Episode 57: The Engine Dial | Elevated Communicator Series, Part 6

Continuing the Elevated Communicator Series, Sam moves from Movement into the fourth pillar: Momentum. He introduces The Engine Dial — a three-zone framework that helps leaders move beyond flat, factual delivery and into communication that actually moves people to action.

The Engine Dial has three zones. Inform is where most people live — delivering facts, data, updates. It's necessary but insufficient. Inspire is where you bring stories, pauses, and emotional connection. Ignite is the highest gear — conviction, urgency, the moment where you shift from getting people to feel something to getting them to do something.

Key Takeaways:

• Most leaders are stuck in "Inform" mode — delivering facts without connection.
• The Engine Dial has three zones: Inform, Inspire, Ignite — and the best communicators shift between them intentionally.
• When people aren't responding, the answer isn't to say it louder. It's to shift zones and reframe the message around their world.

Take the free Competence-Communication Audit at samuellinton.com to discover where you stand and get a personalized roadmap.

Take the confidence audit here ==> samuellinton.com/audit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

He came into the first session of one of our programs. And right off the bat, I could tell that this was a man who had confidence. He had a lot of confidence. And it was refreshing because most of the folks who come into our programs, a lot of them, I should say, they don't feel particularly confident with regard to how they speak. This guy did. So while I was waiting to begin, I kind of pulled him aside and I said, You seem like you're pretty good about what we're going to do here. And I was going to do some talks with them, workshop some talks, get them in front of the room. And he said, Yeah, I feel great. He goes, I didn't want to tell anyone because I'm embarrassed, but I'm actually a pastor. I said, Oh, really? He said, Yeah. And I've I've been speaking for quite a long time. I'm I'm really good at it. I'm comfortable in front of the room. No problem whatsoever. I said, Great. That's awesome. I hadn't heard him speak. Now, he didn't know that I was a pastor. And at that point, I'd been a pastor for like 17 years. And this guy looked to be about 20 years old. So I imagine he was still in diapers when I was doing this. So I just didn't tell him about that. I just let him go and I told him that's going to be great. So the time came for him to do his first talk. And I had high hopes because I'm like, dude's a preacher. We're we're in the we're the same. And he got up and he spoke and he started to preach. And it was well, I just don't have any other way to say it. He was less interested in his topic than just about any church member I have ever dealt with. He was less interested than the non-churchgoing person would ever be about church stuff. So as a preacher, you know, of course, I stopped him and I said, Well, tell me what excites you about this. He was talking about Jesus. And I was like, Well, tell me about what you like about this. He's like, Well, Jesus is, you know, he gives us eternal life. I'm like, oh, cool. I said, well, why don't you say that like he gives us eternal life? And he looks at his group, the group, and he goes, Jesus gives us eternal life. I said, okay, can you say that as if you actually cared? And he's like, what do you mean? And I said, well, what do you mean? What do I mean? I said, you're talking essentially about the most important message ever spoken, that Jesus gives you eternal life. He's like, Yeah, it is the most important message. I said, Okay, you and I are on the same page. I said, now tell it like it's important. And he looked at me, and I'll never forget this. He was like, well, it speaks for itself. I don't need to make it any better because it's already the best. And he's like, you might not know this because all you do is deal with business. But I'm a pastor. And I do this for a living. And I looked at him and I said, You might not know this because you didn't read my bio, but I'm a pastor. And I've been a pastor almost as long as you have been alive. And let me tell you something. I've preached to thousands of people. And sometimes they need to be convinced that the message that you have is the most important message that they will ever hear. And I will tell you from that moment, he looked at me and he got white as a sheet. He had no idea that I was in ministry. I didn't do this to shame him. But what I did was to call attention to something that happens to just about every single leader, regardless of whether you're a nonprofit leader like this gentleman, or whether you're a business leader, an executive, or a CEO. And that is the danger of falling into what I call the monotone trap. It's the trap where you are so good at knowing your material, you are so good at understanding the message. And you are so confident because you have been in front of people so many times that to question your ability as a speaker would be crazy.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Because you know your stuff. One thing you're missing. You are missing momentum.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

