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The Part You Left Out 🎤
Your best story is the one you keep editing out of your speeches.
Dear Diamond Polisher,
Think of a talk that actually changed something in you. A leader at a company meeting, a teacher, someone on a stage. Years later you can probably still find the moment inside it that got you, and I would guess the facts have long gone and that one moment has stayed.
When I ask people about that moment in a session, it turns out to be the same kind of moment nearly every time: the one where the speaker admitted something. A doubt, a mistake, a night they had no idea what to do next.
And most of us, standing in front of our own teams, bring the finished version. We prepare the version where it all made sense. We arrive with the conclusion already packaged, the numbers already reconciled, the path already straight. Of course we lead them in a practical way, but at the same time what they came for is something else entirely, and we hand them the summary.
So that’s why the speech with the warmest applause is so often the one that changes the least. The room admired you, and Monday looked exactly like Friday.
There is a real difference between explaining something to people and inspiring them, and it is smaller than it looks: one of them puts your conclusion in front of them, and the other puts them inside your experience.
🧠 What a Story Does Inside Someone Else
Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert & Uri Hasson · Princeton University, PNAS, 2010
A woman told a real, unrehearsed, fifteen-minute story from her own life while her brain was scanned. Then eleven people listened to the recording in a scanner. As she spoke, the listeners’ brain activity came to mirror hers, following a second or two behind. And the more closely a listener’s brain matched the speaker’s, the more of the story they actually understood. In the listeners who understood her best, parts of their brain activity ran slightly ahead of hers, as if they were already living the next moment with her.
Nicole Speer, Jeffrey Zacks and colleagues · Washington University in St. Louis, Psychological Science, 2009
They scanned people while they read a simple story. When the character picked something up, the part of the reader’s brain that moves their own hand came alive. When the character walked into a new room, the part that keeps track of where the reader is came alive too. The reader was sitting still in a scanner. Inside, they were doing it.
Read those two together, because this is the whole reason to tell a story at all. When you present your conclusion, your team receives a conclusion. When you tell them what happened to you, their brain reconstructs the experience and, for a few minutes, they have lived something close to what you lived.
That is what makes a story move people. It goes in through the difficulty. That’s the door; that’s the part of you their brain can actually walk into.
Which is what makes the next bit so hard, because the difficulty is the first thing most of us take out.
PhilBot Coaches Hugo
Hugo founded an engineering firm nine years ago. It is three hundred people now. Three weeks ago at the company offsite he gave what he believes is the best speech of his life: forty minutes on the contract they won against three larger competitors, and the new direction he wants everyone to take because of it. Warm applause. Since then the new direction has stayed exactly where he left it. On Tuesday, Marta, who has run delivery beside him for six years, told him that people are waiting to see whether he means it this time.
Hugo I gave them everything. The whole story, how we won it, what it took, the two years nobody saw. They clapped. And then, nothing. Three weeks, and not one person has moved a centimetre. I honestly don’t understand what more they want from me.
PhilBot Which part of that story did you tell them?
Hugo All of it. From the first call to the signature.
PhilBot And the part where you didn’t know if it would come off?
Hugo ...I mean, that’s, no, I don’t put that in. That’s from before it turned. Nobody needs the version where I’m sitting in a hotel room in Osaka at one in the morning thinking I have just made a very expensive mistake.
PhilBot Say that last sentence to me again, slowly.
Hugo Sitting in a hotel room in Osaka at one in the morning, thinking I have just made a very expensive mistake. ...Yeah. Okay. That’s the only interesting part of the whole thing, isn’t it.
👆 Step 1: the piece he had edited out was the only piece his people could stand inside.
PhilBot When you imagine telling three hundred people about that night, what sensations come up? And where do you feel them?
Hugo My shoulders come up around my ears. There’s something tight at the base of my throat, and my stomach drops, like the floor moved under me.
PhilBot And what is that tightness telling you?
Hugo That if they see me in that hotel room, they stop believing I can get us anywhere. I’m the one who is supposed to know.
👆 Step 2: his Little Judge, doing precisely the job it was built for, guarding a version of Hugo that nobody in the room had asked for.
PhilBot Who was sitting in that hall three weeks ago who has been in their own version of that hotel room?
Hugo ...All of them. Marta’s whole team has been in it since March.
PhilBot So they were waiting for you to say so.
