Katie 00:03
Hello, and welcome to The Internal Comms Podcast with me, Katie Macaulay. If you’re passionate about improving the way we communicate at work, then you are in exactly the right place. Every fortnight, I sit down with a communications practitioner, author, academic or consultant to uncover how we can help people feel truly heard, understood and inspired at work. Today, I want to keep my preamble brief, because honestly, I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation. Indeed. I’m tempted to say, if you listen to just one podcast on communication this year, make it this one. My guest is Jeremy Connell-Waite, communication designer, storyteller and speechwriter, whose day job is helping the global technology innovator IBM tell better stories.

Katie 01:09
I love absolutely everything about this conversation. If you’re looking for inspiration, if you’re keen to define your why or wondering, can I really make a difference inside my organisation? Then this conversation is exactly what you need. Jeremy reveals how in business, our goal isn’t just to inform, it’s to help people feel something so they do something. And then he breaks down how we can do that through transformative stories, using the power of surprise and optimism and far fewer words than you might imagine. He introduces us to the Ikigai framework, a powerful tool for finding your why, for aligning your work with what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, everything from Aaron Sorkin to Aristotle, I kid you not. This show is packed with useful resources, smart thinking, lots of great ideas. But don’t worry if you can’t take notes, there is a downloadable transcript, detailed show notes, all the links you need on AB’s website. So just visit abcomm.co.uk, and head over to our podcast page. So without further ado, please enjoy this gloriously insightful and uplifting conversation with a very brilliant Jeremy Connell-Waite. Jeremy, it is an honor and a privilege to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Jeremy 03:01
We’re gonna have so much fun. I can’t wait. This is gonna be great now. Thanks for having me.

Katie 03:06
I will have done an introduction to you before this conversation starts, but because your job title is so intriguing, I thought we could set the scene for listeners. You’re on a plane. You’ve got a stranger sat next to you, who says, What do you do for a living? How do you respond to that question?

Jeremy 03:26
I’d like to say that I’m a storyteller. I’m a mixture between a storyteller and a speech writer. Speech writers probably my favorite part, because there’s not many around and it begs the question, oh, who do you write for? What do you do, and how do you write? Because you don’t hear about that very much anymore. It’s like one of these lost arts, the art of rhetoric and persuasion. You hear about it in politics, but you don’t hear about it much in terms of entertainment and business. So I call myself a communications designer, just because I draw speeches. And people go, Oh, you write speeches, you’re speechwriter. I’m like, look at some of my stuff. I draw speeches like I physically draw it and color it in, the shape the emotion, how it’s going to make an audience feel. So I design communications. But whilst I’ve been in marketing most of my career, I don’t actually sit in marketing. I’m not in comms. I’m not a traditional internal comms person. So I sit with executives and consultants, scientists and researchers, trying to help them tell their story. So a little bit of performance coaching in there as well, exec coaching stuff. But let’s go with storyteller and speech writer.

Katie 04:34
Love it. Were you born to do this job, do you think?

Jeremy 04:38
Do you know, I think I was. I was thinking about this the other day. I remember when I was at school, and I went to the careers officer, and I think I must have been 15, 16, I’m 52 so I was fourth year, I think. And you meet your careers officer, and they say, Jeremy, what are you going to do? And you have to do the thing that makes your parents happy, or what’s on the list of jobs that you could have nothing to do with the fact that the job you’ll end up having, hasn’t been invented yet, for most people. And I was like, oh, okay, I want to be an accountant. I want to be an accountant. And now, and I watched Wall Street with Gordon Gekko. You remember with the red braces? I’m from Salford, and I wore red braces, how I didn’t get beat up regularly as a 14 year old or something, going to the shop to buy the Financial Times pretending to be Gordon Gekko, and I thought that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into the stock market and be a stockbroker. I think I would have hated it. I love people and I love numbers, and I accidentally fell into social media at the right time, when nobody knew how to recruit for social media, it was literally people that can understand data and how large groups of people move, and then you’ve got to love the people that are going to do the thing. So that set me on a trajectory to marketing, a love of storytelling, and ultimately, a love of speech writing, and along the way, just wanting to be purpose driven, yes, like, without getting all deep super quick, like, how can you actually tell a story that’s going to make a difference and move people to act, that’s going to make the world work better in some way, no matter how small. So yeah, so I’m absolutely doing what I love. It doesn’t even feel like work anymore. What a great feeling tell my boss that because he looks after me and pays me well. But no, that’s a lot of fun.

Katie 06:15
We’re going to talk about storytellings a lot in this conversation, so I guess we should do a little bit around definitions up front. It’s my observation that all too often you see on a company website our story, and you click on it, and you think you might get a story, but you don’t, you get a string of facts. How do you define what is actually a story?

Jeremy 06:38
Oh, my goodness. Okay, so a really short version. One of our mutual friends, Aaron Sorkin, likes to say the it’s only two words. A story has to have intention and obstacle, that’s it. Somebody has to want something really bad, something huge is standing in their way. And usually the thing that is standing in their way is so big and so formidable, and they can’t get past it on their own. And therefore, some sort of the transformation journey happens with our protagonist… And you’ve got heroes journeys. There’s millions of different structures we could go into. If you wanted to, if you was to go one stage deeper, and especially for the folks listening, and they’re making notes, if you want something practical about what a story is versus what it’s not: A story is not about something dramatic that happened. Somebody said to me the other day, like, imagine Gladiator, or you’re in the Coliseum and you’re watching the lions and and the gladiators do nothing. That’s going to be really interesting for a short period of time, but you’re going to have lots of drama, and then more fighting, and then more people die. After a while, it’s going to get a bit… there’s no intention and obstacle. It’s not just a list of things that happened. If you was to be a real student of storytelling, you’re going to end up in 335 BC, with Aristotle probably looking at a pamphlet, I think it was about 62 pages long, called poetics, and it’s where the three act structure came from it’s why we have three act structures in theater. It’s why even TED is three act structures of talks, three, six minute. But essentially it just goes like this: somebody wants something really badly, and something huge is standing in their way. They meet a guide that gives them a plan that calls them to actions so that they live happily ever after. Somebody wants something really badly, and then these things are standing in their way. They might be internal problems, internal comms, external problems, or market forces. You might have a philosophical existential crisis, big obstacles, usually one big thing, and they meet a guide, and that guide is going to have empathy, and they’re going to have authority. They’re going to have the head and the heart right, the left brain, the right brain. So that they come and they give you a plan, because they can navigate their way through this messy transformation, like Gollum, I don’t know, trying to get you through Middle Earth. They give you a plan that calls you to action, that ends up in comedy or tragedy, hopefully success. That’s it. Oh, but somebody goes into the start of that journey, and they end it transformed in some way. If they are not transformed, it’s not a story. And that’s why, when you just see dramatic events, or you see just sequences of things that happen, it doesn’t make you feel, doesn’t take you on that emotional roller coaster of a journey like the way that we’d binge watch something on Netflix or watching Beast Games or something. So a roller coaster. It’s a transformation.

