need to do, the marketing collateral, and the marketing funnels, and the sales collateral, and all that stuff.  But the hard part, the heavy lifting, we’re talking [about] today is figuring out what to say, especially for people who are experts in what they do, their expertise.  They are not usually taught how to communicate.

And the reality is they suffer the same problem that basically everybody suffers, right?  It’s why you forget about all the things going on at your kids’ school.  It’s because while your school may send home ninety-seven pieces of paper a week or ninety-seven emails a week, and if your school is distance learning, as we’re recording this in August 2020, you aren’t in faculty meetings with your kids’ teachers.  You’re not in staff meetings.  You don’t get staff-wide emails.  You don’t live or breathe school… I mean, some of you are now – in digital distance – but you don’t live and breathe education forty-plus hours a week.  And so, when you see all this random stuff from your school… and we’re living this right now, you know.  Our oldest is in kindergarten this year so we’re in the middle of, like – I remember going to school – it was a long time ago, but obviously things have changed.

And so, I’m having to remind myself.  Like, we had curriculum night last week.  I didn’t really know what that was.  I’m still not really sure what we were supposed to do or what we did.  I don’t live in that world.  I have no idea what’s going on because the reality is schools suffer the same problem that experts do, that your doctor does, and that is they forget that you are not them, right?  You and I, a lot of times, we forget.  In our own world, we’re living it every day.  We’re thinking about it all the time.  Our emails are about it. Our meetings are about it, and our client projects, the things we’re selling are all about the thing that we know really well, and we forget that everybody else is not that way.  That’s why we’re experts, and not everybody else is.

There’s a book I’ve got on the shelf somewhere called The Art of Explanation by a guy named Lee LeFever.  And he talks about it in this idea of “the curse of knowledge.”  You should know your thing at a nine or ten on a scale of one to ten.  Your audience knows it at about a two, maybe a three because they’re busy.  So, a lot of us think we’re communicating clearly when we knock it down to a seven or eight.  And then the audience goes, “I know that’s English.  I know those are complete sentences.  I’ve heard those words before, never in that way.  What does that mean?”

Andrea:  Well, do they even bother asking, “What does it mean?”

Wes Gay:  They don’t.

Andrea:  They just totally tune it out.

Wes Gay:  They tune it out, and they go to your competitor.  And then you’re like, “Why is that knucklehead getting more clients?”  Well, because they’re saying stuff that people understand, and then they wind up buying from them instead of you.

Andrea:  It’s so true.  I mean, this happens a lot, I think.  I mean, it’s frustrating, especially when you really live in your head.  I think a lot of people live in our own heads, and we’re not exactly sure like, “What did I actually even say?”  And maybe you know that everybody else isn’t you, but you’re not sure how to deal with that.  Like, how do I even take on the perspective of somebody else who isn’t in my head all the time?

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  Yeah, that’s a great question.  I mean, it really starts with empathy.  We have to spend as much time thinking about our customer and our audience as we do thinking about the thing we do.  Because the reality is we might know we’re experts, but if we don’t communicate it effectively, nobody else is going to know that we’re experts.  I mean, this is one of the frustrating things I think about internet guru culture.  Let me rant on that for a minute.  There’s a lot of people who pretend to be experts who really aren’t, but they communicate clearly and they come across that way so people buy into their stuff.  They buy their courses and their books and they’re buying into their tribe, and then you start to pull layers back, and, “Wait a second, you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.”  They just did a really good job of communicating clearly because they’ve done the hard work of simplifying and speaking to their audience, not speaking to their expertise, right?

It’s why when you go to the doctor…  I mean, I know your husband’s a physical therapist, so I think you have a leg up on most of the rest of us.  But I go to the doctor and they start saying stuff, and I’m like, “I don’t know what those words are.  That sounds like a spelling bee quiz,” you know?  You’ve got to think of it through, “What does it mean to me,” as opposed to, “What does it just mean?”  And so, I think one of the opportunities is, quite frankly, when you think about your expertise – you think about your business, think about the stuff you’re selling, you’re doing – spend time literally thinking about, “Who is my audience? Who am I speaking to hear, all right?  What’s going on in their world?”

Let’s say it’s… I’m working with a company that’s a nonprofit tech software company, for example.  A few months ago, I was on a group of calls with their marketing team and we were talking about shifting their messaging.  Obviously, in the global pandemic and everything’s going on, we need to speak differently.  So, I literally said, “Who’s your target audience?”  And they told me it’s like an executive director of a nonprofit.  I said, “What do you think their day is like right now?”  And they were like, “Oh, my gosh…”  They rattled it off what I thought, and they confirmed what I suspected.  I said, “Well, if you know that’s what their day is like and you know what they’re struggling with, why does none of your marketing collateral and the stuff you’re saying match up with what you know they’re dealing with on a daily basis?”  It’s this idea of how do we not come down but just come to where people are and say, “Hey, I know where you’re struggling with, I know your problems, and I can help you.”

