Stop Overcomplicating
What You Know

Transcript from the episode recording, with speaker names added and paragraphs formatted for readability. Automated transcription may contain errors; the audio is the original record.

Brad Hauck 00:14

Welcome to the experts' journey. Most experts think that they need better marketing when what they really need is better translation. After years of experience, it becomes easy to speak in frameworks, technical language, and detailed explanations that make perfect sense to you but leave potential clients confused. The more knowledge you gain, the harder it can become to explain what you do in a way that feels clear, simple, and instantly valuable. In this episode, we're going to look at the expertise track and why knowing too much can quietly hurt your marketing. We'll talk about the gap between what experts want to explain and what audience need to hear, and how we can work with that.

Good morning, Dixie.

Dixie Carlton 00:58

Good morning, Brad. What a fantastic topic to be talking about. I love the concept of the translation and the expertise gap. Yeah.

Brad Hauck 01:08

Yeah, definitely. You get more and more expertise, and we bring in more jargon and all sorts of things to make it more interesting for people. And yet sometimes we actually pull ourselves away from the audience that we're trying to help because of the level that we're presenting at or that we're writing about.

Dixie Carlton 01:27

I completely agree with you. I remember years ago someone saying it's a matter of we get bored with our own content long before anybody else does. And if we are completely honest, we do get so tied up in that translation issue. Like, what does the audience need to hear from me versus what do I want to share? That's brand new and exciting. And like, this is my new bright shiny object. Keep up, people. And in actual fact, that's not what we need to be doing at all.

Brad Hauck 01:56

Exactly, because bright shiny objects are a lot of fun. I agree with you. I'm very much a bower bird when it comes to bright shiny objects, especially when it comes to software. But we often move because of our expertise, we learn very fast in that area because we have a natural affinity with it. So we'll read everything, we'll watch everything, try everything that comes up. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving along at a steady pace. And so the gap between us and them grows very quickly. And I've often found because, for example, I work in tech, my world sits very far above where the majority of people are working.

And the need to bring my knowledge down to their level to help them succeed is really important. So I've got to step back from gee me and become helpful advisor to help people move forward.

Dixie Carlton 02:52

So do you find that because you are a tech specialist, that there is a real dichotomy between what people expect to learn and what you are actually turning up to teach? Or is it more something that you think or maybe even overthink in terms of what you're doing when you're doing the planning to start with?

Brad Hauck 03:11

Yeah, I think there's a combination of things. I have to look at the audience and understand where they're at. That's really important because I think about what it is and what level I want to bring the content in at. So, for example, is it futurism? Am I bringing what you could be doing to the people? Or am I saying, like at my workshop yesterday, this is how you use AI step one. And I work my way through the basics of how to use clawed AI with the people in the room. So I'm looking at is this basics?

Is this futurism? Is this stretching people's brains? What am I trying to achieve? And so different horses for different courses, as they say, I think you've got to realize that. But you do need to do some research, you do need to talk to people to understand what the common level of knowledge and understanding is.

Dixie Carlton 04:04

Yes. And it's finding that balance and even recognizing in yourself that you may or may not be thinking this through effectively. So what happens when you don't? When someone turns up and they think, well, I'm gonna bring the new things in anyway, because surely the world must need this and know this or be at this level by now. How do we curtail our own enthusiasm for what we expect of our audiences?

Brad Hauck 04:37

I think that comes down to actually knowing your audience, really thinking about who you're trying to help. Sometimes you can do things like you can pepper high-level stuff in with low-level stuff. So, for example, I remember one of the first classes I ever taught in my last prack was a 3-4-5, grade three, four, five. Now, you can imagine that's three years of schooling. So you've got to actually teach them at different times and you're teaching them different concepts. So they're all doing math, but they're doing different math concepts. So you start this group and then you get that group going while that group checks, and then you bring the third level in.

Well, the same principle kind of applies when you're teaching people stuff. You can bring in some basic information and then say, but if you're already literally understanding that, what about this? Check out this possibility. So you can take those people that are at a higher level and bring them into the conversation as well. And sometimes, if it's a workshop, for example, you can use those people also as helpers. And there's all sorts of ways to tie that stuff together.

Dixie Carlton 05:45

I wrote a book a few years ago which was called Advertising, Branding and Marketing 101. And it was very clearly this is the beginning, this is the basic level stuff, the jargon, the concepts of target marketing and all that sort of thing. So it was really simplified marketing 101, as was in the title. And I had two people give me reviews saying, Oh, it's a bit basic. It's a bit too basic.