Katie 09:27
How important is the element of surprise, do you think? Because what you’re describing there has a moment of more than one moment of surprise, potentially, is that a critical element?

Jeremy 09:38
What are you watching at the moment? Have you got a favourite show or a movie or a mini series?

Katie 09:42
I’ve just been watching something that no one will know about it. It’s called Drops of God, and if you are in any way interested in wine, then it’s about six or seven episodes, one season. It is brilliant.

Jeremy 09:56
Have you watched a few of them back to back?

Katie 09:57
Yes. I binged it completely.

Jeremy 10:00
What was it that surprised you about that show?

Katie 10:03
At every turn, it’s taking you down a path and then flips the script and you’re seeing something from a completely different perspective. You didn’t see it coming. It makes perfect sense in retrospect, but you didn’t see it in advance

Jeremy 10:20
The reason that that works is the magic ingredient of storytelling, and what actually happens when you surprise an audience and you show them the world in a way they didn’t expect, especially why something about something that you absolutely love, your emotions have been proven scientifically to intensify by 400%.

Katie 10:38
Wow.

Jeremy 10:39
So if you are surprised, you get something that you didn’t expect. Your emotions intensity by 400% that’s connected to dopamine. And dopamine is the thing that makes us want more and more of stuff. What happened next, when we’re on the edge of our seat and we want to binge watch, just, I’m into Beast Games at the moment, and it’s just a typical cliffhanger all the time, and you’ve got to do the next one just like on The Traitors or something, because there’s an element of surprise. Yes, if you knew that was coming, we’ve got Valentine’s Day coming up. You might get some flowers. And Valentine’s Day, you might love them, but you might not be surprised. It’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy. Now, if you got them tonight, oh my gosh. Thank you so much for thing! Your emotions intensify.

Jeremy 11:27
There’s another really interesting side of it, not just that storytellers are there to drive an emotional response. Because you could argue that storytelling is just there to make you feel something. Yeah, really. And in business, we want you to feel something so that you do something. So I like that analogy, but it’s really so rooted in emotions. The other thing is that it’s also been scientifically proven that surprise is the only emotion that can change the biological makeup in your brain to move you from a negative state of mind to a positive one. Wow. So when you look at even persuasion and influence and words and language rhetoric, Chris Voss, an amazing guest you had early on on your show, I love Chris Voss, to bits. Tactical empathy. A lot of what he’s talking about is the element of surprise to get a win, sometimes with a hostile audience. And that element of surprise is often trying to move people from a negative mindset to a positive one, where you need to have this very tactical application of emotional intelligence, where you’re trying to persuade and influence, which is why words and language have been used for bad as well, right? Yeah, speech writers in the political world, sometimes indirectly, have a bad reputation because of the way that you can manipulate audiences. For sure, we’ve seen a lot of that at the moment. Some of it’s fake, some of it’s real, yeah, but surprise, yeah, if that’s one of the only things that people take away from this episode, next time you’re trying to write a speech or a story or presentation, or maybe you’re sat trying to coach your team, or even if you’re going for a promotion, you’re going for an interview, think about what that audience is expecting you to say, and ask yourself, how could I surprise this audience by giving them something they don’t expect? I ask my guys to do that all the time. I’m like, look, they’re expecting 300 slides with a white background and 500 words on each slide, and they’d probably expected you to read them as well. So people do that, so don’t do that. But surprise, don’t use slides. Draw it on a flip chart or a whiteboard.

Katie 13:33
Can you imagine Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with why’ speech if he hadn’t have used the little flip chart on a pen?

Jeremy 13:39
I did an event with Simon a while ago, and it was at the Science Museum in London. Have you ever been in the Science Museum?

Katie 13:45
Only once recently for an awards night.

Jeremy 13:47
It’s the most amazing theater, you’ve got the IMAX theater inside. And Simon knew that he had access to this IMAX theater with this incredible screen. Now, any other presenter is going to go into that venue, and people were spending 1000s. It was a very small group of us. They were spending 1000s to go and see him, to do basically a three hour session. You would look at that screen and go, Oh my goodness, like in the sphere in Las Vegas, I am going to make the most of this technology if it kills me, I’m gonna have slides and animations and videos. None of that. Same thing. He stayed on brand. He got his flip chart, drew it just at his marker, and honestly, it’s one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen live as a presenter, where three and a half hours with only one break, no slides, just a marker pen and a flip chart, because he was that good at engaging the audience and solving a problem. I’ve seen Al Gore do that. John Maxwell is a leadership coach in America, I’ve seen him do that a lot. Six hours, just sat on a stool talking to an audience with no slides whatsoever for six hours, and it’s just phenomenal. You don’t need the glitter glamour if you’re good enough.

Katie 14:11
I think it’s John Maxwell’s quote “an audience doesn’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” Have you heard that?

Jeremy 15:04
That is a good one. Another one of my favourite quotes of his, “people are not persuaded by what you say, but by what they understand.” Oh, isn’t that a good one? Like we’re all here so desperate to tell our stories and to… “here’s what you should know.” It’s not about that. What do they understand? The audience is always the hero. Yes, yourself in their shoes like massive amounts of empathy, it’s not about you. You’re not the hero. Nobody really cares what you think anyway. How can you help them to think differently? What will they understand? All of that. John Maxwell is awesome.

Katie 15:37
When we chatted earlier to prepare for this, we were talking about storytelling, about organisations, and you said, “there’s always two sides to the performance story.”

Jeremy 15:48
I love the idea of performance, and I don’t think anyone’s done anything on this. Actually performance driven storytelling. I started to play around with the idea of purpose driven storytelling and being purpose driven, and there’s nothing new there. Everyone seems to attach purpose to everything, even though a lot of the time they shouldn’t. But the idea of performance driven, I like that, because there’s two sides to that coin. And I work for a very large organisation with a lot of people and a lot of money at stake with some of the decisions that we’re helping advise people on, and it’s all performance driven. We’ve got to keep stakeholders happy. We’ve got to keep shareholders happy. We’re looking at Wall Street. We’re speaking to analysts. We’ve got all of our employees and everyone internally, performance, performance. How are we going to do… what’s the metric? What’s the value of a story?

