Write Like a Thought Leader, Now with AI

You can become a thought leader by finding a framing your best ideas. The key is defining a very narrow niche, having an opinion and writing in a journalistic style.

Rhea Wessel is an American writer who helps companies grow their business by enabling their subject-matter experts with journalistic thinking and writing skills. As a journalist, she wrote thousands of stories for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and BBC. As a writer for companies, she has penned and edited thousands more stories across 30 industries. Rhea is the founder and head of The Institute for Thought Leadership. Her book, Write Like a Thought Leader, was published in 2022. She is at work on version 2, which is focused on using AI to boost your thought leadership.

Website – https://www.instituteforthoughtleadership.com/

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The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange podcast. Stories by leaders for leaders. To help you raise the bar on your own excellence. To release the potential inside of you. Now, here’s today’s podcast. Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is episode number 401. David, we’ve been doing this for a while. This is Hugh Ballou and David Dunworth. Say hi, David.

David Dunworth:
Hi, David.

Hugh Ballou:
David is the chair of the board of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. And we have a brilliant guest today, Ray Wessel. And Ray is coming in from Frankfurt, Germany. But she’s going to talk about English. And Ray, so what are you going to talk about today and tell people a little bit about who you are and your passion for that work?

Rhea Wessel:
Sure, thank you, Hugh. My name isRhea Wessel. I am calling in from Frankfurt, Germany, but I hail from Houston, Texas, grew up there. And I am going to share with you my thoughts on thought leadership. And what is thought leadership? That is being known for what you know. So we’re going to talk about strategies to do that and how important it is to have your purpose and passion lined up as part of your thought leadership strategy.

Hugh Ballou:
being known for what you know. That is a very concise explanation. So I find that leadership in general is misunderstood. And so you compound that with this niche of thought leadership. So you’re a thought leader. You’re here influencing us with what you know. We’re influencing people. So say a little bit more about why that’s important for those of us working on this social benefit or for-purpose or charity sector.

Rhea Wessel:
Yeah, in this social sector, you need to win trust. That is the main currency you’re operating with is trust. And to do that, you have to show your competency and your knowledge and your understanding and your passion. And doing that by publishing, by speaking, by getting your best thinking out is a way to win the trust of your audience. and gain a following and they understand your work. There’s lots of different reasons for going down a path toward thought leadership.

Hugh Ballou:
Let’s talk about the characteristics of writing. Some people don’t think they’re writers. Like, I never thought I was a writer. I’ve got 12 books, 10 online courses, ebooks, blog posts. So I don’t consider myself a writer. But what characterizes thought leadership in writing?

Rhea Wessel:
The thought leadership and writing go hand in hand. And it’s really, they cannot be separated. Some people are natural born talkers. And then when you read their writing, you’re like, hmm. Some people are more natural with their writing, and then they have to warm up for the speaking part. But I am a writer of 25 years or more. I have written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the BBC, and I actually think of myself as a writer, but I never thought of myself as a real expert and writer I just did it. And that’s kind of my story to this work is I. I heard the word thought leadership, it was getting this buzz character and I thought I want to write something about thought leadership. So I went out and bought all the books that I could find that had thought leadership in the title, and I read them all and I said. this space is actually quite occupied, quite well occupied. But there were some exercises in there that made you think about what you love, what you know deeply, and so forth. And I literally sat there with a notebook and started to realize, oh, I actually have quite a lot to say about writing. And then I came to call that thought leadership writing because there is a particular style. And I went on to define 17 types of thought leadership articles. And I think there are probably more out there. But it’s a particular style. And it is designed to sell your offering, your product, your service, for sure. But the point is you cannot tell that in the article. Your offering has to be separated from the article. If you are trying to put in plugs for your product and service, it becomes marketing copy really fast, and your readers are going to be running away at high speed. So there are definitely rules and templates and ways to do it right.

David Dunworth:
What do you think about that, Hugh?

Hugh Ballou:
Well, David, I know you got a question poised, but let me do a follow on first. So, Ray, you must have people that have influenced you as thought leaders. You want to name a couple of people or a few that have influenced you as thought leaders and writers?

