From Obama’s White House to Your Workplace: Terry Szuplat on Authentic Communication

Lottie Bazley: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. Today I am your host, Lottie Bazley, internal communications manager at Staffbase and today, we are digging into one of the most powerful tools a leader can master, telling your story. Now, our guest today is someone who’s done exactly that at the very highest level. Terry Szuplat served nearly eight years as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, helping craft some of the most defining messages of our time. Terry, I believe a grand total of 3,477 speeches?Terry Szuplat: Yeah, I didn’t write them all. I was part of a team. I did about 500.

Lottie Bazley: Very impressive count. And he’s also the best-selling author of “Say It Well,” a powerful and practical guide to public speaking that draws on behind-the-scenes White House stories and the science of communication to help anyone speak with clarity, confidence and impact. In this episode, we’ll explore what internal communicators and exec leaders can learn from presidential storytelling and how to craft messages that don’t just inform but inspire.

Terry, welcome. I must say I am a little awestruck so I will try and keep my cool today, but I’ve been really, really looking forward to this chat, so thank you so much for coming along.

Terry Szuplat: Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Lottie Bazley: Of course. Me too. So we’ll get straight into it if you’re ready.

Terry Szuplat: Sounds great.

Lottie Bazley: Fab. So you have spent 25 years helping leaders around the world find the right words including, as I mentioned, your time as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama. And I’ve heard you tell a story about the first record that your mother bought you, so perhaps that has a part to play. But what first made you really fall in love with the power of language?

Terry Szuplat: Actually, that’s exactly what you mentioned. So as a kid even I’d always been fascinated by politics and government and history. I grew up in Massachusetts down on Cape Cod, a few towns over from Hyannis Port which was the home base of the Kennedy clan family. And so they were always in the news all the time, and I grew up hearing those stories from my family of President Kennedy’s presidency.

And knowing that I was fascinated by politics, my mom gave me a record one day, a record, you know the things you put on a . . .  and they have grooves and you put a needle on it and it makes music, but instead of music it was a collection of speeches. And so there I was as a kid. Other kids were outside playing and I was inside listening to speeches by John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was a kid. I didn’t have all the words to describe what I was hearing. It would be years later when I learned about cadence and rhythm and staccato and all the different ways that we can make our words and our presentations more interesting to the ear and more pleasing to the ear. But that’s what I was captivated by early on as a kid.

It didn’t occur to me that necessarily there was a speechwriter working with the president on those words or that that was a career that you could have or that was a job you could . . . that that was part of public service, but I guess maybe on some level, that I didn’t even appreciate, a little seed was planted and came to fruition many, many years later.

Lottie Bazley: Amazing. And very important question, have you still got the record?

Terry Szuplat: I do actually.

Lottie Bazley: Amazing.Terry Szuplat: And there might be some of your listeners who have it too of a certain age. I think a few years after his assassination, a commemorative record was put out of some of his greatest speeches. And so that’s what it is and I still have it. I don’t have a record player, I can’t listen to it.

Lottie Bazley: I love that. I feel like that would be the one that you just put on when you’re at a party and you get to choose which records to put on and you’re like, “Well I brought this one with me.”

Terry Szuplat: Right, sure.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. So you have seen words shift policy, comfort a nation, unite really divided audiences at times. Is there one lesson that you’d say about storytelling that’s really stuck with you across every speech that you’ve written?

Terry Szuplat: Yeah, I mean there’s many. That’s the whole book. “Say It Well” is about 70,000 80,000 pages of lessons that I took away from all these different experiences, including writing for President Obama. You know, storytelling, I see as a component of communications. Not all communications is storytelling, but storytelling can be one of the most effective forms of communication.

And I actually teach political speech writing at American University here in Washington, DC. And I’m constantly trying to get my students to lose the stats, get away from the policy jargon, get away from the academic talk, get away from all the buzzwords, and just . . . You really want to connect with an audience and really touch their heart and maybe change even the way they think. The best way to do it, we know this from research, we know this from studies, is to tell stories. Human stories, stories about real people, often people who are in pain somehow, or who have suffered, or they’ve been disadvantaged.

This is the way you break through to people. This is oftentimes when you hear people . . . People think in these polarized times, no one changes their mind anymore, but people still do. And when you ask them, “What was it that got you to see this issue differently?” It was hearing somebody’s story. When you look at the tectonic shift in public attitudes, at least here in the United States with regard to marriage equality and same-sex marriage, that happened just in a historic context, so fast, so many people. There were many reasons for that, many, many reasons, but one of the most profound reasons was that people getting up and telling their story, what it meant for them.

