What Should I Even Talk About?

Here's something I hear in almost every single sales conversation I have. A CEO will come to me and say, okay, I get it. I understand that I need to be more visible. I understand that my invisibility is a problem. I'm bought in. I'm ready to do this.

And then the very next sentence is, but I have no idea what I would talk about every time. It's like clockwork. They've come, they've overcome the resistance. They've accepted that visibility is part of the job. And then they hit this wall and it stops them cold because it feels like a real problem. It feels like they're missing something fundamental. Like everyone else who's out there posting and speaking and building an audience was born with some content gene that they just don't have.

But here's the thing, in my experience, and I meet with over 500 CEOs a year, it's almost never true that they have nothing to say. The problem is the opposite. They have too much to say. They've been building companies, leading teams, and solving hard problems for 10, 15, maybe even 20 years. They're sitting on a mountain of hard-won knowledge, but because it's so familiar to them, they just can't see it. They discount it.

They assume everyone already knows what they know, and so they freeze. They stare at a blank LinkedIn compose box and think, who am I to post about this? Everyone already knows this. This isn't interesting.

Today I'm going to break through that wall. I'm going to give you three specific tactics I use with clients to uncover what you should talk about. And I'm going to show you why you already have more to say than you think.

This is Cultivating Executive Presence. I'm Justin Nassiri and this is episode six. What should I even talk about?

Let me set the stage for why this particular question is so common. In the first three episodes of this podcast, I made the case for why CEO visibility matters. I talked about the cost of invisibility. I talked about the difference between humility and hiding. I talked about the courage it takes to show up before you've perfected your message. And if any of that resonated, if you're listening to this episode, there's a good chance you're past the why and into the how.

You've accepted that you need to be more visible. Great. That's the hardest part. Seriously. The mindset shift is the heavy lifting, but now you're staring at a very practical problem. What do I actually say?

I had a conversation recently with a leader who runs a consulting firm. He's on the board of multiple companies, serves as a fractional VP of marketing for one, fractional VP of sales for another. Brilliant guy, deep expertise. But he told me straight up, I have a challenge compartmentalizing all of this for myself. And if it's confusing for me, it's probably really confusing for other people. That's such an honest and common articulation of the problem.

He wasn't lacking for expertise. He had too many lanes, too many angles, too many possible things he could talk about. And the complexity paralyzed him. I see this in different flavors all the time. The CEO who's been in healthcare for 20 years and says, everyone in my industry already knows what I know. The SaaS founder who says, I don't want to just talk about our product, but I don't know what else to say. The private equity operator who says, I wear so many hats, I don't have a coherent story.

The underlying assumption is always the same. I don't have anything valuable to share. Or at least I can't figure out what it is. And I'm here to tell you that that assumption is almost always wrong. The issue isn't that you have nothing to say. The issue is that you're suffering from something I call the curse of expertise.

But before I get into the tactics, I want to acknowledge something. This don't know what to say objection is actually a healthy instinct in a lot of ways. It means you have standards. It means you don't want to be out there adding to the noise. It means you care about quality. And in a world where everyone with a LinkedIn account seems to be posting generic motivational quotes and humble brag announcements, your instinct is to not be that person. That's a good instinct.

The goal isn't to lower your standards. The goal is to help you see that you already meet them. You just can't see it yet.

Here's what I mean by the curse of expertise. When you've been doing something for a long time, when you've spent a decade or more in an industry building companies, leading teams, making decisions under pressure, you start to take your own knowledge for granted.

Things that are obvious to you are not obvious to most people. But because they're obvious to you, you assume they're obvious to everyone.

It's like the fish that doesn't know it's in water. You're swimming in expertise all day, every day. And because you can't see it, you can't value it. You can't imagine that someone would find it interesting or useful because to you, it's just how things work. I see this constantly. I'll be on a call with a CEO and they'll offhandedly say something like, well, the thing most people don't even realize about selling into enterprise is that the real decision maker is never the person in the meeting. And I'll stop them and say, that right there, that's a post, that's a talk, that's a whole series of content. And they'll look at me like I'm crazy. That, everyone knows that.

No, everyone doesn't know that. You know that because you spent 15 years learning it. Your audience, the people you're trying to reach, the investors, the potential hires, the partners, the customers, they don't have your 15 years of experience. What's table stakes to you is a revelation to them.

