107. Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot
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Hi, Matt here. I invite you to look into Stanford Continuing Studies. For over 20 years, I have taught in the program. Discover a diverse range of courses available both online and in person to anyone, anywhere in the world. Classes cover everything from fundamental business skills to the fascinating world of AI. This fall, join me for Communication Essentials for Work and Life, a new course designed to enhance and hone your communication skills in various situations.

Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th, and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. I got to admit, I'm both excited and a little nervous. I'm in the hot seat.

I'm Jenny Luna, and I'm a podcast producer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, we have a bit of a twist on our normal episode format. I'm going to sit in the host seat and put Matt in the hot seat.

Matt's new book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot, launches at the end of this month. So I thought it would be fun to put him in the hot seat and ask him his thoughts on spontaneous speaking. Welcome, Matt. Are you ready for this? I am super excited for this, Jenny. Thank you. I'm going to do my best to think faster and talk smarter. Okay, let's get started. Your new book is on spontaneous speaking. How do you define that and why?

What made you want to focus on that for your book? Throughout my life, I have always been spontaneous speaking. With the last name Abrahams, A-B, I have always gone first. So in elementary school, in high school, even in college and graduate school, I was always the first person asked to speak. I know what it feels like to be put on the spot.

And that's really what spontaneous speaking is all about. It's about that moment where you are called on to step up and say something. Maybe it's answering a question, giving feedback in the moment, fixing a mistake you made, being called on to introduce somebody, or even during small talk. So spontaneous speaking, if you think about it, happens all the time in our personal lives and our professional lives.

I didn't realize this had such personal roots for you, Matt. I really like that. And so how did you come to be interested in kind of helping others with this concept? About a decade ago, the deans at the business school came to me with a problem. And the problem was that our incredibly bright students were panicking and choking in cold call situations. You know where the professor says, what do you think? And you have to respond. Our students who knew the answers, who were very bright, could not in the moment respond. And they asked me, can you help me?

And as a result of that, I got very interested in exploring how we can be better speakers in the moment. And through doing research on my own, looking into other fields and collaborating with people here at the business school, but especially with my colleague from the arts department, Adam Tobin, who's an excellent improviser, came up with a lot of this content.

Interesting. Okay. And I know you're famous around campus and out in the world for this six-step methodology on spontaneous speaking. Can you walk us through those steps? Famous is a big word, but I've definitely spent a lot of time talking about this. The methodology that I've come up with and that we walk all of our MBA students through, they can opt in to learn this content, and most of them do, it's really divided into two major areas.

mindset and messaging. So we have to adjust our mindset. And part of mindset is also dealing with anxiety and listening. And then messaging is about how we structure our messages and then how do we focus them. On this podcast, we've talked a lot about structure. We've talked a lot about being concise and clear. And those are all part of the six-step methodology.

Yeah, we've talked a lot about managing anxiety a few times on this podcast. We've had a lot of guests talk about it. You did a whole episode on it a few years ago. It's one of our more popular episodes among listeners. So let's drill down more into the mindset part of your methodology. Can you help us understand these different shifts that you suggest in a mindset? And also tell us what you mean when you write in the book about missed takes. Yeah.

The way we approach communication, period, but especially spontaneous communication, really matters. And there are a couple of key mindset shifts I think that we should adopt to feel more comfortable and confident in spontaneous situations. First is we often strive for perfection. And I would argue that we should rather be looking for connection.

On the very first day of the strategic communication class I co-teach, I have the audacity to say to my students, maximize your mediocrity. And Jenny, you should see their jaws drop. These students have never been told to be mediocre.

But here's the logic behind that. When we strive to be great, when we strive to be right or perfect in our communication, it actually prevents us from doing it well at all. And it comes down to a simple issue of cognitive bandwidth. Think of your brain as a computer. It's not a perfect analogy. But when you're running your laptop or your phone and you have lots of apps or windows open,

Your computer is not running as effectively as it could. In essence, everything's a little slower. The same thing is true when you're speaking and you're monitoring everything you're saying and judging and evaluating it as you're saying it or even before you're saying it. You're not as effective. So when we dial the volume down, we can actually perform better.