Hugo And I gave them a highlight reel. I stood up in front of three hundred people who are frightened and told them I have never been frightened.
👆 Step 3: bragging is rarely a character flaw. Most of the time it is fear, dressed for the stage.
PhilBot If you had those forty minutes again, what would you want them to leave with?
Hugo That we have been here before and we found our way through. That the not-knowing is part of it, it’s survivable, and you’re allowed to say it out loud in this company.
PhilBot And what would you leave out this time?
Hugo (laughs) The ending. I’d stop just before the lesson and let them find it themselves.
💎 The Diamond Insight
People follow the version of you that had to find a way through. That is the version they can picture themselves becoming, and it is the one you keep editing out.
🎤 Why the Polished Version Slides Off
Two research teams have measured Hugo’s instinct from both sides.
Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino & Michael Norton · UNC Chapel Hill & Harvard Business School, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018
They studied what happens when we dress up a boast as a complaint or a piece of humility. People liked the humblebraggers less, judged them less competent, and, in a field study, were less willing to actually help them. What drove all of it was sincerity: the audience reads the intention long before it evaluates the content.
Anna Bruk, Sabine Scholl & Herbert Bless · University of Mannheim, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018
Across seven studies, people rated showing their own vulnerability as weakness, and rated the very same act, performed by someone else, as courage. They called it the beautiful mess effect. From the inside it feels like exposure. From the outside it looks like strength.
So that’s why a leader can rehearse a story for a week, deliver it beautifully, and watch it go nowhere. Underneath everything, the room is asking one question: is this person actually telling me the truth about themselves? And the moment a story arrives with the difficulty removed, the answer is no, and everybody feels it before they could tell you why.
💡 The S.P.A.R.K. Practice
You don’t need a dramatic story, and it doesn’t need to be long. Ninety seconds of something true beats forty polished minutes, every time. Five moves:
S · Start where it was hard.
Open at the moment you had no idea what to do, before you found your way through.
P · Put yourself in it.
First person, and say what it cost you. Your team can stand inside “I was frightened in a hotel room at one in the morning.” Give them that one.
A · Admit the part you got wrong.
The mistake is what makes the turn believable, and the turn is the entire reason to tell it.
R · Rebuild it out loud.
Walk them through how you actually came out the other side, step by step, so they can walk it too. This is the half most leaders skip, and it is the half that gives people something to do on Monday.
K · Keep the meaning theirs.
Stop before the lesson. Say what happened, and let the room finish the sentence. The moment you explain your story, you have turned it back into instruction.
That last one is the hardest, and it is the whole difference. Explaining hands people your conclusion. Inspiring hands them the experience and trusts them with what it means.
You will think this is the wrong week for it, because your team needs you certain right now. That is the week it does the most.
🏹 This Week’s Challenge:
In your next team meeting, take ninety seconds and tell one story about something that was genuinely hard before it came right. First person. Name the part you got wrong. Then stop before the lesson, and let it be a little uncomfortable. Notice what happens.
PhilBot’s Story Practice 🤖
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PhilBot AI Coach |
Use this prompt with PhilBot, or with any AI, to find the story you have been leaving out:
"I have to speak to my team about [topic] on [date]. Before we touch the message, ask me about a time this was genuinely hard for me and I didn't know what to do. Then ask what it cost me and what I got wrong. Then help me tell it in ninety seconds, first person, and make me stop before the lesson."
Or turn it inward: "Which story about myself have I been telling for years with the hardest part taken out, and who was I protecting?"
Somewhere in your history there is a night you keep out of the speech, and it is very likely the most useful thing you own. It is also, I think, the closest thing you have to the leader you want to become, because it is the only part of you that other people can actually follow.
Who would be helped this week if you finally told it?
I am always happy when somebody writes back to say they tried it, badly, and the room changed.
With warmth and one true story,
Philippe & PhilBot 🎤
Keep shining.
Équilibre k.k. | Tokyo · 20 years of inspiring leaders to shine ✨
P.S. You’ll notice I sign every letter “Philippe & PhilBot.” PhilBot is my AI coaching companion, and these letters are genuinely written together: the heart and stories are mine, the craft is ours. I sign both names because I believe leaders are learning to create alongside AI, and I’d rather be open about that. 🎤
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📖 Book One The Diamond Quest: Finding Your Diamond The story behind everything in these letters. Ten chapters on how to discover, polish, and share your own diamond. You can read it online now.
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