Rhea Wessel:
Yeah, one woman is named Pippa Malmgren. And I was in a large conference financial analyst and she was on the stage talking about global politics and economics and the way that she was connecting the dots and the way that she was telling it with lots of anecdotes and so forth. It just kind of stopped me in my tracks when I was going through that large room and I made an effort to find her and then begin following her work. And she went on to write quite a few books. And I had a chance to interview her as well and understand what her thinking is. And she definitely has the gift of story for sure. And another person whose work I admire is Ray Dalio. and the way that he extracts principles out of his work, not just his deep knowledge and historical knowledge. Like when COVID hit, I was reading his things on LinkedIn because it had a calming effect on me because he took the historical view and he was saying, no one knows. He had the courage to say, not act like, OK, I know what’s happening here. No, no one knows. This is a massive black swan event. So those are two examples. But yeah, right now I’m reading Thomas Moore’s work again. I got away from his things, and now I’m back to his work, which I really appreciate.

David Dunworth:
You know what? Q mentioned that he didn’t consider himself a writer, and yet he’s got this big library of work that he’s created. Well, I consider myself a writer of sorts, only I’m trained in direct response marketing copywriting, which is a totally different animal from what you’re describing. you know, and there’s a process and a psychology and a behavior, you know, it’s all about human behavior, and, and buying trends, and, you know, putting the ideas into people’s heads that make them their ideas, all of that kind of stuff. You’re talking about thought leadership writing. And before we we actually went on air, we touched a little bit on some steps into how to be or how to produce thought writing capabilities, could you kind of with that?

Rhea Wessel:
Yeah, and I think this is actually a good time to also bring up the topic of AI, because it impacts it. So I say that there are three steps to thought leadership writing. And the first one is finding your niche. And that is really, really important to have a deep, deep understanding of that. Because That’s what makes you unique. And if you bring in AI tools later on in the process, that can’t be replicated because your thought leadership niche is made up of your passion and purpose, your unique idea, and your credentials and your expertise. And where those three overlap, that’s your thought leadership niche. And so that’s what I say is your articles, your thinking has to be born of a thought leadership niche. And that’s what makes it uniquely human and uniquely yours. And yeah, so that’s step one, find it. So I’ll give the overview, find it, frame it, flesh it out. So after you found your niche, then you frame your stories. And the point in the framing step is that you need to have a journalistic approach to it. So if you’re, you know, taking an app, that’s so one way that I got into this work is I was working with a lot of consultants and people who have an academic training, and then they were writing and I had to edit it. And then I would get the article and then say, Hmm, no, it, no, it, no, it, no, it. Ah, that’s fascinating. Way down here. We got to kick this out, put this back up here and rearrange. And it came down to a journalistic framing of the article. And that’s just not taught in academia. So that’s the second step, framing it. And we can dive deeper there if you want. And the third one is fleshing it out. And that’s the writing of the articles. So there’s your three steps to thought leadership writing.

David Dunworth:
Could you go a little bit deeper into that framing for us? And I’m asking that kind of selfishly because, you know, I’ve expanded my writing focus to, you know, a few different areas. And I’m also in the publishing field a little bit too, but help me and our audience understand a little bit more about the framing part.

Rhea Wessel:
Sure. So framing it is, as I said, finding the journalistic angle. And when I was, the way that I created that piece of methodology, if you imagine it looks a little bit like a funnel, okay? You’re putting all these ingredients in here and at the bottom, you’re gonna get out a headline, okay? But it’s not just any headline. A lot of things came into play there. And journalists are taught to do that on the spot. And so I just knew, like, I could talk to an expert or hear something, and I’m always thinking in headlines, right? And how would I storify that, right? How would I turn that into a story? And I had to, at some point, deconstruct my own thinking, like kind of reverse engineer it and figure out what I was doing. Cause I went back to the old journalism textbooks that I had from college. And as I was writing my book, you know, and there was nothing, you know, there was like a couple of pages on framing and, you know, there was no methodology, but I’m trying to now help subject matter experts like yourselves do that. So I needed a framework And I ended up creating that funnel that I described. And what it comes down to, what you have to do is you have to really drill down on one problem based by one audience. And it’s a problem you know a lot about, you happen to care a lot about it, and you happen to have some ways to solve that problem. And so in our workshops, for instance, for Harvard alumni entrepreneurs, we’re doing mind maps, big mind maps. I interview someone in front of the group and get that out of them. And it expands. And everyone goes to do that. And you just take that problem to town. And it’s a problem map. It’s not a solution map. And so it’s getting into the mind of the audience. We work through the methodology, and in the end, the headlines come, and they are solutions to those problems. And that’s how the story framing system works.