I had another client, a CEO in the insurance space, and when I asked what he'd talk about if he couldn't mention his company, he said, I'd talk about how the insurance industry is ripping off consumers and what they need to know to protect themselves. That's a goldmine. That's not just LinkedIn content. That's a keynote. That's a newsletter. That's a whole thought leadership platform, but he never thought to say it publicly because to him, it was just obvious. Here's another one. A CEO in his sixties told me he'd talk about what it's like being a CEO his age. The things that change, the things that matter more, the perspective you gain that you just can't have in your thirties and forties. That's incredibly compelling content. There are not a lot of people writing about that.

And the people who could write about it, the experienced CEOs who've actually lived it, most of them aren't writing because they don't think it's interesting. It is interesting. It's fascinating. It's exactly what your audience wants to hear. You just can't see it because you're too close to it.

So the first thing I want you to understand is that your starting position is not zero. You're not building content from nothing. You're sitting on a mountain of experience, insight, and hard-won wisdom. The challenge isn't generating ideas. It's excavating the ones that are already there. And that's where the tactics come in.

The first tactic I use with almost every client is something I call the keynote question. Here's how it goes. I say to the CEO, suppose I could fill an auditorium with 10,000 people. You have one hour to deliver a keynote address, but there's a catch. You cannot mention your company or your product, or they'll pull the mic from you. What will you talk about for an hour to mesmerize the audience?

In nearly every one of the 500 plus sales conversations I've had this year, I asked some version of that question and it works every single time. Not because it's clever, it works because it removes the constraint that causes the paralysis. See, when most CEOs think about what should I post on LinkedIn, they're unconsciously thinking about it through the lens of their company. They're thinking, what can I say that will help my business?

And that immediately narrows the aperture to product announcements, hiring posts, and company milestones. And yeah, that stuff is boring. That's not what builds an audience. That's not what earns trust. That's not what makes someone want to work for you or invest in you. The keynote question blows that aperture wide open. It forces you out of company spokesperson mode and into what do I actually know that's valuable? And the answers I get are always incredible, always. I've never had someone draw a blank on this question when given a few minutes to think about it.

A founder of a mobile gaming company told me he'd explain how to build a mobile game from scratch, the actual step-by-step process that nobody in the industry talks about publicly.

Another CEO said she'd talk about how leaders can turn a group of individuals into a high performing team, the specific things she's done over a 20 year career that actually move the needle on team performance. A healthcare CEO said he'd talk about how the system is fundamentally broken for patients and what needs to change.

A construction company founder said she'd talk about what it's really like to be a woman leading in a male-dominated industry. Not the sanitized version, the real one.

A FinTech CEO told me he'd explain how money actually moves through the banking system because most people, including most people in finance, don't really understand it. Every single one of these answers came within about 60 seconds of me asking the question. These aren't ideas they had to manufacture. They were sitting right there just beneath the surface. And in every case, the CEO's reaction after saying it out loud was some version of, but I mean, is that really interesting? Yes, it's really interesting. The insurance CEO who wants to talk about how consumers are getting ripped off, there are millions of people who would find that compelling. The construction CEO who wants to talk about leading in a male-dominated industry, there's a massive audience for that. The fintech CEO who can explain how money moves, that's content that people would pay for.

Here's what's fascinating about this moment. Before I ask these keynote questions, these leaders tell me they have nothing to say. After I ask it, they can't stop talking. They light up because I've removed the filter that was blocking them. The filter that says everything I post has to relate to my company. Once that filter is gone, they realize they have years of stories, insights, and hard-won lessons just waiting to come out. A chief revenue officer I work with, this guy has taken his company from zero to 200 million in revenue over the last five years. Consumer facing products. He meets with some of the biggest retailers in the world regularly. And in every single one of those meetings, the buyers reference his LinkedIn content, not his company's press release, not industry reports, his personal LinkedIn posts. That's where they're getting their impression of him and his company. And what does he post about? Not product specs, not sales numbers.

He posts about the things he's learned building a consumer brand from scratch. The hard lessons, the surprising insights, the things that are obvious to him that his audience actually finds incredibly valuable. He didn't start with a content strategy. He started by answering essentially the keynote question, what do I know that's worth sharing? And then he started sharing it.