I mean, your husband, it sounds like… before we started recording, you told me he’s got four clinics.  The reason I assume he’s successful is because he’s able to speak to people and quite literally fix their problems and fix their pains, but if his marketing or his all claims are, “Oh, we’re gonna help you be better,” they’re going to go, “I don’t know what you’re gonna help me do,” right?  But he’s a physical therapist, and he probably knows this, “Well, we do this, we do this, we do this,” and they go, “Great, you can solve my problem.  You’re gonna help me,” right?  But he and his team have done the work to say, “This is what we’re gonna do.”  They’re going to help you to get where you want to go, as opposed to using all the big medical terms and all the language that you and I would have to have a dictionary to spell if we were put on the spot.  But the problem is I think we don’t give ourselves enough space to think in the modern world, period, much less when it comes to thinking on, “How do we communicate?”

I, several years ago, saw a video with a guy… and I forget his name, I’d have to go and find it.  He’s one of the top defense attorneys in the country, and it was an interview talking about his process about how he prepares.  And this guy – I cannot remember his name to save my life.  He’s had some big time nationally covered trials.  And before every single trial, he said, “I don’t care if it’s gonna be nationally televised or it’s just a local thing I’m dealing with.  The day before I go to court,” he said, “I turn off all my devices, shut my computer, shut my door, my assistant filters all my calls, I don’t get any calls unless somebody that I love is dying.  Other than that, nobody talks to me.  So I literally think all day.”

He said, “I envision the courtroom.  I envision the jurors that are sitting there after we’ve already done jury selection.  I envision the judge, the physical space.  I envision my client.  I envision the other side.  I literally think about all of it, and really all the preparation we do has to be now filtered through this scene that I see in my head.”  And he said, “That helps me focus, it helps me get really clear.  It also helps me know what to leave out because I’m now thinking about what’s going to really matter in the moment.”  He’s unbelievably successful, and I think that’s a huge part of his success.

Andrea:  Wow.  Yeah, that’s a huge amount of time that you’re devoting to actually thinking.  But like you said, not just to thinking about your topic or your expertise, but how you’re going to actually speak to a context of some kind.

Wes Gay:  Mhmm.  Yeah, you know, again, I think we’re all busy.  I mean, very few people are not busy, or at least, we all claim to be busy.  And I think we’re also not good with space and the silence anymore because we don’t have to have space.  We don’t have to be silent.  I mean, I can literally anytime pick up my device, and I can watch movies from it.  I can read, I can email, and I can do anything.  I can talk to anybody in the world anytime that I want to, but the problem is, especially those of us who are trying to build platforms of some kind of expertise – that something we spend our life studying and we spend years honing our craft – we also have to get really, really good at literally sitting and thinking, “How do I communicate this in a way people care and understand?”

I think that people with some of the biggest platforms, some of the people with the biggest followings are really good at that.  Whether or not they’re as much of an expert as other people doesn’t matter.  What matters is who’s the clearest and who actually engages people the most.  And then, obviously, the expertise has to support that.  But it’s also, I think, just as hard to become an expert in communicating what you do in the way people understand.  Otherwise, they’re going to hear you and again, go, “I know that’s English.  I know these are sentences.  I don’t know what that means.  I genuinely want to know and I have no idea.”  Like, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with clients, and they’ll tell me stuff, and I’ll just look at them and go, “I have no idea what you just said.”

Andrea:  One of the problems with that is then you’re also making people feel stupid.

Wes Gay:  Yeah.

Andrea:  When people feel belittled, they’re going to put it on you that they feel like that.  So then there’s automatically these defenses that come up and this desire to prove themselves or else just to run away.

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  I mean, we never want to feel like we’re talking down to people, right?  We never do.  We want to feel like we’re reaching down to pull them up and say, “Hey, we’re gonna help you get better.”  You know, I think sometimes there’s a tendency to talk to people like they’re dumb.  Most people are smart – again, most not all – but just go onto Facebook most days and you’ll realize that most, not all people, are smart.  We’re all just busy, and we’re constantly scanning our environment.

I read a study a few years ago said the average person reads 100,000 words a day.  Alright, so think about emails, think about Facebook.  I mean, what, you up on Facebook and see the right or wrong – however you want to classify it – high school friend who’s now selling shakes, creams, oils, pills, masks, whatever it is, and you’re going to see a 20,000 word comment thread like that.  Or the wrong political post and you’re going to read the equivalent of The Great Gatsby in one Facebook thread as we’re just debating each other, not going anywhere… that’s another podcast for another day.

But you’ll notice that people, again, who have big followings, who are really successful are just really good at explaining things to people, and not making them feel dumb but empowering them to feel smarter.  I think somebody who is, like, masterful at this is Malcolm Gladwell.  I love Malcolm.  I read every book he puts out.  I’ve read several of them twice.  He’s one of the few podcasts I listen to on the day it releases, and he only does, like, ten episodes a year of revisionist history.  I’ve listened to every one of all the seasons.

