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You can be the smartest person in the room and still sound dumb and lose the room entirely because of the way you speak. And I should know because I have had it happen to me too. So today I am breaking down the speaking patterns that quietly sabotage us, especially high achievers, from founders and CEOs to everyday humans. Just tired of not getting heard. And once you know these, you'll start noticing them everywhere. I'm Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal podcast. This is how you get attention like a CEO. All right, let's go to trap number one, excessive hedging. People ignore everything you say before the word. But did you know that? So if you say I could be totally off here, but and then you drop a perfectly solid point, neuroscience finds you're going to get ignored. And this is actually, there's a word for this. It's called linguistic hedging, and it's killing your competency score. So every single human, immediately, when we meet another one, gets graded on two things, mainly warmth and competency. If you want to be listened to, you better be competent, even above being warm in the world of business. So the research on linguistic hedging shows that excessive qualifiers reduce perceived competence and authority, especially in high status environments. To say that in English, if you use but I don't know, maybe could be, I'm not sure, prepared to be pushed around like a rag doll even when the content quality of what you say is unchanged. So you could be saying really smart things, but you're going to be tossed. There's this classic persuasion finding where speakers who presented arguments confidently were rated as more credible. Okay, that kind of makes sense. Even when their arguments were identical to more hesitant versions. But a really scary study, they did a follow on study that showed people who argued more confidently but were wrong were rated even more credible than those who argued not confidently but were right. So confidence is actually a heuristic. People don't consciously score your logic, they score your cert. So why do smart people do this then? Why do we hedge? Because you're aware of the complexity. You know, you and I both know reality is kind of probabilistic and you know, so we hedge. You don't want to sound like some sort of sycophant out there saying, everyone should do this. You always do this. This never works, because that's not realistic. But the problem, do you want to win or do you want to be right? And now here's some important nuance. Hedging isn't always bad, but it largely is. I mean, there's something called strategic hedging, which sign signals, hey, I'm intellectually honest, but most hedging you're doing is insecurity hedging, which signals, I'm scared of being judged. You know, let's be honest. What are we usually doing? We're probably more scared of being judged than really strategically thinking about how to hedge. So let me show you the difference between the two. Let's say. I say I think we should move forward with point A. However, we have to take into account that there is a 30% failure rate. If we do that, that could be an issue, as opposed to, I want to move forward with point A. But, you know, there's always a chance that it's not going to work. And, I mean, I can't guarantee it 100%. Which one sounds more serious? Obviously, the first one I gave numbers, I stated things as opposed to questioning things. So here's the test. Are you adding nuance for clarity, or are you padding your statement to avoid social risk? Okay, so how do we fix this? How do we make you sound smart and people pay attention to you? Instead of saying, I might be wrong, but I think we should cut this feature, I want you to say, based on the data we have, cutting this feature is the right move. And if you want to be even better, say what the data is. Based on the data we have, we believe with the 70% probability, this is the right move. Give numbers and specifics. So this is the same thought, but just a slightly different posture. I want you to avoid excessive hedging because it's making people stop paying attention to you. Steve Jobs was famous for being the opposite of this. He'd have one sentence that tells you what to think. I call it his Twitter length headline. So he'd have one for the whole talk or product. So maybe, like, today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. This is the world's thinnest notebook. An entire library of songs in your pocket. Right? Everything else was proof of that. One line, one idea repeated, no hedging. The second trap is over. Explaining. Smart people love clarity and they hate being misunderstood. So they explain, then they clarify, then they get an example, then they restate the example. Then they summarize the summary. Yikes. What happens? You signal one of two things. Your audience is either slow or you think your idea can't stand on its own. And neither is going to help your credibility. There's nothing more infuriating to a competent person than having somebody over explain an idea they already got on the first sentence. So if you really want to piss off somebody with add, OCD and high competence, then explain yourself. A lot. I hate to say it, this isn't PC, but ladies, we do this more than men and we have to work on it if we want to be taken seriously. There's actual real research in cognitive psychology that has identified something called processing fluency. So when something is easy to understand, people judge it as more truthful and more intelligent. So ironically, over explaining actually reduces your fluency. It makes simple things feel heavy. And you've seen this, like someone explains a concept for five minutes and you think, what is this guy talking about? Like, the idea could be good, but the delivery, well, that makes everything else get tossed out the window. So what's the fix? I want you to deliver the core idea concisely. Pause. Let silence do the work. If someone wants more depth, they'll ask. Authority ends up trusting the listener. So let me give you an example. Two explanations. Low fluency. Our vertically integrated infrastructure leverages synergistic distribution pathways to optimize cross sector capital capital allocation. Don't we all know somebody who talks like that? By the way, that's low fluency. High fluency. We buy boring businesses that make money. Which one sounds smarter? Actually, the second one. Which one feels more trustworthy? Number two, which one gets remembered? Sure as hell. Number two. Because smart people take complex things and make it simple. And it's not about this cognitive load or using a bunch of vowels. Another fascinating study, if. If you look at stocks with easy names, researchers found that companies with the easiest to pronounce names, like car, outperformed those with hard to pronounce names, like rdo. Naming actually matters. And in marketing, this is really true. This is why Apple ads work so well. Think about them. Simple background, minimal text. One product, clear headline. What do they do that reduces your cognitive load? You don't have to think so hard, your brain just goes. That makes sense and it must be premium. And it makes, you know, Processing fluency basically makes simple look smart. And there's some dangerous sides to this. Like it can make bad ideas look good. That's why scams use simple language and conspiracy theories spread wildly. It's why charismatic leaders will win. We all know one, right? You know one right now who is not as smart as you, not as good as you, but often wins because they're smoother. And so how do you use this ethically if you want to sound more intelligent? We want shorter sentences. We want concrete nouns, no jargon, white space. Speak slower. Remove filter words. This is one of those ideas that quietly runs the world. So keep it stupid, simple. Trap 3 Talking Too Fast when it matters. Ever seen someone's pitch get higher? Their words speed up, their breath shortens. Why? Their nervous system is firing. When we're anxious, the sympathetic nervous system, it activates. That's like your heart rate rises, breathing shifts, speech accelerates. Listeners unconsciously interpret that speed as uncertainty. Even if actually you know what the fuck you're talking about and you just talk fast like I do. So studies on vocal perception show that slower, lower paced speech is actually associated with higher status and greater credibility. Now you got to be careful here because when you're talking to your boss, don't try to be profound. You want to make sure you are tied to the right timing. But when you rush your most important points, you subconsciously signal, I need to get through this before you reject it. What's the fix? When you reach your most important sentence, slow down by 20%. Add micro pauses. Breathe before the key line. For example, instead of saying, so what I'm saying is we should pivot the whole strategy because the data is clearly showing diminishing returns. Try. I think we should pivot. The data is showing diminishing returns. You can make everything fast up until then, but when you've got your plane to land, land it. I want you to remember the three S's, Shorter, slower, stronger. They use this on us in advertising. Like, listen to the speed of this part of the Apple speech. Think different. Here's to the crazy ones.