So here's my challenge to you. Right now, wherever you're listening to this, I want you to actually answer the question. 10,000 people, one hour, no company talk. What do you talk about?

If you can answer that, and I'm confident you can, you already have more content ideas than you'll need for the next six months.

So the keynote question gives you a list of things you could talk about, but not everything on that list is going to resonate with your target audience. And that's where the second tactic comes in. I call it the Venn diagram and it's dead simple. You draw two circles. The first circle is your expertise. In what areas are you a subject matter expert? What topics do you know more than most people? If you're being honest with yourself, there are probably at least 10 areas where you have deep, hard-won knowledge. Maybe it's scaling sales teams, maybe it's navigating FDA approvals, maybe it's building a company culture that actually retains people. Whatever it is, write it all down. The second circle is your audience's interests and this is where empathy becomes essential. Who is your target audience? What do they care about? What keeps them up at night? What do they want to learn, understand, or solve?

If your audience is other CEOs and senior leaders, which for a lot of you it is, they tend to care about things like company performance, growth strategy, managing a team, building a brand, hiring, fundraising, navigating market shifts. That list goes on. But the point is you need to have clarity on what matters to them. The overlap of those two circles, where your expertise intersects with your audience's interest, that's your content sweet spot. That's where you should focus. Now here's where this gets real, and I'll use myself as an example. A big part of my personal life is personal development work. I do meditation, I've been part of men's groups for six years, I've done over two months of silent meditation retreats. I'm genuinely passionate about this stuff.

It's a huge part of who I am and I could talk about it all day, but my audience doesn't care. When I've posted about meditation or inner work on LinkedIn, the engagement falls off a cliff, crickets. Not because it's not valuable, it is, but it's not what my audience is looking for from me. They come to me for insights about executive visibility, LinkedIn strategy, and leadership communication. That's the overlap. That's where my expertise meets their interest.

And that's okay. It doesn't mean I can't talk about meditation ever. It means it's not in the primary content mix. Maybe I reference it occasionally as part of a story, but it's not a swim lane. The Venn diagram protects you from a common trap, which is thinking that everything you're interested in belongs in your public content. It doesn't. Some of your expertise, some of your passion is going to fall outside that overlap. And the discipline is to let it.

I had a client who was a deeply technical chief technology officer, brilliant engineer, and he wanted to post about highly technical architecture decisions. And in theory, that is his expertise, but his target audience, investors, potential customers, future hires who weren't all engineers, didn't care about the technical minutia. They cared about what those architecture decisions meant for the business, how they translated into product reliability, customer trust, competitive advantage. So he shifted his content. Same underlying expertise, same genuine knowledge, but reframed through the lens of what his audience actually wanted to learn. His engagement went through the roof because he was still talking about what he knew. He was just talking about it in a way that landed with the people he was trying to reach.

That's the Venn diagram in action. Your expertise is the raw material. Your audience's interest is the filter and the overlap is the gold. Now, one thing I want to emphasize, the Venn diagram is not static. Your expertise evolves as you learn new things. Your audience's interests shift as the market changes. And most importantly, you won't know the true overlap until you start testing it. You might think your audience wants content about leadership philosophy, and it turns out they actually respond more to tactical, specific content about how you solved a particular problem. That's fine. The Venn diagram is a starting hypothesis. The data will refine it. But it gives you a framework for making decisions. When you're staring at that blank compose box and thinking, should I post about this? The Venn diagram gives you a filter. Do I have genuine expertise here? Does my target audience care about this?

If both answers are yes, post it. If either answer is no, move on to something else. It sounds simple and it is, but you'd be amazed how many people either post about things they're passionate about that their audience doesn't care about, or they post about things they think their audience wants to hear, but where they have no real expertise. Both of these miss the overlap, and the overlap is where trust gets built.

The third tactic is simplest and it's one that a lot of people overlook. What do you already talk about? I mean that literally in your day-to-day life as a CEO, in board meetings and one-on-ones and sales calls and all hands, there are things you say over and over again. Phrases you repeat, stories you tell, frameworks you reference, points you make every single time. Those repetitions are clues.

They're signals. They point directly to the ideas that are most central to how you think and lead. One way to uncover this is to ask your team. And I mean literally walk up to three or four people who work closely with you and say, what do I always talk about? What are my go-to stories? What's the thing I say in every meeting that you could probably recite by heart at this point?

