The Presence Lab · S5E295
How Do You Know You’ve Actually Changed?
You can understand the feedback. You can work on the problem. You can walk out of a meeting convinced you’re getting better.
None of that proves the people around you are experiencing anything different.
The Scorecard gives you a better standard: Meaning. Behavior. Evidence.
Intentions Don’t Belong on the Scorecard. Behavior Does.
Most of us are generous graders when we’re evaluating ourselves.
We remember the work. We remember the meeting where we listened instead of interrupting. We notice that we’re more aware of the behavior than we used to be.
That’s useful. It isn’t proof.
Communication happens on the receiving end. If the behavior has genuinely changed, someone besides you should eventually be able to see the difference.
Under pressure, that becomes even more important. Attention narrows. We tend to reach for the responses we’ve practiced most. And while we’re managing the conversation, disagreement, deadline, or room, we aren’t especially good observers of ourselves.
That’s why the Scorecard uses evidence from both sides of the conversation.
The framework
The Communication Change Scorecard
01 · Meaning
The Retell
Did the message you intended become the message they understood?
Instead of ending an important conversation with “Does that make sense?”, ask the other person to reconstruct the meaning:
- What are you going to tell your team about this?
- How would you explain this decision to your client?
- When you talk about this later, how will you describe what we decided?
Don’t measure whether they heard you. Measure what they built from what you said.
02 · Behavior
The Replacement
Goals like “be more present,” “be less defensive,” or “show more executive presence” sound useful but are nearly impossible to score.
Replace the aspiration with an observable action tied to the trigger:
- When someone challenges my position → I let them finish before I respond.
- When I get bad news → I ask one question before giving my opinion.
- When someone comes to talk with me → the screen loses my attention and the person gets it.
If you can’t see the behavior, you can’t score the behavior.
03 · Evidence
The Outside Score
Pick one behavior. Choose two or three people who experience it often enough to notice. Ask one narrow question, then ask again later.
Use a simple 1-to-5 score, then ask the far more useful follow-up:
- “Over the past month, when we talk, how often do you feel you have my full attention?”
- “What have you seen that makes you give me that score?”
One good meeting is encouraging. Repeated evidence is change.
We know what we were trying to do.
Everyone else only gets what we did.
That’s why the most credible communication score eventually has to come from outside your own head.
Practice
Run the Scorecard for 30 Days
Day 1 · Choose one behavior
Not five. One. Name the situation where the old behavior tends to appear.
Define the replacement
Write the response you want available when that trigger appears. Format: WHEN ______ happens, I will ______.
Get a baseline
Ask two or three trusted people the same narrow behavioral question. Record their 1-to-5 score, what they have actually observed, and any repeated patterns.
Practice
Work the replacement behavior deliberately for 30 days. Don’t chase perfection. Look for repetitions.
Score again
Ask the same people the same question. Compare the evidence, not merely the number — then ask what they are seeing now that they weren’t seeing before.
Free resource
Get the 30-Day Scorecard
The free Field Guide for this episode includes:
- The Retell framework
- Replacement Behavior worksheet
- Outside Score questions
- 1-to-5 baseline measurement
- 30-day practice tracker
- Follow-up scoring prompts
Free to join. The Field Guide is inside.
A story
The Score That Mattered
Years ago, an employee gave Dale feedback that landed hard.
He was busy enough that conversations sometimes competed with a screen, another meeting, or whatever was coming next. He thought he was being efficient.
The person sitting across from him experienced something different: he had Dale’s time, but not always his full attention.
Dale worked on it. Years later, while developing this episode, he asked his wife Tonia one question without explaining why:
“What communication behavior have you seen me genuinely change over time?”
“You are more present.”
That was better evidence than anything Dale could have written on his own scorecard.
She wasn’t grading the intention. She had experienced the behavior.
The episode
Listen to The Scorecard
The Scorecard: How to Prove Your Communication Actually Changed
You can believe you’ve changed. You can remember every bit of the work. Neither proves the people around you are experiencing something different.
In this episode, Dale Dixon builds a practical behavior-change scorecard for leaders using The Retell, The Replacement, and The Outside Score.
It’s a way to stop grading yourself on effort and start collecting evidence that the change is real, including when the pressure rises.
The Presence Lab · Season 5, Episode 295
Listen here without leaving the page.
Evidence base
Why the Scorecard Works
Teach-Back
Research on teach-back shows that asking someone to explain information in their own words gives the communicator better evidence of what was actually understood.
Presence Lab application: The Retell
Implementation Intentions
Research on “if-then” planning shows that defining a response in advance improves the likelihood that an intention becomes action.
Presence Lab application: The Replacement
Multisource Feedback
Research on multisource feedback shows that feedback by itself produces limited change. Improvement becomes more likely when feedback leads to specific goals and deliberate action.
Presence Lab application: The Outside Score
Sources
- Use the Teach-Back Method: Tool 5Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality · Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit
- Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and ProcessesGollwitzer & Sheeran · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119 (2006)
- Does Performance Improve Following Multisource Feedback?Smither, London & Reilly · Personnel Psychology, 58(1), 33–66 (2005)
Common questions
Measuring communication change
How do you measure communication improvement?
Measure three things: whether the receiver understood the intended meaning, whether the leader performed a defined observable behavior, and whether other people see that behavior consistently over time.
How can leaders know whether their communication has actually changed?
Do not rely only on self-assessment. Define one observable replacement behavior, gather a baseline score from people who experience it, practice it for 30 days, then ask the same people the same behavioral question again.
What is the Communication Change Scorecard?
A three-part standard for proving communication change: Meaning (did the message land as intended), Behavior (a defined, observable replacement action), and Evidence (repeated scores from the people who experience the behavior).
Why is self-assessment not enough to prove communication change?
Communication happens on the receiving end. You can remember your effort and intentions, but only the people around you can confirm that the behavior they experience has genuinely changed.
Executive coaching
What Would the People Around You Score?
Executive communication coaching gets useful when we move beyond how communication feels and examine what actually happens when the stakes rise.
If you’re preparing for a consequential presentation, boardroom conversation, media interview, leadership transition, or another high-pressure communication moment, we can work on the behavior before the pressure arrives.