Highlights
Five tools from cognitive linguist Dr. Laura Sicola for closing the distance between the message you sent and the one that actually landed.
- You can’t see your own footage. You are the only person who never experiences your own communication, so the gap between what you intended and what others received is invisible to the one person who could close it.
- You already contain every register you need. Shifting how you speak to suit a room is not a betrayal of who you are. It is range, and range can be trained.
- Warmth comes before competence. People decide whether they can trust you before they decide whether they can respect you, so how you make a room feel determines whether your ideas get heard at all.
Record fifteen seconds of yourself wishing a friend happy birthday. Watch it back. Within seconds you will find a dozen things wrong: the thing your face did, the word you mangled, the way your voice sounds nothing like the voice in your head. You were there. You chose every word. And the footage still surprises you.
Dr. Laura Sicola has built a twenty-year career on the unsettling fact underneath that small experiment. You are the only person who never sees your own footage. Everyone else gets the version on the tape. You get the version in your head: the intention, the meaning, the movie you were certain you broadcast. The two are rarely the same movie.
“The movie playing in your mind is not the same movie everybody else is watching. You know what you meant. They know what you did.”
Dr. Laura Sicola
Sicola is a cognitive linguist, an executive communication coach, and the author of Speaking to Influence. She earned her Ph.D. in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for a dozen years, and she now spends her days helping scientists, physicians, and executives master what she calls the three Cs of executive presence: command the room, connect with the audience, and close the deal. Her fascination started early. As a small child she watched her grandmother, the one relative who was not Italian, switch into Spanish on the phone with her siblings in Santiago. It sounded like a secret code, a superpower other people had and she did not. The hunger to understand and to be understood became, in her words, her North Star.
That childhood gap, the one between the code and the kid locked out of it, turns out to be the same gap every leader faces. Not a foreign language. The distance between your own crystal-clear intention and what the other person actually receives once it passes through their filters, their stress, their assumptions, and their day. Her book is built on exactly this problem. Closing the gap, she argues, is the entire job of communicating with influence. And she works it from both ends, the message you send and the message they take in.
Here are five of her tools for doing that.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Laura Sicola:
1. See the movie everyone else is watching
You cannot close a gap you cannot see, and the gap is structurally hidden from you. This is the first move, and most leaders skip it entirely: they try to fix their delivery without ever once watching themselves deliver.
Sicola’s frame is the iceberg. The fraction of communication you are consciously aware of: the words you chose and the point you meant to make, sits above the waterline. Everything determining how it actually lands sits below: the pace, the volume, the face, the four acronyms in a sentence where the listener only knew two.
“People know how to use Microsoft Word. Nobody knows the code running behind it.”
Dr. Laura Sicola
The frustration that sends people to her usually sounds the same. I told them exactly what to do, and they did something else. Why don’t they get it? The answer is almost never competence. It is the gap. You delivered the movie in your head. They watched the one on the tape. You will not believe how different the two are until you see the tape.
The insight
Stop editing a performance you have never watched. Diagnosis comes before adjustment.
Take action
On your next video call, prop your phone against the screen and record one minute of yourself talking. Watch it later. Notice what worked, and the one thing that made you wince. Two minutes of footage will teach you more than two hours of asking other people for feedback.
2. You are not your default voice. You are a prism.
The most common objection Sicola hears, especially from senior people, is some version of: if you are telling me to change how I communicate, you are telling me to stop being myself. It feels like a matter of integrity. It is actually a category error.
Picture the little crystal sun-catcher hanging in a kitchen window. White light goes in, and the full spectrum comes out the other side. You hold every one of those colors already. The only question at any given moment is which one the room needs you to let shine.
Sicola is candid about her own spectrum. The voice she uses to coach and teach is one color. The voice she uses with her nine-year-old is another: goofier, different vocabulary, different cadence, different posture. And the voice that escapes when her sports team is losing in spectacular fashion is a third color entirely, complete with words she would not use on a podcast. None of these is, singularly, “the real one” with the others pasted on top.
“It’s still me. It’s not about being more or less authentic.”
