Think Faster, Talk Smarter with Matt Abrahams

Raise your hand if you have recently had to introduce yourself or make small talk. Yes, that is what today is all about: how to speak better in the moment. My hunch is, for many of you, introducing yourselves and making small talk at some points was challenging. It's awkward; it can be uncomfortable.

So today, I want to talk about how we can think faster and talk smarter in those moments where we're put on the spot to think and act quickly. We all know that speaking in planned situations—presentations, pitches, meetings with agendas—can be hard, but it can be much harder to speak in the moment. And if you think about it, most of our communication happens in the moment. It's things like making a toast, answering questions, giving feedback, introducing yourself, answering questions—these are the things that can be very challenging for us.

So today, I'd like to walk you through a methodology that I developed in service of the needs of our students here at Stanford many years ago. The Deans came to me and said, "We have a problem." The problem is this: our very bright Stanford MBA students are struggling to answer those cold-call questions from their professors. You remember back here when people would say, "What do you think?" and you had to respond. So I did a deep dive into research in psychology, anthropology, sociology, improvisation, and neuroscience and came up with a methodology. Now, all Stanford MBAs, within the first three weeks of their time here, have an opportunity to take it, and it turns out it helps them feel more comfortable and confident, not just answering questions, but in standing up in class and giving a position, and many other situations that they find themselves in when they leave here: interviewing for jobs, giving feedback to employees, etc.

So today is going to be not just listening to me, but it's going to be participative, and we're going to start. It's not hard. Some of you are looking at each other going, "Oh no, what's he going to make me do?" Pretty simple. I'd like you all to read this sentence, and what's more important to me than the meaning of the sentence is I'd like for you to count the number of Fs, the letter F. How many Fs do you find? I'll give you three or four seconds to do it. Keep the answer quiet to yourself. How many Fs? I wish my MBA students were as quiet and thoughtful as you are right now. All right, all right. Raise your hand if you found three Fs. How many found three? Excellent, very good. Anybody find four? Ah, anybody find five? How about six? There are six Fs. What two-letter word ending in F did many of us miss?

So why do I do this activity? I have done this in every workshop, every keynote I ever deliver, why? Because this is an exact analogy of what we're going to be doing here today. Many of us miss little things that make a big difference in our communication. Now, the other reason I do this is, 14 years ago, when I first saw this, I found three. I felt really stupid, and I like to pass that—that's so we're going to identify little things that make a big difference, difference to make us more effective in our spontaneous speaking. So I want to introduce you to a six-step methodology that we can use to become better at speaking in the moment, and the six steps divide into two categories: mindset and messaging.

The first step has to do with managing anxiety—taming the anxiety beast. Most people get nervous speaking in spontaneous situations. In fact, most people get nervous speaking in any high-stakes situation. We have some research that says upwards of 85% of people feel nervous in high-stakes situations, and I think the other 15% are lying. So let me ask you this: how do you feel when you watch a nervous speaker present? Now, I know a few of you probably like watching people suffer, but most of us don't. How does it feel? Just shout out. How do—how do you feel when you see a nervous speaker present? Okay, so uncomfortable, empathetic, and I heard some people say, "I actually feel anxious myself." I call that secondhand anxiety. So, if for no other reason, we should learn to manage our anxiety so our audience can focus on us and not be distracted.

So when it comes to managing anxiety, we have to take a two-pronged approach. We have to manage both symptoms and sources. Symptoms are the things that we physiologically experience—what goes on in our body—and sources are the things that initiate or exacerbate that anxiety. So I'd like—I'd like to hear from some of you: what happens for you when you get nervous when you're put on the spot? I'll start: I blush and I perspire. What happens for some of you? My mouth goes—mouth goes dry. I call this plumbing reversal: what's normally dry gets wet, and what's normally wet gets dry. So you get sweaty palms but dry mouth—really weird, right? What else happens? My brain goes—yeah, you freeze, you can't remember what to say. What else happens, please? Heart—yeah, you feel your heart pounding, right? Some of us get shaky. These are normal and natural responses to anxiety. Your body sees speaking in the moment as being under threat, and it invokes the fight-or-flight response, and these are normal and natural responses, but there are things we can do to address these. Now allow me to share a few with you.

