#123 Stop Over-Explaining: The 3 S’s Rule For Projecting Authority

but this school-flashback is just in the middle of the night. No, not at all. This story is my safe space. Do you all know everything about me? Yes, exactly.

This story is the story of the story that you just understood. The story of the studio, the job, or the house. The story, the house. I don't really know how the story is. The story is in the lead.

Save. With this story, you can be the smartest person in the room. And still sound dumb, and lose the room entirely, because of the way you speak. And I should know because I have had it happen to me too.

So today, I'm breaking down the speaking pattern that quietly sabotage us, especially high achievers from founders and CEOs to everyday humans, just tired of not getting heard. And once you know these, you'll start noticing them everywhere.

I'm Cody Sanchez, and this is the big deal podcast. This is how you get attention like a CEO. All right, let's go to trap number one, excessive hedging. People ignore everything you say before the word bud. Did you know that?

So if you say, I could be totally off here, but and then you drop a perfectly solid point, neuroscience finds you're going to get ignored. And this is actually, there's a word for this. It's called linguistic hedging, and it's killing your competency score.

So every single human, immediately, when we meet another one, gets graded on two things, manly, warmth, and competency.

“If you want to be listened to, you better be competent.”

Even above being warm in the world of business. So the research on linguistic hedging shows that excessive qualifiers reduce perceived competence and authority, especially in high status environments. To say that in English, if you use butt, I don't know,

maybe could be, I'm not sure, prepared to be pushed around like a rag doll. Even when the content quality of what you say is unchanged, so you could be saying really smart things, but you're going to be tossed.

There's this classic persuasion finding where speakers who presented arguments confidently were rated as more credible. Okay, that kind of makes sense. Even when there are arguments where identical to more hesitant versions, but a really scary study, they did a follow-on study

that showed people who argued more confidently, but were wrong, were rated even more credible than those who argued not confidently, but were right. So confidence is actually a heuristic. People don't consciously score your logic,

they score your certainty. So why do smart people do this? Then why do we hedge? Because you're aware of the complexity, you know, you and I both know reality is kind of probabilistic,

and you know, so we hedge. You don't want to sound like some sort of sick of an out there saying, everyone should do this. You always do this.

This never works, because that's not realistic,

“but the problem, do you want to win or do you want to be right?”

And now here's some important nuance, hedging isn't always bad, but it largely is. I mean, there's something called strategic hedging, which signals, hey, I'm intellectually honest, but most hedging you're doing is insecurity hedging,

which signals I'm scared to be enjudged. You know, let's be honest, what are we usually doing? We're probably more scared of being judged than really strategically thinking about how to hedge. So let me show you the difference between the two.

Let's say, I say, I think we should move forward with point A. However, we have to take into account that there is a 30% failure rate. If we do that, that could be an issue. As opposed to, I want to move forward with point A, but you know, there's always a chance that it's not going to work,

and I mean, I can't guarantee it a hundred percent, which one sounds more serious.

Obviously, the first one, I gave numbers.

I stated things as opposed to questioning things. So here's the test, are you adding nuance for clarity, or are you patting your statement to avoid social risk? Okay, so how do we fix this? How do I make you sound smart and people pay attention to you?

Instead of saying, I might be wrong, but I think we should cut this feature. I want you to say, based on the data we have, cutting this feature is the right move.

“And if you want to be even better, say, what the data is.”

Based on the data we have, we believe with the 70% probability, this is the right move, give numbers and specifics. So this is the same thought, but just a slightly different posture. I want you to avoid excessive hedging, because it's making people stop paying attention to you.

Steve Job was famous for being the opposite of this. He'd have one sentence that tells you what to think. He, he, I call it his Twitter link headline. So we'd have one for the whole talk or product. So maybe like today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

This is the world's thinnest notebook. An entire library of songs in your pocket, right? Everything else was proof of that one line. One idea repeated, no hedging.

