How do you respond to the question “What do you do?”
Can you answer it in a sentence?
Is your answer as simple as “I do X for Y because Z”?
Or do you have to take a deep breath before you wander down a long, winding road toward an inexact definition of your work? Do you use the word “synergy”? Do you drop any acronyms along the way? Do you just start mumbling and hope the other person will change the subject?
I get it. Especially if you work in a technical industry, or your work is niche, or most people wouldn’t understand, it’s tough to talk simply about your work.
Most of us want to be able to talk about our work. But bridging the gap between your expertise and outsiders’ interest gets harder and harder as you move up in your career and your own knowledge gets deeper.
But it’s worth trying. Here’s why. If you can’t break your work down into the basics, you’ll never be able to invite anyone in. You’ll be stuck on your own planet with a handful of other residents who already understand your language. If someone new cruises by, you’ll just have to wave as they pass through the outer atmosphere.
If you want to invite people (including potential clients and business partners) to understand your work, I challenge you to take these 3 steps to simplify the way you talk about your work.
Develop a one-sentence story.
I use a simple framework to get people started with thought leadership. We write their one-sentence story:
I help
people
do something
using tools/frameworks.
Your job is to get crystal clear on those three pieces: WHO do you help, WHAT do you help them do, and HOW do you do it?
Write that sentence for yourself.
Then go back and read it, pretending like you’re a new college graduate. Or your next-door neighbor. Would they understand what that sentence means? (Probably not, so write it again, but simpler this time. Repeat until you have a sentence that explains what you do in the simplest terms.)
Practice talking to outsiders about your work.
Test your one-sentence story when friends, acquaintances, or your dentist asks you what you do. Try out new ways of talking about your work.
Kids are a great audience for this. In my experience, kids won’t pretend they understand something to preserve their own ego. If you come at them with nonsensical jargon like “synergy,” “cross-functional innovation,” or “scalable solutions,” they’ll scrunch up their face, laugh, and say “WHAT?!” (or just slowly back away and go back to their Legos).
In college, I spent a semester studying Spanish in Mexico. I often gravitated toward the six-and-under set. First, because they spoke slowly enough for me to have a successful conversation with them, and second, because they’d tell me when I said something wrong. They weren’t afraid to call me out and correct my Spanish.
Kids can do the same when you’re figuring out how to talk about your work in a simplified way.
Banish jargon when you’re talking to insiders, too.
Sometimes we just get into bad habits. I’ve seen teams and entire companies establish vocabularies that work just fine internally, but don’t make sense to anyone else. When a new employee starts, a big chunk of their onboarding is spent on explaining internal language. That feels like a waste of time to me. Instead of developing an internal dictionary, what if you leaned into speaking in clear language, even to people who know more about your work than you do?
If leaders set the standard of speaking in plain terms, the rest of the organization will follow.
Bonus: If you get in the habit of speaking clearly in every setting, it won’t take much work or translation to tell your story to business magazines, journalists who are interested in your story, or potential clients. You’ll already have a de-jargoned, clear message ready for them…and you won’t have to hire someone like me as an intermediary. (But, hi, you could still hire me. 👋 I love de-jargoning.)
Let’s ditch the buzzwords and start speaking more clearly about what we do.
