Just Because You're an Expert... Doesn't Make You Interesting

By Dr. Paul Homoly, CSP

In this book, Dr. Paul Homoly shows you how to better relate with the people you serve.

If you're a professional service provider —in financial services, law, healthcare, business or other field—you're aware of a bitter irony: the most highly skilled professionals are often not the most rewarded. Why? Because while most experts are highly skilled at what they do, they often do a poor job in communicating knowledge to clients in a way that is interesting.

By following the unique approach outlined in Just Because You're an Expert... Doesn't Make You Interesting, you will gain your clients' trust, make it easy for them to follow your advice, and compel them to want to refer their friends, family and colleagues to you. The result? A proven way to prosper in your business while better helping those you serve

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9780977628957

Book preview

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Introduction

WHEN FRIENDS HEAR the name of this book, Just Because You’re an Expert . . . Doesn’t Make You Interesting, they laugh.

I feel like a comedian delivering a punch line.

I guess people laugh because, like most wit, the title reveals something they know but wouldn’t normally say.

We’ve all had experiences with experts who weren’t interesting. Unfortunately, there are a lot of dull, smart people out there.

It’s not that they are unable to be more interesting. Most of them just haven’t been given the training or made the choice to invest the time, effort, and resources to do so.

This book is designed to make sure you’re not one of those people. It will provide you with a pragmatic, step-by-step process for becoming a more interesting expert.

I wrote this book because I understand dull, smart people. In fact, I’ve been one.

I’ve also been surrounded by some of the dullest smart people you can image—dentists! I practiced dentistry for twenty years. I loved my work and my patients, but, I’ve got to tell you, it was tough listening to all that tooth talk. I’m not throwing my colleagues under the bus here; it’s just that I can endure only so much time talking about teeth.

Then one day, after I’d been practicing dentistry for twenty years, my eyes crossed.

This is not a joke.

Although my crossed eyes were corrected with surgery, it was impossible for me to continue my profession. I was forced to retire from the practice I’d spent two decades developing.

I didn’t (couldn’t) retire in the economic sense. So I created a new career by teaching others in my profession what I’d learned about being an interesting expert. I wrote three books on the subject and delivered hundreds of public and private training sessions to dentists on how to become more interesting and influential with their patients and staff members.

The results were so positive that other industries came calling.

Part of my dental practice had involved interacting with other healthcare professionals—physicians, pharmacists, researchers, educators, and dental lab techs. On the business side, I’d dealt with financial planners, accountants, bankers, and lawyers.

Guess what? Many of them were dull, smart people too.

So, when colleagues from those professions heard about the results people were getting from my programs, they asked, Would you expand your work to address how we can be more interesting and better influence and serve our clients too?

I agreed.

Here’s a bitter irony that I’ve come to realize from working with a wide variety of professionals: the most highly skilled professionals are often not the most rewarded. I wrote this book to change that.

Many experts don’t achieve the success they deserve. It’s not that they lack competence; they lack connection. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing; it’s that they can’t communicate their expertise and advice in a way that gets through to their clients.

It turns out that most highly educated professionals (which we’ll refer to in this book as experts) were never taught in school how to talk to their patients and clients (which we’ll refer to as novices.)

Too often, experts talk in the highly technical jargon of their trade, which can come across as confusing, frustrating, and forgettable. In other words, dull.

In this book, I will teach you, step by step, how to be an interesting expert. I will teach you how to get across what you want and need to say so your clients and patients are motivated to listen, understand, and act.

Being more interesting will give you an amazing advantage in your career. It will close the gap between what you know and what your novice gets, what you suggest and what your novice chooses to do.

One More Thing . . .

What time is it?

—Reporter

You mean now?

—Yogi Berra,

Baseball legend

I know you’re busy. You may think, I’m already putting in sixty-plus-hour weeks. How can I carve out time to read this book and then study and apply its techniques?

You’re right. You have a lot on your plate.

But what if reading this book and following its advice were to help you take all those things you’re so busy doing and do them in a way that yields greater professional fulfillment, less stress, and more profitability?

I’d bet you’d be glad you did it.

If you’re like the thousands of professionals I’ve coached over the last twenty years, I guarantee there’s a blind spot in your communication style that’s affecting the way you connect with the people you seek to influence.

The methods I present in this book are ones your professors never got close to teaching you in school or in your professional continuing education. Whether you’re a recent graduate from a professional school or a thirty-year veteran of your profession, you will learn from this book.

In the unlikely event that you’re a one-in-a-million communicator with novices, then I’ll bet the farm you have people who work with or for you who aren’t—so this book will benefit you as well.