Their answers will surprise you because they've been listening to you more carefully than you've been listening to yourself. And the things you repeat, the things that feel so obvious to you that you don't even notice you're saying them, those are often your most powerful pieces of content. Another way to get at this is to sit in on your own sales calls or client conversations, or better yet, record them.

If you're interacting with clients or potential clients, there's a very good chance you're in a consultative role. You're sharing advice, you're offering frameworks, you're diagnosing their problems and proposing solutions. And those conversations are ripe with content that seems commonplace to you, but would be incredibly valuable to a broader audience. I'll give you an example from my own life.

I noticed that in almost every sales call, I was explaining the difference between personal branding and executive presence. I'd say something like, this isn't about building a personal brand. It's about making sure your company's perception matches its reality. It's about leadership, not marketing. I said some version of that dozens and dozens of times.

And eventually I thought, why am I only saying this on sales calls? This is a core belief that my audience needs to hear. So I turned it into content and it resonated because it was refined through repetition. It had been pressure tested in real conversations.

It wasn't theoretical. It was a point I'd made a hundred times and sharpened with each telling. Here's another example. I have a client who's the CEO of a staffing company and I noticed that every time he talked to a new client, he'd explain his philosophy on hiring. That the best hires aren't the people with the most impressive resumes, but the people whose values align with the company's culture.

He'd tell the story about a hire he made early on, someone with a non-traditional background who ended up being the best performer in the company. He told that story in probably 50 client meetings. When I suggested he turn that into a LinkedIn post, he said, that old story, everyone's heard that. No, his clients had heard it. His audience of thousands of LinkedIn connections had not.

And when he posted it, it became one of his top performing pieces of content because it was real.

It was specific and it had been refined over years of telling. There's a third variation of this that's even easier. Look at your sent emails. Seriously, go through the last month of emails you've sent to your team, your board, your clients. I guarantee there are paragraphs in those emails, explanations, frameworks, pieces of advice that could be lifted almost verbatim and turned into content. You've already written it. You just wrote it for an audience of one instead of an audience of thousands.

Your repetitions have that same quality. They're pre-tested, they're refined, they represent the things you believe most deeply about your work. All you have to do is pay attention to what you're already saying and then say it in a more public forum. And there's a bonus here that I think is really important. When you turn your existing conversations into content, you're not creating something from scratch. You're not staring at a blank page trying to be creative.

You're just documenting what you already think and say. That's a much lower bar. And for the busy CEOs who don't have time to become writers, it's often the most sustainable path to consistent content.

So now you've done the work. You've answered the keynote question, you've mapped out the Venn diagram, you've identified what you already talk about. You probably have a long list of potential topics. The next step is to organize that list into what I call swim lanes.

These are your three to five core content categories, the buckets that all of your content will fit into. I like for clients to have at least three swim lanes. Here's why. First, it gives you variety. If you're posting two to five times a week, you need enough range that your audience doesn't feel like they're reading the same post over and over. Three lanes gives you that rotation.

Second, it gives you room to experiment. Not every topic is going to resonate equally. Having three lanes means you can test which ones your audience responds to and then adjust over time. Each post is a data point. Three swim lanes means you're running experiments across three different hypotheses about what your audience values.

Let me give you an example of how this might break down.

Swim lane number one is thought leadership. This is the core. This is where 40 to 80 percent of your content should live. It's you sharing expertise, offering frameworks, providing insights about your industry or your leadership experience. It's educational, it's generous, it's the kind of content that makes someone think this person really knows their stuff. I'd want them in my corner.

Swim lane number two is your career journey. This is the personal stuff. Not personal like what you had for breakfast, but personal like what you've learned along the way. The mistakes you've made, the lessons you've carried with you, the pivotal moments that shaped how you lead. This content builds trust and relatability. It makes you human. It's usually the content that gets the most engagement because people connect with stories, not frameworks.

Swim lane number three is company related. And this is where I want to be really clear. This should be 20% or less of your content, maybe even 10%. This includes things like product announcements, hiring posts, milestones. And even when you do this kind of content, it works better when it's framed through a personal lens. Not we're excited to announce we've raised a Series B, but here's what I learned about fundraising during the hardest three months of my career and why this Series B means something different.

