Do you ever find yourself explaining every single aspect of your work just to make sure that they see everything that's involved?
But what if your thoroughness is actually sending the wrong signals?
Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high-performing introverts, including you, social introverts where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, godmother and strategist, and also a professional interrupter of unnecessary explanations.
By the end of today's episode, you will know five sneaky signs you're over explaining and how others are silently reacting.
The internal belief that drives this habit and how to reframe it for executive level impact.
And a simple shift that turns you from explainer to respected concise, trusted advisor.
So you think you're being responsible helpful thoughtful, but what you're actually signaling when you over-explain is self-doubt, not mastery.
You're actually making it harder for people to make decisions.
You're putting the burden on the people listening, the burden of curating and filtering and interpreting what you're supposed to be doing.
And on top of that, you may be boring them with unnecessary details.
Stakeholders may include customers deciding whether to work with your company or not.
And here's what's happening.
You know, you realize maybe that something's wrong and you feel frustrated misunderstood, invisible.
And what happens externally is that, you know, your ideas don't really make it a lot of times.
Other people can take credit because they can sum up everything nicely and sell it, and then they get the credit for you.
And that is not where you need to be.
There's a very dangerous and common and very expensive assumption out there.
And I think it's partly driven by the fact that we're surrounded by so much data.
But the assumption is more detail is more value.
But in leadership communication, especially at the top, the opposite is true.
The more you explain, the less confident you sound.
It's like inflation.
More words it takes to say something, then the value goes down.
And you don't sound confident and you don't have influence.
So you may be thinking that that extra content, the background, the history, another clarification really tried to anticipate questions, which is good.
But you want to give people the opportunity to ask the question.
So you don't want to give them like everything away.
So what are the beliefs that may be driving this tendency to say too much?
For a lot of people, it's proving that they belong or, even more than that, proving that they've done the work, like trying to give the thing that they're pitching or explaining more value.
So you can be over-preparing, over-justifying and answering questions that people aren't even asking, just in case.
So that's one thing is proving yourself.
Number two would be, you know, protecting everyone from confusion or mistakes, and kind of a safety approach.
It feels generous, but it lands like uncertainty.
And it can be just a bad habit.
You can be just a chatty, fun, natural storyteller and you like context.
Nothing is wrong with that.
It's a beautiful thing.
But in certain meetings and presentations, it costs you authority.
So here are the what over explaining looks like.
These are the five signs.
And one is that you keep circling the same point, like you give it one round and then you go back and give another round with a little bit different approach, maybe more detail, a change of emphasis.
And I've seen people give three rounds or sometimes more, usually three.
And what they tell me is like, I'm not sure when to stop.
So circling the same point is not good.
Another sign of over explaining is going on these tangents.
It could be the tangent of the history of, well, this is not a new problem.
It started in 1967.
Anytime somebody says to you, oh, why don't we park that? they're telling you, please stop talking.
Side stories, extra details, stay away from the tangents.
Another sign is, if you see the body language of your people listening, that they just seem kind of like staring into space.
Maybe somebody's looking at their phone, but they just are not engaged.
That's a cue to stop talking.
Another sign is that you preempt every single objection.
And again, preempting objections is a good practice, but if you take it too far and explain everything and you don't give people a chance to ask questions because you've already talked about it, you're just losing them.
And then another sign was obviously, if you go over the time you're allotted, always aim to go less than.
If you ever end early, people will remember you and love you.
All right, so here is the identity shift that you want to think about.
You're not an explainer.
You're a curator.
That's what a trusted advisor does, right?
If you hire an expensive consultant, it's because they're going to tell you, based on all their experience over the years with so many clients.
They're going to sum down 5000 pages into a paragraph.
If you have a collection, we'll say, of Picasso paintings, then you might have thousands of paintings.
And you know, if you were going to show it to someone without curation, you would kind of get tired of it after maybe 20 paintings because it's not curated.
There's no story.
There's no explanation.
Your job is to distill and to interpret what is important, relevant to the situation at hand.
That's what makes people see you as sharp, strategic, executive, ready.
And that's because you've done the work.
When you filter, when you curate, then people are paying attention.
They know they're going to get high value.
They're not going to get this inflated, fluffy message.
You're going to exude executive presence, of course, without changing your personality, and you're going to get more buy-in.
You know you've got to make that headline recommendation that connect to the business impact, and then pause right.
So what is the headline?
The headline should answer the question of why are you talking?
Why are you talking?
Think of wait, why am I talking?
Why are you mentioning it?
This thing is going to help us achieve this goal.
You can also think about whatever you're saying, like what is your recommendation?
When your early career begins.
You're just kind of giving the weather report what's happening and then you go up into how you solve problems.
But really, if you're aiming for senior leadership, or that senior leadership identity.
You need to be guiding people, helping them to make the right decisions.
And so how are you as the trusted advisor helping whoever you're talking to make that decision?
And just give them that.
Don't make them work harder to figure out what they need from your message.
Usually it's something like that, or this is the solution to this problem.
And if it's a little bit more subtle than that, then you need to explain it and say like we made this metric go up.
Okay, wonderful.
What does that mean for the company?
What is the impact?
Now, the details, you know them.
You can put them in an appendix or you can just say, I can answer questions if you have.
If you recognize yourself in this episode, if you're tired of watching your ideas get diluted ignored, taken over by others.
That's why I created the Executive Presence Mastery System.
It's designed to help senior leaders get heard, not just listened to.
There's a link to set up a conversation about this to see if it's a good next step for you.
In the show notes at the top, or you can go to my website, speakupwithlaura.com slash speak up.
Because leadership is not about saying more.
It's about saying what matters and then stopping.
Have a fantastic day and I will catch you on the next episode.