Reading this book is the kind of work that never seems urgent. The endless daily tasks that compete for your attention tend to obscure its importance. As you’ve already experienced, it’s easy to get consumed by the urgent and never get to the work that is actually important. Don’t let this happen to this work.

Following the advice in this book is like starting a healthy diet. It won’t change your life in one meal, but over time, it will create performance leverage and bring energy to everything you do.

It’s done it for me, and you’ll read how it’s done it for many others.

Now it’s your turn.

Talk This Way

A heavy-set woman goes into a drug store and asks for talcum powder. The bowlegged clerk says, ‘Walk this way,’ and the woman answers, ‘If I could walk that way, I would not need talcum powder!’

—Old Vaudevillian Joke (author unknown)

Walk this way has been a recurrent gag in many movies and television shows, most notably in movies by Mel Brooks. It refers to the double usage of way as both a direction and a manner.

This is a talk this way book; it focuses on the direction and manner of speaking to novices.

I’ll provide the right direction—a kind of a path or map to show you how to structure expert/novice conversations. This method is called the Spectrum of Appeal™, and it will guide you in how to prepare critical conversations/presentations in half the time, with twice the impact. It’s never failed to make the expert/novice communications of my students (private and workshop clients) more interesting and influential.

I’ll help you with the right manner, your personal speaking style. You’ll learn about the Leaders Pyramid™: the process for earning and holding listeners’ attention, making it easier for them to remember you and your advice.

You’ll enjoy StorySelling®—a way to embroider stories into your content. This will create a personal connection that will distinguish you in the minds of your listener(s), making your professional services less vulnerable to second opinions and less price sensitive.

I know you’re not a professional speaker or entertainer. Most experts I know don’t have the DNA, the personality, or the interest to be a public speaker. As experts, we were selected to professional schools/graduate programs and had to meet the academic standards for graduation and licensure through our cognitive abilities, not our dazzling personalities.

However, the truth is you don’t need dazzle to be interesting.

In fact, attempts to change your personality or adopt acting/dazzle skills to become more interesting will only result in unsustainable and inauthentic behaviors. What you as an expert need is a process that, when followed, creates an interesting and influential experience in the mind of the novice.

Experts are excellent at following a process (that’s how they became experts). Show them steps #1, #2, and #3—and include a visual model, along with some training simulations in a safe learning environment—and they’ll manifest the most interesting version of themselves.

So will you.

Start Now

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where she is.

—Comedian Ellen DeGeneres

I know where you’ll end up if you pursue this work every day: you’ll be a more interesting expert.

I’ve written tight chapters and given real-life examples from various professions so you can see your circumstances in this book. There are lots of action items so that you’ll know what to do.

In addition, you’ll find that what you’ll learn about becoming an interesting expert will improve all of your relationships with family, friends, ex-spouses (well, maybe not that one).

This is important work, and it’s fun and a breeze to learn.

You’re the expert . . . now’s the time.

So, are you ready? Turn the page, and let’s start.

Chapter 1

Just Because You’re

an Expert . . . Doesn’t Make

You Interesting

Remember, you’re more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is.

—Andy Rooney,

Journalist

IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO:

Today is the annual fundraising luncheon for the Easter Seals House in Charlotte, North Carolina. Easter Seals House is a school for children with irreversible and devastating birth defects. These are children in wheelchairs to whom many people only give a passing glance.

You’re seated elbow to elbow in a crowded banquet room with more than 400 guests—all A-list contributors to charitable organizations.

As the servers remove the desert plates, your tablemate tells you that although several speakers have already addressed the group, it’s the next speaker who always has the greatest impact. You turn your chair toward the stage and look forward to hearing the next presentation.

The emcee begins his introduction:

Ladies and gentleman, each year the Easter Seals’ committee selects a mother or father of one of our students to give a parent’s testimony. It is our belief that no one is better able to relate the importance and impact our school has on our children and our community than one of our parents.

This year, I have the privilege of introducing Mr. Richard Worrell, our committee chairman and proud father of Richard Jr., one of our special needs children. He and his wife, Alana, came to us over two years ago and became an important addition to the leadership of the Easter Seals School.

Please help me welcome Richard Worrell!

If you were Richard Worrell, how would you prepare for this talk? Would you write it out several days or weeks in advance and practice it looking into a mirror? Would you prepare a fancy PowerPoint®presentation? Or would you simply stand up and speak from the heart, without notes?

How would you motivate people to really hear what you think and feel so they’re inspired to listen and take action?

The truth is that every time we communicate, we are all Richard. What we say and how we say it determines whether or not people will choose to listen to us. Just because we care about something and think it’s important that doesn’t mean other people will care about it and act on our advice.