And so when people realized they had a gay brother or sister or aunt or uncle or friend or family member, hearing those stories, hearing their pain and their pride, their story of their full experience, that’s what changed their minds and opened their hearts. And this is true in business and nonprofits and politics and across every . . . Think of all the best movies and plays and books you’ve ever read. They’re so often about a particular person and their story. That’s how you really can be an effective communicator and leader, again, whether it’s politics, business, or whatever field you’re in.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you. I really love that. And actually on a similar note, I read an article about top speeches that you’ve written, particularly a speech given by Obama after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, which begins . . . or not quite begins, but right at the start, “On Monday morning, the sun rose over Boston.” I just think this is an incredible example of storytelling in speeches. That’s beautiful. It sounds like the start of a book, especially about such a deeply moving topic.

I mean for you, that must have been a challenging speech to write, even more so given your personal connection to the city. But alongside this one, maybe, is there anything else or any particular speech or even a single line that you helped write that gives you the chills today?

Terry Szuplat: Not really any particular line, although the line you mentioned from the Boston Marathon speech was one that I think was very indicative of what we’re talking about here. For those who haven’t heard it, the president just gets up at the memorial service after the bombing of the Boston Marathon. You know, he doesn’t start with a big long list of acknowledgements. He just dives right into a story, and it’s the story of that beautiful morning. And it starts with, “On Monday morning, the sun rose over Boston.” He just proceeds to paint a picture of this beautiful morning, seeming like another Boston Marathon morning. And he walks through all these little moments and images of what that day was like before the tragedy struck.

But another one that I often come back to is one of the State of the Unions. I think it was 2004, where President Obama ended his State of the Union by telling the story of a wounded warrior, an Army Ranger, that he had gotten to know very well, Army Ranger Cory Remsburg. And he proceeded to tell Cory’s story, not to justify military spending, or to justify a war, even to justify veteran spending. He wasn’t using Cory to make a policy point. He was actually talking about Cory and his resilience. He had been grievously wounded in the war. And it was the story of his therapy and his recovery and his rehab and his resilience.

And the president was holding Cory up as the kind of person that we all . . . the kind of country we needed to be and the people we needed to be as we were coming out of wars, coming out of recession and what makes America strong. And so, again, another great example of powerful storytelling.

And I have to say, it almost worked too well. Your listeners will know a State of the Union can often go on for 50 minutes, an hour, and the stories are meant to lift up and amplify the core message. But the next day, we found so many people were talking not just about the policies, but about Cory, and they wanted to know more about him. It was a great example of how a powerful story can break through in just about any setting.

Lottie Bazley: That’s amazing. So you have said before that we should tell only the stories that we can tell. What does this mean to you? And for someone who might be trying to uncover their most meaningful or their most authentic stories, what questions should they ask themselves to try and find that voice?

Terry Szuplat: Right. So as a speechwriter, now in the private sector, I run my own company, and clients come to me, and one of the first questions that I often get, that we all often get in this field is, “I’ve been invited to speak. I don’t know what to say. What should I say?” They’re looking to the speechwriter to help them figure out what to say. And one of my answers, and one of our most common responses, and it’s not meant to be flip, but it’s, “You should say what only you should say. You’ve been invited to speak. You’ve been given the opportunity to speak. It’s because that audience, that group, sees something in you that they find interesting, that they find unique, that they want to hear more about.”

And so the first lesson there, there’s a whole chapter in the book called “Say What Only You Can Say,” because I think people forget that, yeah, you do actually have an interesting life, an interesting story. I’ve had clients say, “Well, I haven’t had a very interesting life.” And then you ask them a few questions about their life, it turns out they’ve had a very . . . We’ve all had interesting lives. We’ve all had unique stories.

And so one of the things that I do as a speechwriter, the first thing that I do with someone who’s maybe struggling with what to say is, we just do a deep dive. It’s almost more like a therapy session. I’ve had one client tell me once, “This feels like a therapy session,” because in the book, I list out about a dozen questions that I think we can all ask ourselves when we have to give a presentation or any sort of speech.

