How to Talk So Clearly People Assume Youre Brilliant

Every time you open your mouth, people are forming an opinion like that. Is this someone I can respect? Or somebody I should forget? When I started my first company, I used to over-explain, I used to ramble, I used to talk in circles all the time. And honestly, it sucked. And it feels like it almost killed the business because it made things so unbearable that I didn't want to do half of my job. But when I learned how to communicate clearly, that shift allowed me to grow my business into a $250 million portfolio that it is today. So if you want to be trusted like a leader, these are five communication skills that will help you speak like the top 1% CEO. Skill number one is we want to keep the goal of the conversation front and center. CEOs, in most conversations they have, okay, most conversations, they do not speak to explore. They actually speak to arrive somewhere. I always talk about my team like, hey, I'm trying to kick the goal to the finish line. I'm trying to kick it into the net. And they're like, what does that mean? I'm like, I see every conversation as how are we getting closer to the net, not kicking it back and forth, kicking it back and forth. That might be called a brainstorming session, but most of the conversations I have are not brainstorming sessions. It's like me trying to get the ball into the net. Most conversations that people have, they drift and they take ******* forever because nobody is protecting the goal. They take all these side quests. They have extra context. They have unrelated stories. They have emotional detours. Oh my God, well, yeah, that thing happened, and then this over here, and then, oh my God, so many unnecessary debates. Now, CEOs, they resist this. It's not because they're rude. It's because they're ******* deliberate, and they know that every conversation costs time and attention, and attention is not infinite. We only have so much in a day that we can get to something. I actually used to do the opposite. I used to have endlessly long meetings. It's actually really ******* embarrassing to think about, but for a while, I thought that was just how it worked. Like you have a big business. There's a lot to discuss. Meetings take time, but that was actually not the real problem that I had. The real problem was that I let other people's emotions, their distractiveness, their inability to stay focused, derail the entire meeting, and so somebody would bring up a side tangent. Someone else would then have a reaction to that side tangent, and then we'd spend like 20 minutes on something that was not even what we were in the ******* meeting for, and I hated it, and it was so terrible. Now, I run meetings completely freaking differently. When these things come, great, let's table that. Cool, how about you two take that offline? Awesome, we will sync up one-on-one on that. We don't need to talk about this in front of the whole group. What am I doing? I'm constantly kicking the ball down the court rather than side to side. This is not about being cold. It is about respecting everybody's time, including my own. In fact, your spouse does not wanna have a two-hour discussion with you about your relationship. You could probably get to in five minutes, but you're just afraid, and so you take all these side quests to avoid the one thing you need to say. Before a conversation, decide one thing. What do I want to accomplish from this conversation? If something doesn't move you closer to the outcome that you have defined, it's not for that conversation. That doesn't mean it's not a conversation. It just means it's not that conversation. The second skill is optimizing for progress, not for approval. Most people in the world, they speak so that they can be liked. CEOs speak to move things forward. Does that mean that they're completely cold or careless? No, it means that they understand that leadership communication exists to create movement, not to always just get consensus and approval from everybody. Now, if you optimize for approval, you're basically hedging, and if you optimize for progress, you're gonna clarify things for your team and move things forward. I remember the first time I realized this was during COVID. Everything shut down. There was so much fear and uncertainty everywhere. My entire team was like, Leila, we need you to speak immediately, and I was like, okay. I was prepared to do that, but I wasn't preparing to assure everybody. I wanted to get progress on the team, and so what I did is I let them know that we could not be certain of anything, but that this was an opportunity for us to come together in that moment of uncertainty, and I remember in that moment, my team was like, what the? You know, we wanted you to speak quickly because everyone was so scared, and what I realized is people did not love the answer, but they did appreciate the clarity. In fact, some of the most effective things that I've said as leader were not popular, but they were clear, and I remember after having that presentation or I would say it was like a town hall with my team, I remember my leaders messaging me. They were like, oh, I don't feel much better, and then I had other people on the team messaging me, and they said, thank you for being the only honest CEO I've ever worked for, and I was like, honestly, that's all I aim for. I just wanna be honest. I don't want people to feel like I'm ever gonna bull them, and if that means that people feel a little more scared, well, I believe that they can be scared and be okay. I believe that I don't need to treat them like children. I believe that they, not just me, I'm not the one that takes all the courage from everybody. We all can be courageous, and I think that clarity over time builds so much more trust than giving that emotional comfort in the moment. I do not think that people need more leaders who make them feel good. That is, this world is full of just people whose leaders kiss ass, say the right thing so that people will nod, say yes, and keep working. They need leaders who help them move in the right direction, and sometimes that feels uncomfortable in the moment. After