The second trap is overexplaning.

Smart people love clarity, and they hate being misunderstood. So they explain, then they clarify, then they get an example, then they restate the example, then they summarize the summary.

You signal one or two things. Your audience is either slow, or you think your idea can't stand on its own. And neither is going to help your credibility. And there's nothing more infuriating to a competent person than having somebody overexplaning an idea.

They already got on the first sentence.

So if you really want to piss off somebody with ADD, OCD, and high competence, then explain yourself a lot. I hate to say it. This isn't PC, but ladies, we do this more than men. And we have to work on it if we want to be taken seriously.

There's actual real research and cognitive psychology that has identified something called processing fluency. So when something is easy to understand, people judge it as more truthful and more intelligent. So ironically, overexplaning actually reduces your fluency.

It makes simple things feel heavy. And you've seen this, like someone explains a concept for five minutes, and you think, what does this guy talking about? Like the idea could be good, but the delivery, well, that makes everything else get tossed out the window.

So what's the fix? I want you to deliver the core idea concisely. Pause, let silence do the work. If someone wants more depth, the last authority ends up trusting in the listener. So let me give you an example, two explanations, low fluency,

are vertically integrated infrastructure leverages synergistic distribution pathways to optimize cross-sector capital allocation.

“Don't we all know somebody who talks like that by the way?”

That's low fluency. High fluency. We buy boring businesses that make money, which one sounds smarter?

Actually, the second one, which one feels more trustworthy?

Number two, which one gets remembered? Sure is hell, number two, because smart people take complex things and make it simple. And it's not about this cognitive load or using a bunch of vows, another fascinating study.

If you look at stocks with easy names, researchers found that companies with the easiest to pronounce names, like car, outperformed those with hard to pronounce names, like RDO, naming actually matters. And in marketing, this is really true.

This is why Apple ads work so well. Think about them. Simple background, minimal text, one product, clear headline, what do they do? That reduces your cognitive load.

You don't have to think so hard. Your brain just goes, that makes sense, and it must be premium. And it makes processing fluency basically make simple looks smart. And there's some dangerous sides to this. Like it can make bad ideas look good.

That's why scams use simple language. And conspiracy theories spread wildly. It's why charismatic leaders will win. We all know one, right? You know one right now who is not as smart as you, not as good as you,

but often wins because they're smoother. And so how do you use this ethically?

“If you want to sound more intelligent, we want shorter sentences,”

we want concrete nouns, no jargon, white space, speak slower, remove filter words. This is one of those ideas that quietly runs the world. So keep it stupid simple. Trapped three, talking too fast when it matters.

Ever seen someone's pitch get higher, their words speed up, their breath shortens why. Their nervous system is firing. When we're anxious, the sympathetic nervous system and activates, that's like your heart rate rises.

Breathing shifts, speech accelerates. Listeners unconsciously interpret that speed as uncertainty. Even if actually you know what the fuck you're talking about, you just talk fast like I do. So studies on vocal perception show that slower,

lower-paced speech is actually associated with higher status and greater credibility. Now you've got to be careful here because when you're talking to your boss, don't try to be profound. You want to make sure you are tied to the right timing.

But when you rush your most important points, you so consciously signal, I need to get through this before you reject it. What's the fix?

When you reach your most important sentence, slow down by 20 percent,

add microposses, breathe before the key line, for example. Instead of saying, so what I'm saying is we should pivot the whole strategy because the data is clear to showing diminishing returns. Try, I think we should pivot the data showing diminishing returns. You can make everything fast up until then,

but when you've got your plane to land, land it. I want you to remember the three assets, shorter, slower, stronger. They use this on us and advertising, like listen to the speed of this part of the Apple speech, think different. Here's to the crazy ones.

Here's to the crazy ones. The miss fits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs and the square holes. The ones who see things differently, they're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

“About the only thing you can't do is ignore them,”

because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

are the ones who do.

