281. How to turn your message into a movement
You're about to meet my TEDx speech coach, Neil Gordon.
Yes, even a speech coach needs a coach — especially when you’re close to the content. Neil helped transform my talk by introducing me to the concept of the silver bullet sentence — the one powerful line that cuts through the noise and anchors your message.
We dive into how to craft that sentence, how to turn your message into a movement, and the number one mistake speakers make when they’re on stage.
transcript
It's a bit freaky this week because I am recording this episode before my TEDx talk on the 14th of March. Yet you'll be listening to this after my TEDx talk. So throwing some energy into the future here to say, oh gosh, it was amazing. Everything went brilliantly. Brought the house down. Go and check out my social media, especially my Instagram stories. That's where you'll be able to get the latest on how it actually went.
And today's guest, Neil Gordon, was instrumental in helping me put my TEDx talk together. Now, you might be thinking, hang on, Sal, don't you write speeches? The answer is yes. Yes I do. And I believe that everyone needs a coach, especially when you're really close to the content.
You need that extra set of eyes. You need that outside expertise. So you know, the best tennis players in the world still have a coach, and I wanted to make sure I put the best foot forward that I could in on that red circle. And absolutely after my session with Neil, it really changed the content of my speech. It improved it by a long shot. And part of that was because of his methodology around this thing he calls the silver bullet. His book is called The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time. This is the Silver Bullet sentence. And in this episode you'll hear more about what that is and some great examples of it too. Neil shares how you can turn your message into a movement. It's a really great conversation, lots of takeaways. And he also shares the number one mistake he sees speakers make.
And I see it as well. And so if you do any speaking, chances are you have made it. I know I've certainly made this mistake in the past, but it is one that we really need to start watching, especially if we are going to turn our message into a movement, inspire people to take action and change, not tune out and jump on their phones. So it is such a joy post TEDx to be introducing you to my TEDx coach, and I know you will adore this conversation.
Sally:
Neil Gordon, welcome to That Voice Podcast. It is great to have you here. How are you feeling?
Neil:
Oh, I'm doing great, Sally, and it's great to be here. Thank you.
Sally:
So tell us, how did you get into the world of speech coaching?
Neil:
My background is in book publishing in that I started as a low-level editor at Penguin here in the States many years ago. And the next thing I'm supposed to say is I got my book publishing gig because I was a real bookworm growing up, and I loved English class and I loved writing and all of that. And I didn't like any of of it. In fact, I was terrible at reading. And I went through all of school, including college, hardly reading anything at all, including my assigned reading. And then toward the very end of college, I discovered books. And once I graduated from college, I moved to New York City. And this is before smartphones and all of that. And I needed somehow a way to escape the subways. So I really got into reading then, and I read this one book called A Prayer For and Meaning by John Irving, which was such a paradigm, worldview shifting kind of experience for me that I questioned all of my beliefs.
Neil:
And it was such a profound and meaningful shift for me that I then had to read everything I could get my hands on and ask the question, why did language do this to me? Why did the written word in this case do this to me? And that curiosity eventually got me. I'm skipping over a lot of steps, but eventually that got me the job at Penguin. And I worked there for just a few years, never really climbed my way up the ladder or anything. And I went out on my own trying to edit freelance, but this is before that was as big of a deal. This is in the two thousands. And so I wound up writing freelance writing, and within a year I got a gig ghost writing a book proposal for an author who wanted to sell it to traditional publishers. We got him a six figure deal. And that really laid all of the groundwork for my becoming more of a persuasion expert than anything. And then in the 2000 in the 2010s, I realized the best way for me to put myself out there with this approach to persuasion is public speaking.
Sally:
There's so many similarities between persuasive writing and persuasive speaking. What have you found to be some of the differences between writing and speaking?
Neil:
I would actually say there are very few differences, Sally, in that I really believe that the best writing on the page is fairly conversational. Now, I don't wanna be misunderstood. I'm not saying to really play up all of the vocal pauses and to really sound as much like a person fumbling their way through a conversation as possible. But I do believe that there's not that big of a distinction. There's a slightly greater formality to the written word than there is to the spoken word. But I feel that better speeches have a certain deliberate quality to them. They, they have a certain plan to them. They're not just, oh, I just happened to be on the stage, so I'm gonna talk to you guys. And the best writing sounds a bit more like something you would casually talk about with someone. So it's a little, it's sort of like a Yin Yang kind of symbol.
Neil:
You have mostly a written version on the page with a little bit of a speaking quality. And then on stage you have mostly a speaking quality with a little bit of a written quality as well. So it just really becomes a matter of remembering that no matter what situation a person's in, they're still a person. They're not a machine consuming content like an AI bot would. And so that means they are going to benefit from being taken care of by a more planned and strategic talk. And they're also going to really appreciate being treated like a person. They're gonna appreciate more of a conversation with the author when reading the book.
Sally:
Yeah, I totally get that. One of the nicest pieces of feedback I've got from my book Voice Print was people saying, Oh, Sal, I could hear your voice as I was reading it. I felt like you were telling it to me. And as a background, as a TV reporter, I've always been in the habit of speaking out aloud while I'm writing. In saying that my speeches are a little bit more conversational. And Neil, I'm so grateful you helped me put together my TEDx Talk. And something that you really helped me with was this thing called a silver bullet statement. What is the silver bullet?