The first and best thing you can probably do is to take a deep belly breath, the kind of breath you would take if you've ever done yoga or—or tai chi—a deep belly breath. And what's interesting is it's the exhale that's more important than the inhale. So my rule of thumb, or shall I say my rule of lung, is you want your exhale to be twice as long as your inhale. And if you take two or three of these deep belly breaths, you'll actually reduce the rapid heart rate, the rapid breathing that causes you to speak faster, and you'll feel calmer. So before you walk into a room where you think you might be asked for feedback or you know questions are coming, or before you unmute on that Zoom, take this deep belly breath, and it will help. Now, if you get dry mouth and you know you're going into a situation where you might have to speak in the moment, drink some warm water, suck on a lozenge, or chew some gum. Obviously, you don't want to do that while you're in the midst of speaking, but that will help reactivate those salivary glands. If you're like me and you blush and you perspire, hold something cold in the palms of your hand. The palms of your hand are thermoregulators for your body, just like your forehead or the back of your neck. If you've ever had a fever and you put a cold compress on your head to cool down, because your heart rate is going up, because your body tenses when you're stressed, you have more blood going through tighter tubes, your blood pressure goes up, and that causes you to get hotter—it's like you're exercising. So we can reduce the sweating and the blushing by cooling ourselves down. In fact, before I started speaking today, I was holding a cold bottle of water to help.

So these are some of the things we can do to manage our symptoms of anxiety. If I didn't talk about a symptom you have, there are resources I'll share at the end of the talk that can help you find ways to manage your anxiety. Now, there's another side, too. We have to think about sources. Sources are the things that initiate or exacerbate our anxiety. There are many; let me talk about one. Many of us are made nervous by the goal of what we're trying to achieve when we communicate. My students want to get a good grade; the entrepreneurs I coach want to get funding; you might want to get a new job, or you might want to get your project supported. So what makes you nervous is the fact that you might not achieve that goal; in other words, what's making you nervous is a potential negative future outcome. So how do we short-circuit that? We become very present-oriented, because if you're in the moment, by definition you're not worried about the future. So how do we get present-oriented? One way is to do something physical—walk around the building before you go in for that job interview. Another way is to listen to a song or a playlist, just like athletes do. You can do what I do: I get present-oriented by talking to people. Before I got up here on stage, I was talking with many of you; that helps me get present-oriented. I can't engage in a conversation and be thinking about what might go wrong in my presentation or Q&A session. Start at 100 and count backwards by 17s—that'll get you present-oriented. I know I'm in front of a crowd that's trying—the first one's easy, 83—the next one's hard. My favorite way to get present-oriented is to say tongue twisters. You can't say a tongue twister right and not be in the present moment. Some of you are going, "Uh-oh," that's right. I'm going to ask you to say my favorite tongue twister. I said this tongue twister right before I walked out here; it warms me up and it gets me present-oriented. Many of us assume that we can just go from silence to brilliance without warming up our voices, but you know, if you've ever played a sport or exercised or played a musical instrument, you should warm up first. So let's try it. My favorite tongue twister takes five seconds to say, has three phrases, and if you say one of the phrases wrong, you'll say a naughty word. So I'm listening to here. Okay, let's try it. Repeat after me: "I slit a sheet. I slit a sheet. I slit and on that slitted sheet I sit." Excellent. Nobody said that naughty word, and I'm sure you all know what it is. So by managing our anxiety, both symptoms and sources, we prepare ourselves to be better when we speak in the moment.