Brad Hauck 06:12

It's always called 101.

Dixie Carlton 06:14

Yeah. And I remember writing back to one of them and saying, but the title says very clearly this is not at the level that you were looking for. But this brings up the whole issue of people's expectations and what you deliver to them, if you get it wrong, they can be quite mean about it. And it doesn't matter how clearly you make it sound in the marketing and even the titles. If you get it wrong and you get bad reviews because you got it wrong, it's very hard to come back from that sometimes. What are your thoughts on that?

Brad Hauck 06:50

I think it comes down to how you title and describe things. So, for example, take your book, you call it 101. To me, that means the first course because I went to university, and in university you have science 101 and math 101. That's your first level courses. But for the rest of the people who didn't go to university, it might mean 101. And so there's a different expectation on how you read it. I assume people think it's level one, but that's that's wrong of me to assume that. I think sometimes in the language we use in the description, these are the most simple ways to grow your marketing.

The basics, if you're just starting out, we the language we use to describe our speech or our book or whatever it is. I think that's where we set that up and we say, no, look, this is introductory or this is foundation or whatever. And a lot of times we write stuff to make it sound amazing to get people in the room to listen to us or to buy our book when they read the back of the book, and we get carried away and forget that we actually have to talk specifically to the audience.

Dixie Carlton 08:00

Yes. I think you've raised a really good point. The 101 concept could easily, which I had never thought about, a 101 concept could easily be misconstrued as a 101 ways. And I think maybe that also highlights the point that not everybody reads the instructions carefully.

Brad Hauck 08:20

No, and I think that's why we've got to be clear. So in the course I ran yesterday, I've clearly stated this is a basic clawed AI course. This is for anyone who hasn't used it before, but and I'll go back and review that sales page now and rewrite it because I want it to be even clearer that it's really basic. Because that's the target audience of that particular course. It's not for people who've used it for years and years. It is for people who really want to understand how to use it and really haven't used it before.

Unidentified speaker 08:52

Right.

Brad Hauck 08:52

And so often when we're working with audiences, we explain things at different levels as well. So we start at a level 10 when the audience is at a level two. And so we need to really think about that. Are we teaching ahead of our audience's understanding? And I know sometimes I'll look at the room and I can see the eyes glaze. Well, okay, pull back. Let's just drop an explanation in there. Can I give a story that will explain that better? I'm watching for those things from my audience because I often want to expose them to that, but I need to do it in a way that it's going to be easy for them to understand.

Dixie Carlton 09:32

Yes, 100%. And I think that highlights the difference between when you are presenting online versus presenting live, it is far easier to read the room because there's the body language, there's the energies, there's all of those things. But if you are doing something where you've got an online audience and that clarity is not there of where you're dropping people off or where you're skipping or where they're skipping past what you're trying to produce, coming back to that whole concept of story and using story to make those facts really sticky, and then taking people from a meandering path more to a direct route to what you're trying to get them to understand at the end.

Also, maybe sometimes it comes down to how much time you have, how much planning you've done, and how many tools you have in your toolkit to be able to say, well, let's simplify this or let's step this up.

Brad Hauck 10:32

Absolutely. Look, complexity feels intelligent to you, but it can cost you a lot of money. People rarely buy what they don't understand quickly. And this is really important that you understand this. They will not take in what they don't understand quickly, and they certainly won't buy a product or a service from you if they don't quickly understand what they're getting and what it'll do for them. So if your positioning, if your information that you're presenting requires too much explanation, then you can assume your audience is not going to take it in.

Dixie Carlton 11:07

I quite agree. I've just written down the concept of complexity intelligence. And I think I might write something further about that because what you've just explained is the problem that we so often come across where we lose sight of what is complex versus what is not. And if we don't have, as you said before, that really good relationship with our clients or our audience, then we don't know what the definition of the complexity intelligence levels are in any one instance. So that leads us now to briefing, finding out feedback, getting the information from the people who have booked you to start with.

Where are you at? And a few weeks ago we talked about planning, and I said someone that I'd recently talked to does four briefing course, and the CEO has to be there if he's going to do a briefing call to deliver a workshop or a keynote. And I remember thinking that was a lot, but when you then start to look at it from this perspective that we're talking about today, that complexity intelligence issue is uncovered very quickly. How far do you go in terms of the questions you ask to get that complexity intelligence aspect covered?

