Matt Abrahams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now we're going to be so, so careful, I don't want this podcast flagged and for adults only. Okay, shift to a new topic. You have a whole book about how to get better speaking on the spot. And I think why this is important is again, what I said at the beginning that I think most of our "public speaking" is not planned public speaking. There's people asking for feedback in a meeting, people wanting you to give a toast, Q&A as we talked about. So what I want to do is you have advice for broadly getting better at these things and then you have advice for very specifically how to get better at giving better toast, doing better Q&A, getting better at small talk and things like that. So I want to start with the broad advice and then get into each of these. That sound good? Absolutely. How about you share your favorite techniques for broadly getting better at speaking on the spot, and then we'll see where that goes? Sure. So the first thing in helping yourself feel better, speaking spontaneously, which is the vast majority of our communication, the plan presenting, the practiced pitch, the meeting with agenda pale in comparison to the times that we are spontaneously speaking. And the first thing that is important for everybody to know is we can all get better at it. That's the fundamental bottom line. Many of us feel like we're either born with the gift of gab or we're not. And so the first thing we have to realize is we can get better at it. The second big point to make is you actually have to prepare to be spontaneous. And that's counterintuitive, but it is through preparation that we get better at it. And if you think about it, if you think about an athlete, when an athlete is doing their sport, they are being spontaneous, they are responding to the conditions that present themselves to them. What helps them do well is all the preparation and practice that they've done. So there are lots of analogs to this, but when we think about it in of communication, it seems foreign, but when you think about it in athletics or jazz music, it's like of course you would prepare and practice. Those are the two big underlying principles to helping people get better. The next level has to do with we have to attack both mindset and approach and the actual messaging itself. The only way I have found to help people get better at this is to look at how we approach it, our mindset, and then how we actually craft the messages through structure and focus that help us be better. So that's the gradual process from the broadest level about how we have to go about making this better for ourselves. Maybe let's dig into the structure.…

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