The second step in our process has to do with maximizing mediocrity. We get in our own way. I have the audacity, in front of my Stanford MBA students on the first day of class, to say, "Maximize mediocrity." Their jaws drop. They've never been told to be mediocre, but why do I recommend this? It boils down to this: we are the biggest impediment to our ability to speak spontaneously in the moment. We get in our own way, and we do it through all the judging and evaluating that we do of the material that we're thinking about saying. We get in our head. Here's why this is problematic: think of your brain as a computer. This is not a perfect analogy, but for this point it works. You know, on your laptops or your phones, when you have a lot of apps and windows open, how the performance of each one of those is a little less good because the others are open. That's because the bandwidth is less. The same is true with your brain. When I am evaluating and judging everything I'm saying as I'm saying it, I have less cognitive bandwidth to focus on what I'm actually saying. So when we are evaluating ourselves as we're speaking, we're doing ourselves a disservice. Now be very clear: I am not saying you should never judge or evaluate your speaking; you should, but we can turn the volume down a little bit to give us more resources so we can be more present and be more effective in what we're saying. So the true sentence that I tell my students at the end—I start with, "Maximize mediocrity," and then I end the class by saying, "Maximize mediocrity so you can achieve greatness." If you give yourself permission just to answer the question, just to give the feedback, just to have the small talk, then you put yourself in a position to do it very well. But when I say to myself, "I have to give the right answer, the best feedback; I need to be the most interesting in small talk," it reduces the likelihood that you'll do those well. So Step One is manage anxiety; Step Two is turn down that volume on that mental observation and evaluation we're doing, and that puts you in a position to be more present and more engaged.