Dr. Laura Sicola
This is the reframe that gives people permission to grow. A scientist newly promoted to lead a team is going to have to speak more strategically and less tactically, to translate for people who do not share the lab. That is not abandoning the self. That is the same person turning a different facet to the light because the situation calls for it. You are who the room needs you to be, and you contain all of it.
The insight
Adjusting your register for context is range, not pretense. Authenticity is not one fixed setting.
Take action
Name three settings where you already speak in noticeably different ways: the conference room, the kitchen table, the group chat with old friends. Label each with a color. Now decide, on purpose, which color your next high-stakes conversation actually requires.
3. Millimeters, not makeovers
Once people accept that they can shift, they tend to overcorrect. Told they come across as too blunt, they lurch toward saccharine. Told to project more authority, they crank everything to maximum. They treat communication like a power switch: this is me, that is not me, on or off.
Sicola’s correction is to throw out the switch and picture a mixing board. A sound engineer producing a record does not flip tracks on and off. They have dozens of dials, and the magic is in nudging them. You do not need a new personality. Maybe you just talk fast and loud when you are stressed, so we ease the volume from an eight to a six and the pace from a nine to a seven. The content is identical. But now it reads as talking with people rather than at them, and the wall of sound stops going up.
She is fond of the golfer’s two-millimeter shift. Rotate your wrists a hair at the tee and, a hundred and fifty yards downrange, the ball lands fifty yards from where you wanted it. Or the combination lock: spin it ninety-nine percent of the way and nothing opens, because the difference between staying locked and clicking open is the single notch between seventeen and eighteen. Small inputs, enormous downstream consequences.
The math of incremental practice
1%
better
every day
~2×
more effective
in 70 days
No dramatic overhaul required. Just one dial moved two notches at a time.
This is also why the math of incremental practice is so forgiving. Improve roughly one percent a day and you are about twice as effective in seventy days, without ever attempting a single dramatic overhaul.
The insight
Presence is engineered in small increments. You are not in the makeover business. You are in the two-millimeter shift business.
Take action
Pick exactly one dial (pace, volume, filler words, or acronyms per sentence) and practice moving it two notches for one week. One dial. Let it become a habit before you touch the next.
4. Warmth is the password
Here is what is happening chemically in the people you are about to talk to. By the fourth or fifth meeting of their day, the generous opening question, how can I contribute, has curdled into something defensive: what do you want from me, and how is this going to make my life harder? Cortisol and adrenaline, the resistance hormones, are running the room. Arms are folded, literally or otherwise.
The very first thing out of your mouth either feeds that resistance or starts to dissolve it. A small, disarming, human moment: a little self-deprecating humor, something that earns a chuckle, that releases a different chemistry.
“You can’t be angry and laugh at the same time. It is physiologically impossible.”
Dr. Laura Sicola
Sicola lived this in front of three hundred management consultants in Denmark. Knowing the technical crowd would brace for the “speaking expert,” she spent two months on Duolingo so she could open in halting Danish. All she could manage was the equivalent of girls and boys eat rice. She said it anyway. The room burst out laughing, then applauded. The point was not the sentence. It was the willingness to look a little foolish out of respect for them, which dropped the collective anxiety and unfolded three hundred sets of arms before she said anything of substance.
The research explains why this is not a soft nicety but a precondition. Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske, and Peter Glick have shown that people evaluate one another along two primary dimensions, warmth and competence, and that they assess warmth first. The opening question a listener answers, usually without knowing they are answering it, is can I trust this person? Only after that comes can I respect this person? Trust is the channel influence travels through. If the warmth signal does not land, your competence never gets a hearing, no matter how strong your data.
How every listener evaluates every speaker, in order
Warmth: assessed first
“Can I trust this person?”
Competence: assessed second
“Can I respect this person?” (only after trust is established)
Research: Cuddy, Fiske & Glick on warmth and competence. Leaders who lead with competence first skip the step that makes competence audible.
This reframes charisma, a word that frightens technical professionals because it conjures the image of stereotypical televangelists. Sicola’s version is quieter. She asks: who in your life would choose to spend a whole day with you, and who are you when you are with that person? Direct, at ease, fully attentive, accepting them as they are. That is the energy, adjusted for context, that travels. Charismatic can be calm. The most magnetic people in a room are often the ones who make the person in front of them feel like the only one in it.