Jeremy 16:35
I love attaching values to a story. There’s lots of wrong ways that you can do it, and there’s lots of ways that it would absolutely fail. I used to value audiences at Facebook many years ago, and some companies even went bankrupt trying to put a value on an audience or a value on a story, but they were really looking at tracking the performance, some sort of KPI. But I also like the other side of it, that it’s not all science and maths. There’s an art to it that’s beautiful, and there’s a side to it that’s going to be the tenor. How do you stand up on stage and engage that audience in a way with charisma, with presence, with so much love and engagement you’re there to serve them and build trust and do all these wonderful things. And there should be an element of performance in the way that we bring our stories to life. So if you think that a story is there to make you feel something, so that you do something, this is why I think there’s a book waiting to be written here somewhere, the feel something so that you do something. Feel something is the performance of the bringing it to life. And the do something is the performance in terms of what did it do?

Jeremy 17:37
You know, Al Gore said many times, the only judge of a good speech, the only metric. What did the audience do afterwards? What did they do next? And if you’re in climate change, if you’re trying to drive some sort of a movement, if you’re in business, did they change their attitude? Did they use their voice, their votes? Did they change their choices? What did they do? And you’re tracking that element of performance. What seems to happen in comms is the people skew towards the edges, and it’s like they almost go all in on one side. It’s never balanced enough. It’s either they’re all in on performance, in terms of money and metrics, and we’ve got to impress the CIO, the CTO, the CFO, especially. And marketing and comms is especially guilty of that. They go all in on the performance of the how do you bring it to life with preference, consideration, awareness, engagement at a traditional marketing metric around uplift and sometimes NPS, and they’re looking at the performance side of here’s how it made me feel. And got this many impressions and this many eyeballs, and it was gorgeous, which is also good. There’s… we need that. But you go and take that to a CFO, and they’re like, no, no, yes, exactly. You’ve got no budget. I’m not buying that. Where’s the transitional head count? Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. But look how we made them feel. You need both. You need both. You want the head and the heart.

Katie 19:03
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Katie 20:34
How do you find these great stories, and then how do you structure them? It’s my, again, my observation, and I don’t know whether it’s a lack of imagination, I always think about 30 years service. Jane Doe’s just done 30 years service. No one wants to read that story on the internet for a second. They might read about the biggest lessons she’s learned in that career, or the biggest mistake she’s ever made, or the letter she’d write to a younger self. So it’s something to do with angle, but it’s got to be a bit more than that. How do we find these great stories, and then how do we structure them?

Jeremy 21:07
So there’s two very big answers to both of those. Gosh, how do we find them? I think there’s a side of it that like, you’ve got to be obsessed, you’ve got to really want to do it. You’ve got to love the work. I almost said passionate, then there’s so much around people who are passionately driven to do things, and that’s just not enough, just to have that kind of emotional drive. The thing is, it might have been Brendon Burchard that said this a while ago, maybe on one of the performance podcasts. But anyway, Brendon Burchard wrote High Performance Habits, wonderful author. He talks about where, if you’re passionate about something, everybody loves that. Oh, I found that passion. There’s a lot of people in the industry at the moment saying passion is the worst thing in the world, especially if you’re a startup or you’re an entrepreneur. Don’t do something based on your passion. But that doesn’t offend anybody, because people love that. When you found your passion you want to be great. Let’s talk about that.

Jeremy 22:00
When you’re obsessed by something, you’re kind of on the edges, you start to get like, this is keeping me up at night. It’s getting me out of bed in the morning. It’s the only thing I talk about. It’s the only thing I read. I’m geeking out to levels of colours of ink deep on this, but I’m obsessed. And what sometimes happens is people are like, oh, Jeremy, that’s, just down a bit, just easy Tiger, just to turn it down, because it’s almost like you’re too intense. But there is a level of if you want to be up there as one of the best, there has to be a level of obsession. And when you are so driven to know that stories can genuinely change things for the better, and you see the impact of that as I started to get more and more obsessed with helping other people to find their own voice and their own stories, and I get more and more turned up.

Jeremy 22:47
Between passion and obsession, I’m just, collecting stories like this is the favourite thing in the world. I sometimes block out half a day when all I do, I’m like an architect, I’m either going to be structuring stories that I’ve seen before, or like, I’m some archeologist that’s about to go digging. I might be on masterclass.com, I might be on a research site, and all I’m doing is digging for stories, and it might take me four hours of nothing to get through all that coal, right? There’ll be a diamond somewhere. But the joy in finding that story, because I’ve put in the work and the effort with my level of obsession… Some of us might have just given up after 40 minutes. It’s a lot of coal. Forget it.

Jeremy 23:28
So I don’t know that there’s a quick answer to that, because you’ve got to love it to put the effort in, because storytelling is hard. It’s not a soft skill. AI can take you so far, but it’s just such a human craft, telling really good story. You need to find something that is connected to your deepest passions that you can then find a career in that you can turn into that obsession that’s going to help you, hopefully make a lot of money and inspire a lot of people. For me, that was a very specific journey. I’ve used processes like Ikigai in the past., to try and figure out how I find my why. I love Simon’s stuff around Find your why, but I think it sometimes feels a bit too superficial. It’s like a cliche bumper sticker of, what’s your why? I want to do this so that this happens. Whereas something like Ikigai gets deep into what drives, you know, what keeps you up at night, that’s not enough, that doesn’t inspire anybody. What gets me out of bed in the morning? And how can I articulate that in a way that turns into a job that someone wants to pay me for? And for me that’s going to be that obsessive desire to find better and better stories and better speeches, and you gotta crawl through a lot of crap. You gotta listen to a lot of bad TED Talks.

Katie 24:45
That was my next question, because you must have seen this happen, or heard this happen many times, and you just… your head is in your hands because you’re thinking, you just killed that story, it could have been fantastic, and you just didn’t bring it to life. You didn’t connect with it. What a missed opportunity. Is there one mistake that people make over and over again that just absolutely kills a story in the telling of it?

Jeremy 25:09
Apart from them being too self obsessed and forgetting that the audience is the hero… there’s lots of places for that, when you are there to talk about yourself, biography, thought leadership, to a degree, if you’re a real expert in your field, especially if you’re educating, you’re doing a lecture or some form of a seminar. For the most part, it is that case of you’ve not understood enough what the audience wants to hear. You’ve not thought enough. Someone in the audience is sat there thinking, I want that speaker to understand what I feel, and what I’m thinking. And the speaker hasn’t put themselves in their shoes well enough.

