Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We need to share about it. I mean, I always will share that I still have anxiety in speaking in certain situations and it's something that's taken me a long time to work on. I also help people understand that it's not a light switch. It's not like you either have it or you don't. It's a process. And so the idea is over time, we will feel less nervous if we apply some of these principles you and I are talking about. A great technique to help people that often isn't talked about is many of us feel much more comfortable in conversation than we do in presenting. And conversation is a back and forth. So you can actually set up a lot of your communication situations, a presentation, a meeting, et cetera, as conversations. And you don't even have to have a conversation with the audience. You can simply have it with yourself. For example, what would it be like if you were to start a presentation by saying, "Today I have three questions I'd like to answer. Question number one is..." And you state the question and then you answer it. I am actually having a conversation with myself in that moment where I am asking myself a question. I happen to know the answer, I give the answer. This again, just like the reframing as excitement versus anxiety, this is a reframe. I'm not presenting, I'm having a conversation. And in so doing it ratchets down that anxiety. So we need to talk about it. We need to share our experiences with developing anxiety management plans. We realize it's not binary, it's not I have it or I don't. And we start seeing where we feel more comfortable and how can we bring that comfort level into the types of situations that make us nervous, like simply having a conversation with yourself. You have another technique I think that's different, maybe it's exactly the same, which is to ask a question of somebody else as you're talking, which is I think deflects attention from you. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So we talked about the way we desensitize through visualization. The other thing we can do is distract. I coached a very senior leader at Google who got very nervous when he was up in front of people, and what we did is we distract his audience. So he would start every single presentation saying these words, "Good morning, let's watch this video." And he'd show a 30-second video that was on topic about something they were going to talk about in the meeting. And when the video stopped, he would then facilitate a discussion of what that video was about and then he would ease into his content. So he went from being a presenter to being a facilitator or somebody who was having a conversation with the audience. That made him feel so much better. And so all of us can do things that can distract our audience. Now when I say distract, I don't mean take them on a tangent that's not relevant to what you're saying, but maybe you ask them a question, maybe you tell them a story, maybe you show them a video or ask them to read something. So there are lots of things that you can do that will help get the attention off you for just a little bit so that you can then focus on what works for you or take that deep breath that'll help calm you down. All of these are very useful techniques.…

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