Here’s How to spot Whether Someone’s Full of BS

Throughout my career, I’ve sometimes found myself sitting around a table with people who say the right things, wear the right clothes, show up in the right car, travel on the right train. But when you scratch the surface, the substance isn’t there. 

They’re full of BS, basically.

And as someone who’s worked with a fair few of those types in my time – and learned some pretty expensive lessons from working with them – I’ve become quite quick at spotting the signs.

There are coaches who do it. Mentors. Self-styled ‘gurus’. Consultants. Even some business owners are full of BS. But whoever they are, they’re all about talking the talk – without being able to walk the walk.

So today’s blog looks at how to spot someone who’s BS-ing you – sort of like a Part 2 of our recent CEO of Nothing podcast about people with Main Character energy.

Here are some of the telltale signs.

BS-ers have read a hundred books, but they couldn’t quote you a single lesson from any of those books. They attend everything but produce nothing. They wear ‘being busy’ like a badge, but they don’t have the results to demonstrate why they’ve been so busy.

In a meeting, they’ll take furious amounts of notes but never look at them again. They’ll avoid metrics and specificity like the plague, and when you press them on evidence, they default to fluffy language.

Their advice is vague, broad and often copied.

When you see them speaking on stage or at an event, they’ll often share ‘performative vulnerabilities’; personal narratives that don’t actually come from a place of vulnerability, but to solicit a reaction or behaviour from their audience.

I’ve met people who’ve stood up on stage and confessed that their cashflow was so terrible at one point that they’d thought about killing themselves.

That’s genuine vulnerability.

BS-ers are more likely to tell you they were bullied at school, but when you actually ask them about that experience afterwards, it turns out they were forced to sit at the front in certain lessons. Or something of that ilk.

And that performative vulnerability becomes the anchor of every talk they ever do on stage.

Why do they do that?

Because if they’re a coach, or a mentor, or someone in that space, and they’re claiming to help ‘struggling business owners’, they know that their audience is more likely to buy from someone who also appears to have been through that struggle.

And genuinely, there are some incredible coaches and mentors out there who are of huge value to businesses.

My coach, for instance, is absolutely awesome.

There’s nothing performative or false about him; he’s been through true struggles too, and that’s why I relate to him.

But I’m quite skeptical of this performative vulnerability, especially since it’s taken me a long time to be able to share my own vulnerabilities and some of the things that have happened to me.

So when some 22-year-old, self-titled ‘guru’ stands up on stage and says they’ve been beaten up for 37 years, it’s like: “Hang on, I thought you said you were 22?”

And they have buzzwords, too.

They’ll say things like ‘alignment with my truth’ and ‘holding space’ and ‘the power within’.

And I’m like, hang on, what? 

This agitates me because since COVID, there’s been a massive boom of not just coaches and consultants, but business owners who are ‘talking about their truth’. There’s no such thing as ‘your truth’ – there’s only one truth. The actual truth.

If it’s your opinion, it’s not the truth.

To me, you have to be self-aware enough to know that your perspective is not the truth.

If I came into the office tomorrow and said: “Look, guys, my truth is that this ice cream isn’t cold – cold to me is -40 and this ice cream’s only -3,” they’d be like: “Joel, WTF?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a rant about people who are performative, because some of the best speakers I’ve ever seen are performative.

There’s energy and engagement and they tell a story well.

It’s the ones that are performative and full of themselves.

There are too many of these hype merchants at the moment. And in contrast, I’ve met some coaches of high-level CEOs who I’d never heard anything from before, but I didn’t need to because their reputation preceded them.

Those types of people aren’t in it for volume.

They’re in it for quality.

And it’s the same with consultants and specialists. People who come in to audit your accounts or solve your cybersecurity issues. I can guarantee you their websites will be quite dry, their YouTube content pretty boring – if they even have any.

But they don’t need to entertain you or be the person you want to speak to in the pub. They need to be calm and methodical – even boring. No false promises, no hype, no inflated egos.

Just someone you can trust to do their job.

You even get these shrinking violet types in marketing. They’re quiet, often intellectual and very data driven, but they’re very good at making a lot of noise for other people.

BS-ers, on the other hand, will often talk about ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’.

They’re ‘faking it ‘til they make it’, basically.

To the extent where some of the worst people I’ve worked with had even written a testimonial from me for their website, which I never said.

What worries me about the way BS-ers work is that they can draw in someone unsuspecting that actually, genuinely needs support. You start to believe their hype and think their way is the correct way to do business.

Hyping something up when they can’t back up their own claims is a deceitful way to do things. And sometimes the placebo effect of the hype is enough to get you a result.

But that’s not how business should work.

Ultimately, commercial business is selling someone something that then they can use to sell their thing for more. So, if we sell marketing to Client X, and it positions their business to sell more of their product – or for more money – that’s a win.

An accountant can shave off some of the costs in your business and help you get on top of your numbers so you can see where the profit margins are, and again, that helps you make better business decisions to make more money.

But these hype gurus will never be able to do that for you.

These people being full of hype doesn’t mean they’re full of success.

So, quick tip to end on. The next time you’re at an event or in a networking environment and you think someone might be full of BS, ask them this: “What did you do last week that moved your business forward?”

And see what they say.

That’s a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Don’t miss the next episode of Stay Hungry – we’ll dive into straight-talking insights on business marketing, growth mindset, and the realities of running a business. And if you want to take the hassle out of your marketing, we’ve got you covered with our done-for-you service.