A father is driving home from dinner with his 14-year-old daughter in the truck. His phone rings. The chief of police is on the line, on speakerphone, and proceeds to talk for almost twenty minutes without saying anything. When the call finally ends, the daughter looks at her dad and says, “That was the most inefficient conversation I’ve ever heard.” Then she asks, “When are you going to quit?”
The man behind the wheel is Justin Atherton. He spent 20 years in law enforcement as a SWAT operator, training lieutenant, and detective before stepping into leadership consulting and writing his book, How to Get to the Damn Point. On Episode 263 of the March or Die podcast, he sits down with Sean Kennard to unpack the leadership skill most men assume they have and almost none of them actually train.
Clarity.
“When you can’t give clear, concise communication, sometimes it’s on purpose,” Justin says. “It’s because I don’t want to be held accountable for what I say.”
That sentence sits at the center of the entire conversation. Vague language is rarely a vocabulary problem. It is a courage problem. And the cost is paid by everyone within earshot.
Most Leaders Don’t Lose the Room With Bad Vision
The instinct in most teams is to assume that authority is built through big speeches and grand vision. It is not. Authority is built or burned in the small moments where words either match reality or paper over it.
A team learns quickly. If the leader’s words have edges, the team can act. If the words are soft, the team learns to discount them. Over time, the soft words train the team to stop trusting any words at all.
“Clarity is a leadership obligation,” Justin says.
That framing matters. Obligation, not preference. Not a personality trait some men are born with and others are not. A duty owed to the people under a man’s care.
The same principle that anchors a leader through a crisis (covered in How to Lead When the World Feels Out of Control) applies to the daily ground game of communication. The men who lead well say what is true, plainly, in language that can be measured. The men who lose authority hide.
The Three Categories of Words to Audit
Justin’s framework, taught in his book and built from his background in statement analysis, focuses on three categories of words that erode trust on contact.
Absolutes. Always. Never. Every. No one. These show up most often in arguments and in sales pitches. You always do this. We never miss a deadline. The listener knows the words are inflated. The credit on the speaker’s account drops by the sentence.
Equivocations. Maybe. Sort of. Kind of. We’ll see. These are the words a man reaches for when he wants to look responsive without committing to anything. They function as escape hatches. A team that hears them often enough stops believing the leader will follow through on anything that has not been written in stone.
Stop-action verbs. This is the most damaging category. Try. Plan to. Want to. Need to. Maintain. Hope to. Each one announces a commitment that has already given itself permission to fail.
“I’ll try to be at the meeting.” “We’re planning to launch in Q3.” “I want to get the report done by Friday.”
The team hears the soft language. They start adjusting their expectations downward before the work has even begun. Worse, the leader hears himself, and the subconscious takes the verb at face value. Try is what gets done.
Concrete Beats Abstract, Every Time
The other trap Justin names is abstract language masquerading as feedback.
A performance review reads, “Sean has demonstrated a bad attitude this quarter.”
What does attitude mean? What does bad look like? The person on the receiving end has nothing to act on. The leader walks out of the meeting feeling like clarity was delivered. The employee walks out with a vague grade and no path to fix it.
Now compare: “We need you to engage in team meetings instead of staying silent. We need you to stop interrupting other presenters mid-sentence.” Same conversation. Now there is something a person can actually do.
The rule is simple. If a word can be misinterpreted, it will be. Determined. Engaged. Better. Professional. These feel meaningful. They produce no behavior. Replace them with something a video camera could record.
This is the same principle scripture has been pressing on for centuries. James 5:12 says, “Let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no, that you may not fall under condemnation.” The man who speaks clearly is the man who is willing to be measured against his words. The man who hides behind abstractions is hedging against accountability.
The WAVE Method for Self-Auditing Language
Justin teaches a four-part framework for cleaning up communication. He calls it WAVE.
Words. Learn the three categories above. Train the ear to flag them in real time. The leader who cannot hear his own equivocations cannot stop using them.
Awareness. Catch the words in the moment and replace them. “I’ll try to make it to the gym today” becomes “I will go to the gym today.” Small change. Different identity. The subconscious is always listening, and it accepts whatever verb gets spoken into it.
Verify. Audit written communication harder than spoken. Email, text, proposals, marketing copy. The recipient reads in their own mood, with no facial expression to lean on, plugging in their own meaning. Important emails should be re-read four or five times with the words above in mind. Vague language gets stripped out.
Engage. Bring an accountability partner into the process. A spouse, a coworker, a teammate. Someone who has permission to say, “You just used ‘try.'” Real change requires friction from the outside. Justin’s wife became his check, and the work stuck because of it.
The framework is simple. Working it is uncomfortable. That is the point. (Many of the same instincts that let a man hide behind soft words also keep him from facing harder seasons head on. See Leading Through Adversity for how to build the deeper backbone clarity sits on.)
Lead With the Point, Not the Story
The other habit Justin presses is structural. Most people bury the point under five minutes of warm-up. The room is lost before the speaker arrives at what he meant to say.
The fix is a formula Justin teaches in the book. Point, then Why, then Context only if needed.
“Hey, we need to talk about Project X. It is behind. Here is the data.”
Three sentences. The whole room is now on the same page. Compare that to the more familiar version. “Hey, you know, I was in a meeting last week, and we were looking at last quarter’s numbers, and I was thinking about how this whole thing fits together, and long story short…” By the time the point lands, the listener has stopped tracking.
The same principle applies to hard conversations. Skip the polite sandwich. The compliment-correction-compliment formula does not soften the blow. It just delays it and makes the receiver suspicious of every kind word that comes their way afterward. Lead with the issue. Be human at the back end of the conversation, not the front.
The Cost of Avoiding Clarity
The man who refuses to speak clearly trains everyone around him to stop trusting his word. The team stops asking. The wife stops counting on the promises. The kids learn that “we’ll see” usually means “no” and that “I’ll try” usually means “probably not.” The leader still feels like he is leading. Nobody is following.
This is the quiet cost of vague language. It does not blow up in a single moment. It erodes one conversation at a time, and the man at the center is usually the last to notice.
The opposite is also true. The leader who learns to say what he means, who lets his yes be yes and his no be no, builds an account of trust that compounds over time. The team moves faster. The home runs steadier. The relationships hold weight when the pressure comes.
Clarity is not glamorous. It is not the leadership skill anyone puts on the cover of a book. It is the skill that decides whether the cover is worth reading.
March Forward With Words That Mean Something
Audit the words. The promises made in the meeting. The answers given to a teammate. The “maybe” that should have been “yes.” The “we’ll see” that should have been “no.” The “I’ll try” that should have been “I will.”
Say the point. Say it clearly. Then stand on it.
That is what leadership sounds like when it is real.
Watch the full conversation with Justin Atherton: Clarity Is a Leadership Obligation: Why Vague Communication Costs You the Room. Pick up Justin’s book, How to Get to the Damn Point, on Amazon. And join the brotherhood of men learning to lead with conviction inside Men of Action.