But they’re actually good questions to ask just in your life generally. But before I give them to you, I should say, one of the things I asked President Obama once was, “What do you think makes for a compelling public speaker?” I’ve been writing for him for years. I’d never asked him, “You’re one of the great speakers. What do you think?” You know and his answer was not about structure and narrative, although he cared about all these things, or body language.

His answer, I thought, was very interesting. He said, “For me, the most compelling public speakers are those who speak from a place of conviction. They know who they are, and they know what they believe.” And we’ve all heard speakers in business and in politics who clearly don’t know what they believe, don’t know what they stand for. They’re saying one thing one day and something the opposite the next day.

So that leads me to about 10 or 12 questions that I share in the book, which is, before we get up to speak to an audience and expect them to believe in us and to follow us and to go the way we’re pointing, we have to know who we are and what we believe. It’s these really profound, maybe simple, but terrifying questions sometimes. Who am I? What do I believe? What are my values? Why do I do the work that I do? What am I working towards? What are my goals? What challenges and setbacks have I faced in my life? How did I face them? How did I overcome?

The answers to those questions are important for life. But they also make for very powerful presentations about giving a feature presentation that’s unique to you and that only you can give. And we all have it whether we realize it or not. And one of the things I hope from the book is that . . . I’ve had people who read it reach out to me and say that through it, they’ve come to better understand their own story and their own life and how they can share that to help inspire and motivate other people.

Lottie Bazley: I really love that. And I’ve got a couple of questions about authenticity coming up. But I think that is a great start to figure out, “Okay, who is it I am? What is it I want to say? What lessons can I teach people?” And just that kind of discovery, almost, of yourself and what your voice is, is a really lovely place to start rather than just opening up your laptop and starting to type away.

Terry Szuplat: Most cases, you’re probably not the only speaker that day. You’re not the only person presenting. You want to be different. Don’t be generic. We’ve all had these situations where maybe we’re the third or fourth speaker and one by one, you hear them mentioning the statistic that you were going to mention or mentioning the generic anecdote or the historical anecdote that you were going to. Well that’s a cue to you that whatever you were planning to say was not that unique, it was not that interesting. Other total strangers can come up with the same thing. So it’s another way to make sure you’re always being unique and being interesting, standing out.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Let’s get into a little bit more of the process itself now. One thing that, as an internal communicator, strikes me is often we’re writing on behalf of other people. And I guess it’s similar when you’re a speechwriter. Your job is often to channel somebody else’s voice and potentially, perhaps when their values aren’t necessarily reflective of your own. Is that something that you’ve ever had to navigate yourself? And if so, how did you overcome it?

Terry Szuplat: Sure. I should say it’s interesting. The question that I often get is how do you write for someone when you disagree with their decision or their policy? And my answer typically is, well, that’s bound to happen. No one agrees 100% of the time with everybody else, our colleagues, our spouses, the people who are close to us. It’s only natural that in your workplaces, there will be times when we’re facing the fact that we don’t maybe fully agree with what we’re doing.

I don’t think that’s so much of a problem because again, that’s part of life, so long as you feel that you are in alignment with your colleague, with the person you’re writing for, around core values. You know, I didn’t agree with every single thing that Barack Obama did, but I felt that I was in alignment with him around. I knew what his core values were, I shared them. And more often than not, I did agree.

I think if you ever find yourself, and I tell this to young people as well, if you ever find yourself in a position in the workplace, again, this doesn’t matter, politics, business, philanthropy, advocacy, where you, more often than not, are finding yourself in disagreement with your colleagues or your organization or the person you’re writing for, if you feel like you no longer share basic core values that are important to you, then it’s time to go, because you’re not right for them and they’re not right for you. You deserve to write for someone and to be part of an organization that matches your values and they deserve it too.

If you’re feeling that you’re out of sync most of the time, there’s other people who will do that job. And we see this all the time in politics, business. People leave organizations because something has changed, the person at the top has changed, or something has come up in the world that has changed and that folks no longer feel in sync. So I think when that happens, when you start to just feel like you’re not lining up on big, important questions, you have to go.

Lottie Bazley: Very, very good advice. And like you say, don’t sweat the small stuff, I guess. There are always going to be things that you might not [agree] on, but I really like the message of, if the core values aren’t there, then probably, it’s not the right place for you.

Terry Szuplat: And people know. Again, you read people leave, they stop working for their member of Congress, they leave a business, they leave a law firm, they leave in a political administration because something that’s really important to them, something that’s core and fundamental no longer lines up. And not only do they feel, they should leave, they often feel better when they do leave.