He even said at times, “I just want to explain stuff to people.”  And he’s taken in all kinds of ideas and concepts, and in some ways, popularized them because he’s so good at taking a lot of stuff and filtering out the stuff that doesn’t matter and say, “Okay, this is the thing you need to know,” and then we all feel a lot smarter because of it.  So, he is empowering us.  He’s not saying, “Hey, look how smart I am.  Let me tell you all the books I’ve read about this.  Let me tell the interviews I’ve done about this.”  Instead, it’s, “I’m just going to teach you.  I’m going to take on that role of a teacher.”  And then you and I feel smarter because now we’ve read these books or we’ve listened to this podcast, and he’s enlightened us, and that’s what we all want.  We all want to feel smarter.  And a lot of it comes down to the posture because the way you make people feel dumb is when you talk about yourself, and the way you make them feel smarter is when you talk about them, right?

The content is the same.  Your expertise is there no matter what, but it’s the delivery and the posture.  If I talk about you and then what I know as it relates to you, you’re going to feel a lot more empowered and smarter.  But if I talk about me to you as it relates to you, you’re not gonna really care, and you’re going to feel dumb because you don’t live in my world and you don’t understand it.

Andrea:  Right.  Well, I mean, that kind of takes me back to an issue that I’ve seen over and over, and I’ve felt over and over, which is, it’s way easier to focus on the other person when the other person is sitting there with you, or you’re in this conversation with them one-on-one.  It’s a lot harder when you are broadcasting a message or when you’re speaking in front of a crowd to really connect with that one person, and speak to them, and their individual kind of thing.  So, what kind of thoughts do you have about that?

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  In a former life, I worked in churches and preached occasionally, but I was constantly on the stage doing something.  And one of the things, I think I just instinctively did early on was anytime I’d go on stage, I would think about, “Who is in the room today?”  And the advantage you have there is obviously you work there and then you’re on stage so you literally know who’s in the room.  But even when I’ve walked into rooms where I didn’t know anybody in the room, I’ll always ask like an event organizer in speaking and say, “Who is the audience?  Who’s gonna be here?  What sales is going on?”  I want to know the context that people are going in the room for, and then I’ll go, “Okay, now that helps me better think about their day, how they’ve gotten here, what they’re probably going through.”  And then I can maybe adapt my talk to speak to that by getting really specific.

One of the mistakes people make in general with communication – running specifically with marketing, and speaking, and communicating, and online, and stuff like that – is they don’t think specifically about who they’re talking to, right?  They say, “Well, I’m talking to men;” that’s a big audience.  Or “I’m talking to Americans;” that’s 330 million people, right?  It’s like, “I’m talking to everybody with a pulse because we are the world and, you know, my marketing approach is “everybody always” which is a good Bob Goff book, but a terrible communications approach, right? What you wanna do is if you’re in person, you want to ask, “Who’s in the room?”  If you’re communicating online, you want to think about, “Who is my audience?  Who do I know best resonates with what I do and my expertise, or who needs it the most,” right?

So, then you go a step further; “Okay, now I have an idea of who that is.  What are they dealing with specifically?”  The more specific you get, ironically, the more people you attract.  Not to bring it back, but Malcolm Gladwell, about two or three years ago, one of his podcast episodes talked about the premise of, “Why is country music so much sadder than every other genre of music?”  It’s like you’d never think of it until he asked the question and then I’m forty minutes down a rabbit hole of why country music is so sad.  And the whole thing is because county music is so specific.  It’s known as a storytelling genre.

And so the saddest country song of all time is often rated as, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones, but it’s because he died, right?  It’s a funeral song, and you get that in the third verse, and like, everybody’s crying by the end of it.  Compare that to “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones.  That’s a sad song that said wild horses couldn’t drag you away.  We’ve all been to a funeral.  We’ve never had wild horses drag us away, I don’t think, right?  We’ve all had funerals.  We’ve all seen people who are heartbroken because their lifelong love has passed whatever.  We’ve never seen anybody dragged by wild horses ever, not even in movies they don’t do that.  But it’s specific so we can relate to it and it draws us in.

So, if I’m getting online to, say, shoot a video for a few minutes, I’m going to think about, “Who am I going to talk to?  What’s the likely context of their day?  What’re they doing?  What are they stressed out about?  What are they thinking, you know, in terms of a global pandemic and an economic recession?  What are they facing right now?”  And then how can I shape what I’m saying and what I know to meet them where they are because, like you and I, they’re constantly scanning their environment for, “What’s in this for me?”  And so, if I can answer that question and then also deliver my expertise to solve a problem I know they face, they’re going to be a lot more likely to engage.  Otherwise, if you try to target everybody, you actually hit nobody.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And that’s something that… of course, I’ve heard for the last six years of paying attention to this stuff.  But it is so hard.  I would say, it’s so hard to do, to get really specific because… first of all, we think of our own offering being something that everybody needs.  And then second of all, we think of it as being, “I don’t want to cut anybody out.  I don’t want to filter anybody out,” but you kind of just answered that question.  The more specific you get, the more people you actually attract.

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  You bring up a great point.  A lot of people think, “Well, if I get specific, I’m going to exclude people.”  Well, the first people you’re going to exclude are the people who wouldn’t buy from you anyway, right?  Because the more specific you are, the wrong people who would waste your time as potential leads in your business anywhere are going to go, “Yeah, that’s actually not for me.” They’re going to move on.  But more of the right people are going to go, “Well, that’s actually what I’m dealing with.  That’s exactly what I’m going through.  I need to talk to them.”  But also, while you may be focused, it’s a primary focus, not a sole focus, right?