There's an optional fourth lane that I sometimes add, which is what I call work adjacent content. These are the things you talk about at a dinner party with your clients. Maybe it's a book that changed how you think about management. Maybe it's a trend in your industry that you find fascinating. Maybe it's a perspective on work life integration that your audience would resonate with. This stuff rounds out your voice and makes you feel like a complete person, not just a business robot.

Now here's the critical rule. 80% of your content should be about educating and adding value, not about promoting your company, not about sharing how humbled you are to be featured in some publication, not about reposting your company's press release with a fire emoji.

I'm serious about this. 80% education, 20% or less promotion. And honestly, the clients who do best tend to be closer to 90-10 because the education is what builds the audience. The education is what builds trust and credibility. The promotion, when it comes, lands 10 times harder because you've already earned the right to ask for attention. A repost of your company's latest press release with a comment like, great work team, gets about 10% of the visibility of an original post. 10%. LinkedIn's algorithm knows the difference, and so does your audience. They want to hear your ideas, not your company's marketing copy.

I see this constantly. A company will invest in a great PR hit. Maybe they got mentioned in an industry publication. Maybe they released a report. And then the CEO reposts it with a two sentence comment and it gets like 12 impressions. Meanwhile, if that same CEO took the core insight from that PR hit and wrote it in their own words, told the story of why it matters, what it means, what they learned, it would get 10 to 50 times the reach.

Same underlying content, completely different impact. I was just looking at a CRO's LinkedIn the other day, smart guy doing great work, but his entire feed was reposts of company announcements and press releases.

And his engagement, as you would expect, was basically zero. Meanwhile, his company is spending real money on a PR agency to generate those placements. And the amplification strategy, the thing that would actually get eyeballs on that content, is broken. Because nobody wants to read a repost. They want to hear from a human being with a point of view.

So when you build your swim lanes, make sure the vast majority of what you're putting out there is original thinking. Your stories, your frameworks, your lessons. That's what people follow you for. That's what builds the audience. The company stuff can live on the company page. Your page is for you.

I want to take a step back here and address something that I think is underneath the I don't know what to say objection. Because for a lot of leaders, it's not actually a content problem, it's a fear problem.

The fear has a few different flavors. There's the fear of saying the wrong thing, of putting an opinion out there and having it be wrong or misinterpreted or controversial in a way you didn't intend. CEOs are used to environments where their words carry weight. In a board meeting, if you say something inaccurate, the consequences are real. So they bring that same caution to LinkedIn and social media, where the stakes are actually much, much lower.

There's the fear of looking dumb, of sharing something that you think is insightful, and having someone in the comments say, actually that's wrong. Or everyone already knows this. For high achieving people, and most CEOs are extremely high achieving, the idea of looking uninformed in public is deeply uncomfortable. There's the fear of being judged by peers. I hear this a lot. What will other CEOs think if they see me posting on LinkedIn?

There's a perception in some circles that posting actively on social media is somehow beneath serious leaders, that it's for influencers, not operators. And even though that perception is changing fast, it still holds some people back.

And then there's the fear I talked about last episode, the fear of putting in effort and getting nothing back, of crafting something you care about and watching it get four likes. That's a real fear because it taps into something primal about rejection and being seen.

I want to name all of these fears because they're legitimate. I'm not going to dismiss them. They're real emotional experiences that real leaders go through. But I also want to reframe them. The fear of saying the wrong thing is actually a sign that you're a thoughtful leader. Good. Channel that into being intentional about what you share. But don't let it become a veto on sharing anything at all.

The fear of looking dumb is ironically what keeps most smart people invisible. The people who are willing to look a little dumb in public while they figure it out, those are the ones who end up being seen as experts because they showed their work. They let people watch them think. The fear of peer judgment, I promise you the other CEOs who might judge you for posting on LinkedIn are the same ones who are quietly wondering how to do it themselves.

And in 18 months, when they finally start, you'll have a year and a half head start. And the fear of low engagement, we talked about this last episode, so I won't belabor it. But remember, each post is not a performance to be graded. It's a data point. It's a rep. It gets you building the muscle. The engagement will come, but only if you start.

I had a conversation with a leader recently who told me his biggest hesitation was that he wears so many hats across different companies and he was worried that posting would confuse people.

I don't want to feel like the guy that's saying, hey, look at me, I do all these things. And that's a totally understandable concern. But here's what I told him. LinkedIn is not a business card. You don't need to represent every role you hold in every post. You just need to share what you know. And the through line isn't your title, it's your perspective. Your audience will follow the perspective, not the org chart.