The third step of the methodology has to do with the fact that many of us see speaking in the moment, and in general, as threatening and challenging. If I were to tell any of you at the end of the meeting you're running that you're going to get some questions from your audience, many of you aren't like, "Oh, that's great, I can't wait!" You say, "Oh no, I better do a good job; I'm afraid they're going to see what I said is wrong; they're going to challenge me." Many of us see these situations as threatening and challenging, and when we do so, it impacts not just what we say but how we say it. We tend to retreat; we make ourselves small; our answers are curt; our tone is harsh because we feel we have to defend. There's another way to approach this, and before I share with you that way and give you some tools, I want you to actually have an experience of it. So I'm going to ask you to play a very simple improvisation game with me. It's called "Give a Gift." All of us in our lives have had the experience of giving a gift and getting a gift, so you know how to play this game, but we're going to practice. I'd like everybody to take out an imaginary box. Will you do this with me, please? Here's your imaginary box. On the count of three, I'd like you to just practice giving it, and then give—to give the gift—you just extend your arms. Everybody ready? 1, 2, 3. Give a gift. Perfect, very good. Now, when you receive a gift, you do it in reverse. Ready? 1, 2, 3. You've received a gift. Perfect. So here's what we're going to do in a moment. I'm going to ask you to find somebody sitting near you. You're simply going to introduce yourself if you don't know, and you're going to play the give-a-gift game. One of you will give a gift to your partner; your partner will take the imaginary gift, open the box, look inside, look at the partner, and say, "Thank you for the…" and you're going to say the first thing that pops into your head. So you might say, "Thank you for the car," "Thank you for the pen," "Thank you for the airplane"—it doesn't even have to fit in the box. Your partner, who gave you the imaginary gift, upon hearing it, is going to explain to you why they gave it to you. Do you see how there are two acts of spontaneity that happen in this activity? And then you'll switch. So again, when it's your turn to give, you give the gift; your partner receives the gift, they open up the box, they look inside, and they thank you for the first—first thing that comes to mind. By show of hands, how many of you already know what's in your box? Uh-huh, over half of you raised your hands. Yes, remember what I said in the previous step: how we want to do well and we want to make sure we're right. So you've—okay, I know there's going to be a dog bone in my box—that's perfect, I'm done. I want you literally, when you open up the box, to say the first thing that comes to your mind. I have to tell my MBA students to keep it clean and keep it legal. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that here, but I want you to name it, and then your partner, upon hearing it, is immediately going to explain, and then you're going to switch. This activity should take two minutes. I will ask you to come back in about two minutes. So find somebody sitting next to you, introduce yourself—the person who woke up earliest this morning goes first. I learned a long time ago as a teacher: if you don't say who goes first, everybody argues about it. All right, find a person. Thank you, by the way, for doing this activity. I saw lots of—of smiles; looks like you were having fun. I am simply going to move my arm across the audience, and as my hand points in your general direction, will you just call out what you found in your box? I just—I love hearing what people gave themselves. Just start shouting out what you gave yourselves. Kleenex, tires, okay, catnip, I heard yes, pumpkin, notes, did I hear broccoli? Oh, yes, dog poop, okay, yes, sweater. Excellent. You guys gave yourselves wonderful gifts. It's a bit of a Rorschach test, too; it tells us a little bit about you, but we won't go there. Let me ask you this: how did it feel when you gave the gift and you were waiting to hear what you gave? Many of you looked excited. I see many of you—what did I give? What did I give? And then all of you embraced a rule that comes from improvisation. I am a huge fan of improv, and I have had wonderful improv teachers here on this campus: Patricia Ryan Madson, Adam Tobin, Dan Kleene—these are improv experts who've taught me the value of improv—and all of you just executed the number one rule of improv: yes, and. You didn't say, "I did not give you a dog bone." No, you said, "Of course I did, and here's why," right? You embraced it right away. What if—what if when somebody asked you a question or asked you for feedback, you saw it as an opportunity, just like you saw this activity as an opportunity? Now I am not naive; I know sometimes people, when they ask us questions or ask us for feedback, they're really putting us on the spot; they want to challenge us; they're coming after us. But even in those moments, if I can see it as an opportunity to connect, to learn, to find some area of commonality, it can change—change everything. I will step in; I will be bigger in my response; my tone will be more collaborative; my answers will be more detailed. By seeing spontaneous communication as an opportunity, as a gift, not a threat, it changes our entire approach. So how do we do this? How do we execute on it? In the new book I wrote, *Thinking Faster, Talking Smarter*, I introduce several tools we can use to see things as opportunities. The first comes from this notion of growth mindset, which Carol Dweck, on this campus, helped to develop and champions. It's wonderful, and her work is fantastic. One area of her work in growth mindset, which really essentially says that when we are faced with a challenge that doesn't go necessarily the way we want it to, we can learn and grow and begin to get better at that versus a fixed mindset, which says, "That's just how we're built; that's just the way it is." A growth mindset again opens to opportunity, and one aspect of it that I really resonate with is this notion of "not yet." Just because something didn't go the way you want to doesn't mean it never will go the way you want it; it just means "not yet." Maybe you don't have the skills, you don't have the practice, but it means you can get there. So by adopting a "not yet" mindset, it helps us see things as opportunities—opportunities to learn, opportunities to grow. So when you meet with a frustration in your life, especially around communication, say to yourself, "Not yet." We've already talked about "yes, and." "Yes, and" is where we see the possibility of connection. So even if you're in disagreement in a negotiation that's happening in the moment, you can look for those areas of commonality: where is it that we agree? Where is the "yes, and"? From there, build. The third of these comes from the world of basketball. Many of you are familiar with Mike Krzyzewski, former basketball coach—Coach K. One of the things he has credited with instilling in his players, but in all of sport, is this notion of "next play." If you're an athlete—say a basketball player—and you miss a shot, instead of ruminating and getting frustrated with yourself, move on to the next play. Because the reality is, if I miss my shot and I sit there thinking about how bad it was, how I should have made it, the play is already ensuing, and the other team might be scoring a shot. I have to move to "next play." And the same is true when you're in the midst of a conversation, small talk, feedback situation. If something happens that doesn't go exactly the way you want it to, "next play"—keep moving. Now, while rumination in the moment is bad, reflection after the fact is very good. So I'd love for you, in the moment, to move to the next play, but later that day, reflect: what worked and what didn't. Many of us treat our communication as that definition of insanity: you know, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. If you don't reflect and learn and think about it, you're not going to change. So in the moment, "next play"; later in the day, reflection. And then the final of these steps has us reframing the way we think about mistakes. Many of us try to avoid mistakes; we feel a mistake is a bad thing. Now, if you think about it, we learn through mistakes. If you watch kids as they develop, they make lots of mistakes, and that's how they learn. We can take benefit from that as well, but we have to look at them differently. Rather than mistakes, I'd like you to think of them as "missed takes." You know, in television and film, directors will have their actors do multiple takes of the same scene. You've seen that clapboard that says "Take One," "Take Two"—no one scene is wrong; they're just trying to optimize and try different things. So when you do something that doesn't go the way you want, think to yourself, "Take Two; I'm just going to do it again differently." It wasn't bad; it wasn't wrong; I'm just going to try it differently. And if you take that approach to your actions and the things that don't go the way you want, one, it keeps you in a much more positive frame of reference, and it encourages you to think and learn—learn from what just happened. So these four tools—"not yet," "yes, and," "next play," and "missed takes"—are the ways in which we can look at our communication in the moment as opportunities and not threats. So we get out of our own way. After we manage anxiety, we see things as being opportunities, not threats, and then our fourth step has to do with listening. Most—most of us are not good listeners. We listen just enough to get the gist of what somebody is saying and then start thinking, judging, evaluating, rehearsing what we want to say. We don't listen deeply, and if you don't listen deeply when you're communicating in the moment, you can make some errors. Imagine this: we walk out of a meeting together; you turn to me and you say, "How do you think that went?" I hear feedback and I start listing all the things that we did wrong, all the things you could have done better, how we can make sure that we don't make the same errors next time. But had I really listened in that moment, I might have noticed you came out the back door, not the front door; you were looking down and talking more quietly than you usually do. In that moment, what you wanted was not feedback, but you wanted support, and by virtue of giving you all this constructive feedback, I actually did you a disservice and might have damaged the relationship we have. So we need to listen in a very different way when we have—have to speak spontaneously, so we really understand what's needed in the moment. So I'd like to give you some advice about how to listen better, and I have to caveat this that my wife gets really upset when I teach listening because she says I'm still a work in progress. So listen to what I say, not necessarily what I do. First, when you are listening, you need to listen intently. I heard a professor at another university say—he was—he—he was a—he taught music, and he was talking about jazz, and he had a jazz teacher, and I have to look this guy up to get his name, but he said, "We need to listen until you sweat." And I love that approach. We—listening is hard work. So the first thing we need to do is, when somebody's speaking, we have to listen: what's the bottom line of what they're saying? What's the crux of what they're trying to get across? And then, second, we need to employ a strategy that I learned from a colleague here; his name is Collins Dobbs, and Collins teaches critical and crucial conversations here at the business school, and he has a methodology to help do that, and that methodology applies beautifully to listening. It's three things: pace, space, grace. To listen well, you have to give yourself a little bit of each of those.