So, you will likely attract other people who may not be that specific audience.  And that’s okay, as long as they wind up being the right kind of fit for the problems that you solve.  But they may not be your specific audience, but you’re not going to miss out on business.  And the reality is you don’t have to hit everybody to run a really successful business.  You really don’t.  When you actually are looking at the numbers in the math, it’s like you don’t need that many people in the grand scheme of even the United States to be super successful.

Andrea:  Sure.  Well, what about people who aren’t even necessarily like… it’s not their job to maybe get business, but it’s still their job to communicate their expertise in some way that is going to push the company forward, or push the organization forward, or convince a team that they need to get on board with a message, that sort of thing?

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  Again, it goes back to think about things through the lens of the folks you’re communicating to, right?  So, the first thing I want to figure out is, “What is the one thing I’m trying to communicate?”  Too often where communication goes awry, and frankly, it’s marketing – movies go wrong here – is when you’re trying to communicate too many things.  And so, “What is the one thing that I’m trying to get across,” and make it a sentence if possible.  A lot of times in writing and in storytelling and in writing movies, etc., they’re called the controlling idea.  What’s that one central thing that everything is built around?  Like, I’d argue the entire arc of the whole twenty-three Avengers films leads to… and it’s a constant recurring theme of the tension of freedom versus security, or security versus choice, right?  The whole thing is about that, and that kind of controlling idea, but think about how many hours of movies it is that lead to that sentence.

So, the first thing I’ll say is, “What is the one thing you’re trying to communicate?”  And the second thing I would say is, “What is the problem that your audience is facing?”  So, if it’s an internal communication, let’s say, and you’re trying to rally people around something within your company – because you’re an expert within the company and you want to get other people on board – what’s the thing you want to communicate?  And then what’s the obstacle or the challenge that those folks have in relation to the thing that you’re trying to explain?  If you just do those two things and don’t do anything else, you’re going to be a lot further ahead than everybody else.  But you’re still not going to be all the way where you need to be.

The third thing you need to have then is some kind of a plan.  So, you have your idea, you address the problem, and then you want to give people some kind of action, right?  Because, again, we’re constantly scanning our environment for information and ideas.  We’re constantly getting hit with stuff left, right, and sideways.  What we want to do is know, “Okay, but what am I supposed to do with this?”  If you’re internally – as a company, sometimes it’s just like, “Hey, this is just an awareness thing.  We just want you to be aware of it.”  Sometimes it’s an action-oriented thing: “You need to do one, two, three.”

Tell me what I need to do.  What too many communicators do is they assume that I want to pull out a Rand McNally Atlas and map my own destination somewhere when what I really want is a GPS that says, “Turn right, turn left,” whatever.  Like, I use GPS all the time when we go somewhere that I’m not quite sure where it is.  And I still follow when it tells me to turn on my neighborhood and I live fifty feet from the entrance of my neighborhood.  But I still follow the turn-by-turn directions, right?  That’s what people want is they want literal turn-by-turn directions about where you’re trying to take them.

So, what’s the one thing you’re trying to communicate, what’s the problem that your target audience has in relation to that, and then what do they need to do as a result?  So, for example, back when the pandemic first hit, and when everything really started to shut down in March – and the stock market would like lost 30% of its value in a week or whatever it was – I have several financial advisor clients.  And so I called one of them, just said, “Hey, checking in.  How’re you doing?  What’s going on?”  He said, “It’s been chaos as you can imagine.”  He said, “We actually prepped several of our clients ahead of time.”  He said, “Once things started, the wheels started to come off, we started doing things we’ve never done before.”  He said, “So, for example, during the week, I put together a PowerPoint,” and on the weekends… he would record himself via Zoom.  He’s just now breaking into getting really more high-tech stuff.  He said, “I record myself walking through a PowerPoint and simply explaining what happened in the market this week so our customers would know what’s going on.”

And he said, “And I would send it, and that was it.  It was just like, ‘Hey, what’s going on, here’s what you need to know, and here’s what you may or may not need to do as a result.’”  And he said they’ve gotten tremendous feedback.  They’re gonna start doing that ongoing now regardless of what’s going on in the world.  And it’s not a sales tool.  It’s only for clients.  It’s not a marketing tool.  He is a thirty-plus year veteran of the financial advisory space.  He’s an expert in what he does in, particularly, the niche that he focuses in, and so he says, “I’m just gonna explain stuff to people,” going back to that Malcolm Gladwell idea.

And so, that’s an example of saying, “You know what, I’m going to take the one thing that I need to communicate, what happened this week that they need to know to clarify it, to cut through the headlines and the noise and the, you know, Jim Cramer with his sound effects board on CNBC and the whole thing, and say, “This is what you need to know and you need to do as a result.”  And crazy enough, it’s working.  Clients are referring this firm to their friends because they’re getting such great insight, and it’s got some obviously – being revenue generating is a great byproduct, but, at the end of the day, it’s, I’ve got to explain stuff so that I can build my expertise by saying, “Hey, again, here’s what’s going on.  Here’s what you need to know and do as a result to help cut through the noise and cut to the chaos so ultimately, you have clarity.”

