Transcription
I had a billionaire come to me recently, and we were discussing open-ended questions. He was about to go on every major podcast you can imagine. And questions like, "What was the happiest moment of your childhood? Tell me about yourself. What's been hard in your life lately?" just deeply unsettled something inside of him and made him feel nervous, anxious, and frustrated that he couldn't find the right words that captured how he truly felt in his soul about that question.
And this is very normal for most people. As they hear an open-ended question, something that doesn't have an easy yes or no, their heart rate goes up, their brain starts scanning their entire life. And there's this pressure of, "I have to pick the correct answer. I have to find the perfect moment. And if I choose wrong, I look boring. I look shallow, or I look fake in some way."
So, what often is going on inside of their mind? There's an analogy that I like to use of choosing every color of crayon in the crayon box. If you think of a box of 64 crayon colors, people feel like the right answer is where they name every color. "I've got to mention red. I've got to mention yellow. I've got to mention blue." And answering a question like, "What is the happiest moment from your childhood?" feels like, "Well, I have to mention that memory, and that memory, and that memory, and this other phrase of life, and also the emotion associated with it, and like what the color of the sky was, because that's part of the happiness." And it's this desperate attempt to not misrepresent yourself, because what you're trying to do here is fundamentally a good thing, which is you are expressing the fullness of what you have inside of you.
And I'm going to give you, in these next few minutes, an alternative way of thinking about this. And this is what we teach inside of Elite Speak. This is what I teach my clients. And this is what I want to offer up to you as a solution. So, this video is going to give you three things. It's going to give you a new way of seeing open-ended questions, a perspective shift. It's going to give you a simple, repeatable framework that you can run under pressure, because often open-ended questions happen in a very high-stakes environment where you're in front of millions of people, where you're on a panel, where you are in a meeting, and you're asked a question that demands an intelligent answer. And then, number three, is I want to give you two tiny exercises that are going to help you wire this into your nervous system so that you feel calmer, and a brilliant reply to an open-ended question is your default.
So, let's talk about reframing open-ended questions. Let's actually take that question that the billionaire was dealing with, which is, "What is the happiest moment from your childhood?" And once again, this feels like there is a correct answer somewhere. You have to scan your entire life, and you have to pick the perfect moment. And if you choose wrong, you misrepresent yourself, and you come off as really shallow, or really boring, or really fake. This would make anyone's nervous system panic. Like, this is not because someone can't figure out what the answer is, and that person is somehow stupid. No, this would make any normal person unsettled.
So, here's the reframe that I want to give you so that you don't become unsettled. And that is, you're not giving the answer. You're giving just a slice. Once again, I'm not giving the answer. I'm giving just a slice. I'm not trying to upload my entire soul in my response. All I'm trying to do is select one slice, one honest slice from a thousand honest slices.
So, what this might look like in response to the question, "So, what is the happiest moment from your childhood?" Instead of hunting for the best memory, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab a real one that comes to mind right now. And there are several lines that you can use, several sentences that can help you introduce this. So, an example might be, "Joseph, what is the happiest moment from your childhood?" And I might say, "Well, there actually are a bunch, but the one that comes to mind right now is..." and then I transition into it. And we're going to talk about how to frame these examples or these ideas in just a minute. Another sentence might be, "Well, I don't know if this is the happiest memory, but the one that really sticks in my mind is..."
So, using these sentence starters, and I'll put these below in the description, actually in the description. I will use these as a way of transitioning into what we're going to be talking about in a minute. And using these kinds of starters where you say, "Well, this might not be the happiest, but it's what comes to mind right now," allows you to be very honest about the fact that it might not be the best or the perfect moment that shows that you were a happy nine-year-old on some wet grass and you know, summer skies. But what it does illustrate is that you are sharing what immediately was top of mind. People respect that, and it's part of what creates very strong presence. So, already your shoulders should be dropping a little bit. You now have something to do. You have a response. You don't have to pick the perfect answer. You're just picking a slice.
Now, we move on to the framework. If you're an entrepreneur, a coach, a founder, or a high performer and want your speaking to finally match your level, click the link below to apply for Elite Speak. This is our signature program for ambitious people where you'll receive direct feedback from myself and our Elite Speak team, and we'll show you exactly where your communication, your words, your thoughts, and your nervous system are leaking trust and money. Click the link and we'll show you how. I'll see you there.
Now, we move on to the framework. The simple framework. And we teach this as the three M's. The three M's are moment, movie, meaning. Moment, movie, meaning. Every single time you hear a big open-ended question, I want you to think moment, movie, meaning.
So, step one is moment. And moment is just picking a slice. Your job is to answer the question very narrowly. Not this big 30,000 ft bird's-eye view of everything, but just a slice. So, what this might look like would be, let's ask the question again, "Joseph, what was the happiest moment from your childhood?" What I might say, building off of what we talked about earlier, which is, "Well, this might not be the happiest, but what comes to mind right now is this one afternoon when I was about 10 years old." I'm getting very narrow. I'm picking a moment. Or I might say, "What comes to mind is, honestly, it was this one Christmas with my family." Or, "It was this one Saturday in middle school, and I was coming back from soccer practice." So, what's happening here? You're not explaining your entire childhood, or the entire idea, or the entire concept. You're just picking one scene, one slice. And you can use starter stems like, "The one moment that jumps out is..." or "The first thing that comes to mind is when..." And you know, "it was one afternoon when I was 10 years old." And so, what this encourages you to stop doing is scanning your life for like the perfect moment, and you're just zooming in on one small hallway, one small table, one small feeling that you had when you were 10 years old. And it takes a tremendous amount of anxiety and pressure off.
