He runs a billion-dollar hedge fund, and he's terrified of public speaking.
He knows his material better than anyone in the room, probably better than anyone in ten rooms. He's got twenty years of scar tissue on the trades that made him and the trades that almost ended him, and when he talks about the macro picture in a private meeting, he's the kind of person people lean forward to hear. But put him on a stage in front of two hundred people, and he freezes; he starts editing his sentences mid-word. He loses the thread of his own argument.
When I ask him why, he always tells me the same thing. He's afraid he's going to come across as not knowing his thing.
Those are the two words I never want to hear from an executive I'm working with. Come across. The moment you say them, the game is already lost.
If you step onto a stage of any kind, and by stage I mean any situation where you are speaking to more than one person at a time, or to one person through a camera, or through a microphone, or frankly through a cold email, and your goal is to come across as something, you have already stopped being in the room with your audience. You are in a room with yourself, watching yourself from the back of the hall, running a constant internal process that asks how did that sound, how did that land, did they buy it, did I just look stupid, is my posture right, is my voice steady, do they think I'm nervous. Every cycle of that process is a cycle you are not spending on the people in front of you. And audiences, this is the part executives never want to believe, audiences can feel the loop. They can't name it, but they can feel it. It shows up in the eyes, in the micro-pauses, in the way your sentences start to round at the edges. The more you try to manage what they think of you, the more certain they become that something is off.
I ran a workshop yesterday for a community of entrepreneurs and professionals, people who coach other people for a living, and I opened by asking them to name speakers they found authoritative. The answers came back fast and consistent: informal, calm, no fluff, using the right language for the room, making eye contact, not hiding behind jargon, full of passion, living their topic, genuinely curious. Decades of combined coaching experience in that room, and none of the answers had anything to do with what the speaker was actually saying. Every marker of authority they named was a marker of how the speaker was being in the room. The feeling the speaker produced in the audience was the whole ballgame.
Think about that for a second. Professional communicators, every last one of them, went to feelings.
Because that's what authority actually is.
Authority is a feeling you evoke in another human being's body before they have the time to evaluate a single thing you are saying. You could be the most credentialed person on the planet, and if the body of the listener registers this person is trying to impress me, your authority is gone. It doesn't matter what happens next. The feeling has already landed, and you cannot un-land it.
Someone on the call pushed back on me at this point, which I appreciated, because it's the pushback I get from every B2B founder I've ever worked with. Her version was, look, Sam, that's all very nice, but my buyers want to see that I know my stuff. They want track record. They want data. They're not looking to be moved, they're looking to be sure. Sure. Totally fair. And the feeling they are looking for from you is still a feeling. It has a name. The name of the feeling is certitude, and certitude is no less a feeling than awe or laughter or grief. It lives in the body. It arrives before the rational brain has had a chance to audit the claim. Some people feel safe on a mountain bike at two hundred miles an hour. Some people feel safe forty thousand feet up in a metal tube. Some people feel safe only with both feet on the ground. Safety is not an objective quality of the situation. Safety is what your nervous system tells you about the situation. And if you think your B2B buyer is exempt from this because he is wearing a suit and reading a spec sheet, you have never watched a procurement decision up close.
Which means, whether you think you are selling feelings or selling data, you are selling feelings. The feeling is the product. The words are the delivery mechanism. And the moment you start trying to come across as the kind of person who delivers that feeling, the delivery mechanism starts to shake in your hand.
This is the paradox that stops every executive I work with in their tracks. The way to come across as an expert is to stop trying to come across as an expert. Not in a cute, Zen-koan way. In a direct, mechanical way. The part of your brain that is asking how am I doing is the exact same part of your brain that needs to be completely offline for you to be in the room with the person in front of you. You can only do one of those things at a time.
That's the failure mode for every public speaker I've ever worked with. It is not lack of preparation. It is not lack of material. It is the moment you step onto the stage and the loop starts, how am I doing, how am I doing, how am I doing, and the voices you have been running from your entire life pour into the gap. The more successful you are, the louder the voices, because you now have more to lose. This is why the billion-dollar-fund guy is more afraid than the founder running her first company. The fund guy has spent twenty years building a reputation he now has to protect. The first-time founder has nothing yet, so there is less of her for the loop to eat.
I'm going to tell you the only thing I know that actually breaks the loop, and it is going to sound too simple to work.
Stop trying to be impressive. Start trying to help the person in front of you think.
That's the whole move. And it is not a trick to get better at looking impressive. It is a reorientation of the purpose of the speaking itself. You are not on the podcast to impress the host. You are on the podcast to help the listener, who is half-distracted in her car, actually think a new thought today. You are not on the stage to protect your reputation. You are on the stage because someone in the audience is stuck on a problem, and you know something that might unstick them. The talk isn't about you. It was never about you. It cannot be about you, or the loop starts and the voices come in and you choke.
When you orient that way, the behaviors executives spend thousands of dollars trying to learn, the calmness, the pacing, the eye contact, the absence of filler words, all show up for free. They show up because the self-conscious loop has been replaced with something else. The question did what I just said help the person in front of me think is a question you can actually answer, because you can see it on their face. The other question, did I come across well, has no answer and never will. That is why it loops. That is why it eats people alive.
At the end of the workshop yesterday, one of the participants brought up a show he had been watching about the brain. They were talking about free-throw shooters in basketball. A good free-throw specialist hits nineteen out of twenty from the line. Until you offer him a million dollars for the next shot. Then he misses it. The difference is that the prefrontal cortex has just walked into the room, and it is asking the one question that will ruin everything. How am I about to do?
Every executive I work with is that free-throw shooter, with a million dollars on every shot.
The work is not to get better at the million-dollar question. The work is to notice that the question itself is the whole problem, and to put it down.
Come across is the phrase that keeps putting it back in your hand.
Stop saying it.
Stop thinking it.
The person in front of you has a question.
Help them think.