But that goes back to those other questions you’re talking about. If you haven’t asked those questions, if you don’t know who you are or what you believe or why you’re doing the job that you’re doing, the work that you’re doing, then you can’t even answer those questions. You feel, again, out of sync, but you don’t necessarily know why, or you feel like, “I disagreed with the last four decisions to come down from the C-suite.” At that point, you realize there’s something fundamental going on here that is leading, that you’re constantly finding yourself at odds with your organization.

Again, in my case, sure, there were moments when I didn’t necessarily agree 100% with the policy, but also as a speechwriter, no one elected me to do anything. I was staffed. I chose to work there. I wanted to write speeches for the president and I wanted to help. Our job was not to advance our agenda, it was to advance his agenda. And so long as I felt that the values were aligned, I was good.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you. On that note of, I guess, working together and collaboration, was there ever a time where you really had to fight for a line or a truth or a perspective in a speech where you really thought, “No, this needs to be in there,” but you were facing that, or, “Maybe that could be cut”? How did you navigate a situation like that?

Terry Szuplat: There were many times. One that immediately comes to mind is the president had to give a speech about terrorism, particularly terrorism from domestic US sources, so not foreign entities, foreign terrorist groups trying to attack the United States, but rather Americans or people living in the United States committing acts of violence for a political end. And he was hosting a summit to talk about this, so it was only natural, as we wrote his remarks, to mention some of the more recent domestic terrorist attacks that had occurred. You have to describe the problem. And one of the recent attacks was, as we were discussing earlier, the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

And there were some lawyers at the White House who didn’t want the president to mention that because sentencing was coming up and there was a concern that the president speaking about it might somehow influence the jury or the sentencing process, and so they were taking a very lawyerly approach to it and wanted us not to mention that incident, which just as a communicator, I thought was not sustainable. How can the president get up there, say that this is a problem, and then fail to mention one of the biggest examples of it?

So a classic example of the lawyer’s and the communicator’s intention. And that way I just felt very strongly about it. We worked it up the chain and eventually someone had to make a decision and they agreed that the president, it was something he needed to mention.

One of the many lessons I share in the book is, one of the chapters is called “Talk Like a Human,” people always laugh. It’s like, “Well, how else are we supposed to talk?” How often in business and politics and philanthropy and advocacy we hear people, they don’t sound like they’re human anymore. They sound like bots. They sound like all this jargon. And that was a great example of that where, the most natural human thing to do would be to acknowledge what everyone knows to be true in that moment, which is that it was this horrific thing that happened.

And so we, as communicators, are always trying to make sure that you’re talking like a normal human being, and no offense to lawyers, but that you don’t talk like a lawyer because most of the people you’re talking to are not lawyers. So yeah, that would be one example.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you for sharing that. On a much smaller scale, I’ve definitely been there battling with C-suite to say, “No, we have to say this.” And I think sometimes there are occasions where it gets to a point where your argument is, “Because it’s weird if we don’t mention it, I’m not sure what more I can tell you. People will think, ‘Why haven’t they said anything about that?'”

Terry Szuplat: Right. The right answer is often the easiest answer, is the one that just feels right, if it feels weird to not mention something or feels weird to mention something, if it’s what’s going to come up in a normal conversation. And I think part of the problem is that, again there are, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners go through this, there are legal consequences as a CEO, a COO, a CMO. If your organization or your company is involved in a lawsuit, what you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. And so it is right to run speeches by the lawyers at times.

I think the challenge is that sometimes, run it by legal, legal gets a veto. And I think the problem is that I don’t think any one person should get the veto. I think it has to be the speaker. It has to make sense. It has to make sense to your audience. Probably a lot of your listeners who are communicators, who have, and again, I’m not a lawyer, but I have a lot of friends who are lawyers, I love lawyers, I talk about this in the book, they saved me many times from mistakes that would probably have cost me my job. So I know there’s a time and a place, you got to listen to your lawyers. There’s also a time and a place where they’re one voice among many. And you have to find that logical, common sense space.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. Continuing on that subject of back and forth, especially sometimes I’ve had it, personal experiences that there’s just one phrase or one word that people are going back and forth over. And I listened to a podcast where you talked about Obama’s processes, where you would continuously work on a speech up until the last minute, whether you had three days or three hours. And something for me that I was thinking as I was listening to that was, how do you find that balance between getting the perfect version of the speech when it’s being delivered versus, and this is again, my personal experience, obsessing to the point where you get to that? How do you find that balance?