So I'm not saying we shouldn't judge and evaluate what we say. We should. But if we turn the volume down a little bit, we can do it better. So the whole saying I tell my students on that first day is maximize mediocrity so you can achieve greatness. When we focus on connecting with our audience, delivering a message that's relevant for them, we can actually do it better if we're not judging and evaluating. So that's the first mindset shift, connection over perfection.

The second is to see these spontaneous speaking situations as opportunities rather than threats. Many of us, when we're put under the gauntlet of Q&A or asked for feedback in the moment, we feel like we have to defend our position. We have to be perfect in the threat of challenge. And so how do we deal with that? We challenge.

get in a very tight body posture, our responses are curt and short, our tone is harsh. If we see these as opportunities, as the ability to connect, to expand, to collaborate, it changes completely how we feel.

Now, I'm not naive. I know people do actually challenge us. But even in those moments, if we see it as an opportunity to connect, it really changes things. So we want to strive for connection over perfection. We want to see these circumstances as opportunities. And then finally, many of us fear making mistakes. We don't want to make mistakes. And as we've talked about on this podcast before,

Mistakes are ways that we learn. You have to break a few things in order to actually learn and progress. So I like to encourage people to reframe how they see mistakes. And you know, in the making of films or television, they do lots of takes. We've all seen that little clapboard that comes down. They say, take one, take two.

I think if we see our communication and the things that go wrong as missed takes rather than mistakes, it can really help us. So when a movie director is looking at a particular scene, she might be asking the actors to do it again and again, different takes, not because any one take is wrong.

but because they're looking for something a little different. Maybe you do it standing up versus sitting. Maybe you put a little more emotion in one part versus the other. So when things don't go the way we want them to, if we see them as a missed take, just another opportunity to do it differently next time, that feels very different than having gotten it wrong. So those three mindset shifts can make a big difference in our communication.

I love this concept of turning the volume down, turning the internal volume down and then taking things not as threats, but as opportunities and then reframing into a missed take instead of a mistake. That's great.

When it comes to structure, I love in your book how you provide a series of examples and advice for situations we find ourselves in, like small talk, making an apology, giving a toast or an introduction, and giving feedback. That's a big one.

The one structure that I put into use right away was your pitching structure. Can you share that with listeners and then give an example of pitching structure? Sure. So often we're in these circumstances where we have to sell an idea or sell a product or a service and we're put on the spot. You literally get in the elevator with somebody and they say, what do you do? And you have to give that elevator pitch.

And it can be hard. As a result of work I've done here at the business school with lots of entrepreneurs, I developed a four-sentence structured pitch. If you finish these sentence starters, you have a good pitch. And they are, what if you could, so that...

for example, and that's not all. So if you finish each one of those, it gives you a really tight, clear pitch and idea of what it is that you are selling, if you will. So let's say I was explaining to somebody about our podcast, Think Fast, Talk Smart, something that you do amazing work for. And somebody, let's say I'm in an elevator or I'm at a small talk chit chat situation. Somebody says, tell me about your podcast. I would say,

What if you could learn to hone and develop your communication skills so that you can achieve your personal and professional goals? For example, you could learn how to be more confident, more persuasive, and even more creative in your communication. And that's not all. You'll join a wonderful community of other people who are also trying to build their communication skills.

Do you hear how just finishing those four sentences really provides a tight, clear pitch? It makes it relevant. It makes it impactful and memorable. I'm sold. This sounds like a fantastic podcast. Well, you should listen to it maybe. Something that we hear time and again from our guests and from our listeners is how well you do with paraphrasing, being concise and being clear.

You have a chapter in your new book, what you call the F word of spontaneous speaking. So can you give us some advice around that? F word for focus, not that naughty word that some of you were talking about. I think paraphrasing is a critical tool in communication. And one of the ways that you can be more focused is to make sure that what you're saying is relevant and targeted to your audience. Asking clarifying questions and paraphrasing serves as a tool to help you focus.