Neil:
If you were to open up a very popular nonfiction book on a Kindle device where it's all digital, and so they aggregate all of the highlighted the most highlighted passages in the book, what you'll find is that there's a certain pattern in the most highlighted sentences or passages in that book. And so, for example, a book that came out a number of years ago called Creativity Inc. By Ed Catal, he's the co-founder of Pixar. And he writes this book on how did they create this culture that led to all these incredibly innovative original stories. And he says, about a quarter, quarter of the way into the book, getting the team right is a necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. That at the last time I checked that quote, had maybe 10,000 highlights. When you open another book on the Kindle called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harra also came out around that same time, somewhere in the first half of the two of the 2010s. About 10% of the way into the book he says, and this one I might need to paraphrase a bit, but he says, large groups of strangers can cooperate when they believe in common myths. He's explaining how do these large societies stay stable? How do they not tear each other apart? It's 'cause they all believe in the same story. And that one the last time I checked, had like 30 or 35,000 highlights.
Sally:
How do you find highlights on Kindle? Is this a feature that you can see?
Neil:
When you are reading it on Kindle? You can see that certain passages are underlined. And if you're reading it on like an iPhone app, then you might see it's underlined in a different way and then you click on it and then it'll show you how many people have highlighted that passage.
Sally:
That'd be so interesting to do for your own book, wouldn't it?
Neil:
What's interesting, Sally, is that I didn't realize this until relatively recently. 'cause My book just came out this past year and I was delighted 'cause I haven't sold the kind of copies that Creativity Inc. And Sapiens have sold yet.
Neil:
But yet, well, it's at the beginning, you know, small steps. And I was delighted to find out that my book has been read enough on the Kindle that it's aggregated a bunch of highlights already. And that was really delightful. Like one of them is almost up to a hundred highlights. And sure enough, it's the exact same kind of sentence that these other passages are. And so this becomes quantifiable evidence that a certain kind of sentence has shown up in these very popular works and been actionable on a small level. Like highlighting a passage is empowering them to think, Ooh, I wanna go back to that. And we see this again in ancient quotes by the ancient philosophers. And we see in many of the most popular TED Talks of all time, they have this other kind, this, this kind of sentence as well, I call a silver bullet because in this noisy, noisy world where there's so much content and and information being thrown at us all the time, these particular sentences cut through that noise where the silver bullet was the only thing that could kill the werewolf. These are the only sentences that can really get through to people.
Sally:
Yeah. It's so good. It gave my TEDx so much focus and it's really got me thinking about the silver bullet statements that I already use and how I could lean more into them or tweak them. It's really brilliant. Neil, what's the name of your book?
Neil:
Well, I won't turn down that opportunity to plug. It's called the Most Powerful Sentence of all Time.
Sally:
And,
Neil:
And the subtitle is A Fable about persuasion. I should always get that into
Sally:
Love It. And through your book, do you explain about the silver bullet in a deeper way?
Neil:
Absolutely. We not only explore how it shows up and different examples of it and how we've been seeing it across the last 2,500 years, but it also breaks down the mechanics of it. And it's a fable. So there's some quirky and interesting ways that, that the mechanics of it are explained. So it's not so dry and boring as anything that comes with the word mechanics, frankly.
Sally:
Yeah, absolutely. So speeches that use this silver bullet statement, they're already a cut above the rest. Speech is not including that statement is one mistake you would see. What are some other mistakes that you see speakers make in their speeches?
Neil:
The main problem I see speakers running up against is that they believe, and this is almost every client I've ever helped, hundreds and hundreds of clients, probably over a thousand by now, have all come to me with the exact same belief and a speech written as a reflection of this belief that more information means more value. And so 45 minutes on stage, let's say, and you're, you have a TED Talk coming up, but this is, this is let's say a longer keynote kind of speech. People have 45 minutes to speak. They will then cram as much of their content, their components, their tips, their steps, a a clever anagram that spells out their methodology. They will cram as much of that into their 45 minutes as they can because they believe that the more information they provide, the more likely they're going to get more speaking gigs and get paid more and have people coming up to 'em afterwards and wanting to work with them and buying the book at the back of the room and all of that.
Neil:
But this is not true. This amount of information is the exact opposite of what you want in a 45 minute or a 30 minute or a 15 minute talk. Because in, again, in this noisy information laden world, the worst thing we could do is pump people with more information if they're not ready for it. People don't come to a conference or some other event with a live speaker for information. They go because they want change. And that change is going to be more likely to happen if they believe that they can be a part of it. If they can, if they believe that they can do something with what you've said on stage. But if you overwhelm them with too much stuff, they're gonna believe, oh, this is too much work for me. I'm checking out. And you see it happen physically 'cause they take out their phones because that's where they're gonna get their dopamine from for that 45 minutes.
Sally:
Yeah, it's so true, isn't it? It's not what you want people to know. It's how you want people to feel.