Terry Szuplat: Right. So some of the stories you mentioned that I share in the book are of President Obama forcing us to make edits and shorten a speech, hours and even minutes sometimes. We’d be backstage in the green room as he’s sitting, waiting to give his speech and he might still be editing because, why not? We have 10 minutes, why not make it even better? We’ve been running around frantically trying to put the changes in the teleprompter or reprint the speech if we had to. He was trying to make it better.

As a general rule, I don’t recommend that people do that. I think for most of the rest of us, those last-minute edits, are often where the mistakes occur, pages go missing, I’ve seen that happen more often than not.

What I recommend to people, I have this rule of thumb that I share in the book called the 50-25-25 rule, which is just a general framework for how to use the time that you have, whether you have a month to get ready for a presentation or a week or a few days, or even just a few hours. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they start writing, creating scripts and PowerPoints immediately before they’ve done the heavy thinking of what the speech is really about, what the core message is, what you want to leave your audience with.

And so I recommend that folks, take about 50% of your time, however much you have, and just think, write down ideas, brainstorm, create, research, come up with stories, find your content, your material, then maybe spend about 25% of your time writing. Then very importantly, set aside, make sure you’ve budgeted in 25% or so of your time to practice, to edit, to share it with your colleagues, so that if it’s terrible, there’s time to make it better, if it’s good, there’s time to practice and become great. But if you don’t build that in, you’ll find yourself noodling right up until the very end. And that’s when mistakes occur.

We’ve had that too, where, we were supposed to make an edit and it just didn’t get in. You should be in those final minutes and hours of, for the rest of us, we should be just getting comfortable, we should be rehearsing, we should be practicing, so that by the time we get to the podium, it’s not like we’re seeing these words for the first time. We’ve all been in those presentations. You’re wondering, “Did this person see this speech before?” Sometimes the answer is no.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. And I really love that. The majority of that, the 50 out of the 50-20-25, is, to your point earlier, about thinking about what it is that you want to say rather than just starting typing and then getting lost in, “What is my point here? I’m just going off on all these tangents.” I really love the perspective that the majority of the time should just be thinking and creating rather than typing straight away.

Terry Szuplat: Right. For years, my title was Speech Writer, but I actually spent most of my time thinking, researching, outlining, brainstorming, interviewing people. The writing, you do all that, you do it right, you suddenly have so much content, so much material. The writing comes so much easier, and through that process, you learn yourself. You may start that process not really knowing what the core message is going to be, but through that process, you learn and you teach yourself, so that by the time you do sit down to write, you’re not staring at a blank screen with the cursor pointing and taunting you and thinking, “What is this about?” You should know that before you start writing.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. Fab. Thank you. So we talked a bit about authenticity earlier and finding your voice and your true self. And I think there’s probably some people out there that would say by spending days, weeks, months, rewriting a script and going back and forth . . . In a presentation you gave, I saw a photograph of some of the heavier edits that were made by Obama. Do you think you can remain truly authentic when each sentence or even each word is poured over?

Terry Szuplat: Oh, absolutely. It’s funny, this is one of the big debates that I see in communications and public speaking. You have some folks out there saying, some public speaking coaches, “Don’t ever write it down. Don’t ever write out a full script, and then number two, don’t ever just get up there and ‘just read it.'”

I think that’s a false choice. I don’t think those things are exclusive to one another. You can have an unwritten off-the-cuff presentation that is authentic and inspiring and one that is horrible. You can have a written speech that is authentic and inspiring and a written speech that is horrible. So it’s not about whether or not it’s written down. It’s about whether or not what you’re writing down and what you’re saying is true to who you are.

So for example, President Obama would give, regularly, speeches 30, 40, 50 minutes long. And, as you mentioned, people can go online and see how he would edit every single word because, again, what was he doing there? He was thinking deeply about every word, every sentence, whether it was what he wanted to say in that moment, whether it was true to what he believed, whether it was what he wanted that audience to hear at that moment.

That process of caring deeply and thinking deeply about what you want to say is absolutely indispensable to being a great communicator. And it’s true of all the great communicators throughout history. They care about what they say. They don’t just get up and riff. I say in the book, I think one of the most powerful predictors of whether we succeed at the podium is not what we do at the podium, it’s all that work that we put in before we ever get near the podium, the thinking about the audience. Who am I? Who’s the audience? What do they need to hear in this moment? What’s going on?