Jeremy 25:43
But I think a slightly more flippant reply to that question would be, they speak for too long. That’s it. They speak for too long. Just shut up. Take however much time you got, cut it in half. Collins, who used to be Tony Blair speechwriter, even when they’d pruned a speech to death on the morning of the speech, they’d still cut it by another 10% and they got into the habit of doing that, because no one’s ever gonna tell you off for having a short speech. John F Kennedy used to say, if anybody speaks for longer than 12 minutes, the audience is just thinking about food and sex anyway. Come on. You got 12 minutes. Maybe you get 18 on a TED stage. But Al Gore does some wonderful presentations that he calls truth in 10. They’re 10 minute speeches, and they’re amazing. Other people would have done that in 40. He’s like, why 40 minutes? If I can get the job done in 10.

Katie 26:34
Yeah, don’t bury the lead, as we used to say in newspaper.

Jeremy 26:37
Yeah, exactly.

Katie 26:39
We’re recording this at the start of a new year. People might be thinking about career development, setting their career goals. You mentioned it earlier, about advising executives, coaching them. How do you help people unlock more of their own potential? It’s a big question I know.

Jeremy 26:57
It is a big question. And thing is, that’s what I love most about your work as well, by the way, just looking at what your agency does and the work that you’ve written on the masterclass that you host. To me, it’s just all about unlocking the potential in other people, right? So we’ve got this common vested like that love of, how do we..? Because it’s flipping hard. And there’s a book Coaching for Performance, it’s a wonderful book, Coaching for Performance. And the book opens, it’s like a Bible for if you want to become a coach and you want to help other people remove the obstacles standing in their way, help them be successful. That’s the Bible for a lot of coaches. But right at the beginning of the book, it talks about the average business person is only working to about 40% of their potential. And it’s reasonably anecdotal, because it’s based upon the surveys of all the people that have been through multiple coaching programs, almost like an NPS style survey. But it just shows a lot of people, they don’t know how to unlock that. And sometimes they’re in the right company, but they’ve got the wrong manager. Sometimes they’re in the wrong department, and they’ve not yet figured that out. Again, it’s why I think one of the stepping stones… I don’t mean this to be a cliche or a bumper sticker again, but the reason that I love Ikigai is because I think that’s a really good platform to help you find more of your potential, to help you find that thing that you should be passionate about that unlocks your potential. If anyone’s never heard the phrase before, Ikigai is a Japanese phrase from Okinawa. What the Japanese think Ikigai means is very different to what Westerners mean, but that’s a whole different story. The way that we’ve interpreted it is that you have what you are good at and what you’re paid for, what you love and what the world needs, and if you found your why, these four circles, like a big Venn diagram, all overlap. Now what that actually means in reality is that what I’m good at and what I’m paid for is my job. It’s my job description. Hopefully they’re the same thing. And it’s really interesting to see how much those two circles overlap or not. Your perfect job is going to get those two to overlap first. But then, what do I really love? And that may even be going back to childhood. It might be bmxs and LEGO, and dance and art and painting, and they might be church and sports and all sorts of stuff in there. And then, what does the world need? What do you think that the world needs? You’re going to be passionate about something, something purpose driven, something that’s maybe a legacy based thing you got to be super proud of. But those are usually things that go often outside of work or is voluntary. The process of Ikigai is about, okay, how do I get the love and the passion and the obsession with what the world needs. How do I get that to overlap with what I’m good at, what I get paid for? And because I’ve coached to so many hundreds of execs through a similar process, and we’ve often framed it in different ways, that’s been the start in the light bulb for unlocking more of their potential. To inspire a bigger audience to move into a new field, to invent a new product, to lead a team in a different way. Works in family, in business, I love that, because I think at the end of the day, Katie, I don’t want to be cheesy, but I am being cheesy. I think we’re here to build a business, to change a world and have fun. I think that’s it. I think that’s all it comes down to, and we should be able to do all three: build a business, change the world in some small way. It doesn’t always feel like it, especially not at the moment, but we should have tons of fun. You know, if it’s not fun, come on, what are we doing it for?

Katie 30:33
What a rallying cry. Thank you for that, Jeremy. That’s powerful stuff. This is the week that Edelman brought out their 2025 Trust Barometer. Yeah, I saw you blogged about that. Do you want to just share with us, I think it’d be quite interesting, your reading of that research this time round?

Jeremy 30:55
Will everyone on the pod be aware of what the Trust Barometer is? I know this is all the internal comms folks.

Katie 31:01
Let’s give them the background. It’s a pretty robust study on it’s 33,000 respondents, I think,.

Jeremy 31:07
That’s right. They’ve been doing it for 25 years. And it’s informed individuals. It’s a good crowd. It is slightly skewed with the people that fill in a survey like that, but for the most part, it’s showing what informed individuals in the workplace, think and feel and for the last few years, they’ve been releasing it at World Economic Forum in Davos, which we’ve had this week. But no, it’s really interesting. I remember last year when it came out, there was two stats that stood out to me like a sore thumb. 88% of people were scared of losing their jobs, and 54% of people said that technology is changing too fast in ways that are not good for people like me. So I always keep an eye on it, just because it’s almost like this barometer. It is like you’ve taken the pulse, excuse, a lot across different geographies and certainly different technologies and industries. But it does show the state of play when you’ve got in the UK, for example, CIPD, Chartered Institute of Professional Development, saying nine out of 10 jobs are going to need to re skill by 2030.

Jeremy 32:07
So I looked at the one this year. Let me see, I made a couple of notes, because it was connected to that, and it backed up a lot of the data that I’ve seen. And it’s, any statistic can be manipulated to you, right? So that that being said, it’s nice to have some form of validation for what you feel. Yes. So 84% agree that employees need to be retrained or re skilled in order to remain competitive. People have serious concerns about levels of trust in AI, there was line that dominated. It is going to take some jobs, but it can also amplify what you love. It can be this amazing augmented assistant.

Jeremy 32:42
Only 36% believe the next generation will be better off than we are today.

Katie 32:47
That’s so scary.

Jeremy 32:49
Yeah, that’s a bit of a rough one, isn’t it? Unprecedented global decline in employer trust that’s close to the heart of all of your listeners, for sure, absolutely, business remains a more trusted institution than NGOs, government or media. What was the last couple? 63% have major concerns about the credibility of news sources now – it’s just hard to know what’s real. Job security. Worried about innovations in AI. Scientists and teachers remain the most trusted leaders, but there was a lot of thinking around how certain leaders are believed, or at least perceived to be willingly misleading audiences, you know, it’s more of a rallying cry to anything else. There’s no blame. You’ve got to just look at your own house. And sometimes it should be some private conversations, maybe with yourself. Yeah, “Am I guilty of that? Do we have a cognitive bias? So I like that the Trust Barometer is like this flag that goes up, yes, that feels to me now like it’s trying to keep people honest a little bit. Look, we’re here to build trust. We’re here to perform a service to our clients. We are here to serve other people in one form or another, trusted advisors building trust across the… So, yeah, it’s a great study. If anyone hasn’t seen it, just search Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s a good read, and it’s a pretty good deck as well. Lots of slides you can steal.