We have to slow things down. The world moves very quickly. We've got a lot going on. If I slow down, I can listen better. So the first step is to slow things down.

Second, you have to give yourself space. Sometimes it's physical space; move to a location where you can actually hear better. As I get older, everything is louder in the ambient sound. Move to a place where you can actually hear, but also mental space. Give yourself permission to be present-oriented, in this moment, listening to this person.

And then finally, grace. Grace is to give yourself permission to pay attention to what's going on in the environment—how the person says what they say, not just what they say. And grace refers to listening to your own intuition. We have heard lots of things; we have seen lots of things in our lives, and we get intuitions that come to us based on what we hear. Respect those as well. We often think listening is only what's coming in, but you can also listen to what's happening inside you.

So, but with a little bit of pace, space, and grace, and focusing on the crux of what somebody is saying, you can listen better. One of the best tools we can use to listen better is to ask either clarifying questions or to paraphrase. We have this notion that we have to respond in the moment, right away. If I don't respond right away, it means I'm not confident; it means I don't know my stuff. And yet we can pause a bit to actually reflect on what we're listening to before we respond. So I can literally just take a pause. Some of us feel pausing is bad, but pausing can be great. I can ask a clarifying question that gives me a little bit of time, or I can paraphrase, which is where I take something you've said, synthesize it, and present it back to you in a way that's distilled down. So it's not like what a 5-year-old does who just parrots back what you say—that's annoying—but you look for the key idea and you repeat it back.

