How to think faster and talk smarter

MATT ABRAHAMS: You should start pitches and presentations like an action movie. There’s something there right away. A lot of people have long preambles. You need to get yourself into the audience’s perspective. This is a fundamental tenet.

JEFF BERMAN: Matt Abrahams knows what it takes to win over a crowd, close a deal, and inspire a team. It’s not enough to have a great product or terrific idea. You need to be a brilliant communicator as well.

ABRAHAMS: Neuroscience has taught us emotion gets into our brains differently than information, gets in faster, stays longer, motivates behavior. So do I want people excited or concerned? Do I want them to have FOMO, fear of missing out, or be validated or just be confident? Think about that emotion.

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BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. Today on the show, communication expert Matt Abrahams. He teaches at Stanford’s Business School and has a brilliant podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart. Whether it’s preparing for a big speech, a one-on-one investor pitch or anything in between, Matt has science-backed strategies to help you succeed. We talk about how to overcome anxiety about public speaking, how to nail a job interview, and much, much more. Matt, welcome to Masters of Scale.

ABRAHAMS: I’m thrilled to be here, Jeff. Thank you.

BERMAN: We’re thrilled to have you. I just want to start by asking you, how do you describe what you do?

ABRAHAMS: So fundamentally, I’m somebody who’s really passionate about communication, and really what I think I do is I help people to hone and develop their communication skills. And a lot of that is really just asking people to turn habits into choices. Most people communicate out of habit, and my job, I think, is to expose them to different opportunities, tools, and techniques, and then ask them to consider in their situations they find themselves in to try a different technique out.

Copy LinkHow communication skills shape careers

BERMAN: What led you to choose to really specialize in this and to teach others how to be great at this?

ABRAHAMS: The teaching bug, I think, is just inside of me inherently. I’ve always loved teaching. I’ve had lots of opportunities to teach. After graduate school, I worked in the corporate world for a while. I had to pay off some loans, and I just saw the impact that good communication could have on somebody’s career in a company’s trajectory, and how bad communication got in the way. And so when the opportunity presented itself to do some teaching in this, actually here at Stanford through their continuing studies program, I fell in love with it, and I saw the impact it had. And I really enjoyed learning from my students and have never turned back.

BERMAN: I started my career as a public defender, not the obvious place to start for what I do now. And I’ll never forget, we had one lawyer who was quite experienced, and doing this for decades, who told us that they went into the restroom and threw up every single day before court. And it really just struck me as that you’ve got literally decades of experience and you’re still showing up with that level of nerve. As you work with people on communication, particularly on public communication, how common is this, this nervousness? And what do you help people understand that they can do to be less nervous to walk in with more confidence in these rooms?

ABRAHAMS: So anxiety around communication looms large. We have some evidence that suggests up to 85% of people feel anxiety. And quite frankly, I think the other 15% are lying. Those of us who study it have found it in every culture we’ve studied. We find it develops around the same time around when kids become early teenagers is when it really becomes more prominent and stays that way. So we believe it’s part of the human condition. There’s an evolutionary explanation for it. Your relative status in a group matters a lot. Not today, and I’m not telling you who drives the fanciest car and has the most social media likes. But when we were a species hanging out in groups of 150 people during our early evolution, your relative status meant everything. And it meant access to resources like food, reproduction. And if you did anything that jeopardized that, it could have quite a significant impact.

So it’s wired into us. Now that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to manage it. I spend a lot of my time helping people learn to manage anxiety. And you can do it both by focusing on the symptoms and the sources, but it is ubiquitous and it is something we have to work at. But over time, we can manage it. I don’t think we can ever truly overcome it, as your example shows. Having anxiety tells us that what we’re doing is important, gives us energy, helps us focus, but we have to manage it so it doesn’t manage us.

Copy LinkPractical ways to manage speaking anxiety in the moment

BERMAN: Are there truths about managing anxiety that apply to 90 percent of the population, or is it really specific to the individual?