Katie 34:13
You’re making me wonder about the importance of optimism, because I read that and it’s bleak, and I was wondering, what role do we have? What responsibility do we have to inject a little bit of optimism into the debate? And I guess we shouldn’t sugar coat things, gloss over things. If things are tough, we should say it. But how important is optimism? It feels like it’s really important at the moment.

Jeremy 34:37
It feels like we got to keep each other… Do you remember when the Earthshot Prize? Have you seen much of that stuff? David Attenborough kicked it off originally with Prince of Wales. I love the Earthshot Prize. I just love everything about it and everything that it stands for, and Hannah and the team that’s leading the Earthshot Prize is phenomenal. If you don’t know it, just do a quick Google and you’ll just see this. Trying to use technologies to try and build new things. They’re giving million pound grants to five people each year. It’s a phenomenal thing. But the reason I say that is because they have a little tiny equation privately that they have behind the scenes. They featured it in a book that they wrote about the Earthshot Prize originally, but it was urgency plus optimism equals action. That’s one to go in the back of your notebook or post it note in front of your screen. That’s what we need. We need urgency. We need optimism if we want to get stuff done. Urgency plus optimism equals action. And it was very Sir David Attenborough thing. I love that.

Jeremy 35:36
But I’ve also just been reading an IBM book for where our values were written. It’s an old one. It’s like 1962 and the son of our founders, a guy called Thomas J Watson Jr, and he wrote a book called A Business and its Beliefs. And it was basically an internal comms book for how IBM should communicate. And it was written like a love letter to employees. You can still buy it. It’s called Business Beliefs 1962 it’s gorgeous. And the thing is, they were looking at, how do you become successful within the workplace, especially with massive amounts of change happening at an unprecedented speed, and this is the early 60s, so you’ve got political unrest, you’ve got everything that’s going on with the Cold War. You’re about to have the space race, civil riots, all sorts of stuff, college riots going on, civil rights. And he said, We need optimism, we need enthusiasm. We need excitement, and we need pace. Those are the four things that leaders should have. We have loads of excitement in what it is that we’re doing. We’ve got to have tons of enthusiasm for doing it. We’ve got to show the world an optimistic point of view, and we need to have pace to get stuff done. We’ve got to move fast. Now I look at that and think, you know what? We could have written that last week. And some of my favorite YouTubers, people like Cleo Abram, she’s built this phenomenal YouTube channel called Huge If True, and all she does is talk about technology in an optimistic way, and the reason that she’s built such a massive audience so quickly is because we’re just hungry for more optimism. Yeah, you mentioned Simon before, if you asked him on a plane and you sat next to Simon Sinek and you said, What are you? And he’s shared this on podcasts loads of times, but it’s like, I’m an optimist. He doesn’t give his job title, he doesn’t talk about, you know, I’m a this, and I’m that, he’s like, I’m an optimist, because he begs the question, interesting, okay, why? I don’t think I could get away with that. It’s a bit cheesy, but I like that idea. But urgency plus optimism, that’s great, isn’t it?

Katie 37:40
Yes, it’s very good. I’m so glad I asked you that question. It’s also making me think again about Aaron Sorkin. We mentioned him early on, and we I know we’re both massive West Wing geeks, and maybe he gets criticized for this a bit, but however dark and difficult things get in every show, you see the light, you see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel. He never just leaves you completely bleak and cold. I don’t know if that’s your reading of it.

Jeremy 38:08
I think that’s why people still love that show, though, like 25 years after, it was, just because there was so much optimism and Aaron Sorkin gets a lot of stick for being super idealistic in the way that his scripts are put together. But people want that. The place for that… This is what we want leaders to be like, you know. And there is that kind of level of that sort of aspirationally ‘we reach for the stars,’ the way that President Bartlet in the West Wing might speak. It’s really attractive. And even though the show is a bit dated, now, I’ve just started watching it again today.

Katie 38:41
My son has, and I just peek over his shoulder. He hasn’t got to the two cathedrals yet. I’m waiting for that.

Jeremy 38:47
What a great episode. Yeah, there’s a really good one. And I think it’s, I’m gonna say it’s Episode 10 of season four. I think it’s called Game on. It’s definitely called Game on. But I can’t remember which episode it is, but it’s about 10 words. 10 words, 10 words. Leo McGarry is talking about 10 words all the way through. They’re basically trying to find the strap line to be able to beat Senator Richie, I think, in the debate, and they’re looking for this 10 line, because in debating, 10 words can kill you. That’s the tip of the sword. It’s like the headline that the journalists write about … and they can’t find it. And there’s this gorgeous moment. You can look at it on YouTube if you just search 10 words or 10 word answers the West Wing. It’s about three minutes long, and it’s this little monologue about how 10 word answers can kill you because they’re so sharp. But what about those 10 words? What happens after those 10 words, then what? So I’m often writing headlines for scripts and stories, and I always think about the headline first, what the 10 words going to be, because that’s a political device of what people will remember, some of the big story in 10 words, but you’ve also then going to think, what’s next? A great West Wing phrase, what’s next? What happens after that? Yes, that’s probably one of my favorite episodes.

Katie 40:04
I’m gonna give your podcast. I know it’s probably a couple of years old now, but the 10 Word Podcast, everyone, if the Aaron Sorkin fans need to listen to part one and part two of that show, are gonna learn so much about Aaron. I was amazed that he wrote A Few Good Men on the back of cocktail mats in a bar while

Jeremy 40:25
He was working on Broadway in a bar, in between acts while everybody was out.

Katie 40:30
Which just goes to show, if you’ve got a story to tell, then your body will make you tell it. Exactly. There you go. I’m going to ask you a really unfair question, but I can’t not help ask you this, because this has just been such an amazing conversation already. You’ve got 1000 seconds, and there’s a reason that I’ve chosen 1000 seconds, and you’re probably going to explain to listeners why, to inspire a room full of internal comms pros, what are you going to say?