The thing with asking follow-up questions and paraphrasing is these are lower-order cognitive skills. In other words, I can be thinking about what I want to say next while I'm doing those. So we're going to do a paraphrasing activity. It's very quick, very similar to what we did with "give a gift." In a moment, I'm going to ask you to find a different partner in the room, and I'm going to ask you to share a story of your name. And it can be anything related to your name you want; it can be very deep and meaningful; it can be fun. For 30 seconds, you're going to tell a story of your name. This activity is not about storytelling; this activity is about paraphrasing, because the person you're telling it to is going to paraphrase what you said, and then they're going to ask a question. Because paraphrasing never happens by itself; it's always followed by something—maybe your answer, maybe connecting to the agenda, maybe asking a question.

So let me give you an example of what this is like. So I'm going to tell you a story about my name for 30 seconds. I'm going to ask for a volunteer if you'd like to paraphrase what I said, and then another volunteer to ask a question. Now you do not need to answer the question, but by training yourself to ask a question immediately after paraphrasing, you're training yourself to keep the conversation moving. Paraphrasing is never something you do in and of itself; you always use it to move on. So here's a story of my name: My name is Matt. All through my childhood, I was teased mercilessly because Matt rhymes with everything—okay, lazy as a doormat, silly as a cat, you're fat—I was teased all the time. When my wife and I started our family, it was very important to me that our children not be named something that was easily teased. As a teacher, I have a built-in focus group, so I went into my classroom, I wrote the three names that my wife and I were willing to call our kids, and I gave my students five minutes to come up with the most heinous, mean, bad rhymes and everything they could, and we named my children the names that had the shortest lists. So that's the story of my name. Is there somebody here who'd be willing to just paraphrase my story? Again, a paraphrase gets to the crux of it. I see your hand here, sir. Yes. That wouldn't happen. Excellent. Great paraphrase. Essentially what he said, for those of you who couldn't hear, is you stress-tested your kids' names, right? That's a great paraphrase. What is a reasonable question that you might ask? Yes. What are the kids' names? Yes. I'm not going to tell you because they would be very upset, but I'll tell you that my kids are not teased because of their names. Now they're teased for lots of other things, but not their names. Do you see how paraphrasing can actually help you listen more intently?

So here's what I'm going to ask you to do: Find somebody else sitting around you, introduce yourself, and the person in your partnership who had to travel the farthest to get to campus for the event—not this morning, if you're not local, you're staying in a hotel that's close by—but where you came from. Whoever traveled the farthest will go first. You'll tell a 30-second story about your name; your partner will immediately paraphrase and ask a question. You need not answer it, and then you'll switch. This should take us two minutes to do. Find a partner; tell a story of your name. How did it feel to have your story paraphrased? It feels good, doesn't it? It feels good to have your story paraphrased; it feels good to be listened to. Now we're not virtual in this room, so we don't have some of those cool features that you have on tools like Zoom and Teams and Meet, so we're going to do it all the old-fashioned way. Will everybody put your fist out like this? This is a yes; thumbs up, yes; thumbs down, no. No middle fingers. Did your partner paraphrase well your story of your name? I am seeing almost exclusively thumbs up. I see one sideways, and we might have one thumbs down, but there's always one in every crowd. No. How did it feel? How did it feel to listen to the paraphrase? How did it feel to do this? Hard, right? I see thumbs up, but it was hard, right? You had to listen in a different way. When I looked at all of you doing this, you were leaning in; you were nodding. It was clear that you were listening with intensity. We have the capability to listen well, but we have to encourage ourselves to do it. And when we speak spontaneously, it is critical to listen well.