So if we are in a conversation and you ask me for feedback, I could jump right into giving feedback. Or I might say, I might ask you a question. Do you want feedback about what you said or about what we could do differently in the future? And that clarifying question helps me focus. So there's a lot we can do to help focus our messages based on what we do before we actually provide those messages. Certainly, there are things we can do.

Once we're speaking as well, I'm a huge fan of trying to eliminate extraneous words or acronyms or jargon. So really focusing on focusing our messages is critical, especially in spontaneous speaking, because so often we are actually taking people along the journey of ourselves, discovering what we want to say as we say it. And we say much more than we need to. And Jenny, you've heard me say this many times, but I'll share it again. My mother has this wonderful saying that gets to the heart of this.

Tell me the time. Don't build me the clock. Focus is a great segue into my next question. We've had a lot of guests talk about mindfulness, taking a pause, focusing on the breath when we're getting anxious about our communication. And I know that you practice martial arts and you have for many years, right? I have decades. Yes. So what similarities, I'm curious, do you see between communication and martial arts? Okay.

I love this question, and thank you for asking. I don't often share about my martial arts journey, but I've been doing the martial arts for four decades now. I've studied many, many styles. I still participate and teach the martial arts today. And it's been so instructive to me in so many ways. But in terms of communication, the martial arts teach you to be present, to respond to what's happening in front of you.

to think about how your moves or what it is that you do impacts not just the person in front of you, but the environment and situation. And all of those are mirrored in communication. I am a better communicator because of my martial arts and perhaps a better martial artist because of my communication, but they're intimately linked. I encourage everybody to try to find a physical practice that can inform ideas

Our day to day interactions and who we are in the world. And for me, the martial arts have done that. I know you tell a great story about a martial arts experience you had as a young person. I'm wondering if you can tell that story again, just while we have more listeners right now.

Thank you, Jenny. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my entire life happened when I was a 14-year-old boy. On the very first day of my freshman year, my English professor had all of us stand up and tell what we did that summer. Of course, I went first, as I've said, being first row, first seat. And at the end of the day, he came up to me and said, Matt, you're good at this talking thing. I need you to go to this speech tournament this Friday.

I think every teacher had to send one student from their classes. So I was his student. And he said, give a speech on something that's important to you. So begrudgingly, I went. I had my dad tie a tie for me. I was wearing pants that were way too short. I had grown over the summer. I show up 7.30 in the morning giving a speech on the martial arts. That was important to me then as it is now. And in the room are 40 or 50 people. The parents of my friends who are judging my friends. The girl I liked is in the room.

It's my turn to go. I'm so nervous. I am so nervous.

So nervous that I forgot to put on my special karate pants. If you know anything about the martial arts, the pants you wear are very loose fitting so you can do kicks. And that's exactly how I started my speech with a karate kick. It got everybody's attention and it really got their attention because when I did this kick, I ripped my pants. I kid you not from zipper to belt buckle in the first 10 seconds of a 10 minute speech. And it is at that moment and from that moment that I became fascinated by the impact of anxiety and

on communication. And that's what really motivated me to actually study it and do everything that I've done. All goes back to that gym on a Saturday morning as a 14-year-old boy. So yes, the martial arts had a huge impact on me. It exposed me to so many things, literally and figuratively. That's a great story. And there are so many things that influence our work that come from our personal lives as an example of that. Matt, let's take a break.

from Spontaneous Speaking and ask you about hosting this podcast. I feel very fortunate to be part of our Small But Mighty team, and I'm curious how you feel about having completed 100 episodes.

The first word that comes to mind is gratitude. It has been a true pleasure to work with you, Jenny, and all the work you do behind the scenes to make this thing a success. Our colleague Neil and others in the marketing communication team is fantastic. But the thing that I'm most grateful for is just the connection that I and we have with our listeners.