Jeremy 41:00
Goodness, 1000 seconds, folks, is 16 minutes and 40 seconds. I’ve been trying to write a book for ages that’s never got off the ground, and maybe it never will. I had it as an idea for a podcast. Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t, but ‘how to change the world in 1000 seconds.’ Because if you look at some of the most powerful speeches that have ever been given, it’s the weirdest coincidence that they’re all roughly 16 or 17 minutes, amazing, and some of them almost exactly. Look at Vladimir Zelinskyy, New Year’s address, exactly 1000 seconds. Jerry Seinfeld commencement, Simon Sinek TED Talk. Brene Brown, Tim Amanda ngocciodic. Think of Martin Luther King, Dream speech, 970 seconds, Kennedy’s Moon speech, “we meet in an hour of change and challenge, decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance,” just over 1000 seconds. The moon speech, probably the greatest technology speech that’s ever been given for lots of reasons, man on the moon within a decade. So I’m super passionate about the idea of 1000 seconds, and I like it, because no one’s ever done anything with that before. People are like, what 1000 seconds, really? And there’s a lot going on with that, and TED talks have been shaped around that.

Jeremy 42:14
But I think if I was going to give a message around that idea of, could you change your world in 1000 seconds? I’d probably start with a picture of Greta, and probably her phrase, which she had as a title of a book. I think at one point, Noone’s too Small to Make a Difference. And I’d probably end with a phrase like an Obama quote of something like, “you can change the world just by sharing your story,” 10 words. Yeah, change your words just by sharing your story, 10 words, an Obama quote. But in the middle of that, you’re probably going to be asking yourself, really? Obama types or senior execs? You’re in a boardroom with super senior people, you’re at the UN you’re at Davos, all these places. Who am I? Greta? Noone’s too small to make a difference. It’s actually, side note, but it’s a really interesting exercise to go all the way back to Greta Thunberg’s Instagram to her first posts. Because she had no idea what she was doing, people talk about oh, she was engineered this, and she was an influencer that, and she had this support. She had no clue. Everything was in Swedish, no hashtags. Was all over the place, but no one’s too small to make a difference. So I look at that and think, are we okay if we go deep into a bit of the science,? Sorry, folks. I hope this is going to be really interesting, but bear with me. I’ve this is going to be awesome, but okay, no one’s too small to make a difference. Change your world by sharing your story. In the middle of that gorgeous little sandwich. We have another West Wing quote, from Margaret Mead, wonderful anthropologist. Do you know the start of the quote? Katie? Never doubt that a small thoughtful group of committed citizens can change the world. Why?

Katie 43:57
The only thing that ever has,?

Jeremy 43:59
The only thing that ever has, okay? So a small thoughtful group of commit citizens, that sounds nice as well. Now, if someone’s to write a book that was called something like from cascade to conversation, probably a great idea for a book, what they’d probably do is talk about how a lot of change doesn’t come from the top down. It comes from the bottom up, grassroots movements, right? Yeah. Lin Manuel, Hamilton, but we don’t want a moment we’re turning this into a movement. There’s a law of how movements happen, which worked for the climate change movement, of which Greta was absolutely at the right place at the right time. They’d call it Kairos, with the perfect timing. But the climate movement, absolutely small group of people had a huge impact and very, very quickly bottom up.

Jeremy 44:44
But you can also look at gay rights, civil rights, Black Lives Matter, me too. You can go abolition. You could go all the way back to women’s vote. Looking at a lot of the gay rights, three and a half percent of any given group can influence everybody else to change. And there was a professor at Harvard that did a TED talk about it, a gorgeous lady called Erica Chenoweth. And she also looked at it from the point of view of non violent civil disobedience. You want to try and overthrow a government without violence. We’ve just had Martin Luther King Day. You’re thinking of Gandhi, three and a half percent. So I might be looking at those internal comms folks who are thinking, Am I too small to make a difference? And maybe there’s 10 people in your team, and you’re the catalyst that’s going to change the way that world works. Maybe there’s 100 people in your team and you’re there thinking, What can I do? In theory, if you’ve got the right tools and the right mindset and the right message, you and three of your friends and colleagues who are similarly obsessed, could influence the other 96 to change. And also, if you can extrapolate it out, because it is very similar to the laws of influencer marketing, of where those influences come from, to try and bring about some sort of change at scale. So the three and a half percent rule, I love, so that would be, there you go. I’ve just pitched my 1,000 second keynote. I’m sure we’d have a timer in the corner from 16 minutes 40 counting down, and maybe it ends on that final Obama quote, change the world by sharing your story.

Katie 46:15
I love it. That answer made me think in internal communication, we’re often struggling with a lack of budget, a lack of air time. We just don’t get the resources always that our friends in media relations, advertising, marketing, get. But from everything you have said over the last 40 or 50 minutes, actually, what we need is a little bit of obsession. We need to think about surprise. We need to get into the mind of our audience and really try to think about what piece of understanding or insight we want to impart to them. None of that actually requires huge budgets. So this is another wonderful thing about what you’re saying. We can make a difference with the resources we’ve got exactly where we are now, which I think is really inspiring.

Jeremy 47:02
Who said that quote? Do what you can with what you have where you are, is it Roosevelt? Do what you can with what you have where you are. I like that.

Katie 47:11
Love it. Love it. This question I do like asking people like you. You are clearly so inspiring. This whole conversation has been amazing… before we head to those quick fire questions, where do you get your inspiration from?

Jeremy 47:29
Kids, my dog, Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan. You get it from wherever you can. You’ve got to go digging. And it’s definitely not always there. It’s pretty hard out there. At the moment, I saw a study from MIT not long ago that was showing something like 80% of the thoughts that we have at work every day are negative, and you’ve got people anxious and overwhelmed and underprepared for the challenges that it is. It’s hard work, and it’s not always there. We’ve not always got it. So you gotta, you gotta go digging.