Brad Hauck 12:34

Well, I think I start out with what I want to deliver, and then I start to think, how do I bring that down to, as I always say, readability level six, 12-year-old? I'll often take my bullet points and run them past AI just to say, am I going too complex? How can I put this more simply? Alternatively, I will just rewrite them in simple language, which depending on how much time I've got. So it's very much about a process. You're going to think at your level, that's the way you are. Then you need to think about, okay, I've done this background research.

I know who I'm going to be presenting to or I'm going to be writing for or whatever. And then you say, okay, well, based on that, let's bring this down another level. I haven't seen too many situations where you can't bring it down to a lower level. I don't think you can dumb things down too far unless you are speaking specifically at like a scientific conference where you're supposed to use scientific language and you're presenting a paper or something like that. I think otherwise there's no need to worry about that. I don't think that you can bring it too low.

I think as long as you're using story and you're using great examples, people will enjoy it.

Dixie Carlton 13:51

Yes. What about our own enjoyment as presenters? Because it's all about obviously making sure the audience is engaged in all of that. How do we make it more meaningful and interesting for us to deliver if we have to continually think about bringing down that complexity?

Brad Hauck 14:10

I think it's something that becomes ingrained over time. And then it just becomes part of who you are, how you present. And then the rest of the happiness comes from the actual presenting, the response from the audience, the fact that people say, that was fantastic, I enjoyed that, I learned something. They might write you a review on LinkedIn. But it really comes down to picking where you get your enjoyment from. If you're helping people, which is why we do this as experts in the end, isn't it? And yes, we want to get paid. There's no doubt about that.

Never forget that we need to eat. But if you're helping people and you're getting paid and you're moving forward in your life, and everybody's winning, that that whole win-win situation, I think that's all that's important in the end.

Dixie Carlton 14:58

Yes, I quite agree.

Brad Hauck 15:01

We start out to change people's lives, to move them from A to B. That's the whole goal of being on a stage or writing a book or doing a video, whatever it happens to be, is to move people. So if we need to bring the language and the stories and everything down to a certain level so that it reaches those people and moves them from A to B, then that's what you need to do. Because that's the goal.

Dixie Carlton 15:28

Absolutely brilliantly well put. Let's not lose sight of the goal.

Brad Hauck 15:36

Exactly. So I've made a note here, the curse of knowledge makes you forget what beginners struggle with.

Dixie Carlton 15:44

The gray line, do you want to repeat that?

Brad Hauck 15:47

The curse of knowledge makes you forget what beginners struggle with. It's so true. Obviously, I went to a conference recently, I was speaking about AI. I went to watch some other AI speakers, and I realized that I'm working in the futurism area, they were working in the practical area. And where I thought people's practical skills was vastly different from where they actually were. And it made me realize that I'd forgotten that people were at this level, that people needed to learn at that level. It was a really great reminder for me. And one of the reasons why I started running workshops again.

Because I realized there was a need there. People really needed me to be there, not here.

Dixie Carlton 16:27

Right. So on stage versus in the room doing the work as a workshop is obviously a critical part of the planning around where things land and what people really need to know most. One of the things that people say to me often, well, what do I write about? And it really comes down to what are the most commonly asked questions that you get if you're sitting there talking to someone at a dinner table and outside of your expertise area, if someone's interested in what you have to say, what is it that they most want to know who are not part of your expertise industry?

And that's often a good place to start. Those FAQs are so valuable.

Brad Hauck 17:07

Yeah, you can do a lot of research online by just what are the most common questions about this topic. It's amazing what you'll see if you can run deep research through Reddit and through all of those places. You'll see the questions that people are asking. Google has Google Trends. You go to Google Trends, you type in a topic, it'll show you what the most popular searches are, what the rising searches are about something. You can go to Uber Suggest and other tools like that, and it'll actually give you the questions that people are asking search engines.

So there is actually tools available that you can go and see the popular and then pull out the top five you think will fit with the topic that you cover that. Now you don't have to lay them out as question one, two, three, four, of course. You can rewrite them, but cover the content that's in them.

Dixie Carlton 17:58

I've started using a program a couple of years ago called Answer the Public, which is just dial it in on the internet and pull it up as a website. And that gives you the sort of things that people are asking. And you can narrow it down by country, by location, by it'll give you what additional style of questions that that they're asking, like instead of why or how or what can, what style of thinking people are coming up with in relation to specific topics, and get a trend based on how popular certain styles of questioning is around a topic.

I find that absolutely brilliant for getting to the basics of exactly what we're talking about. What is the most commonly asked question? What are the answers people are most desperately looking for? It doesn't have to be complex.