Andrea:  Yeah.  It builds loyalty and makes people feel like they want to do whatever other business with you that they can.  Okay, besides just taking time, which we talked about already, is there any way to whittle down yourself, and sift through all the things that you’re thinking, and choose that one thing for the audience, for the person that you need to talk to?

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  Well, let’s see.  Let me ask you a question.  Are you saying, like, if I’m trying to figure out what my expertise is, or just like in, an offer, you know… I got to decide what to post on Instagram?

Andrea:  Yeah, deciding what to talk about in the moment or what to talk about… you already know your expertise, but what about like, “We’ve got this initiative that we need to push through.  There’s so much going on.  How do I decide?”

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  Well, I will say… this is going to frustrate some people so, I’m gonna just apologize up front.  Oftentimes, there’s not a right or wrong answer; there’s usually a better or a best answer.  So like, even if you choose “better” and it’s not the “best”, it’s still not bad, you know.  It’s still really good.

Andrea:  And “bad” is just confusing and too much?

Wes Gay:   Yeah, “bad” is confusing, and you’re trying to get too many things across.  If you’ve got a big initiative to get across, I would, again, think back, “Okay, what is this initiative?  What’s the point?  What’s the purpose, etc?”  For me, it would probably be on my mind for a few days and then, “Okay, what are we really trying to get across?”  And I literally, even now, I probably got forty notes on the Notes I have in my iPhone in a folder called “Social Media”, and it’s literally random ideas that I think occasionally of, “What am I going to post online?”  And what I do is I realized inspiration doesn’t strike by your schedule or by your task list, and as an Enneagram Three, I love task lists and I love all the things because it’s a sign of achievement.  Even sometimes I’ve written “Create list,” and then I mark it off, like, “Well, I achieved something today.”

But what I’ve decided to do is I’m just going to capture those ideas when they come, as they happen.  Sometimes, obviously, it happens in the shower, when you’re cooking dinner, you’re eating breakfast.  It’s just random.  I was washing our minivan Sunday with my four-year-old and five-year-old and something hit me.  I was like, “This would be a good thing to share.” Kind of what we’re talking about now.

And so, as soon as I got a moment, I went on my phone, captured it, and what I’m going to do is then go back and think about, “Is this the clearest version of what I’m trying to convey?  Can this be misunderstood?  Can this be confusing?  Can this be simplified?”  And you have to play with it a little bit, particularly if it’s a big thing you’re trying to push through internally, you need to whittle it down.  You may need to run it by a few people and say, “Hey, if I say this, do you know what I’m saying?”  And they go, “Nope,” well, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board.

So, think about internally now.  If I’m thinking about social media, I want to think about, “Okay, what do I do?”  Well, I help people figure out their messaging, which naturally means marketing, which automatically means, “Here’s what you should do.  Here’s what you should avoid.  Here’s what you should think about,” right?  Picking that one idea of messaging actually opens me up to a lot of things I can do.  And even lately, just honestly, where I’m looking at it is like, “What if I filter it down to only things that I’m either doing or have done, that I’m learning or have learned, or that I see or have seen.”  And notice those are all action-oriented.  So, like, “What am I in the process of seeing or doing or learning,” and then through the lens of what I do for the most part, in terms of career…

I mean, there’s occasional personal stuff out there, but for the most part, how do I do those three things?  And what that actually [does] is helps me even filter even more and kind of force me into some lanes.  So then again, once you do that, it opens you up to a tremendous amount of ideas of, “How do I communicate my expertise?”  Well, you know, one question I’ll ask people when they ask me the same thing is I’ll say, “What’s something that you hear all the time from clients or prospects that you think they get wrong?”  That’s one question.  And most people can come up with fifty things because you kind of irritate them, and they just get going.  Another question is what is something that most people misunderstand that drives you crazy about what you do?  Those two questions are going to generate fifty to a hundred ideas, in terms of like, externally facing I’m just putting content out there.

Andrea:  Okay.  That’s good.

Wes Gay:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Yeah, that’s good.  I like that.  I like the questions that cause people to feel irritated or prick their irritation.  That always really gets people going.

Wes Gay:  Especially people who are subject matter experts.  They all roll their eyes and go, “Oh, just hang on.  Let me tell you,” and then you’re just off to the races.

Andrea:  So then you take those things that you’ve written down and you turn them into some sort of content, some sort of message to put out on LinkedIn, to put out on your internal memo, whatever it might be.

Wes Gay:  Yeah, I mean, so you have your controlling idea so, “This is the thing I want to convey here.”  And then you say, “Okay, am I addressing a problem, and then do I give people some kind of like next steps or what do they need to do as a result?”  And then you write it.  And I get it, writing is scary.  People say that public speaking is… I don’t see how public speaking is ranked higher than snakes on the fears chart because snakes are pretty awful.  That’s one of the things that Indiana Jones and I have in common is our fear of snakes.

Andrea:  One of them.