you speak to your friends, to your family, to a group of people, to your team, ask yourself, did this help people know what to do next? Did it create clarity for them, or did I just speak to keep them comfortable? We do not need to give people more reassurance, and CEOs know that there's a fine line. Of course we want to let people know when they are safe and secure, but there's a lot of times in life where things aren't safe and secure. There are a lot of unknowns. How do we create clarity for people during that time so that they know what you're thinking? Because that alone sometimes is more reassuring than the fake bullshit. CEOs do not speak differently because they're special. They speak differently because they are clearer. They're much more intentional and outcome-focused in what they say, and they use simple language, they frame it for the listener, and they think in systems, always protecting the goal of the conversation and optimizing for progress, not for approval or likeness from everybody around them. So this is not about sounding important. It is about being clear enough that people actually move and you don't need a title to do that. The third skill is speaking from a perspective of the system, not the individual. Okay, so most people speak from a single point of view. What is that point of view? Theirs. CEOs do not do this. That is a liability. Okay, they are constantly translating through multiple lenses. How are my employees going to hear this? How will my customers interpret this? What behaviors will this create downstream? What would the public think about this? What would my potential hires think about this? When I put out a video, I think about all those things. Leadership in communication is not about being right. It is about being interpreted correctly and at scale, which is why having the skill to lead a large company is much harder than the skill of leading a small company. Why is that? It's much easier to take the perspective of five people than it is 100 or 1,000 or 5,000 or 20,000. The first time I did a full team presentation when my company had about 100 people, I wrapped up the first presentation and I remember I literally opened up my Slack and I had like 15 messages from different leaders telling me I'd confused this department, this department felt left out, this one was pissed I said this thing. And I was like, oh my God, I cannot win. Good Lord. Now, why is that? It's because a decision that makes like perfect sense to one person can create absolute chaos in somebody else's head who has a completely different point of view. And that is why the best CEOs are so careful with their language, not because they are trying to be political, but because they're trying to understand second order effects. They don't just ask, is what I'm saying true? They ask, what will people do after hearing this? What will they say after hearing this? What are their fears from hearing this? What are they gonna wanna talk about with their team when they hear this? How can I address all of those things while I'm speaking? So here's the tactic for you. Before you speak, just do one check. If I were on the receiving end of this, what questions would I have, concerns would I have and fears would I have? And if the answer is unclear to you, you probably have not nailed your message yet. So a great piece of this is if you do already lead a company and you have a big presentation you need to give, send it to like four people in your team that are in random departments, et cetera, and say, hey, I'd like feedback on this before I present to the entire team. As our company has gotten bigger, you know, we have over 150 people. That's something I do is I share it with different people and I say, how would you interpret this? What do you think your team's gonna have concerns about? What do you have concerns about? And by the way, this applies to also your significant other. This applies to your friends. This applies to your family. This applies to your coworkers. Like if you're constantly speaking in a way that is inducing all of their concerns and fears, of course they might not, they might seem like they don't wanna talk to you all the time. Because if you don't take other people's perspectives into consideration, then you're constantly just stress inducing when you talk to them. The fourth skill is you wanna frame everything around the benefit for the listener. People do not stay engaged because you are interesting. They stay engaged because they understand why this matters to them. Please just take this. Regular people communicate from their perspective. They talk about what's in it for them, what they need, what they want, what they're trying to explain. CEOs flip the frame. They start with the listener's incentive, what the listener wants, not what they want. You're essentially talking at people versus the other one, you're talking to people. You're communicating. I'll give you a great example of this. I had a potential CTO that I wanted to hire. And I remember he came in and he was like, I'm gonna pitch you on why you should hire me. I was like, okay. So he walked through his background, his experience, his vision of what he would do with the company and the department, all this stuff. And every single point was what this role would do for him, how it was gonna advance his careers, how aligned it was with his goals, how excited he was about the opportunity and the team he would get to work with. And I literally sat there thinking, great, but why should I care? Contrast that with when I sold my company. I remember the people that bought my company, one of the very first slides that the acquirer put up said, what this gets you. It wasn't who we are, our history, the firm. Shit, I don't give a **** about. It was, this is what you get. And it was a picture with just a few words. And that locked me the **** in because they understood something that most people don't. I don't care about your story until I know why it matters to me. That is the power of framing. Now, here's the thing. You've probably done this. You've been in a meeting where someone's three minutes in to an explanation and you're