How do we go about inspiring people to follow up on our advice and act on our recommendations?

If you’ve asked yourself this question, then this book is for you.

Making Experts Interesting

Let’s give ’em something to talk about.

—Bonnie Raitt, Singer-songwriter

For the past twenty years, I’ve specialized in making experts more interesting and influential. Specifically, I focus on improving the expert/ novice conversation.

By expert, I mean highly educated professionals such as physicians, attorneys, financial planners, professors, architects, and psychologists.

By novice, I mean any individual seeking advice, treatment, or guidance from an expert or a group being influenced by an expert.

Expert/novice conversations might include a stockbroker talking to a client, a surgeon talking to a patient, a builder talking to a homeowner, a CEO talking to his or her team, a prosecutor talking to a jury, a keynoter talking to an audience, a professor talking to his students . . . you get the idea.

The step-by-step process presented in this book is based on thousands of hours I have spent helping experts in many fields become more interesting and influential talkers—which subsequently helped them become more effective and prosperous leaders.

As mentioned in the introduction, many highly educated professionals become frustrated because they’re not able to get through to their novices. Despite their impressive inventory of skills, knowledge, and experience, their clients and patients often tune out and ignore their advice.

My mission is to change that.

Experts typically spend eight to twelve years in universities, devoting thousands of hours (and dollars) to studying, researching, testing, and interning to prepare for their careers. Yet, after investing all that sweat equity, I’ve witnessed many experts fall into the following situations:

• Run up huge personal debts establishing practices that don’t flourish.

• Be unable to pay back their parents, who have exhausted their life savings to pay for their child’s higher education.

• Suffer health challenges as cumulative stress takes its toll on their minds and bodies.

• Watch their marriages and family relationships crash as a result of the long hours necessary to make ends meet in their demanding, high-overhead professions.

• Retreat from the profession they chose when they realize their dreams aren’t coming true.

• Witness all they’ve worked for and sweated for going up in smoke.

Why do I care so deeply about this?

As I mentioned in the introduction, I was once that person, that professional, whose practice went up in smoke. My insurance company deemed my vision disability a pre-existing condition, so I was left without an income or career. I was forced to sell my professional building and practice and netted just enough to pay off my debts. It was a hard way to learn the truth of the adage, Money is just slightly less important than oxygen.

Those circumstances left me wondering, What experiences from the past twenty years have prepared and positioned me for my next twenty years so I can make a good living and have a meaningful life?

After a great deal of introspection and self-analysis, and after asking colleagues for their input, I realized I’d learned how to successfully connect with people.

Practicing implant dentistry—especially early on, when that type of surgery and treatment was in its infancy—forced me to learn how to influence patients who had severe dental health breakdowns. I’d learned how to talk with them, not at them, so they chose to act on my advice.

My ability to communicate and connect resulted in patients opting for treatment in spite of the fact that they:

• Had little initial knowledge of the complexity of their dental conditions and the necessary procedures to correct them.

• Felt brittle fear about the surgery and, at that time in the fairly new dental implant industry, the surgery’s lengthy and sometimes painful post-operative side effects.

• Owned little or no insurance coverage for procedures costing $10,000 and up.

• Had no guarantees of outcomes.

To adequately address my patients’ fears and concerns, I had to develop a more effective set of communication skills—skills that enabled me to have a two-way relationship as opposed to delivering one-way advice.

As an expert who cared about my patients, I came to understand that it was my responsibility to connect with them. If my patients didn’t understand what I was saying, and if they weren’t motivated to follow my advice, then I wasn’t serving them.

Analyzing these experiences and then comparing them to those in other professions led me to discover that the necessary communication techniques, technical expertise, teamwork issues, and relationship challenges required to build and sustain a profitable dental implant practice rival any other professional services offering.

Later, I successfully applied and adapted what I learned about leading and influencing patients to other professional domains—financial services, law, healthcare, leadership, management, manufacturing, high technology, sales, and marketing. In each of these fields, I found that professionals fail to thrive not from incompetence but from not connecting with those they serve.

I have never met a professional who told me his or her formal education prepared him or her to successfully communicate. Furthermore, as a professional working with thousands of other professionals, I’ve never found a body of information delving deep into the mechanics and processes of how experts can effectively communicate their expertise to their clients, patients, and all those they seek to serve and influence.

Those of us attracted to the professions—sciences, healthcare, financial services, engineering, etc.—are not accepted into those respective, specialized schools based on our verbal skills. Nor are we recognized or rewarded for that skill set during the time of our education. Our grades, eventual graduation, and licensure are all built on our analytical and cognitive abilities. However, as we emerge from the cocoon of our academic silos, our verbal and people dexterities create the opportunities to apply our complex expertise.