I lay out in the book all the questions that you should ask yourself as a leader and a speaker about your audience so that you can truly connect to them. You can’t do that when you’re riffing. We have people who just get up and give what we call, in politics, we call them stump speeches. That’s essentially the same speech every day, no matter who the audience is. They’ll tweak the beginning a little bit here and that.

But the rest of us shouldn’t be doing that. We shouldn’t just be getting up and giving the same generic speech to every audience, no matter who they are. We’re missing a huge opportunity, really tailoring and connect with that audience around who they are and what their experiences are. You know authenticity is . . . I think people often think that writing something down and delivering a script is inherently at odds with authenticity. I think it actually can be just the opposite.

Lottie Bazley: Agreed. And I really think, again, to your point earlier starting with those questions about, “Who am I? What am I trying to say here?” to begin with that, then really whether you say, “You,” or, “We,” in one of the sentences doesn’t make a huge difference because it’s the whole thing and the way that you are talking to people that makes the difference of the authenticity rather than one word versus another.

So actually I’d heard about this 50-20-25 rule before and then also this finding-your-10-words concept, which I really love. However, please forgive me for exploring a slightly personal agenda here. In the next couple of weeks, I’m about to start the process of writing a speech for my best friend’s wedding. I’m really nervous about it, but I’m hoping to take a lot from this conversation today.

And I think that 50-25-25 and the 10 words thing really resonates to me when it comes to political speeches or presentations at work. But does this rule work for more personal speeches, whether it be wedding speeches, vows, or a eulogy even, maybe? Do they translate?

Terry Szuplat: Oh, absolutely. And I use this framework with all my clients, whether they’re political, business, personal, whether it’s a company meeting, a eulogy, whether it’s eulogies that I’ve had to write myself, commencement speeches, absolutely, because I think that the process is the same. You said you’re nervous. And I think most people are when they would speak at a eulogy, honor someone you love, speak at a wedding, big day. When do you have to give the speech? How many weeks away is it?

Lottie Bazley: Oh, my gosh. She’ll kill me if I get this date wrong. It’s August the 24th, so I have a few weeks still.

Terry Szuplat: A few weeks? You have months. You have, let’s just say, all of June and all of July and most of August. I mean I would say, use this first 50% of your time, carry a notebook around with you, write down little thoughts that come to mind as you go through your life thinking about this person. For eulogies, toasts, wedding, obviously shorter is better. One of the techniques I use, I ask two big questions and they’re two sides of the same coin, and maybe we could do it here with you, which is, as you think about your friend, what are the three or four or five values or qualities that you most associate with this person? Just hold that thought in your head for the next few weeks.

I don’t know this, but if you wanted me to understand this person, what are those three to four or five values? And then, as you think through these next few weeks, what are your three to four or five favorite stories about this person? And I bet you, you will find that they line up. Really, I think the greatest speeches, again, back to storytelling that we talked about at the beginning, the greatest eulogies, the greatest commencement speeches are often just stories.

One of the greatest commencement speeches of all time was Steve Jobs at Stanford that millions of people have watched. All he does is, he gets out, he says, “Thank you.” He literally says, “I want to tell you three stories today.” Another great one, Bill McRaven, the SEAL Commander, at the University of Texas at Austin, he shares 10 lessons and stories from his SEAL training, each one.

So for you, what are the three or four stories that you love the most about your friend? And then what is it that those stories reveal? They probably reveal those qualities that you admire most about them, or them as a couple in this case, because you want to celebrate them as a couple. Maybe it’s the three or four moments that you feel illustrate who they are as a couple.

That’s what people remember, as opposed to generic abstract tributes that you could say about anybody, anywhere.

“Say It Well” is not just for . . .  it’s for business, it’s for politics, it’s for life, it’s for speaking, it’s for how to have better conversations with your family around dinner, speaking with your neighbors, your churches. I’m from Massachusetts. We have this great tradition of town meetings where you can get up and we see this all over the country. You have three minutes to make your point. “Say It Well” can help you how to do it.

Lottie Bazley: Fabulous. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. On a similar note to that, actually, I heard you talk about, one of your reasons for writing the book was to think about, there are these great speeches that we hear and these great talks that we hear and the ones that we remember, but actually think about how many voices we are not hearing because the average person might not have the confidence or the tools to get up and say something. So would you have any kind of starting advice for those people? Apart from the questions that you ask yourself, is there any confidence-building things that you might offer to people?