David Dunworth:
Yeah, great. I’m glad you expanded on that. Sounds a little familiar to you, I would think, Hugh, based on the processes that you teach.

Hugh Ballou:
It does. It does. And being a musician, a conductor, we have to have form to this. And it really, if we’re a listener or reader, even if we’re not aware, we’re listening to a piece of music, we’re listening to an article, we’re reading an article, the form of it helps us process the data. And so that leads into my next question. What can subject matter experts do to boost their thought leadership? So I think bouncing off of that, you have to present it. Sometimes we write in stream of consciousness, and then the other person has to figure out what in the heck we’re talking about. It’s not in an orderly fashion that they can accept it. So what are some things that we can do as thought leader experts to get that across?

Rhea Wessel:
Mm hmm. Yeah. So I think you need to become like a walk in talking story machine, you know, just thinking in story and practicing that. And when I say story, I don’t mean anecdotes. And if you string together three or four anecdotes, that doesn’t mean you have a nice article, right? It can work that well, you need more of a real framework, you know, what’s beneath the music, what’s happening there, what’s holding it up. And that for me is always looking for the transformation, right? And Hugh, as you were prepping me for this conversation, you said, what would you like people to leave this conversation, you know, as a takeaway, what would be different for them before they heard the podcast and after? And I think that is instinctively the right question to be asking. And that’s what you need to capture in your articles. Is something changed? If you’re writing about a project, it had an evolution. If you’re writing about your views and how they changed, what was the inciting event? What was the messy middle where you weren’t sure how this is going to come out? And what was the resolution? So looking for something that changed and building that into the story architecture. And that’s what makes it a story. On top of that, you can have a nice anecdote as well. But always looking for what has changed.

Hugh Ballou:
So you’ve got to have a really important concept or thought or principle that you’re sharing. But it’s more than that. I don’t want you reading any of my stuff. I’m learning a lot too, David. What do you got?

David Dunworth:
Oh, this has been very enlightening you know he even though I say hey yeah I’m a writer. I’m, I’m kind of a writer I’m a writer of, you know, some stuff, but not everything but the proper all writers were all yeah but the premise that that Ray is is sharing with us. is universal, even though it may be tagged as thought leadership it’s great sound advice and counsel for anybody who has a message to get out there so I appreciate that very very much. And, you know, earlier on. You said those words, AI, actually they’re letters. We know them as artificial intelligence or machine learning or LLM, large language models and all that kind of stuff. How is that, I know it’s impacting everything, but how is it impacting thought leadership in that field? Could you delve into that?

Rhea Wessel:
Yeah, it is impacting thought leadership widely and deeply. And if you look at the process I shared of three steps to thought leadership writing, it can actually help in all of those areas. less so in the first one, which actually tells me as I evolve my thinking and scale up and take on the AI world, it’s like, where do I see the creativity in the writing that’s AI generated? It’s at the front end. and finding the idea and harvesting the ideas out of yourself, out of your soul, getting that thinking articulated for the first time. So it can help in that first step, finding your thought leadership niche, because you can play around with it and put in some ideas. In framing the stories, the machine is quite good at coming up with headlines, right? However, they’re not necessarily born out of a thought leadership niche. But one thing I’ve done in my advanced courses that we also teach for companies, I teach comms teams, I teach teams of subject matter experts, is really drilling down with that problem map I described, is creating a psychological profile of that audience, including their internal struggles and their external struggles, and really deepening that audience research with the help of AI. And it’s fascinating what comes out of there. And because you have an idea about who, you know, who you’re talking to, but you can start with, you know, what are the What are the job titles of people who experience this problem? And what are their internal struggles? What are their external struggles? And it’s funny here, I have this really interesting laser light from my shade here. It’s going to be beamed up soon here. Yeah, there you go. But I’ll just change my shade a second.