Although I no longer practice dentistry and dental surgery, my practice now is helping others redeem all the work and sweat they’ve plowed into their profession so that they may reap the rewards and freedom they have earned and deserve.

This work will provide the missing link between knowing your profession and successfully practicing it.

While teaching, coaching, and counseling, I’ve achieved the highest-earned designation in professional speaking: CSP—Certified Speaking Professional. Coming after I had logged thousands of hours in front of audiences, this certification includes my experiences inside boardrooms, facilitating workshops, creating customized, train-the-trainer programs, and mentoring hundreds of professionals.

This book offers you the best of what I’ve learned to help make you, the professional expert, more interesting, influential, and fulfilled.

The Knowledge Gap

If you stick to what you know; you sell yourself short.

—Carrie Underwood, Singer

There’s often a knowledge gap between what we as experts know and what our novices need to know to act on our recommendations. Our goal is to learn how to communicate so we can close that knowledge gap.

The belief espoused in dentistry is that the best way to close the knowledge gap (and gain agreement, or a sale) is to educate each patient about the details of his or her needed procedures. This process is called raising the patient’s dental IQ. It involves explaining to a patient what his or her conditions are and then explaining the benefits, risks, and alternatives of that patient’s treatment options.

My team and I got really good at raising our patients’ dental IQs. We poured a ton of time and money into this process. Initially, we were successful, but after a few years, our practice and profits stalled. We reached productive capacity. The harder we pushed our practice to grow, the harder it pushed back. We remained stalled for a few years, but eventually, we figured out a better approach, which ignited a growth spurt that endured for a decade, until I retired.

This better approach to raising our patients’ IQs and closing their knowledge gap emerged when I realized I was trying to educate my patients the same way my professors had educated me. My team and I discovered—the hard way—that this professorial style of educating was not only time-consuming and confusing but also the single biggest contributor to the complexity that was stalling our patients’ choice to act and our profitability!

Novices who experience confusion and complexity say no. We came up with a better way to communicate that motivated them to say yes.

The Accidental Education

Are you doing what you’re doing today because you want to, or because it’s what you were doing yesterday?

—Dr. Phil McGraw, Psychologist

Are you an innocent victim of an accidental education?

My professors in dental school had encyclopedic knowledge of medicine and dentistry, were masters of their specialties, and did their best to teach the techniques of our profession. However, their communication style was traditional in that it was linear and left-brained. They delivered content in a dry, one-way lecture format. It was our responsibility as students to take notes as fast as possible and then spend hours afterward reviewing the material so we truly got it.

My gross anatomy instructor during my freshman year in dental school was a nightmare. Teaching how to dissect human cadavers is a daunting task, but he made it worse than it had to be. He’d stroll into the cadaver room wearing some nasty, formaldehyde-stained lab coat. Within minutes, he’d be elbow deep in an abdominal space, shouting out the scientific names of major nerves, arteries, veins, organs, and muscular attachments in English and their Latin derivatives.

This professor was most certainly an expert, but his rapid-fire, highly technical language was difficult to grasp. It took enormous concentration to keep up with him. Many times we simply couldn’t and had to spend hours outside class studying the material to try to truly learn it.

My other professors weren’t as bad, but they also used a content-centered style of educating. It rubbed off on me and most everyone else in their classes.

Consequently, while we consciously learned the art, science, and business of dentistry, we unconsciously learned that (a) the way to educate people is to lecture using the language of our profession, and (b) the burden of learning is on the student.

As a result, although I received an intentional education in my chosen career, I also received an accidental education in my chosen communication.

The accidental education is like acquiring a southern accent. If you grow up in the south, you don’t intentionally learn a southern accent; you adopt it because it’s all around you. It is what’s being modeled, so it becomes your norm.

Think about it: most lawyers, accountants, financial planners, business leaders, engineers, physicians, and architects have absorbed and automatically integrated their professors’ and professions’ communication styles into their own personal styles. This accidental education will continue unless someone brings the consequences of it to their attention and shows them a better way.

Please note that you can still use the linear, data-rich communication you used throughout your higher education to explain complex processes to your fellow professionals. In fact, if you attend medical conventions or bar association meetings, you’ll quickly see that this content-heavy approach with its metrics, bar charts, and PowerPoint® slides is reinforced, rewarded, and still the norm.

However, when you interact with a novice (the cardiologist with a patient, the loan officer with a borrower, the architect and a homeowner), a left-brained, information-only style can come across as intimidating and overwhelming.

Data-rich, content-only messages usually will not influence novices to proceed in a manner in line with your intentions. Even though your advice may be well founded, logical, and true, novices