Terry Szuplat: Yeah well, so one thing we haven’t talked about yet here is that, while a lot of the book is stories from working with President Obama and what we can learn from one of the great speakers of our time, I recognize that that’s a bit of a leap for most of us. People can say, “Well, he’s Barack Obama, he’s the president. He had a team of speech writers helping him every day.” As you point out, those thousands of speeches, the rest of us don’t have that.

So I made a point throughout the book, every single chapter, there are stories of regular folks across the country and around the world, advocates, students, business people who gave incredible speeches and presentations that often went viral and resonated with millions of people around the world. They didn’t have a professional speechwriter to help them. And so I try to show . . . every chapter has a lesson, here’s an example of the president using that lesson and here’s a real story of a real person doing it too.

And I think the biggest hurdle that most people have, at least based on my experience of working with folks is, again, people just . . . there’s anxiety and there’s nerves, but there’s this fundamental misunderstanding that, “I don’t have anything unique to say. Why should people listen to me? Oh, someone else can say it better.”

And I think, one of the first lessons that I share in the book, the title of the chapter is called “Love Your Sacred Story,” and it’s the idea that every single one of us in our life has a story that is sacred, that is unique, that we can share if we ask ourselves these fundamental questions. One of the most meaningful pieces of feedback that I’ve received from the book is when people say to me, “I read the book and I realized that I have something unique to share.” And this is someone who might, otherwise, never had the courage to get up and speak at a family reunion, at a eulogy, to give a toast at work, to speak at work.

So I think that one of the great tragedies is, you think, over human history, how many people have we not heard from? Now, we’ve all been inspired by great leaders and great citizens and activists and moments of challenge. Just think for every one of those, there’s probably hundreds, thousands, millions who also had something, but they didn’t have the courage to speak up or they didn’t have the confidence to do it.

And so my hope is that with this book, when someone is done, they realize, “I’m going to put my hand up in class and I’m going to speak,” “I’m going to put my hand up at work, I’m going to speak,” “I am going to give that eulogy as hard as it is,” “I’m going to speak at the wedding.” A lot of people are given opportunities like that and they’ll say, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I love you, I care deeply about this issue, whatever it is, I’m committed to this company, but this is just not a space that I’m comfortable in and someone else can do it better.”

I want more people to say, “No, I’m going to do it. It might be scary. I might be nervous.” The nerves are good. In fact, we talk about this in the book, your nerves are your body doing what it should be doing when you’re doing something that’s a little scary. It’s preparing you to succeed, preparing you to do well. So yeah, that’s one of my hopes of this book.

Lottie Bazley: I find that very admirable. I, personally, am very grateful that there’s someone out there that is looking out for those people that maybe don’t have that courage to . . . Like you say, just even the smallest thing of just saying yes, to doing that presentation at work. Think of all of the glass door moments that people might’ve had. So I find it very admirable that that’s one of the key reasons why you’ve written this book.

Sadly, Terry, we are getting towards the end of our time together, but I just wanted to ask a couple of final questions. We wouldn’t be the Aspire to Inspire Podcast if we didn’t ask a question about inspiration. So what is one piece of advice that you would give to leaders looking to inspire rather than just to inform their teams?

Terry Szuplat: I think when you look throughout history and who the great leaders and the great communicators are, again, politics, business, philanthropy, whatever the field, they have many things in common. One of the things in common is that they always leave their audience with a clear vision of what they’re trying to achieve, a big, bold goal of something to work for. For a company, it can be a revenue target. It can be number of customers reached. If it’s an advocacy group, it’s people reached, lives saved, a social condition, a war that’s ended, or hunger that’s eliminated.

I think having a big, bold goal, and I talk about this in the book, you see it across all social movements, political movements, businesses. Great leaders and great communicators leave their audience with a big, bold, great goal to work towards. And we see over and over that that is what motivates people. You ask yourself, “Why do people sign up to serve in the military?” It’s not because of a statistic. It’s because they believe in a big, bold idea and goal and a vision for what the world or the country ought to be. Why do people put in extra hours at work? It’s not just because of a paycheck. It’s because they believe that their organization is doing something profound and big and important and meaningful.