It has been truly a blessing and just amazing to get to know people from all over the world, from all walks of life, from places I've never heard of, who are not just...

benefiting from the podcast but also connecting to our larger community and really helping each other and role modeling some of the things that we talked about I have learned more hosting this podcast from our guests and our audience members than I ever thought possible so when you ask me what do I think about him how do I reflect on this it's really just from a place of gratitude it's been awesome okay well I thought we'd end today's show a little bit differently since on a prior episode you've answered the questions that you asked all

all of the guests. I want to put you to the test and ask you to think faster and talk smarter. I'm going to give you three prompts that reflect some of the situations that you provide in your new book and ask you to respond. Are you ready for that? I am. And just so everybody knows, I have no idea what Jenny is going to ask me. Okay. Well, I treasure feedback. What is one thing you would suggest that I could do to be a better podcast host?

I'm going to leverage the what, so what, now what structure that I teach. And for those of you who haven't heard me talk about this, what is the information, the idea, the product, the service, in this case, the feedback, the so what is why is it important? And then now what is what could the person do differently or what comes next? So I'm going to find some constructive thing to say because you asked for it. And I know you truly accept feedback as a gift.

There are times where you have been looking away in our conversation. And for me, it's a little hard because I know you make such intense eye contact always. So the feedback I would give you in the what is sometimes you look away when you're asking questions. When you do that, it makes me feel disconnected. That's the so what. So in the future, I would ask that you keep your eye contact on me or whoever you're interviewing to really help foster that connection and make it easier on the guest.

So it sounds like by making more eye contact, we can be more successful in our communication. And I'm going to work on that. Wow. Great paraphrase. It takes a lot of listening to be able to do that. Okay. So we have a new resource for providing listeners who want to learn English by listening to our podcast. How would you pitch that to them?

All right, so we're going to try this. What if you could learn to feel more comfortable speaking in the English language so that you can participate in some of your daily and business interactions more comfortably? For example, you could learn specific idioms and phrasing that might help you in situations that you encounter. And that's not all. You'll be able to enjoy Think Fast, Talk Smart episodes even more.

Wonderful. That structure really does work well. Okay, question three. The entire Stanford GSB community has come together to celebrate the podcast. You have to give a toast. Go.

Oh, boy. So I have a structure I teach in the book. It's called WHAT, W-H-A-T, for giving toasts and tributes. The W is why are we all here? The H is how are you, the person speaking, connected? Then an anecdote or two, that's the A. And then finally, the thanking or the toasting at the end. So it's W-H-A-T. So I might say, thank you all for being here to celebrate the GSB's Think Fast, Talk Smart 100th anniversary episode.

I, Matt, am the host of this podcast and just one of a small but mighty team of people that bring this to you. I remember back years ago when we were first thinking of this idea and brainstorming and wondering, would anybody ever listen, let alone want to be a guest on the podcast? And it has been fantastic to see that people actually do want to listen and do want to join us. So I thank every single one of you for being here. And I thank every single one of you for being a part of the Think Fast, Talk Smart family.

Wonderful. Hear, hear. And congratulations, Matt, not only to 100 episodes, but to your new book. I know we're all looking forward to cracking that open. Your passion for communication and thank you for your concise, clear and helpful guidance as always. And I wish you well on the new book.

That was a great conversation and I look forward to many more. Jenny, thank you so much for all you do for the podcast, for sitting in and interviewing me. While this guest seat is pretty comfy, I look forward to getting back into the host seat soon. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Michael Reilly, and me, Matt Abrahams. For more information and episodes, visit gsb.stanford.edu or subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, find us on social media at Stanford GSB.

Hi, Matt here. Before we jump in, I wanted to let you know about three unique executive education programs offered to senior-level business leaders by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Executive Program in Leadership, the Emerging CFO Program, and the Director's Consortium Program are

are all being hosted here on Stanford's beautiful campus in the next few months, crafted with proven strategies for success and filled with diverse leaders from around the globe, taught by many of the guests you've heard on Think Fast, Talk Smart. Apply today at grow.stanford.edu slash upcoming to join us.