Hugh Ballou:
If you’re listening to the podcast, she’s in Germany and she’s got the next.

Rhea Wessel:
OK, that’s right. I thought we were on video.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, that’s right.

Rhea Wessel:
Anyway, you all could see my laser halo there. You can visualize that the the machine is really great at creating psychological profiles of your readers. And once you have that, you can you’ve created a persona, then you can query that persona. And you can, you know, put it, put in test scenarios and understand their problems more. And you as a thought leader are solving their problems. So that is super helpful and something that humans can’t replicate because of the vast amount of records that are, that are coming in there. So, so people tend to have an aha experience when I lead them through. building that profile and then querying that profile about your field. And then, of course, for the third step, AI helps a lot with the writing. You do need to really understand story architecture to operate it well. But I’m writing in a different way. I’ve trained my own GPTs. I’ve actually uploaded my own book into a custom GPT. I don’t share that, but then it helps me synthesize my ideas in a new way. And I’m having a lot of fun with it. So I’m running with it. I’m not running from it.

David Dunworth:
Well, good for you. That’s great.

Hugh Ballou:
I want to help our listeners. We don’t do a good job in this sector we call nonprofit. It’s a bad word anyway. We think we’ve got a scarcity mentality. We really have abundance. And the work we’re doing is so important. We forget that we need to build the skill set to tell people about the impact of our work. So we push people because we’re making a difference. We call it philanthropy, the love of humankind. impacting people’s lives. And so, I’m just reflecting here, it’s so important for those of us that are in the trenches doing the work of helping people to understand this whole dynamic. And Ray, I want to encourage people, there’s someone on your team that might really have a passion for this, and we’re burned out. So, A, it might be your passion, then you get something else off your plate, but if it’s not your passion, work with somebody on your team and they can excel at this. You’ve given us a lot of good ideas. This interview has gone by fast, but I’m gonna, if people are, if you’re listening to this on a podcast or you’re watching it on video, I’m gonna go to Ray’s website. It’s instituteforthoughtleadership.com and I’m gonna show it to people that are watching. If you go to, if you’re on a podcast and you wanna see it, go to the, NonprofitExchange.org or just go to the website which is instituteforthoughtleadership.com. So, tell us what people are going to find when they go there, right?

Rhea Wessel:
Sure. On the website you’ll see some of the frameworks and methodologies that we use in our teaching for companies. And Hugh, what you were saying earlier, get people involved. That’s one thing that we talk about as well, is activate the subject matter experts in your organization to do the writing. It doesn’t all need to go through the comms department. So you’ll find methodologies to help with that. You’ll find things about our work with Harvard alumni entrepreneurs, where we give a 10-week thought leadership writing incubator. So if your organization needs fresh content, then you can ask the subject matter experts and the comms department as well to join these programs. And we literally write three articles in the course of the program. And we even have an award ceremony for the best article. So you’ll learn a little bit about that. Now, you’ll find the blog where I write about ideas, coaching. And ideas, coaching is the process of of getting a sparring partner to get that messaging framework set and then design stories on top of that. So all of those things are on the website in your book and the book. Yes. And it’ll be like a thought.

Hugh Ballou:
It’ll be on the web page and you can click on it and find the book. So, this has been so, so very helpful today, Ray. So, as a parting thought, what do you want to leave people with?

Rhea Wessel:
I hope that The good work that you’re doing, I hope you’ll get out there and talk about it more and share your processes, share your struggles, share what’s going on in your mind, and use the publication strategy to be known for what you know. Because I think that is the best way to win trust and of course, find new donors as well. So hopefully I’ve given you some takeaways to write more, write better, and some inspiration to do that.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, she’s not only a good writer, David, she’s a good presenter. So we thank you for being our guest today on The Nonprofit Exchange.

David Dunworth:
Yeah, very nicely done. Thank you so very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Rhea Wessel:
Thank you, David. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

Hugh Ballou:
Thank you for listening to The Nonprofit Exchange.