Brad Hauck 18:46

No. And another place I would suggest people look at is YouTube. YouTube is where everybody goes to learn how to do things nowadays. So if you go to YouTube and you want to learn how to put a pair of set of stairs in, well, it's there. You can watch it. But you can do a how-to stairs and see which videos come up number one. Then you can look to see which one's got the most likes, the most views. See what content's covered in that video and take that and use that as uh an outline of something.

One video is the outline of a whole speech, if you want it to be, or a whole article. So use YouTube because it is the place we ask those how to, why to questions, and you can find some really great content, but it's been voted for by people. The thumbs up on there and the number of subscriptions to a particular person or whatever are indicators of quality in a lot of cases. But you don't have to take the first one, you can look at three or four videos. So remember, there's lots of places you can go to see what people are asking, what level they're thinking, and what they want to actually know by looking at those different tools we've got.

Dixie Carlton 19:58

Now, there are so many ways to get around this dilemma of where the expertise trap or gap sits, right? But one of the critical places where I think we overlook is the fact that we have to know who our avatars are. Who is our target market? What does Bob or Jenny or Sum or Brian look like? What are they identifying your psychometrics, your sorry, your psychographics, your demographics? I think when you start identifying clearly your target demographic, the psychographics where they live, what their problems are, what their biggest challenges are, and really understanding who and what and how they operate, then you have the ability to plan whatever content you're delivering based on that.

And so that again comes back to that very first part of marketing. Who's your target market? Who are you trying to reach? How do you want to affect them and change their lives?

Brad Hauck 20:57

Yeah. Look, your audience is not there just for information. That's why you need to understand them. They're there to get clarity and to move from one place to the other, as we talked about previously. So too many experts, I think, explain process. They all go into process before they talk about outcomes. And it's really important that when you're working with your audience, you understand your audience what they're trying to achieve, and then say to them, if you do this, it will get you this. And this is how we do it, rather than saying, This is what we're going to do, we're going to do this, and then at the end go, and that's so that's how you get here.

Like setting it up wrong sometimes. So, yeah, understanding your audience and then remembering it's not just about the information, it's about what that audience needs to move forward. And I think that whenever you get in front of an audience, they're always buried too. It's okay when you're writing a say an article or you're doing a video online, you can really target in on a specific audience. But if you walk into a room as a speaker, sometimes you have no control over that audience because you speak to everybody generally. So I think that we need to look at the two different audiences as well.

You've got your audience that you're targeting, and then you've got the audience that you're given.

Dixie Carlton 22:14

Yes, that's a really good point, the great distinction.

Brad Hauck 22:19

Yeah, I really like that. So I think being impressive is not the same as being understood. So when we talk about complexity and looking good and saying all the right things and using the right jargon and making yourself sound fantastic, that's fantastic, but it's not as effective in helping your audience as being understood. You don't want the audience walking out going, oh, they're so smart. You want them walking out saying, Oh, that was so good. I know what to do next.

Dixie Carlton 22:50

Yes, absolutely. Being impressive versus being understood. Very clear distinction and a great way to summarize everything we've just been saying. And uh, yeah, I I think we should all have that sit sitting firmly written up on our walls and our post-it notes and remember that regularly.

Brad Hauck 23:09

Exactly. Look, sometimes the biggest communication problem is not a lack of knowledge, it's having so much knowledge that you forget what clarity sounds like to everyone else. The experts who grow fastest are not always the smartest in the room. Absolutely. They're usually the easiest to understand.

Dixie Carlton 23:26

Love it. Well, it's another great conversation. And we've touched on some fantastic highlights and points in there. So just to summarize, there's the curse of knowledge makes you forget what others struggle with and being impressive versus being understood. Those are the mantras I think that we need to remember to bring to everything that we do when we're planning some of our presentations.

Brad Hauck 23:51

Exactly. So look, if this episode has you thinking about writing a book, but you're not sure how to shape your ideas, reach out to Dixie at indiexpertspublishing.com. She can help you turn what's in your head into a clear, compelling book that builds real authority. And if you want to get more out of AI, join my authority multiplier coaching community at bradhauck.com, and I'll help you grow your business with AI.

Dixie Carlton 24:15

Fantastic. And of course, if you love what we do, remember to review and just post a note to say, hey, loved this part of it, because we thrive on the reviews and the feedback. So thank you.

Brad Hauck 24:27

Thanks a lot. Catch you next week.

Dixie Carlton 24:29

Talk soon. Thanks, Brad.