And that is the next pillar that we're going to examine on the elevated communicator framework. I told you before we've been working through the framework. We spent two weeks on last uh on the last pillar, which was movement. We talked about body language. We talked about how important you the way you speak, especially with regard to your body and your hands and even pacing back and forth. And we kind of took a little bit of a detour and we talked about pacing from the standpoint of fast and slow. And we examined that last week. And of course, the first week we talked about mindset, then we talked about message. Well, now we're going to talk about momentum. We're actually on to the fourth pillar, momentum. And that is beyond body language, this is when you are actually speaking as if you care. Because here is a promise from a man who has attended hundreds, if not thousands, of meetings and audited hundreds, if not thousands, of presentations. The people you are speaking to about your subject are hardly ever going to be more enthusiastic about your subject than you. You might say, well, no, they're really passionate, and they're, it's so important what I'm saying, and it's the company's bottom line, and it's everything that we've been working on, and they're they're not going to surpass your level of passion. It's like when I tell parents, your children are scarcely going to surpass the level of discipline that you have in your life. You can't expect your children to be more radically disciplined than you. Now, you might come from a home where your parents have given you no discipline whatsoever. And I don't mean necessarily discipline like spanking. I'm talking about discipline in terms of doing things they don't want to do, in terms of being responsible, in terms of managing things. Your children hardly surpass that. So you have to come to the level where you get them to meet you and you try to push them over the edge. That's what you have to do with your audience. Your audience, they're not children, but it is very likely that if you are running a meeting, that your audience is going to care less about what you're saying than you do. And if you're like, well, I don't really care about what I'm saying. Well, we have a problem, Houston. And that problem is, if you don't care, how in the heck are they gonna care? Sorry, we had a bit of technical difficulties there in terms of our actual um recording. So I had to move to a brand new location. So we're coming back, and we are coming to this place that we just discussed, which is what do we do with that monotone trap that we all fall into? And one of the things you have to realize is there's a framework that I teach with my clients. And it's a framework that I tried to help that pastor to get, but it's it's a little bit, it's gonna require your buy-in. Let me put it that way. It's gonna require your buy-in. And here's the buy-in that you have to give me. You have to believe that just because your message is important, doesn't mean that it's landing. I don't know of anyone who is speaking and thinking that what they're saying doesn't matter, that it's not important, who cares? Most people don't think that way. Most people actually believe that the reason why they're speaking, that the that the fact that they are speaking is important. So they think that they're valuable as communicators. And you should. You should. But the problem is the message is not going to do the heavy lifting for you. Sure, the message is gonna help you to keep you grounded. But more important a lot of times in connection than the message is the nature of the way that you're communicating. So the framework I use is called an engine dial. Picture uh a dial that's got three settings, all right? So circular dial, three settings, like a gauge that you might see in a vehicle. Here is the three different levels that you want to go back and forth from. There are three. First is inform, that's the first level, all the way to the left, the bottom left. Then the middle is gonna be inspire, and the final is ignite. We're gonna talk about them. Inform, inspire, and ignite. And as a leader, you have to master these because nobody else is gonna care about your stuff the way that you care about your stuff. So let's look at this in order. First, we have inform. Inform is going to be your baseline. This is almost what we spoke about last time when we talked about the way that you speak in terms of your speed. This is going to be where home base is. It's not necessarily going to be up or down, it's going to be neutral. And unfortunately, when we believe our message is very important, many of us will get stuck in this inform, monotone discussion. You'll have a little bit of variance in pacing, you'll have an up and down tone. You're going to keep things going. Case in point. Uh, you know, a client that I was working with one time told me about how what she was responsible for was communicating to people on her team to turn in their timesheets. She was working in a field where they had to turn in physical timesheets. Yes, these still exist. She had a lot of laborers that worked for them, and they had to turn in physical time clocks, timesheets into a time clock system on the floor that she managed. And I told her, how do I asked her, I said, how do you set up this discussion? Like, how do you get people to do what you ask them to do? She goes, I just tell them. Timesheet due Thursday noon. I said, and what happens? She goes, always I find that some of the people just don't complete their timesheets on time. They're late, they're emailing me, telling me that they didn't get a chance to get them in. They are uh doing them with a lot of mistakes, and I have to go back in course correct, and it's annoying, and I hate it. I said, Well, how are you saying it? And she said, Well, what do you mean? I said, How are you saying to turn the timesheets in? What are you, what words are you using, or how are you framing this up? She said, I just say as timesheets are due Thursday at noon. So I coached her for a while. We went back and forth, and I told her that she had one mode that she was into. She's just informing. And when you are stuck in informing, you become Charlie Brown's teacher. Well, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. That's all you hear. And nobody cares. I said, you have to make them care. So I had her reframe it and say, hey, if you want to get paid this week, the best way to do that is by turning your timesheet in at noon. Guess what happened? Just her going from inform and leaving that and focusing on them for a moment, it changed everything. And even though the information didn't change, the way that she framed it changed. And that's the way you have to look at this. Is you have to go from flat and factual and steady, and you have to think about moving from that area. The facts are important. Informing is important. You're the leader, you're the manager of that department, you're the overseer of the project. Yes, it is important. And the message is important, but it's not going to get them to pay attention. It's not going to get them to believe that you believe what they're saying. You see, with the young minister that I was dealing with in my earlier example when I opened up, he believed in his message. But the problem is, I didn't believe that he believed it because he wasn't showing me that he did. He was informing me about the message and letting the message take care of itself. The message won't. We have to connect it. We have to connect the dots. We have to be the people who are willing to behave in a way that shows our audience that what we're saying actually is worth their time. Or else it's not. Then let's just make this meeting an email, give them the rest of their day, and shoo them off. Otherwise, you need