David recognizes that the fear of repeating ourselves in our client work is motivated by the right things: “am I delivering value?”

Links

"Repeating Yourself as an Expert" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

"Questions, Not Answers" 2Bobs episode

Transcript

Blair: David, this topic is timely.

David: Like all of my topics.

Blair: Yes, like some of your topics. It's timely because I just got back from a 3-day trip with 10 family members.

David: This is about you. I knew.

Blair: Yes, of course.

[laughter]

Blair: That's why I'm here. [laughs]

David: You found 10 family members that wanted to be with you on a long weekend.

Blair: Nine, yes.

David: Oh, nine, okay.

Blair: Yes, we had a blast. As I'm reading this post of yours that we're going to discuss today, you are cheating clients unless you're repetitive. I'm reading this post, and just the headline made me think of all the stories I'm telling-- everybody in the family on this trip is younger than me, other than my wife, so everybody's younger than us. I'm doing what a person of my age might do with a younger group of family. I'm telling stories. Every story I'm telling, I'm thinking, "How many times have they heard this story? Why can't I stop myself?"

[laughter]

David: Is it the same story? Do they notice the subtle differences where now I'm the hero in this story? Before, it was an accident. [laughs]

Blair: I'm more and more of a hero as the years go by. Yes, that triggered that for me. Your point is, I'm cheating my family unless I continue to tell them these stories ad nauseam. Is that the point of this? Let's just get right to the chase here.

David: Yes, that is exactly it. Your family members each contacted me. It was so odd. They said, "We just love hearing his stories over and over again."

Blair: Tell the audience this story about your grandparents, a story that you have told to me four or five times.

David: [laughs] My grandpa was really sharp up until he died. He was over 100. He always wanted to be 100. He said, "Okay, I'm going to live to be 100, and then I'm going to die." Sure enough, he did. My grandma, she was not very sharp at the end like he was. Towards the end, they would come visit us every year for a week. They'd pull their travel trailer, and they'd call it the relative route. We called it the sponging route. They'd call it the relative route.

They arrived one of the visits after we'd purchased a new van. Grandma, we were taking them to restaurants or whatever and parks. I don't know, 8, 10 times a day, she would ask me, "Hey, David, how long have you had this van? When did you buy this van?" I'd say, "Six months ago, Grandma." She would just go on and on about how much she liked it and everything. I was just losing my mind. It's like, I cannot answer that question again. I thought, okay, I'm going to switch it up. She asked again, "How long have you had this van, David?" I said, "A half a year, Grandma." She looked at me and grinned, and she said, "You silly man. That is six months." [chuckles]

That's what got me thinking about repeating myself. On top of that, you just think about your experience with clients where you're on a phone call with a client, and it's a great client. They've asked a very legitimate question. You go into the answer, and you catch yourself halfway through and think, "You know what? I was saying the same thing yesterday." Then sometimes I'll joke. It's like, "You should have been on the call I was on yesterday with a different client because they asked the same question." You just realize, "Wow, there's a lot of repeating myself. Is this good? Is this cheating clients to repeat myself, or is this bad?" That's what got me thinking about it. Have you ever had that feeling when you're working with clients?

Blair: Haven't we had this conversation before?

David: Yes.

Blair: All the time, yes.

David: Do you ever feel bad, like, "Am I cheating somebody?"

Blair: Sometimes I find myself getting a little bit short, like I'm talking to a child with whom I have had the same conversation a million times, and we shouldn't have to have this conversation yet again. I don't know if it's discernible to the person I'm speaking to, but sometimes I find myself getting a little short, like, "Come on, we know this." That's called the curse of knowledge. I know something. Once I explain it to you once, I assume that you know it to the same extent that I know it. If it has to come up again, I start to think, "You're a moron." Meanwhile, how much repetition did it take for it to sink in on my end? I think we all suffer with this to a certain extent. The older we get, the more we suffer from it.

David: Yes. Where all the people have been so patient with me over the years, and somehow it seems like a burden to me to be patient with somebody that's never had the privilege of hearing this before, that paid me a lot of money, that's just wrong on my part. It's just natural. It's not evil. It's just a natural reaction. Then, when that hits me, I have an option. I can either be more selfish and just say, "Okay, I got to do something to break this up." Then, instead of figuring out a way to say it even better, I'll try to reinvent things so that I don't have to say the same thing. That's the whole point of this. You're cheating your clients.

If what you are telling one client is the right thing for them to hear, and if there are similarities in your client base, and the next client comes along that needs to hear the same thing, you're cheating them by not telling them that. I'm just trying to surface the fact that tightly positioned experts are going to face this. They are going to repeat themselves, and there are good ways to do it, and there are bad ways to do it.

Blair: What's the good way to do it?

David: The good way to do it is to think about better ways to say the same thing. That would be one way to do it. Another would be how to seed the brain of the person that you're going to talk to so that they can come to that same conclusion without you having to tell them that. You lead them to it by asking better questions instead of just coming right out with the answer, which is easy and efficient. Especially if you're impatient, naturally, that's the way you want to do it, instead of letting the client come to that conclusion by diving really deeply into the specifics of their situation, rather than just a pronouncement that sounds just like what you said last time.

Blair: More of a teacher where you're leading the student on a learning experience. We've talked about this. We've done at least one episode on questions, not answers. We've touched on it in other topics, too. There is this danger of being an expert in anything that you feel like-- and now this is pretty personal to me. I feel like it's my job to have the answers when really it should be to have the questions. There's this danger of seeing yourself as the expert and wanting to prove your expertise constantly by saying the same things over and over again.

Your point here is that the right way to do this is to lean into it instead of delivering that same rote statement that you've delivered dozens of times over the previous years. You would think of the question to pose to the client in this situation that would lead them to the understanding you're trying to deliver in the assertion.

David: Yes, exactly right. Then the context around that is something that you don't run away from. You actually embrace it and say, "Oh, wow, I have been saying something similar multiple times with different clients over the years. What's causing this? At what point does this happen? Or is there any pattern in the firms that experience a situation that calls for this statement?" You lean into it and you try to figure out everything you can about what's unique here. You embrace pattern matching as the very foundation of expertise.

If you're repeating yourself, that is a pattern. Embrace it. Figure out why that's happening. Figure out everything you can about it. Start to articulate that in some of your writings, and you use this as an excuse. Sometimes in my early days of consulting, a client would ask me a question, whatever it was, and I jumped to an answer, partly because I felt like I had to have an answer, which is the wrong approach. Also, I had this inclination, but I realized in myself-- I'm not sure that the client in this case even picked up on it. I realized in myself, I was like, "Well, I don't feel quite as confident about how I answered that question as I would like to. I'm going to start writing down some of those questions that I get repeatedly, and then I'm going to dive deeper into them to make sure that my instincts are correct here."

You use those repeated applications, those repeated questions that are leading to your repetiti