One concrete tool of warmth: how to deliver hard feedback without tripping the threat response. Most people lead with praise, then say “but,” and the “but” quietly erases everything before it while the listener braces. Sicola swaps two words. The transition becomes “and,” and the ask becomes “even better.” Here is what you did well, and here is what would make it even better. “Better” implies a deficit to fix. “Even better” says the work already pleased you and there is more to reach for. The information is the same. The chemistry is not.
The insight
Warmth is not decoration applied on top of competence. It is the precondition for competence being heard as intended.
Take action
Open your next high-stakes meeting with one genuine, slightly disarming line before any content at all. Watch the arms unfold.
5. Build the bridge with metaphor
The first four tools close the gap on your end. The last one closes it on theirs.
The obstacle is the curse of knowledge: once you understand something deeply, you forget what it was like not to. So the expert does what feels like generosity and is actually overload, dumping data point after data point until the listener’s brain is, in their own silent words, fried. The expert is whipping Tetris blocks at the audience at high speed and expecting them to assemble a clean puzzle. Nobody can.
Sicola’s fix is to lead with an analogy or metaphor. A metaphor reaches the unconscious instantly, before the slow, effortful logical brain has to “carry the one” and do the math. Give people a mental picture they already own, and your data simply maps onto a shape that is waiting for it. You are fitting the peg into a hole you pre-cut.
“The best way to make someone think you are smart is to make them feel smart.”
Dr. Laura Sicola
Watch her and you realize she has been doing it the entire time. The iceberg, the prism, the mixing board, the golfer’s grip, the combination lock: a dozen analogies across one conversation, and you barely noticed any of them as analogies. That is the proof of the technique. It does not make you sound less expert. It makes you more relatable while your listener quietly concludes that you are brilliant, because the real secret is this: drown them in jargon and the best they will think is I guess they know their stuff, but I have no idea what they are talking about, and I am not going to say so. That is not where anyone says yes.
The insight
Clarity is not dumbing down. It is building the on-ramp. Clarity is currency.
Take action
Before your next technical explanation, find one everyday analogy and open with it. Then map the data onto it. Notice how much less you have to repeat yourself.
From brilliant minds to influential voices
The gap is most expensive precisely where the minds are most brilliant. In biotech, the curse of knowledge runs deepest and the cost of being misheard is highest: a therapy that does not get funded, a team that never aligns, science that stalls before it reaches a patient. Brilliance is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the distance between what the brilliant person meant and what the room took in.
It is worth remembering how Fred Rogers opened his most famous six minutes. In May 1969, facing a Senate subcommittee weighing a cut to public broadcasting from twenty million dollars to ten, he did not lead with budget arguments. He led with trust, telling the chairman that one of the first things a child learns in a healthy home is trust, and that he trusted the senator would read his statement. He closed the gap before he ever made his case, and the full twenty million survived. Warmth first. Then the ask.
None of Sicola’s five tools is exotic. See your own footage. Choose your color. Move by millimeters. Lead with warmth. Build the bridge. What makes them hard is the gap itself, the simple fact that you will always be the last person to know how you come across. Which is why the work starts where it started as a five-year-old listening to a secret code she could not crack: with the decision to find out.
So watch your own recording. It is the only way to see what everyone else has been noticing all along.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Laura Sicola, “From Brilliant Minds to Influential Voices,” on Stand Up to Stand Out.
- Mr. Rogers’ 1969 Senate testimony: youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA
- Two free chapters of Speaking to Influence: speakingtoinfluence.com/2free-chapters/
Further Reading
Speaking to Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice by Dr. Laura Sicola
Published 2019 • Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press
Sicola’s book takes leaders through the Three Cs of executive presence (command the room, connect with the audience, and close the deal), with frameworks drawn from cognitive linguistics and two decades of coaching senior executives, physicians, and scientists.
Dr. Laura Sicola is a cognitive linguist and executive communication coach, author of Speaking to Influence, and host of the Speaking to Influence podcast. She earned her Ph.D. in educational linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught from 2001 to 2013. Her TEDxPenn talk has been viewed more than six million times.