So, once we have moment defined, we move on to movie. And movie is just a way of saying animation. It's painting a tiny scene. It's turning that moment into a film, a little film. And so, the technique that we teach for animation, visual animation or verbal animation, is what's called TAKES. T-A-K-E-S. TAKES stands for time, audio, kinesthetic, eyesight, and smell.
So, time would be, "Well, it was one moment on a Tuesday, 5:42 p.m." Or, "I think it was in 2021, my favorite moment, and I realized that I had just fallen in love." And these ideas of time, we only need to really check two of these boxes: time, audio, kinesthetic, eyesight, or smell. It doesn't have to be all five. That you can do that, you'd be very creatively oriented and very talented if you could do all five.
So, time is the first one. Audio. So, you can talk about the popping popcorn in the background, the brakes screeching of a car, the feet running on the wood floor. Then there's kinesthetic. Kinesthetic is feeling. So, it could be like the soft fur of your pet dog, or the, I don't know, you know, the nice baby alpaca scarf that someone was wearing, or anything that has like texture to it. And then there is eyesight. Eyesight is what you see, obviously. It could be the old TV, it could be the dim light, it could be the lamp in the background, it could be the squirrels running outside. And then there's smell. And smell is, well, anything that has that, you know, visceral potent stench to it, or pleasant smells like roses, anything.
And so, using these as a way of animating the scene and just stepping through the idea and just having different touch points within TAKES could be, "I thought of this idea in 2021, and I remember sitting at my desk. I was working on writing a letter, a Christmas letter to my friends, and I had this epiphany moment." Right? So, you've now created this scene. Even if it's not something that's rooted in memory, it could be an abstract idea that you're teaching. You can still check some of these TAKES boxes. T-A-K-E-S.
And so, your answer goes from something like, "Yeah, my childhood was nice. My family was pretty close," to, "There's this one moment on Christmas that always jumps out to me. My grandmother was in the kitchen cooking some Hungarian chicken paprikash, and my brother and I were sitting in front of the TV, and we just heard our siblings playing in the background, and we were both looking at this one gift that we knew we weren't supposed to open." Like, you can see how people are engaged in an answer like that. And you can do this. You don't have to do this with anything once again that's rooted in memory. You can do this with anything that is abstract or idea-related, something like an engineer might talk about, or a CEO or an executive type. It's about being able to animate with your words. People can see that, and they feel it.
Step number three is meaning. And this one is really simple. It's just, why does it matter? You close the loop. You went from moment to animating that moment to extracting, in one sentence, what it taught you. And that sentence can be something as simple as, "You know, that Christmas with my grandmother made me realize that what I valued most was family, and that's why I do what I do right now." Or it could be, "Looking back, I realized that my obsession with YouTube started because I uploaded one video about a health issue I had when I was younger, and I realized that talking about my struggles is what I always wanted to do." Or, "That's probably why I care so much about animals now, because I lost the pet that was most important to me when I was younger." I mean, I'm just making up examples. This isn't my life, by the way. But what we're doing here is we're reflecting back on this movie that we just went through. It's like writing a movie review after going through a full two-hour cinematic experience. And so, what you're doing here, you're not giving the full story. You're just stepping through these three M's. And you give people something that's very real, very visual, and they'll tell you it's probably a very articulate answer as well.
So, what I want to focus on now, I want to make sure that we give you a win. And we don't just talk about this in theory. I want to give you two short exercises to retrain your nervous system so that you go from, "I don't know what to do. I have no frameworks. I'm freaking out," to, "I know what to do. I'm calm, and I'm answering this question, this open-ended question that I'm hearing for the first time, as if I've answered it a thousand times before."
And so, the exercise number one, I really want you all to practice this. This is something I do, and it makes a tremendous difference. It sounds simple, but it works. And it is, after you hear the question asked to you, even though your impulse is to talk fast, it's to fill the gap with words, it's to prove that you're not shallow by adding more and more and more and more. What I want you to do is just close your mouth and take a deep breath that is as long as the question that was asked. So, if it's a three-second question, "What was the happiest moment from your childhood?" Repeat the question in your head and breathe throughout the duration of that question. It's going to give you a little bit of silence, and it's going to act as a tiny reset button for your nervous system to keep you calm and to build that pattern recognition inside of your body that allows you to be able to solve and answer open-ended questions with ease. That's step number one. No nervous. Yeah, I I think my childhood, wow, like the child, I think the moment that comes to... Stop scrambling. Part of that is because you have no real discipline over your breathing in the beginning. Get that right, and this second exercise will be very easy.
And this second exercise very simply is just asking yourself, "What am I seeing in my mind right now? What's the first thing that comes to mind?" Seriously, say that. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't overthink it. If I am asked a question about my childhood, and I think of, "Well, the thing that comes to mind is me rolling down some grassy hill one summer when I had nothing to do," then that's what I would talk about. I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going to sit for 30 seconds and try to find the best. That will come with time, and you will get better and better at your answers the more that you output. But you have to stick with one.