And so ask yourself, if you were a leader of an organization, and this is one of the things that I help organizations do, is, what is the big, bold goal that you’re working toward? And again, this goes back to one of those fundamental questions that we asked at the beginning of the discussion here. Why do you do the work you do? What are you working for? If you don’t know, then your team won’t know. If your team doesn’t know, that’s when you have a lot of problems. And I think anyone listening to this conversation will know, we’ve all been in organizations where there’s no clear sense of, “What are we doing here? Are we treading water? Are we just sustaining the organization, or are we working towards something big and bold and inspiring?”

That’s political. You think of Churchill, he had this big, bold idea that they were going to win the war at a time when it didn’t seem so possible. Abraham Lincoln, “We’re going to win a war and end slavery in this nation.” Abolitionists, civil rights movements, LGBTQ movement, whatever the movement, Steve Jobs inventing an entirely new device that’s going to change the world. Habitat for Humanity, building homes, or any organization committed to the elimination of hunger, big, bold goals.

And yes, people need paychecks, we need to provide for our families, but we know from all sorts of research that it only gets you so far. So as a leader, you’ve got to have a big, bold goal to inspire your organization.

Lottie Bazley: I mean I’ve said this before, but it comes back to the point that you made right at the start of, “What am I trying to do here? What am I trying to achieve here?” And if you’re really confident in yourself, then hopefully that will pass on to others. Terry, I’m going to be really cheeky here. We can cut this if the producers aren’t happy about it. But I’m sure that the listeners are wondering, myself included, what is Obama actually like? Is he as nice as everyone thinks that he is?

Terry Szuplat: I get asked this a lot. And again, this goes back to questions of authenticity and leadership is, is the person you’re seeing in front of the camera the same person when the cameras are off? In my experience, he absolutely was. He has this reputation as being very calm, cool, and collected and that’s exactly what my experience was with him across those nearly eight years.

In all that time, I made mistakes, other people around me made mistakes. We’ve all worked for bosses and leaders who in those moments, they’re stressed, they have the burden of the organization, in this case, the burden of the world on the president. They can be forgiven if they, maybe, snap at you or they lose their cool. And, at least in my experience, despite whatever mistakes I made, or whatever stress President Obama was under, he didn’t raise his voice at me, he didn’t yell at me. I know of no other situation where he lost his cool and raised his voice at others.

He treated us with dignity and respect. And I always really appreciated that, because, if we did write a draft of speech that didn’t quite measure up in his view, he could have said, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t give me this garbage. Fire this speech writer.” But I’d like to think he knew that we had to go back and actually do it again, make it better. He couldn’t destroy our morale. So he would bring us into the Oval Office and walk us through all the different ways that he felt we needed to make this better.

One of the phrases that he would often say to all of us was, “Hey, this is a solid speech, I could give this speech today,” which meant he didn’t want to give it today. But he’ll say something like, “We have three or four days, so let’s use those three or four days to make it better,” as opposed to, “What the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you do your job?” And that made it easier to go back . . . you felt bad that you kind of missed the mark, but it made you want to go and do better.

And so there was a great lesson in leadership and management. He wanted us to go back and keep doing our work and to be better and figure, given all the pressures he was under in the world, if he could keep it together, then none of us have an excuse for not treating our people and staff and our colleagues with dignity and respect. Again, regardless of politics, whether you like the guy or don’t like the guy, or agree with his politics, he treated us well.

And I hope that . . . that’s something I teach my students as they begin their careers, as you look for a job in an organization, of course, the pay should be worthy of your experiences. Look for colleagues at a place that you want to be, but also look for a boss who’s going to treat you right with the dignity that you deserve, because we all deserve to be treated that way.

Lottie Bazley: Lovely. Well thank you for answering. And I’m very pleased to hear that. My claim to fame is that I drank in the same bar as Obama one time when I was in New York. And we stood outside and we waved to him after he left, and he was very lovely and gracious to us then. So I’m glad to hear that that is the case. So finally, Terry, where can our listeners find you, where can they follow your work, and where can they get a copy of the book, “Say It Well?”

Terry Szuplat: Sure, thanks for asking. So the book is available everywhere. You just go online, Google it. It’s at Amazon in the US, Amazon internationally. My company is called Global Voices Communication. So you can also Google me there and find the book, and find out how I work with organizations and the training and the workshops that I offer organizations to help them become better communicators on behalf of their companies and the causes that they believe in. It’s called “Say It Well” and I hope folks find it useful whatever field they’re in.

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