Wes Gay:  Yeah, one of them.  The Fedora… I mean, the Bullwhip – you know, you never know when a good bullwhip can come in handy – our propensity for archaeological calamities…  Anyway, I would say I think the other one that’s probably just as high as public speaking is the sheer terror invoked by the blinking cursor on a blank page.  When you have to go write a LinkedIn post, when you have to go write a Word document, you have to write an email that’s got some weight to it, it scares people to death, right?  It just terrifies people.  And even though we’re in a visual society and you got the videos and the TikToks and the Reels on Instagram, and all the things – YouTube, everything else, and the ninety-eight streaming platforms that are out there – at the end of the day, we still are a world that is driven by words, particularly the written word.

And so, treat everything like a draft, frankly.  Write the draft…  Again, if it’s a big one, if it’s some kind of big, internal thing you’re pushing your team or your company, write it, wait a day, read it out loud and say, “Does that make sense?  What did I miss?”  And you’re going to be able to edit it pretty quickly.  Because reading it out loud, you actually start to realize, “Okay, what I just typed doesn’t actually sound anything like what I’m trying to convey or like anything I would actually say in a meeting or a Zoom call or whatever.”  And so, the bigger it is, the more time, I think, you need to give it.

But then the ad hoc stuff on LinkedIn or whatever, again, look at what is the big idea what you’re trying to convey.  You know, I worked on a thing yesterday, an idea hit me for something I should put…  I was like, “I should post that to Instagram.”  So, then I went over to Canva and did a little graphic thing, and then I typed a caption, but I’ve got to wait.  Because I need to come back to this – probably do it this afternoon – and say, “What’s my idea?  Is it obvious, and is it understood?  And do I give people a sense of what they need to do as a result?”  And it’ll probably take me a few minutes, all right?  Nothing crazy, but I know the more questions I ask the more I filter it, the clearer it’s going to be and the better result I’m going to get in the end, right?

So, if you’re trying to convey your expertise externally through, you know, social media, through email marketing, through your website, through whatever… even if you’re not the business owner and you’re selling it, but it’s like, you’ve got to push content out there – you’ve got to get things out there for an audience, whoever your audience is – then that’s a job responsibility you have.  And you have to think like a writer, and you have to think about, “How can I better communicate this so people understand the one thing I’m trying to get across?”

Andrea:  It’s very intentional.  I mean, most of us, we just want to think about the things that we’re really good at because we feel really smart when we think about the things that we’re really good at.  And we don’t feel so smart when we’re thinking about things that are harder to figure out, and we’re not naturally good at.

Wes Gay:  Yeah, I mean, that’s the challenge.  Again, we know a lot of people are experts in one form or the other, but they don’t feel like they’re experts in communication.  And if you’re going to be an expert in anything, you also have to be an expert in communicating and getting it across.  Because if I can’t understand what you do or can’t understand your expertise, how am I going to know you’re an expert.  Just because you string together a lot of big words…  You know, I love going to LinkedIn for this very reason because it’s like buzzword city over there.  You know what I mean?  You start clicking on “bios” and “about” for these companies – particularly tech companies, they love to sound smart – and they’ll say things like, “We sit at the intersection of innovation and excellence to deliver world-class solutions for our clients.”  And you’re like, “Do you sell software?  Is this like, boutique toilet paper?  Like, what is this?”  That tells me nothing, right?  Or you know, “trust is a commodity we exchange”; what does that mean?

Andrea:  Where do you come up with this stuff?

Wes Gay:  I’ve seen versions of this on LinkedIn so many times because people love the buzzwords.  And we think, you know… like all the posters that have the eagles and the mountains and say “excellence, and innovation, and trust, and all that, integrity”… like, some of these words are empty now.  And so, we have to just figure out how do we better communicate in what is an over-communicated-to society?

Andrea:  Yes.

Wes Gay:  I mean, we are hammered every day with stuff.  And your audience is the same way you and I are.  Like, when you’re trying to talk to people, Andrea, but you’re thinking about your own day, and all the emails you’ve got, and text messages, and stuff for your kids in school, and your husband’s stuff, everything else…  It’s like, your audience is the exact same way.  Just different versions, but it’s the same thing.  And so, we have to do the work to cut through the noise, or we will never get heard.

Andrea:  Okay, so can we go to a real life example?

Wes Gay:  Sure.

Andrea:  Regardless of what people think of masks and that sort of thing, I do think that it would be really interesting to hear your take on Dr. Fauci and how he communicated.  Just because somebody who has a history of being trusted, a trusted expert, and then all of a sudden, he’s not a trusted expert, at least to a certain demographic.  And I mean, what did he do, right?  What could he have done differently that might have helped people in general, especially people who are, you know, resisting to kind of like go with it?

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  Well, there’s a lot to unpack there.  I would say, Fauci is a unique example because he had an online mob – in some ways incited by, technically, his boss – that put a wedge in there of distrust.  I don’t understand why.  The guy’s been at the NIH since 1968, I think.  He’s been in that job, however long that is, a long time, fifty-two years.  I mean, it’s crazy, right?  Most of us didn’t even know his job existed six months ago.  We certainly couldn’t spell what he does.  He’s an epidemiologist, I think, is what his title is.  We didn’t even know that was a thing, right?  We had no idea he was on the forefront of addressing the AIDS crisis.  We had no idea.  We also learned he is terrible at throwing a baseball, but that’s another talk.