So we've now completed the first four steps of the process: manage anxiety, get out of our own way, see it as an opportunity, listen well. All of this has to do with mindset. We haven't actually responded in the moment yet, so that's the next part, and that's messaging. And messaging has two components: First, it has to do with structure. Structure is critical; how you put your messages together matters. Most of us just ramble and give lists of information when we're put on the spot, and your brain is not wired for lists. It's very hard for us to remember just ramblings. Our brains are actually wired for structure, for story. A story, to me, a structure is nothing more than a logical connection of ideas that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I learned the power of story and the power of structure when I was an undergraduate here at Stanford many, many years ago. I was a tour guide on this campus. To this day, I can still walk backwards in a straight line while speaking. They trained us back then for 12 weeks. The most important thing they taught us, they said above all else to be a good tour guide on this campus, you must never ever lose your tour group. You are a bad tour guide if you get people lost. The same is true with us as spontaneous speakers: never lose the audience you're talking to. How do we keep people together? We structure our responses. Structure helps us orient people and set expectations. If I showed up and I said, "Hi, I'm Matt, I'm your tour guide, let's go," how many of you would go with me? A few, because you're adventurous, but the rest of you'd be like, "Heck no. Where are we going? Do I have the right shoes on? Should I go to the bathroom first?" A good tour guide, just like a good spontaneous speaker, sets expectations up front so you can pay attention to what's happening and not wonder what's coming next. Structure also helps connect ideas together. The biggest place, or the most frequent place you will lose people as a tour guide, is when you move from one place to the next; people just wander off. The same is true in our communication. If you are using words like "so," "next," "second," "third" as your transitions, then you are missing opportunities to keep people together. So structure is really important. Let me give you an example of a structure just so you can get your arms around it. Most of us are familiar with a very persuasive structure of problem-solution-benefit. If you've ever, ever pitched an idea, if you've ever watched an advertisement, this is how they go: problem-solution-benefit. Here's an issue; here's how we solve it; and here's the benefit. That's a structure—beginning, middle, and end. Now my favorite structure in the whole world is three simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The "what" is your idea, your belief, your position, your product, your service, your feedback. The "so what" is why is it important to the person you're speaking to? And then "now what" is what comes next—maybe I'll take your questions, let's set another meeting, let me show you a demonstration. "What? So what? Now what?" is a great way to package up information when you're meeting with your friends this weekend and somebody says, "What are you up to?" It's a great structure to update: Here's what I'm doing; here's why I think it's important; here's what I'm planning to do next. When you're giving feedback, you can give feedback in this structure: The feedback is what I saw or what I didn't see; the "so what" is why it's important; and the "now what" is what I'd like you to do differently. So imagine we come out of a meeting together and you say, "Matt, how'd that go?" I say, "Well, I thought it went really well, except when you were talking about the implementation plan, you spoke quickly and didn't give as much detail as you did elsewhere. When you speak quickly without a lot of detail, people might think you're nervous and aren't prepared. Next time, slow down and use these two additional examples." Do you see how, in the moment, just by following this structure, it gives me a good response? Structure is a tool; it's like a recipe. I am a lousy cook, but I have a much better chance of cooking well if I follow a recipe. So by having a recipe, all I have to do is put the ingredients into it. I know how I'm going to give you my feedback; I just have to think about what I say in the feedback. So structure helps you not only package up information for your audience, but it helps you prioritize what to say, and because the information is packaged well, your audience can take that information and share it elsewhere. Think of a job interview. When you're being interviewed, not only are you trying to communicate your skills and how you could benefit the company, but you're trying to equip your interviewer with the information that they can then take to the others involved in the hiring decision and represent you. And if you package up that information easily, they can tell your story really well. If you just give them a whole list of information, they're likely not to remember it. So structure is incredibly helpful in spontaneous communication. In the new book, the whole second half of it is specific spontaneous situations: making small talk, apologizing, giving feedback, introducing yourself, answering questions, and with each one I assign or give a structure that you can use.

