Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I actually think that the biggest misconception with tackling your speaking is that people grossly underestimate just how transformative it could be to your life. And the reason it's so transformative is because speaking is not a specialized skill, it's a meta skill. That means that the better you get at speaking, the better your life gets. So an example of a meta skill is fitness, for example. If you were to start saying, "Okay, I'm going to transform my fitness," and you start lifting weights and you start going on runs, obviously your muscles are going to get bigger, you're going to get more in shape, and your cardiovascular system is going to improve. But that's actually only a sliver of the impact it's going to have on your life because you're going to start feeling more energy, and you're going to start having these nice hormones, these endorphins flowing through your body and you're going to feel better about yourself. And when you walk in front of the mirror, suddenly you're going to have a boost in confidence. So naturally, everything else in your life is going to start to improve as a result of you focusing on your fitness. And for speaking, it's the same thing. This blew my mind when I went on my own speaking journey, is when I started making breakthroughs in speaking, other things started to feel different. So as you get breakthroughs, how you feel at work feels different. How you feel in your group of friends feels different. How you feel in a group of strangers, especially, how you feel and your family can even be impacted. This seeps into everything else in your life. But the thing is, because there's so much self-consciousness that goes with speaking, we often feel kind of constraints under the layers of overthinking and anxiety that come with speaking. So it can be hard to realize that underneath these layers, you actually have this extraordinary superpower, because as humans we're evolved to speak, this is what we are. So you don't need to teach a baby how to speak, it will learn by itself with no formal education. So what that means is, we all have this incredible hardware. The thing is, over the course of our life, because of all these little situations that happen, we start getting bugs in the software and we're not really upgrading our software. The moment you get the bugs and things start working, not working, we start avoiding, and suddenly it's like we're not upgrading our software anymore. So we're stuck on old, buggy software. But the reality is, let's not forget that we have incredible software that were evolved for this. So all we need to do is some debugging and some upgrading of the software and suddenly your entire life can change. So that's really one I want to impart on anybody listening. You have it in, you already have what it takes. Okay. So kind of building on what you just talked about, some of this insight of, your life can improve and how you kind of always have to unlearn stuff. One of my favorite maybe core insights and tenets of the way you approach teaching people to speak, is you talk about how if you don't enjoy speaking, you're doing it wrong. And that really helped me because you kind of encourage, you kind of remind people, try to have fun as you're doing. Can you just talk about that insight and why that's important and how that helps people become better? Well, I think that's very tied to what you were saying. I see enjoyment as a barometer, if I'm doing things right, I'm probably enjoying myself. If I'm doing things wrong, particularly with speaking, because again, this is something we're naturally evolved to do. So if we're naturally evolved to do it, it's not something that we dislike doing. It has to be something that rewards us. So as soon as things start not feeling enjoyable, it's a sign, hey, I'm probably doing this wrong, guy. There's something here that I'm doing that is making this unenjoyable that's probably not helping me. And I think you mentioned that in those people who can hold an audience who are really good communicators in business, it looks like they feel very comfortable, it looks like they feel like themselves. And if you think about speaking, when you're talking with your kids, or with your partner, or with your best friend, your childhood friend, your parents, ever, we all have environments where we feel completely like ourselves. And when we do, communication is extraordinarily enjoyable. It's just a means to connect with other people, a means to share what we have on our mind and it's very, very empowering and it feels very good. Then I take the same person with the same skill set and the same ability and I bring them in a business setting, and suddenly I don't feel like myself anymore. And because of the pressure, I start trying to speak differently. So people start having, I'm going to try to think really hard of what I need to say and I want to control the words that are going to come out of my mouth before they come out of my mouth so I make sure I don't make a mistake. And you basically loop in this thing that is so counter what communication is, which is just a natural subconscious scale. So using speaking as a barometer of, hey, if this is not feeling good, I'm probably overthinking. I probably need to relax and try to just feel a little bit more like myself. But this also applies to practice, where in your practice, because this is not an overnight thing, you can't just snap your fingers, read a book, and be a better speaker. Well, your practice has to be enjoyable as well because otherwise two weeks in, you're going to quit just like a shitty fitness journey or diet. Right? You have to find joy in it and it has to be structured in a way where it rewards you as well, so that you get more energy and you get more enjoyment while you do it.…

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