Jeremy 47:57
I find it in music and art, personally, there’s a little, kind of a geeky thing that I do, and people appreciate this. I love stationery. I work in AI, and I’ve registered some patents, and I’m working on some pretty cutting edge stuff that other people haven’t done before. But I also just love analogue. I love stationery, I love ink, I love crayons. I collect fountain pens. It forces me to slow my brain down when I write in fountain pen, there’s something gorgeous about you’ve got to wait for the ink to dry. It also forces you to think about not just what you’re writing, but what you’re going to write next. And as a left handed fountain pen writer, that’s slowing it down. But I’ll look at things like what colour of ink. I started to study things like color psychology and some of that’s interesting, just in how you can put decks together in presentations, and you’re looking at how a certain color is going to make a certain person feel you can even do in PowerPoint sometimes in Slides view like a Pixar artist would when they’re looking at storyboards. But I’ll look at different colours of inks and thinking that’s going to make me feel a different way. And I’ve got all these different inks, but then it becomes magical, because you get a gorgeous notebook with some nice, sexy paper, and I’ll get my favourite pen and a certain colour of ink, and I’m like, something magical is going to happen, right? Because there’s nothing more exciting than a blank sheet of paper, but there’s nothing more terrifying than a blank sheet of paper. And where I started from, I needed to find some inspiration A while ago, and I heard that Walt Disney used to write in brown ink. So I thought that’s interesting. And I went to the studios and had a look and did some digging around, and had some friends that showed me this specific shade of brown ink. And you can Google it. You can actually see his original Mickey Mouse drawings, because he hated drawing in black like everybody else, you said that the brush strokes or the pen strokes, there’s no texture to them. Whereas you do something in brown, there’s texture, and you can see the ink, and it’s gorgeous. I bought exactly the same brown ink, and I started to write this creative script, and I got all my favourite Walt Disney quotes in my mind, storytellers instill hope time and time again, but I’m writing in brown ink. So I’m trying to channel, you know… I’m actually writing in green ink at the moment, because I’m slightly obsessed with John Batiste. He’s just recorded a gorgeous album with Beethoven, like Beethoven blues, and I’m writing with a fountain pen that is the design inspiration is a Steinway piano, and it’s got a gold nib, so it’s got, like the Beethoven colored ink with my John Batiste Steinway pen. And I’m writing about an Aaron Sorkin-style dialogue, because Aaron Sorkin used to say, when I’m writing dialogue, I hear music. I don’t hear words. There’s a rhythm, there’s a cadence to a really good dialogue and walk and talk. So I find inspiration in little things like this.

Katie 50:45
I love it. I love it so much. And it’s just setting you up for success before you even…

Jeremy 50:52
You’ve gotta have some fun. Business is hard and seriously writing in a different coloured ink. If that’s what does it for you go for it. Get some crayons. I love black winged pencils, and I’m obsessed with black wing colours and really nice sheets and massive sheets of paper when you can draw everything in one go.

Katie 51:11
Yes, and we talked before about your sort of one pagers that show the level of detail that goes into these speeches. It’s just incredible.

Jeremy 51:20
When you don’t know how to do it, it seems easy. When you see how it’s done at the highest level, that you see a script or a story, and you realise that much work has gone into it, yeah? Oh, okay, I get it now, yeah, that’s a really hard skill, like we need to stop calling storytelling the soft skill, yes, internal comms, especially, you know, our mutual friend Rachel Miller, who’s absolutely amazing, like it is not a soft skill, it’s really effing hard. That’s why you need to value what it is that we do, and you need to pay for us as well.

Katie 51:55
This episode of The Internal Comms Podcast is brought to you by my very own Friday Update. Would you like a short email from me, never more than five bullet points long, giving you my take on the week’s news from across the world of communications? This might be the latest reports, books, podcasts, conferences, campaigns that have caught my eye during the week, I always limit myself to just five nuggets of news so you can read it in record time, but still feel a little bit more informed, hopefully a little uplifted as you end your week. Now, this is subscriber-only content which was initially intended just for AB colleagues and clients. I don’t post this content anywhere else, so you do need to sign up, but that is super easy. Simply go to abcomm.co.uk/Friday. We just need your email address, and it’s equally easy to unsubscribe at any time, so give it a go that sign up page again abcomm.co.uk/Friday. And if you do choose to be a subscriber, I very much look forward to being in touch.

Katie 53:28
I’m gonna head to those quick fire questions. What would most surprise people about you?

Jeremy 53:34
I used to be a giraffe keeper. I used to climb willow trees very early in the morning for really articulated giraffe called Eaton, which is my favorite job in the world, didn’t get paid for it, but no. I took some time out after a business didn’t work out and went to work at an animal park.

Katie 53:53
Oh, that’s incredible.

Jeremy 53:55
My favorite animal in the world. I love giraffe so much.

Katie 53:58
What’s one piece of bad advice or unhelpful thinking that has consistently dogged the comms profession, do you think?

Jeremy 54:06
I’d come back to that thing about soft skills? Yeah. Can we just stop calling it that? Yes, and it’s usually people that are not in the industry who call it a soft skill, but we let them get away with it. The way that people communicate, a lot of social skills, the way that you conduct yourself in interviews and meetings, the way that you write a script or tell a story or present a certain thing. Those are the soft skills, and also, we don’t value those in the same way. It’s the first budget to get cut. The budget’s not often what it was originally. It’s always nice to have when the going is good and there’s spare flying around, it’s great. We invest in the soft skills. I want it to be when going is bad and it’s tough and you’re going through a heavy transformation and everything’s at stake, you’ve got to invest in storytelling and comms and encourage people to do better critical thinking and to look at that as a hard skill, yes, and not to dismiss it as a soft skill, as a nice to have if everything else has been taken care of.

Katie 55:02
Do you still meet executives, C level executives that are thinking to themselves, this is fluffy nice to have stuff. And if you do, is there a killer line, or is it not that simple, that you’ll use on them?

Jeremy 55:15
I don’t mean this with any arrogance at all, but I don’t where I work at the moment, just because we’ve done such a good job internally of positioning it. It’s maybe not always the most appropriate language, but we even think about some things in terms of, how do you weaponise storytelling, in order to get stuff done? This is a hard skill. It’s going to drive sales, it’s going to build pipeline. It’s going to make you more efficient and productive. You’ll save five hours a week using these things, you can build a CXO relationship in 30 days, not 60. But you got to increase this particular type of pipeline 22% faster. We put in very specific metrics on storytelling to show how it’s got this direct economic impact. So I don’t often have that problem. My problem is there’s not enough people that can take this out to our 300,000 employees, which is why I’m spending so much time training AI assistants to be like digital twins of great coaches.

Jeremy 56:09
When I go externally, I hear it all the time. So often we’re looking at some of the stuff I’m doing at IBM, we call them client zero stories, and I’m actually starting to spend more time now going out to see clients, to show them what we’re doing internally, to try and help inspire them to think about their comms differently. And the thing is, once you put the economic value on stuff, and they’re seeing that value, that you can see the light bulbs going on, and also comms teams and marketing, we love it because we get the head count. We want the budget, but we want to have that respect and credibility. We’re going to be sat on board seats. You don’t want to just be, yeah, back of the room.

Katie 56:48
What one book above all others, should all comms professionals read?

