Coaching practices for When I Talk About What I Do I Just Rattle Off the Tasks and the Features and People's Eyes Glaze Over Including Mine Because I'm Leading with What it is and Never with Why Any of it Actually Matters
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For When I Talk About What I Do I Just Rattle Off the Tasks and the Features and People's Eyes Glaze Over Including Mine Because I'm Leading with What it is and Never with Why Any of it Actually Matters, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- When I talk about what I do I just rattle off the tasks and the features, and people’s eyes glaze over
- I’ve got an announcement to make and I’m about to do what I always do
- Someone asks "so what are you looking for?" and I ramble out something vague and apologetic
- I open by laying out my framework and definitions up front, and I can watch people’s eyes glaze before I’ve even gotten anywhere
- Every single one-on-one we only ever talk about this week’s deliverables, and we never once zoom out to where they’re headed
Practices that may help
- Start with why (the Golden Circle)
Lead with the purpose behind what you do, not the features of what you do.
Find Your Why, Made Practical - Communicate inside out: Why → How → What
Lead with the belief, then the approach, then the specifics — the reverse of the typical pitch order.
Start With Why: Leading Through Purpose - Practise your story before you need it
Have a clear, genuine two-minute narrative about who you are and where you’re headed.
Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network - Open with a concrete story, not with your framework
Lead with a specific, sensory narrative before introducing any abstraction.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Spend real time on growth, not just tasks
Regularly leave the weeds and talk about career, skills, and where they’re headed.
Effective One-on-Ones, Made Practical - Third-party explanation test
Explain the concept to a person who knows nothing about it and let their questions expose your gaps.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth: You Know Less Than You Think - Lead with the answer, not the build-up
State your conclusion or recommendation first, then provide the supporting evidence.
The Minto Pyramid Principle - Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Articulate your personal "Why" as a leader
A leader who cannot state their own purpose clearly cannot communicate it to anyone else.
Start With Why: Leading Through Purpose - Close with a specific call to action, not a summary
A story landing on "so we should all…" is more powerful than a bullet-point recap.
Storytelling for Persuasion, Made Practical
Related concerns
- When Issue Tree Analysis Communicate The Tree As A Pyramid
Once the analysis is done, restructure your findings into a top-down recommendation, not a bottom-up summary of the tree.
Translate the issue tree into a Pyramid Principle communication
- When Start With Why Leadership Inside Out Communication
Lead with the belief, then the approach, then the specifics — the reverse of the typical pitch order.
Communicate inside out: Why → How → What
- When The Curse Of Knowledge Ask What They Already Know
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
- When The Minto Pyramid Principle Lead With The Answer
State your conclusion or recommendation first, then provide the supporting evidence.
Lead with the answer, not the build-up
- Articulate Your Why Leadership
A leader who cannot state their own purpose clearly cannot communicate it to anyone else.
Articulate your personal "Why" as a leader
- Find Your Why When Starting Out
Simon Sinek’s method says people are moved by why you do something before what or how — so the work is to articulate the purpose, cause, or belief that drives you, captured in a single Why statement. The Golden Circle and the Why-statement format are practitioner frameworks: useful and intuitive, but largely anecdotal in their specifics, even though purpose itself does correlate with motivation in research.
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