So if I don't know what to say is really I'm afraid of what might happen if I say it, I get it. But the cure is the same either way. Start imperfectly. Start imperfectly. Start scared because the fear doesn't go away from thinking about it. It goes away from doing it.

One of the biggest traps I see leaders fall into is trying to perfect their content strategy before they post anything. They want to have the Venn diagram completely mapped. They want their swim lanes defined and approved. They want a 90-day content calendar before they write a single word. And I understand that instinct. These are people who plan for a living. They run companies. They make strategic decisions. Of course, they want a strategy for this too.

But here's what I've learned after working with hundreds of leaders on their public presence. You cannot build a content strategy from your desk. You can only build it from the data and the data only comes from posting. Think of it this way. Every post you put out there is an experiment. It's a hypothesis. I think my audience cares about this topic and the market will tell you whether you're right. Some posts will get strong engagement.

Likes, comments, shares, most importantly, direct messages and real conversations. These are signals. They're telling you, go deeper here. Your audience finds this valuable. Other posts will get crickets. And that's not failure, that's data. It's telling you this particular angle didn't resonate. Maybe it's the topic. Maybe it's how you framed it. But either way, now you know something you didn't know before.

I call this the heat seeking missile approach. You start by firing in a general direction, you watch where it lands, and then you adjust. Fire again, watch, adjust. Over time, and it usually takes about 90 days, you start to develop a very clear picture of what your audience values from you specifically.

Because here's something that surprises a lot of people. Two CEOs in the exact same industry with similar backgrounds will often find that their audiences respond to completely different topics. One CEO's audience might love content about leadership philosophy. The other's might love tactical how-to content. You can't know in advance which one your audience will gravitate toward. You have to let the data tell you.

After about 90 days, maybe 40 to 60 posts, if you're posting a few times a week, you'll have enough signal to refine, to double down on what works, to let go of what doesn't. And at that point, your content strategy isn't theoretical anymore. It's grounded in real evidence of what your specific audience actually wants from you.

I think about that CRO I mentioned earlier, the one whose LinkedIn content gets referenced in meetings with the biggest retailers in the world. He didn't start there. He didn't begin with a polished content strategy and a clear editorial calendar. He started by sharing what he was learning. Some of it landed, a lot of it didn't.

And over time, he found his lane. He found the topics where his expertise met his audience's hunger. And now his content is an asset that directly impacts his business. But he had to start before he was ready. He had to post before he had it figured out. And that's the part that most people resist. So if you're sitting there thinking, I need to plan this before I start, I'm going to gently push back. Planning without data is just guessing.

And the best way to stop guessing is to start posting. Imperfectly, inconsistently at first, if that's all you can manage, but starting. Because every post is a data point and you need data points to build a strategy that actually works.

There's one more thing I want to address before I close because once people start posting a new fear shows up and it goes something like, I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again. Isn't my audience going to get sick of this? No, they won't. And here's why. A good content strategy is like good leadership. You have to say the same thing a million different ways. Think about it in the context of running your company.

If you have a core value, let's say it's customer obsession, you don't say it once at an all hands and assume everyone got it. You reinforce it in every meeting. You reference it in every decision. You tell stories about it. You celebrate examples of it. You address situations where it wasn't upheld. You say the same fundamental thing. Customers come first, but you say it through a hundred different stories, examples, and contexts.

Content works the same way. Your core themes, the three to five ideas that sit at the center of your Venn diagram, you're going to say them over and over. But each time, you'll approach them from a different angle, a different story, a different data point, a different example.

I'll use myself as an example. I probably talk about the idea that CEO invisibility has a real business cost in some form in 30% of my content. That's a core theme, but I've said it through the lens of hiring, through the lens of fundraising, through the lens of competitive dynamics, through the lens of internal culture, through client stories, through my own experience, through data and research.

Same core idea, dozens of different expressions of it. And here's the part that most people don't realize. Your audience is not paying nearly as close attention as you think. You're the one creating the content. You see every single post. You remember what you said last Tuesday. Your audience doesn't. They're scrolling through a feed with hundreds of other posts. They saw maybe what, 20% of what you published? And of what they saw, they retained maybe half.