Jeremy 56:53
I thinking about this. There’s so many books that I could recommend, given we’ve had quite a practical chat today. It’s been a little bit tactical. If you don’t mind, I’d love to recommend a book from a friend of mine, Terry Szuplat, and he was Barack Obama’s former speechwriter. He was the workhorse in Obama’s administration that was tuning out a lot of the speeches. They have a big speech writing team, and you got Cody Keenan and Jon Favreau and just loads of amazing people. But Say it Well, by Terry Szuplat. He’s a gorgeous guy to follow on LinkedIn as well. He’s not done what a lot of people do when they leave office and they write their biography. He’s actually created a really practical guide about how to write speeches. It’s not the what and the why. It’s about, give me the big house. Show me. How are you going to get this done? Like President Bartlett, don’t just tell me the 10 words. How are you going to do that? And Tim’s book, for me is like this beautiful, deep dive into how to craft better communications. And he’s got advice and templates and a 50, 25, 25 rule, you’ll get into it. So really easy read, but yeah, I think it’s the best book on speaking and presenting that I’ve seen in at least the last 10 years.

Katie 58:09
Is it Ted Sorensen, who wrote for JFK, he came up with some amazing advice. Is he a hero as well of yours?

Jeremy 58:19
Ted Sorensen is my number one hero. If there’s one person I can model my career on… because he was a comms guy and he was an internal comms guy, Ted Sorensen, okay, speech writer. And the lovely thing about Ted was that whilst he was a comms guy, he was also really strategic, like he was in the room trying to solve the Cuban Missile Crisis, communicating with Castro. He’s there making it happen in the room where it happens, whilst he’s also crafting the comms, like Sam Seaborne in the West Wing, modeled on a similar role. I like that. I want to help craft the stories and the speeches, but I also want to be looking at the strategy and in the board and trying to help make a difference.

Jeremy 58:58
A lot of people won’t really know this about JFK, because we just have him down as being one of the greatest speakers of a generation, but at the beginning of his career, he was really bad. He was also on loads of drugs. He’s a war hero, but he was very seriously injured in the war. Shouldn’t have survived. JFK always looks a bit awkward because he’s got both buttons done up. It’s because he’s got a back brace on permanently as he’s in so much pain. Whoa. He always had a walking cane, but he was never seen on camera with it. You can sometimes find clips. But he was high pitched, never made eye contact, bad body language, squeaky. Almost failed English at Harvard for being too wordy, and he was all over the place with his language. He met Ted Sorensen as a communications coach who helped him to be the JFK that we now know the: we meet in an hour of change and challenge. Ask not… It’s a lovely thing maybe to end the pod on, because everything that we’ve covered in this amazing chat, you can sum up with the advice that Ted Sorensen gave when somebody asked him, How do you write these amazing stories? Seriously? How would you write that inauguration speech and the peace speech at American University, or the moon speech? Is there a secret? Is there a trick? And he was like, it’s dead easy. It’s just about four words and five lines. That’s all you need. And I love this because you like back to Aaron Sorkin’s Few Good Men. You can write this, folks in the back of a napkin. Get your pens ready. Four words and five lines. We need brevity, levity, clarity and charity. Oh, brevity, right? Keep it short. Remember, 12 minutes, food and sex, right? Short, don’t speak for too long. Levity. You’ve got to keep it light, because it’s tough out there, especially if you’re trying to simplify something complex, or if it’s a really dark topic, ethics in AI people losing their jobs, there’s got to be levity in the way you communicate. You’ve got to have clarity, simplify, complexity. You’ve got to have charity. We’ve got to have a purpose. We’re in this together. How can we change the world, make it work better? So levity, brevity, clarity and charity and the five lines, is dead simple. Every presentation, every story, needs an outline. We talked about structure. It needs a headline. What are our 10 words? It needs a front line. What’s the first thing you’re going to say to get their attention? Maybe 75 words or less. I need a sideline, some interesting quotes, anecdotes. Movie, love Taylor Swift was a giraffe keeper. Things that you can now add into your story to make it your own. Yep, and I need a bottom line, yes. I need to get stuff done. Urgency plus optimism equals action. So you want to feel something, so you do something. So I love it. Outline, headline, Frontline, sideline, bottom line. Levity, brevity, clarity, charity. Love it. That’s it. Love it. All there is to it. Good, easy. Soft skill.

Katie 1:01:46
Soft skill, If only, if only, I have one final question borrowed from the Tim Ferriss show, you get a billboard, a metaphorical billboard for millions to see. Oh, amazing. Put on that any message you like.

Jeremy 1:01:59
Are you paying for the billboard?

Katie 1:02:02
Yes, we’ll mock it up for you in Times Square.

Jeremy 1:02:05
Oh, do it. my favourite quotes in the whole world, which is my life philosophy. I even apply this to LinkedIn, of all places. So Zig Ziglar, quote, a great sales trainer from the 1980s. Just a gorgeous human, Zig Ziglar, just a wonderful name. ‘You can have everything you want in life, if you just help enough other people get what they want.’ Yeah, can we put that on our billboard and people can just be…

Katie 1:02:32
The message for our time.

Jeremy 1:02:35
Everything I want in life, maybe the recent inauguration speech. It’s not all about you. It’s not just about short term money. Let’s see if we can help other folks do their thing.

Katie 1:02:46
I cannot thank you enough. I’m getting a little bit emotional. It’s been so fantastic this conversation. Thank you so much.

Jeremy 1:02:53
No thank you so much. This was fun. This was awesome. Thank you for having me on and thanks folks for listening, those that have stayed with us. Hopefully there’s tons of nuggets that you’ve taken away. Keep listening. And also do Katie’s Masterclass, if you haven’t done already, it’s amazing.

Katie 1:03:08
Thank you, Jeremy. And that is a wrap for this episode of The Internal Comms Podcast. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. As I mentioned at the start, all the links you need on AB’s website, just head over to abcomm.co.uk, and you’ll see our podcast page there. If you did enjoy this episode, I do have a favour to ask you: please could you like rate or review this show on your favourite podcast platform? That just gives the algorithms a little nudge, makes it easier for your fellow comms professionals around the world to discover our show. We have some amazing guests still lined up in this season, so you may want to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss a future episode. A very big thank you to Jeremy and the dream team behind the scenes. My producer, John, sound engineer Stuart, Content Manager, Madi, designer Rob and the rest of the fabulous crew at AB who keep this show on the road. And finally, of course, a heartfelt thank you to you for choosing The Internal Comms Podcast. This show would be nothing without you. And a very special shout out to those of you who share your favorite episodes of this show on social media. That is a very big endorsement. Thank you very much. So until we meet again, lovely listeners, stay safe and well and remember, it’s what’s inside that counts.