already thinking about something else. You're like, my inbox, I've got to do this thing later. I've got groceries. And it's not because what they're saying is bad or wrong, but it's because they haven't started with why the **** should you listen? So what does this mean for you? Start conversations with the benefit, not the background. Instead of being like, you know what's been on my mind? Me, me, me, me, me, me. Try this. This will save you time if you can do this. This will greatly reduce confusion. This will make you a lot of money. This is gonna make your job so much easier. This is gonna help you get to your goals so much faster. Frame it as how it will get them what they want, not you what you want. I swear if you start every conversation with this, it will change your ******* life. I do this with my team. I do it with my husband. I do it with my family. I do it with everybody. I call it speaking to the goal in my company. How do we speak to their goal, not your goal? We all know that you, coming into a conversation, have a goal of what you wanna get out of the conversation. They don't give a ****. So think about what they want, not what you want. Skill number five, use simple language. Do not use jargon, okay? If you want people to understand you, you can't use language that they don't understand. It sounds so obvious, but most people do the opposite. They use all this jargon because they think that that makes them sound credible. They think that big words mean you sound smart. And they think that if you use like insider language where it sounds like all these words that people should know that it's like a signal that they belong to this like upper echelon of people and CEOs. No, like true CEOs do the opposite. They assume that confusion is their fault. Confusion is the fault of the communicator, not the listener. Simple language is not a sign of low intelligence. In fact, it is so much harder to speak with clarity than it is to speak and confuse people. It is a sign that you are smart. And if you can be clear with people and they can understand you, you can earn their trust. I did not understand this when I was first running a business. I literally thought because I came from the gym world and I worked in gyms and I felt like I had to prove myself that I had to sound like I was like the CEO now of this big company. And I was looking at everyone in tech and listening to, you know, on CNBC and on Twitter. And I was like, wow, I have to talk a lot smarter than I talk now because I didn't go to any fancy college. I didn't, you know, get into any fancy, you know, degrees. And so I felt like I had to prove something. So I did a couple of things, over explain everything. And I would, when I was over explaining everything I would use big words that I barely even knew and had just learned what they meant. I would be like, we need the synergistic value. I did not use those words because they were clearer. I used them because I thought that they would make me sound legit. Like, oh, I'm a real business person. I know what these things mean. EBITDA margins, synergistic values, you know, top line, growth, revenue, growth, all this stuff. And I remember doing a talk to my team one time where I started talking to them about operant conditioning. And I was like, super proud of it. I was like, dude, I had done so much research. I understood the concept and I was like, I am going to elevate the out of how we think about behavior and motivation. And I remember within the first five minutes of that talk, I was like, oh, nobody gets it. You heard the word operant conditioning. Do you know what that means? Most of you don't. So if you don't even know what it means when I say it, how are you gonna know when I'm explaining it? Why not break it down to words that people do understand? If I, instead of operant conditioning, I said how to get people to do things, you can understand that. The funny thing is I did that presentation and the irony is that literally nothing changed afterwards. And it's not because my team didn't care. I actually think that they would very much have enjoyed the subject if they knew what the **** it meant. It's because nobody knew what was actually coming out of my mouth and what I was saying. I was using language to sound credible, but credibility does not come from acting smart or sounding smart. It comes from being understood. So when I started forcing myself to strip down my language, this is what I do now and what I've done ever since. I look at something that I've finished preparing and then I ask myself, would this make sense to someone who wasn't me? Then I ask myself, if I showed this to a third grader, would they understand what I just said? Usually the answer is no. And so then what I do is I'm like, okay, how can I cut this down? How can I say less big words to convey a point and keep clarifying the language, dumbing it down, dumbing it down more and more. And suddenly stuff starts working and people start actually understanding what I'm saying. Now you've probably done this before, I'm sure. You have found yourself trying to say words that sound really good, not because they are more clear to the person listening, but because it sounds more professional, makes you sound more polished. There's all sorts of words that people throw around. I call that more bullshit. And that's a trap a lot of us fall into. So here's what you want to do instead. You want to sound like a CEO when you speak. Ask yourself this one question. If a 12 year old were listening, would they understand this? If a 12 year old cannot understand what you're saying, you've probably lost everybody else. If you cannot say it simply, you are not ready to share it yet. So if you are serious about leveling up how you communicate, you should check out Layla's letters. This is my weekly memo that I send out to my team. It's unfiltered. It's not edited. It's not chat GPT and it's not a teammate of mine. Okay, it's words from me to my team in Slack every week. And honestly, I just want you guys to be able to have access to the same insights and lessons that my team does. So you can grab it in the link in the description.