A theme that comes up surprisingly often in my media training work in Singapore is overcompensation.
The need to establish credibility. To demonstrate expertise. To make sure an audience sees: “I am a serious professional, the importance of my work, our department, etc.”
It’s understandable. But here’s the irony: the harder we try to sound credible, the less compelling we can become.
When expertise becomes a shield
When professionals feel pressure to establish their authority, they often retreat into facts.
Statistics, technical explanations, processes, achievements and carefully constructed corporate language. Every statement is defensible. Every detail accurate. Nothing left to chance.
And yet something important is missing.
The human story.
These are often people sitting in extraordinary positions of observation. From their desks, they witness changing markets, shifting human behaviour, emerging risks and difficult decisions.
They see things the rest of us don’t.
They have perspectives shaped by years of experience. They’ve watched strategies succeed and fail. They’ve seen what happens when assumptions collide with reality.
And yet, when asked to communicate what they know, they sometimes deliver a list of facts that could just as easily have been sent in an email.
The information is there. The insight is buried.
Why Executives Resist Storytelling in Media Training
One of the more interesting challenges in media training is encouraging accomplished professionals to move beyond the safety of facts.
Sometimes I encounter considerable resistance.
There can be a reluctance to inject colour, personality or personal observations into a presentation. It’s almost as though making something interesting might somehow diminish its credibility.
I understand the instinct. When people are representing an important function within an organisation, they want to be taken seriously. They don’t want to appear frivolous or stray from carefully approved messages.
But storytelling doesn’t undermine expertise. It reveals it.
Facts inform. Insight creates understanding.
There’s an enormous difference between telling an audience what happened and helping them understand what it means.
A statistic can establish the scale of a problem. A story can reveal its consequences.
A technical explanation can demonstrate knowledge. A personal observation can demonstrate judgement.
And judgement, particularly the kind developed through years of experience, is one of the most valuable things a professional can offer.
I often ask people in media training: What have you witnessed that others might not have seen? What surprised you? What changed your thinking? What have you learned that would be useful to someone outside your organisation?
Those questions produce far more interesting answers than simply asking someone to explain what their department does.
The moment it clicks
One of my favourite moments in media training comes when participants who were initially reluctant to experiment with storytelling finally see themselves on video.
By the final playback, the difference can be striking.
Their presentations are more engaging, their messages more memorable and, perhaps most importantly, they appear more credible, not less.
And they can see it for themselves.
They haven’t suddenly acquired more expertise. They’ve simply stopped hiding the expertise they already possessed behind a wall of facts.
The most authoritative communicators aren’t necessarily the ones who sound the most serious. They’re the ones who are comfortable enough with their knowledge to communicate it with clarity, humanity and a little personality.
Facts demonstrate what you know. Insight reveals how you think.
And sometimes the most powerful way to establish credibility is to stop trying so hard to prove it.
Through my executive media training in Singapore, I help professionals move beyond rehearsed messages to communicate with greater clarity, confidence and impact.