So the idea that you're boring people by repeating yourself, it's almost always in your head, not in reality. Repetition is how messages stick. It's how brands get built. It's how trust gets established. One of my favorite lines is, if you're not sick of saying it, you haven't said it enough. When you're absolutely bored to tears with your own core messages, that's usually about the point where your audience is starting to get it.

I have a client who told me after about four months, Justin, I feel like every post I write is just a different version of the same idea. And I said, that's exactly right. What's the idea? He said that companies under invest in their people and then wonder why they can't grow. I said, that's your thing. That's what you're known for. That's what people associate with your name. If you stopped saying it, you'd lose the thing that makes you you.

He pushed back, said, but don't people get bored? So I had him go look at his analytics. His five best performing posts over those four months were all variations of that same theme. Different stories, different angles, different entry points, but the same core message. His audience wasn't bored. They were attracted to the consistency. They knew what they were getting from him and they kept coming back for it.

That's how it works. You're not trying to be a magazine with a different theme every issue. You're trying to be the person people think of when a specific topic comes up. And the only way to earn that association is to say it enough times that it sticks. So don't be afraid of saying the same thing. Be afraid of not saying it enough because the world is loud and your audience has a short attention span. And the only way to break through is consistency.

Same core ideas, different stories, over and over and over again. That's how you go from, I posted a few times and nothing happened, to people associate me with this topic. That's how you build a reputation. Not by being brilliant once, but by being consistent forever.

Let me bring this full circle. If you came to this episode thinking you have nothing to say, I hope I've changed your mind. You have more to say than you think. You've been building expertise for years, maybe even decades. The problem was never a lack of content. It was a lack of structure to see what was already there. So here are your three takeaways. First, answer the keynote question. 10,000 people, one hour, no company talk. What do you say?

That list is your starting point. Second, draw the Venn diagram. Your expertise on one side, your audience's interests on the other. The overlap is your content sweet spot. And be honest about what falls outside of the overlap. Not everything you care about belongs in your public content. And that's perfectly fine. Third, pay attention to what you already talk about. Ask your team. Listen to your own sales calls. Notice the stories you tell on repeat.

Those repetitions are pre-tested, pre-refined content waiting to be published. Organize all of that into three or four swim lanes. Keep 80% of your content focused on educating and adding value, and then start posting. Don't wait for the perfect plan. Don't wait until you've mapped out a 90-day calendar. Post one thing this week. See what happens. Adjust. Post again. Each post is a data point, and after 90 days, the data will tell you more than any strategy session ever could.

And if you're still stuck after all of that, if you've done the exercises and you're still staring at a blank screen, here's the simplest possible starting point. Think about the last conversation you had with a colleague or a client where you gave them advice. What did you tell them? Write that down. That's a post, that's content. It doesn't have to be a polished essay. It can be five sentences.

Had a conversation with the founder this week who was struggling with X. Here's what I told them. That's it. That's a post. And it's probably more valuable than 90% of what's in your LinkedIn feed right now. I had a client who was completely paralyzed about what to post. Couldn't get started for weeks. And I finally said, just tell me one thing you told your team this week that they found helpful.

She thought for a second and said, I told my VP of sales the best way to handle a tough negotiation is to get the other person talking about their constraints. Once you understand their constraints, you can build a solution they actually want. I said, post that exactly like you just said it to me. She did. It got more engagement than anything the company page had posted in six months.

That's how low the bar is to start. You don't need to be a thought leader. You don't need a ghostwriter. You don't need a content strategy. You need to share one thing you already know and then do it again next week. You're going to feel like you're repeating yourself. That's good. That means you're building a point of view that people can associate with you. You're going to feel like some posts fall flat. That's fine. It means you're learning. You're going to feel uncomfortable.

That's the whole point. We talked about that in the last episode. The discomfort is the muscle building. And one more thing, remember that the things that feel obvious to you are not obvious to your audience. Your curse of expertise is your audience's treasure. The insight you toss off casually at a dinner party is the LinkedIn post that makes someone think, I need to talk to this person. You have more to say than you think, so say it.

Next episode, I'm going to tackle the question I know is coming next. How do I know if any of this is working? We'll talk about why attribution is a trap, what leading indicators actually look like, and how to know if you're on the right track after your first 90 days. I'm Justin Nassiri. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week on Cultivating Executive Presence.