Why Trying to “Sound Smart” is Losing You the Room with Strategic Story Producer Rob Willis

Simon Sinek (0:00)

The way I define charismas is believing in the thing that you're talking about, you know? It's not about jumping off the walls in energy.

There's some very quiet speakers who have unbelievable charisma, and the charisma is, you can tell they really believe in the things they're telling you.

Rob Willis (0:13)

I heard a great definition of charisma. It's charisma is empathy and authority, someone who cares about you and someone who can look after you, because you wouldn't want someone who's just very, very capable but doesn't care about you.

Equally someone who cares about you but can't do anything.

Simon Sinek (0:34)

That's true. We all want to be credible when we speak. We want people to think we're smart, that we know what we're talking about. So what do we do?

We do more. We provide more data, more slides, more proof that we're the expert in whatever we're talking about. But it doesn't work. Because then we see the speaker who comes right after us with few, if any slides, and they can't remember the exact dates of things, and they get things wrong, and yet they hold the room and everyone talks about their talk after the meeting. That's why I invited Rob Willis on the podcast. Rob calls himself a strategic story producer, and I first discovered him on Instagram, where he breaks down how great speakers actually speak, and he actually did one on me.

But it's how Rob learned what it takes to be a great speaker that I find fascinating. He was a tour guide in Berlin, and not a very good one, it turns out, at least not at first. He started doing what most of us would do. He loaded up on dates and facts, and the more impressive his knowledge, the less money he made. And so he studied the guides who made the most money. Those guides actually gave less information, but the information they gave, they communicated those points through a few brilliantly told human stories.

Whether we're pitching an idea or leading a meeting, our job isn't to prove how much we know, it's to give our audience something they can relate to, something they'll remember. And Rob is so good at explaining how we can do that, unsurprisingly. If you like this episode, please do remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.

This episode is proudly brought to you by SAP. Change used to take years, then months. Now it seems to happen in weeks. And in a world moving that fast, the winners are the companies that have figured out how to adapt at the speed of change. That's why I wanted to talk to David Robinson. As the North American President of Customer Success at SAP, he spent more than two decades helping companies keep up with the pace of change. And he has a surprisingly simple idea about what it actually takes. You can learn more in the middle of this episode. To learn more about SAP, the AI Cloud ERP for businesses of all size, head to sap.com/grow.

Rob Willis, thanks for coming on A Bit of Optimism.

Rob Willis (3:15)

Thank you for having me.

Simon Sinek (3:16)

So I learned about you when my friends all started sending me your video about me telling people my rhetorical device for how I start my talks. And we thought, wouldn't it be fun if we just invited you on the show to talk about how to talk, give people advice on how best to present.

Rob Willis (3:34)

Yeah, I noticed you liked it. And for me, it was a very meta moment. My video about Simon Sinek, liked by Simon Sinek. I thought it was good.

Simon Sinek (3:42)

I thought it was good. So you've only been doing this a very short period of time, about a year, right?

David Robinson (3:48)

Yeah. Making videos.

Simon Sinek (3:49)

And you're a thing, like my friends all know you and many of them follow you.

And your videos, they sort of go viral quite frequently. How did, like when, how, what? A year is really quick to sort of pop like that.

David Robinson (4:05)

Yeah.

Rob Willis (4:05)

Now, I've been, I'm also quite surprised by all of this. And I got into it because I have a friend who's also does Instagram videos. He's one of the big creators of our Berlin history. And I saw him doing it and he was like having a good time. He was getting lots of work out of it. And he said, Rob, you've got to do it. And I was a corporate trainer and I thought, now we've got to do LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place to be. But then eventually I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. And I thought I'll do 100 videos in 100 days.