“They basically relaunched Apple's brand around,”

creativity and non-formity, but don't really cleanly,

slowly and strategically. Trapped for, story not specs. So I'm using Steve Jobs' lot in this, because he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs, but also because he's one of the best of all time.

And he is one of the best speakers ever, so we should steal his homework. And I think he followed a simple arc. Status quo, to problem, to bold promise, to proof, to the future.

So we would start with words like, the world before, you know, phones are clunky. Laptops are heavy. Then he raises the stakes to make a clear promise, but in the future, you will hold all of the songs in your pocket.

Then you would show the solution live, bam, show don't tell. Because people remember the story change, not the feature list. So you see when you lead with ruthless simplicity, you can actually tell a story. Steve slides and language were stripped down.

Few words on screen, big visuals, almost no bullets. I want you to think of short concrete phrases instead of jargon, like it just works. Or once on stage, he's just said, gorgeous. Because the story was simple, the audience,

they had the bandwidth to feel it in their brain. One of my favorites on jobs was a speech that he gave on connecting dots at Stanford. And he has a couple lines I love. He's talking about when he does calligraphy,

and he learns computing and coding, and he puts them together, and he creates, maybe the world's most valuable company.

“And he says, you have to trust in something.”

You're gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

Trap 5, be in a showoff. This one hurts, because it's actually hard for me. It's really tempting to play it cool. You should actually be a showoff. The people who win in life are not the ones in the shadows.

They are the ones who actually demonstrate what they do. I was just on a podcast with Bill Garley, one of the best investors of all time. And he told me something fascinating about the founder of we work at a newman.

And he said, when he first met him in a series A, so the company basically had nothing in existence.

His company Benchmark had never done a real estate transaction.

That's what this guy was asking him to do. But he goes within the first few minutes, I knew I was going to invest in Adam, and I was going to invest millions, because he was such a showman.

Think about who the president is right now. Whether you like him or hate him. Donald Trump is a showman. Think about who's the richest man in the world right now. Whether you like him or hate him.

Elon Musk is a showman. So you actually need to flex. You know more than most people in the room. You've read the research. You understand the second order of facts.

You're smarter than you're giving yourself credit for. So flex it. I don't want you to reference obscure frameworks. I don't want you to add theoretical layers that aren't necessary, because I want you to get recognized.

But research on the illusion of explanatory depth and communication shows that the simpler you are, the more intelligent you are perceived. So the smartest communicators they actually reduce complexity. They don't amplify it.

Einstein's supposedly said, if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

“Whether he said it or not, I think it's true.”

Smart insecure speakers try to prove their smart. Secure smart speakers make everyone else feel smart.

Think about that for a second.

That's the power. So here's the fix. Go big and show, but default to the show being simple. Clarity beats cleverness every time. Trap six.

Obsessive rehearsal. Most people think great speakers are born with it. They are not. They are the ones willing to rehearse more than is reasonable. Psychologists and desserts and spent decades studying world-class performers,

like violinist chess players, athletes, surgeons, all of it. And his conclusion, an uncomfortable for everyone who likes the idea of quote-unquote talent, the main difference between the elite and the average, wasn't who they were. That's how they practice.

By age 20, the best violinist in his studies had put in more than 10,000 hours of focused practice. The merely good ones had about 4,000. Same instrument, same age, totally different outcomes. And later research really refined the picture. Practice isn't the only factor.

Like deliberate practice. That explains roughly one fifth to one quarter of the performance gap between pros and amateurs. In other words, if you line up a hundred people, a big part of why the top five looks super human is they simply have done it more on purpose for longer. Public speaking, no different.

Speaking well every day, no different. You know, the speakers who don't rehearse are the ones who ramble or run out of time, panic, and have a voice in their head telling them that they're not saying the right things coming out of their mouth. The ones who run the talk out loud multiple times, well they're common clear, baby.

you're actually seeing something else entirely, hours of practice, hours of cutting out weak examples,

hours of practicing the pause after the key line. So I don't want you to feel like you either have talent or you don't. You can make it.