This is not the final step, though. The final step is the F-word of communication, and it's not that naughty one some of you are thinking about. It's focus. Many of us, when we speak in the moment, take our audiences on the journey of our discovery of what it is we want to say as we're saying it. In other words, we say more than we need to. We need to be focused and concise. My mother has a saying that I love—I know she didn't create it—but it's, "Tell me the time; don't build me the clock." Many of us, when we are spontaneously speaking, build clocks: one, because we're discovering what we want to say; two, because we want people to think we're really smart; and three, we want everybody to see how hard we've worked to get to what we're saying. It is much better to be compact and concise in what you're saying. So how do you do that? Well, one, we've already talked about relevance. If I think about what's really relevant for the audience, then I hinge everything I'm saying on that relevance. Second, you should have a goal whenever you speak, be it spontaneous or planned. A goal, to me, has three parts: information, emotion, and action. What do I want the audience to know? How do I want them to feel? And what do I want them to do? So if I'm walking into a room where I expect that I will be asked questions or asked to give feedback or even making small talk, I think to myself, "What do I want people to know? How do I want them to feel? And what do I want them to do?" And that helps me focus and prioritize what I'm saying. So it's not enough to just have a structured message; you have to focus that message to help people remember it and to not be seen as rambling and giving too much information.

There's another structure I want to introduce you to that is incredibly focused and concise. This is a structure for pitching. I'm often asked by people, "What happens if somebody asks me to pitch an idea in the moment?" So you're getting on an elevator and your boss's boss steps in and they look at you, say, "Oh, what are you working on? I'm about to go speak with the board; maybe I can help you." You got to respond. Four sentence starters: You just finish these sentences: "What if you could… so that… for example… and that's not all." What if you could… so that… for example… and that's not all. Let me show you how this works by taking a suggestion from you all, and I'll put it in this structure, and then together as a group we're going to use this for something. Can somebody think of a product or service that you would like to hear a pitch for? What would you like to hear me give a pitch for? Somebody suggest one. Your book? My book? Well, look at that. Well, thank you. All right, I appreciate that. So my new book is all about how to speak more effectively in the moment. "What if you could feel more comfortable and confident when put on the spot so that you could answer questions well or give appropriate feedback? For example, imagine an upcoming job interview that you nail, that you get all of your points across in a way that really represents who you are. And that's not all: You can apply these principles to small talk, to apologizing, and to even introducing yourself." Do you see how just answering those sentences gets you to a tight, clear pitch?

So here's what we're going to do for all of you to practice, and thank you for that opportunity. Okay, all of us are here for our Stanford reunion. Let's imagine for your next reunion you volunteer to help recruit people to come back to campus for reunion, so you're going to make a pitch. Let's go through each of these four together as a group. Somebody give me the end of this sentence: "What if you could…" Could… What if you could see old friends so that you can walk down memory lane and experience the things that you enjoyed about being on campus? For example… Somebody give me an example of a memory or an exciting thing you'd like to share with an old friend. For example… Here the band, hear the band play and sing some of the old songs. And that's not all… And that's not all: you what you can go to a great lecture on communicating in the moment. I love it. Do you see how easy that was? Do you see how the structure helps you, and it made it very concise? So by focusing on these two messaging elements—structure and focus—you can actually be much better at speaking in the moment.

So some resources for you to continue learning these concepts and others: I host a podcast for the business school; it's called "Think Fast, Talk Smart." It's all about communication skills. I get to interview experts from around campus and around the world on how to be better communicators. Lots of your favorite faculty have been guests on the show, and this show, I'm proud to say, has won many prestigious awards, including best dog-walking podcast and best commute podcast, because our episodes are very concise and short—20 minutes. We've won some other ones as well. I and there's a picture of the book, "Think Faster, Talk Smarter." If you take a shot of this QR code, it'll take you to a whole bunch of resources that I make available to our students here and elsewhere. I encourage all of you to think about how you can be a better in-the-moment speaker. It takes time, and it takes practice. The only way you get better at communication—planned or spontaneous—is three things: repetition, reflection, and feedback. Repetition, reflection, and feedback. You have to practice; you have to think about what's working and what's not working; and you have to seek out advice and guidance from teachers, from colleagues, from mentors to help. That's how we get better.