You know, I think he did a pretty good job.  I think some of the challenges with Fauci and some of the other ones was they were pushing masks, and they weren’t even wearing them.  For a while, they weren’t wearing them.  I remember early on, like in April, when they were doing those daily Coronavirus briefings, like, “You need to start wearing masks and slow the spread,” and blah, blah, blah…  It’s like why are you all shoulder-to-shoulder, not social distancing in the room, and not wearing masks, first of all?

I think they genuinely think that the masks are good.  I think the problem Fauci had was he got hit with a wave of people that’s frankly been building for three or four years, again, frankly led by his ultimate boss.  They created a wedge of distrust.  And so, those are things that are almost impossible to combat.  I don’t know any of us are going to have to ever deal with that.  I would say, though, that – not even just Fauci – I think that one of the challenges of the overall response on the federal level has been they really should have thought about it more like a marketing campaign and not only leverage the experts, but leverage some influencers, right?

Andrea:  Eventually, it happened, I think.  But, yeah.

Wes Gay:  One of the problems too, was early on, is everything became about data.  And what is it, “facts tell and stories sell,” I think is the old tagline.  I think one of the things they could have done – the entire federal level and, frankly, at the state level too – is they could have created some more specific scenarios.  They could have, I think, been a little more relatable.  When you start talking about how they filter and all these other things, like, we don’t know, right?

Again, all of our epidemiologist friends on Facebook now – who are also constitutional lawyers, apparently as well and religious liberty experts, etc. – they’re all sharing graphics, and this and that and the other, and on the other end like nobody’s actually filtering out what’s right.  But the reality is like, I think, they should have been a little more specifically on.  And I think they really needed a lot more aggressive and a lot better marketing campaign, frankly.  I think they need to treat it like a mass marketing campaign, and I think that would have caught on earlier.  I think Fauci made a couple of comments here and there that seemed off course, and I don’t remember the context of those, but ultimately, I think he was right.

But yeah, he’s in a unique place because he’s getting hit by people who are looking for him to say things that they can drive a wedge in, frankly.  I think the lesson for that for us is, again, he’s an epidemiologist.  In fact, he’s been a doctor for forever.  I think he’s got more degrees than a thermometer.  He’s not used to the national spotlight, and having to think through every single syllable that comes out of your mouth, people are looking for ways to discredit you and dislodge what you’re trying to say so their cause can be brought up front.

I think the lesson for us is we’ll never see it at that scale, probably, I imagine, but we have to be really thoughtful, intentional in what we say because there are always people looking to do that for us.  And it might be small, right?  If you’re trying to sell an idea in a company, we all have that knucklehead that’s looking for you to say things that maybe are not as clear as it could be, and then they drive a wedge in the company.  Or we’ve got people who just don’t like what we do publicly with our brand or with our business or whatever, who might be looking for ways, “Well, they said this.”  And you’re like, “Well, that’s not what I meant.”  “Well, that’s what you should have said.”

Like, I said something last week on Twitter, and somebody got in with me on it and they said, “Well, it doesn’t matter what you meant to say.”  I’m like “Yeah, it kind of does, faceless troll of the internet.”  But I think there are always people going to be looking to dislodge us.  So, we have to be really thoughtful and really intentional and think about all the ways that what we say could be interpreted so that the right interpretation is what people get across.  Because one of the problems – again, this is what blows up teams and companies internally – is when we don’t figure out how to craft a clear narrative and a clear message that communicates one single idea that can only be interpreted really the right way by the majority of reasonable people.

Then if we don’t do that, then we create confusion, and we ultimately create room for other narratives to take place, especially the bad ones.  This is what we’re seeing at a national level, but it happens in companies all the time is we see people start to create their own stories, and then they start to create their own outside of the one that’s actually correct.  That’s when a lot of chaos ensues.  So, it’s a good reminder, I think, for all of us from Fauci and others – Birx and the surgeon general, Adams – at the end of the day, it’s a matter of, “Are we communicating in a way that it will be really hard to be misinterpreted?”  And that takes a lot of skill and a lot of work, and it can be done, but it’s not easy.  So that’s what we do so other people don’t have to.

Andrea:  Another thought that I have in this is, like, getting the villain right.  And the problem and the villain right, you know, as a story brand kind of a person, using that framework… I think the villain is always confusing.  We’re having a hard time uniting against the right thing.

Wes Gay:  Yeah.  I will say – to give context next because we haven’t mentioned it yet – what I do is primarily built off this book, Building A StoryBrand.  That’s how Andrea and I first met a few years ago.  I would highly encourage everybody to read it.  It can literally change your business because it gets a storytelling framework.  It’s not new.  I mean, as you read it, you’ll go, “Oh, that sounds like the Hunger Games.  That sounds like Star Wars.”  And I’ve seen people use it with Frozen.  I think you’ll appreciate it because of your book.