to move up in the engine dial to the next level, which is inspire. Oh, I love this one. Inspire. This is you going from informing to really putting passion. You're using things like pauses. You're talking about how your pace, you're talking about your material and your pace changes. And on top of that, this is where you might raise the volume a little bit. You might bring it up and try to get people to get excited. This is where you say, hey, if you don't turn your timesheets in, guess who's not getting paid? Not me. I turn my timesheet in at noon. What about you? So this is where you start to actually inspire action. This is a level that is next level. This is where you start to go from, if you'll kind of permit me to meander on this a little bit, this is where you actually stop to pause on a point and start to consider that there are people on the other side of your words. And those people need to be able to take action on what it is that you're doing. This is where you modulate your tone. Now, if I'm working with clients individually, I will try to get them to do this based on what I see in them. So I can't tell you, oh, you should always talk loud. I've talked to people that are in monotone because they're constantly loud, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're constantly screaming, and that becomes monotone too. It's the variance where the action is. Just like with pacing, we talked about that last week. It's how you're willing to go really loud for a moment, then get really soft to have them pull you in so that you can get the point. When you're doing that, you're inspiring, you're actually believing in what it is that you're saying and not just doing it because, well, what else am I going to do? Right. This is also where you want to use stories. I mean, my company is called Glint Storytelling Group because stories are your most powerful arsenal, and it is. And I've told you before, I've I have a hundred stories about stories, but I could always give you another one. And there was one story in particular where a leader stood up and talked about how they had made a massive mistake. And they went from giving information to talking about how they had experienced at their job. I think they were a sales leader, a sales executive, and they were training new salespeople. They were trying to get them to do the process and update Salesforce and all the things. And as they spoke, they were going from inform, do this, do this, fill this form up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fill this up, fill this up. Well, they stopped and they said, Look, all this is so overwhelming. You just want to make the sale. You just want to get that commission check. You just want to get to the other side. And you know what? When I was in your shoes, I thought the same exact way. And what I saw as the trainer in that moment is they went from somebody that was informing to somebody who was encouraging, somebody who was telling to somebody who was guiding. And they took ownership of their communication and they became a leader through communication. Big difference. Really big difference. This is not about loudness or more quiet. It's about intentionality. It's about you being willing to actually think through that there are other people on the other side of your words who would benefit from you, focusing on them and getting them to think the way that you think. So that is the second one. That's going to be your inspire. And this is where you're going to tell the stories. You're going to really pause. You're going to take your time with pacing. You're going to make sure that you're going back and forth, modulating all the things that we would work with. You know, if I was doing a workshop with you, I would get you to do all these things and film you so you could see what you look like. You could do a lot worse than doing that and film yourself and see how it works. But the last zone, the third zone, that third part of the dial is ignite. This is not about inspiring as much as it is about conviction. This is the moment where you shift from just trying to get people to be passionate about your ideas to the point where you're getting them to take action because you have figured out why it's important to them. Almost every executive that I have worked with has zero ignite moments. They're really concerned about informing. They want them to know in their team what the right things to do are. They want them to know on their team what the protocols are. But most executives don't ever ignite their team. They treat every point the same. And I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If every single thing you say is of the same level of importance, then nothing is important. So what does this mean? Well, a couple things. Number one, this means that you might want to speak with shorter sentences. You might want to ask questions. What would it look like for us if we did this? What would it look like in this quarter, in this spring fiscal quarter? What if we were actually able to deliver on our results in advance? What would that look like? This is where you drop in volume on purpose because you want them to feel like they're going to miss something. You could do this. This could happen to you. This is where things like eye contact come into play, where you're not just talking at a group, but you're looking at Bob from accounting. You're looking over at Cheryl from HR, you're taking a look over at Jim, who is in IT, and you're trying to make a connection that is so important that only he is going to see. This is your closing. This is where you're going to dispel them into action. This is kind of my rule of thumb. If you have more than two ignite moments in this type of a presentation or in a meeting, you have zero. Usually there's only one of these moments. And most of us miss them. Most of us miss them. So you want to make sure that everything you're doing builds to this moment where you're actually dispatching your team to do the right next thing. So, how do we get to these different zones? I mean, I've gone through a lot of material, but I'm going to give you some examples. The way that you move from zone to zone is you have to shift intentionally. You have to be consciously thinking, not just about the words that you're saying, but how those words are going to be received on the other side of that message. And that means that you might do a better job if you really start to think of, okay, this is the part where I want to focus on this. I want to focus on getting them informed. I want to let them know about how the details of this meeting are going to be. I want to give them kind of some housekeeping stuff. And then you shift into inspire. This is where I want to get them excited. This is where I want to tell a story. This is where I want to give an example. This is where I want to scare them about what could be. And then I want to ignite them. I want to talk to them about what their picture looks like in here. I want to use my tone of voice. I want to use body language that conveys that I'm with them and not just that I'm speaking at them. You have to almost think of it in terms of connecting bodies of work. Not too dissimilar than when I talked about the message earlier with the bits. This is similar, but now you're really talking about how you're gonna shape that tone. This is where you're starting to look at like how this message is gonna land, not just how it's going to be on paper. And when you get to the place where you start to look at landing the plane and being intentional, it really changes your message. It really, really does. It also gives your listeners an opportunity to see that you are so concerned that they get it, that you took time to give them ignition.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