“And if you want to see nobody better, go look at Steve Jobs.”

I mean, one of the best speakers of all time, but did you know, he would say the natural delivery he engineered it. People inside Apple say he rehearsed keynotes aloud for hours. And even with so specific down to fonts and demo beats. Because the material was internalized, he could look at people move and improvise around this sort

of solid spine of his speeches. But, you know, the best shorthand for how he speaks and why he's heard is the fact that he practiced for a really long time. Trapped seven, constant self-deprecation. This one is common among us hyperformers.

You joke about being bad at things, you downplay wins, you undercut compliments. I know sometimes it feels humble and maybe sometimes it is. But overuse of this is nothing but self-sabotage. So research on impression management shows that strategic modesty works when balanced with being super competent.

But the problem is chronic self-deprecation actually lowers your perceived ability,

especially among people who don't know you yet. So there's actually a fabulous study on self-promotion versus modesty and job interviews. It's by God-free Jones and Laura. And what they studied, the researchers wanted to test how different self-preservation strategies affect how people perceive you, like does modesty increase like ability for instance.

So how did they do it? The participants acted as evaluators in a mock-hiring scenario. They watched video-taped job interviews where applicants use different communication strategies, self-promotion, ingratiation, modesty, neutral controlled condition.

“The actors delivered identical qualifications, no different, right?”

Same resume, same background, same everything except the style of delivery changed.

After watching evaluators raided the candidates on competence like ability, higher ability, what do you think happened? Self-promotion increased ratings of competence, intelligence, and recommendations for hiring. Slight decrease in like ability if too strong without that much. Engratiation and modesty increased like ability, but actually didn't increase competence,

reduced perceived capability, and also reduced likelihood of them being referred for higher. The key insight, strategic self-promotion, actually gets you hired. You being modest isn't helping anybody else but your competitors. And you know, I really want you to think about this because a lot of times somebody will give you a compliment like, "You did a great job. That was a great presentation."

And you reply honestly, I totally winged it. It was kind of a mess. You just rewrote their perception. Upgrade move, accept the praise. Thank you. That's it. You don't need a shrink to be likeable. Confidence with warmth is magnetic. In security disguised as humor, nothing but transparent. So the pattern behind all these traps, if we're going to zoom out, is fear of social rejection

being wrong, fear of being judged, not being liked. Smart people feel this more because you actually see all the complexity of this. Oh, to be a beautiful idiot. Right? Who you know, how much you don't know. And so here's the paradox. The people who win rooms aren't the ones who know the most. They're the ones who manage perception of others best. And perception is heavily influenced by delivery. Not just content. It's not about pretending. It's not like the fake

alpha energy. It's really about aligning to how you can get the outcome you want. Your job isn't to pre-defend against every possible criticism. It's to communicate clearly and let your ideas stand. And so I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions. A simple, speaking, reset framework. Before important conversations run this checklist, and my hedging on NASA's early, and my overexplaning, and my rushing, and my overcomplicating, and my landing statements confidently,

and my comfortable with silence, pick one thing to improve per week. Don't try to fix everything it wants. Awareness alone is going to upgrade you. 15-20-30%. Because practice actually will help you upgrade the rest. Most smart people are not held back because you're dumb. You're held back because how that intelligence is delivered. If you fix the delivery, suddenly the room treats you

“like the smartest person there. Because now you sound like it. So if you want to outperform your peers”

in anything that involves words, there's a simple unfair advantage available to you. Rehears more than they do, and rehearse with intent. Run the talk through, out loud, fix one thing each time. Do that obsessively, and people will start calling you unnatural. That's it for today. And next time you're in a meeting, listen for these traps. You're going to hear them everywhere. And once you do, you'll come back here and we'll figure out your next step.