But yeah, one of the things you’re talking about in that book is great stories always have a character who wants something, and then there’s a problem.  This is like, the external problem, kind of surface level issue; their internal, how they’re feeling; philosophical, kind of the fundamental issue; and then there’s the villain.  Like, so in Avengers I mentioned earlier, Thanos is the villain, right?  Spoiler alert from a year later.  When Tony Stark snaps and says, “I’m Iron Man,” and he ends up dying, and Thanos is gone, like that villain is gone.  And all of those problems that we spent eleven years watching built up literally are done in the snap.

And so, when we think about communicating, and in this case, we’re thinking about a mask, it’s really hard to identify kind of a core problem, especially in our highly politicized environment because we can make the mistake of thinking the villain is a person.  And we villainize people, and that gets really messy.  And that’s why politics are so frustrating, and we saw it last week at the DNC.  As we record this, it’s the middle of the Republican National Convention, and they’re just firing shots back and forth at each other.  And it’s like, “Wait a second, the real issues are the economic injustices that happen in this country every single day that, as a result, ripple out and cause enormous societal issues.”

Or it’s the unrest.  Well, why do we have such unrest in cities still?  Because of the issues that require unrest to be brought to light.  And so it’s like those are the challenges we should be facing, not attacking people.  And so, when you think about a mask thing, for example, I have… I don’t have any down here in my office.  I have four or five.  I got a new one in the mail yesterday because it’s navy seersucker, and I live in the South, and seersucker is like one of our official colors of the South.

But like, you know, my five-year-old asked yesterday if he can have more because he has to wear them in the school, and their mascot is the Wolves and some people have a mask with a wolf on it.  As a five-year-old, there’s nothing cooler to have half of your face look like a wolf.  So, he’s all in, you know, because it’s a part of his costume, because he still hasn’t figured out that it’s isn’t a costume and a uniform.  Anyways, he asked why he can’t wear Spider-man costume in school.  He said, “We have to wear costumes.”  I’m like “No, it’s a uniform.”  “They’re not the same?  “No, you can’t dress a Spider-man to school.”

But anyways, I think that the villain for masks is we have let everything else but this virus be the problem.  It’s “x person’s” response is why we’re this way or that way, or this mandate or this thing.  And I think like, “No, this virus is bad.  We know it’s bad.  We have a pretty good idea of how it spreads.  We have a pretty good idea of how it affects, so if that’s the problem, we need to focus all of our attention there.”  But the challenge we have now because of social media and everybody thinks they have a platform, everybody technically has a microphone, and everybody thinks they all have to speak into the microphone on every single issue, every single day at all times and that’s just not true.  That contributes to the noise.  That creates these online mobs.  That generates these narratives that distract, and as a result, it’s harder to get along.

I think, you know, one of the ways that they could have avoided it is to have bipartisan support, crazy thought, of, “This virus is bad.  We want to knock it out so that it doesn’t decimate our economy,” which it has, “or really impact communities forever,” which it has.  Instead it was, “Well, this Nancy Pelosi said this,” or “Trump said that,” or “Fauci said…”  it just became, like, finger-pointing, like on the elementary school playground.  And it’s like, “We want to villainize the person as opposed to the problem.”  And the problem is often not a person, it’s something else.  It’s some other underlying issue.  If we can nail that and focus all of our attention there, then we can fix all the other problems, but we as species are not good at that.

Andrea:  No, we’d rather play offense and defense.  But if we can get away from that, if we can get away from calling the person the problem and finding the actual real problem, then people’s defenses won’t be up so much.  It’s a huge piece of it.

Wes, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today.  I’m going to ask you how people can get in touch with you, but then I want to ask you one more question and that question is, what advice do you have for somebody who wants to be a “voice of influence”?  So, first, where can people find you?

Wes Gay:  Sure.  You find me on the internet on twitter.com/wesgay, instagram.com/wesgay, linkedin.com/in/wesgay.  You can find me on my website at wesgay.com.  My agency is [hirewayfinder.com].  If you have seen Moana, they reference wayfinders in Moana.  That boat is a little bit of a nod to Polynesian boats because wayfinders were Polynesian navigators.  That’s where you can find me online.

And then what I would say to people who want to have a “voice of influence”, define the thing that you’re really good at, which requires you defining what you’re not good at and what you shouldn’t say, and that’s harder.  But the reality is, if you can identify the things that you’re best suited to talk about, then you have a much better idea of the kinds of things you’ll have influence over.  If you just say, “I just want to have an opinion about everything all the time,” like some people you and I probably know who jump on every trend or every topic and you’re like, “I have no idea what they’re talking about,” it’s going to be hard to be a person of influence.

But if you are a person of influence, think about the thing that you know better than anybody else that’s easier for you than anybody else.  And then just start talking about it and explaining it and making what you do seem really approachable, and simplify it, and just rinse and repeat every day.  And also, make sure you’re doing that for an audience.  Define who you’re talking to.  The more you do that, the more you define what you’re best supposed to be speaking on, who you’re best supposed to be talking to, the clearer your voice is going to get and the stronger your influence is going to be.

Andrea:  Thank you so much, Wes.  I appreciate you being here.

Wes Andrea:   Thanks, Andrea.