How cool is that? Now I'm gonna ask you to have a vision for a moment.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

What would your meetings look like if every time your employees or your direct reports or your team left, they felt like they were energized instead of empty. What would that be like? They left the meeting on a higher note than when they came in. If they were excited because you brought them in to speak something important to them instead of just taking their time and punching the clock because it's Monday and 9, and this is what we do. So you want to make sure that you think about how this is going to shape up for you this week. Do this. Give this a shot. Look at your meeting agenda. Think about Monday. What are you going to be doing? How are you going to do this? I have a big meeting coming up on Tuesday. I plan on implementing this in this big meeting for the church. I want to make sure that what I'm conveying and other people are conveying, that I'm making this connection and I'm giving people an opportunity to have ignition. If this is where you find yourself, where you're kind of lost, I would love to help you. I want to get you to the place where you are so confident running a meeting, where you are so confident giving an all hands, where you are so confident delivering a keynote that when those opportunities come up, you don't look at them with dread. You look at them with joy because you know that you're going to have a greater impact now than you ever have before. That's what I do for my clients, and that's what I can do for you. I have uh a couple things on the horizon, but I really want you to go first to samuellinton.com slash audit and take my assessment for you to actually see how you are with regard to your own confidence as a communicator. There's no, this isn't, this is a free audit where I you get a little bit of a score at the end. It shows you where you are in terms of your competence and in terms of where you are in the six pillars. And I kind of help you to diagnose that if you schedule the follow-up call. It's a coaching call. It's a, you know, called a discovery call, call whatever you want. Of course, I'm gonna let you know about products we have. But the main thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to get you a win so that you communicate like never before. That's what I do. And I I've come to the place now where I realize, especially with the rise of AI, what I do is more important now than it's ever been. You do amazing work. You put yourself out there. You've led, you're leading. But sometimes the way you communicate isn't landing. And it's not because you're incompetent. It's because in this area you might become ineffective because you just haven't been given the right tools. I will be your tour guide and I will give you the tools that you need. But you have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone and to look at what a future version of you would look like if you communicated the same level of competence that you have led all this time. So, with that said, thank you for tuning into the Sam Linton show. And next week, we're going to talk about upping the stakes as we look at magnetism and how do you keep connections with people in that room? We'll talk soon.