This is a great spot to remind you. It doesn't matter what you say or to who you say it to, if you are not connected to your voice, people can feel it. This is why you need the magnetic voice formula. If you're a Soul Speaker, it's in the portal. If not link is in the show notes.
Sally:
On your website, the first thing you see is how to turn your message into a movement. And I just love that. Tell us more about that. How do we turn our message into a movement?
Neil:
A number of years ago now, this would've been in mid 2021, on the tail end of the pandemic, a woman came to me because she had an area of expertise around trauma and how organizations could rethink their understanding of trauma so as to help create a more functional con like culture for their people. And culture is thrown around among organizations all the time. Now. It's become a buzzword that's so buzzed, it's buzzed out. However, it doesn't mean that the problem still doesn't need to be solved 'cause there's so much toxic workplace stuff going on. The problem she was riding up against is that as much as of a need there was for these organizations to embrace this way of seeing things, people were just tuning her out and dismissing her and had no interest. She, she, of course, started to work with me, and what happened is we found her silver bullet as we've been talking about, and we reframed how her message could be embraced.
Neil:
And this combination of context plus the message meant that it would inform an amazing keynote, which she would then give later that year, and changed everything for her by the way. It would reform how she went about teaching a class that she was already teaching before she met me. And even in just having conversations, she could create the context and then give the message once again that one, two punch, help people to really feel empowered that they could take this message and do something with them, do something with it themselves. And when they see themselves doing something with a message, that's when they want to be a part of it. And if more people are part of it, that's when you have a movement. And so in the years since she has gotten that message in front of thousands and thousands of people who have really gotten into it and made it actionable at various degrees, simply because they were empowered initially.
Sally:
And should we strive for every one of our messages to be turned into a movement?
Neil:
It's an interesting question, Sally, isn't it? I believe that each of us has a north star for our message. There's a larger message that I wish to share with the world, which is interestingly not something I usually talk about. I'll talk, I'll say what it is here. It's a silver bullet, but it's sort of like my CEO silver bullet. It's at the top of the organizational chart. And all my other silver bullets wind up being in service of that one larger idea. And that's the movement I want to create in the world. And the silver bullet, the message is that effective communication values the recipient over the sender.
Neil:
Very simple. If you want to be effective in communicating, you're going to do what you can to make sure the other person's needs are met. But this is the very opposite of what I see a lot happening a lot with demagoguery. When people are using, they're weaponizing their communication, they're, they're using it to evoke fear and to manipulate people for their own gain. And this is the very opposite of what I want. And at the same time, there are plenty of people who don't really know how to serve their audience in a way that's going to lead them to want to be a part of something. And so my larger movement that I'm working on and always committing myself to is turning communication into an act of service. However, there are lots of different specific things that'll fall under that purview. So it's one movement and everything else falls under it.
Sally:
Yeah, so I guess for me, the movement is, is my voice matters.
Neil:
Imagine how many people will be empowered to see their voice as something that matters in the world, and then take active steps to make sure other people hear it.
Sally:
And then a subset of that is, I would love the word voice print to enter into the vernacular. So as people talk about a fingerprint or a footprint, they also talk about other people's voice print their voice print. I really believe language is powerful in creating change, of course. As, as do you. So if people know it as a word, they're more likely to think of the mark their voice leaves when they speak.
Neil:
I once worked with a client who had that impact on the zeitgeist in that he coined a term called Newsjacking.
Sally:
Yeah. And everyone uses that. Yeah. I used to be in PR.
Neil:
Everyone uses that term, and it's in the Oxford English dictionary, crediting him as the person who coined the term, and what a trip that must be to have made a contribution like that. My point in bringing it up, Sally, is that it's absolutely a dream that people have.
Sally:
Yeah.
Neil:
You could get voice print into the Oxford English dictionary.
Sally:
I did try to trademark it, and it was not able to be trademarked because voice print is actually a word. But most of the definitions are around biometric authentication in terms of like a voice print to unlock something not in the way that I'm using it, which is the mark you leave when you speak. So maybe I won't have the be credited for the coining of the term, but hopefully it will be the next meaning goes underneath it.
Neil:
I really like the idea for you, Sally, that you could possibly use the existing schemas around that word, the existing biometric interpretation of it and piggyback onto that perhaps.
Sally:
Yeah. I like it. Neil, is there anything else you'd like to add? You've shared so much value today.
Neil:
I would really like to just emphasize that at the end of the day, our value as a messenger is not based on what we say, but rather what other people do once we're done saying it. And in line with the very spirit of a voice print, I encourage people to really honor the nuance that goes into what they say, because just a slight adjustment could be the difference between whether someone hears us or not.
Sally:
So well said. How can people find you? So share how can they find you and remind us of the name of your book?
Neil:
Again, the name of the book is the Most Powerful Sentence of All Time. And going to my website, Neilcanhelp.com is probably the most direct way to reach out to me. However, you could also follow me on our mutually favorite platform, Tiktok @Neilcanhelp. And that's a good way to hear more of my content and stuff because I post on there regularly.
Sally:
Neil Gordon, thank you so much for joining us on That Voice Podcast.
Neil:
Thank you so much for having me, Sally. This was delightful.