ABRAHAMS: Everybody is different in terms of what their triggers might be or where the sources are, but there are some things you can do that seem to work for most people. I’ll give you a few examples. Deep belly breathing really can help. It slows down your autonomic nervous system. It slows down your breath rate. It lowers your breathing so that your voice sounds more normal. So breathwork seems to be really important. And what’s key is the exhalation. It’s not the inhale, it’s the exhale. So I like to joke that the rule of thumb or rule of lung is you want your exhale to be twice as long as your inhale. And if you do a few of those breaths, just two or three, you’ll actually really feel different and better.

The other thing that gets a lot of people is shakiness. That’s adrenaline. Adrenaline’s role is to move us from threat to safety. So if you move with purpose, you can give that adrenaline a place to go. So if you’re standing up in front of a room, step towards the audience with a welcoming gesture. If you’re sitting like this, lean forward, gesture broadly, that gives the shakiness a place to go. And for most people, those two things alone can help many of the symptoms abate. A lot of people just get inside themselves when they get nervous, they get very still. And then somehow magically, they expect to be able to go from silence to brilliance. But if you watch athletes, actors, dancers, there’s always movement. There’s always warming up that goes on.

So my anxiety management plan, and I encourage all of my students and everybody that I coach to develop their own unique plan. I do three things. First, I take some deep belly breaths. Second, I do my best to interact with somebody to have a conversation. It gets me focused. If it’s somebody who’s part of the audience, even better because I realize these are normal human beings who want to learn something from me rather than judges who are there to evaluate. And then I say tongue twisters. Tongue twisters, I know it sounds silly, but what it does is it warms up my voice and you can’t say a tongue twister right and not be in the present moment. Nobody ever sees me do this, but it’s a way that I warm up. In fact, before we started today, I excused myself and did a few tongue twisters to get myself ready.

BERMAN: Do you have a favorite one?

ABRAHAMS: I do. But I’ll only share it with you if you do it with me.

BERMAN: I’ll do it with you. Sure.

ABRAHAMS: Okay. Now the reason I like this one is it’s short and if you say it wrong, you say a dirty word.

BERMAN: Okay.

ABRAHAMS: All right. I slit a sheet.

BERMAN: I slit a sheet.

ABRAHAMS: A sheet I slit.

BERMAN: A sheet I slit.

ABRAHAMS: And on that slitted sheet I sit.

BERMAN: And on that slitted sheet I sit.

ABRAHAMS: See where the naughty word comes?

BERMAN: Right at the end.

ABRAHAMS: Yeah, exactly.

BERMAN: You want to slip an H in there.

ABRAHAMS: That’s exactly right. And I’ll do that three times and it gets me present, focused, and it warms me up.

BERMAN: Amazing.

Copy LinkWhy repetition, reflection, and feedback build better communicators

ABRAHAMS: I like to say there are only three ways to get good at communication: repetition, reflection, and feedback.

BERMAN: And repetition.

ABRAHAMS: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You got to do it a couple times. So nobody ever got good at speaking by thinking about it. You have to do it. That’s where Toastmasters, taking classes, those things really help. You have to reflect. Most people are just so glad to be done with it. They move on. There’s that definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again. Every night before I go to bed, I spend one minute writing down one thing that went well in my communication and one thing that didn’t each day. And on Sunday, I spend five minutes going back and reflecting and I make a plan to address an issue each week. I’m not saying I’m a great communicator. I am certainly a better communicator because I do that reflection. And then you have to get feedback. We are not the best judges of our communication. I make my MBA students digitally record themselves and they watch. It’s painful.

BERMAN: It’s the worst.

ABRAHAMS: But they learn so much. I tell everybody it’s like going to the dentist. We don’t like going, but we’re really glad we’ve been. And not only do they watch it and listen once, they then watch it without sound and then they listen without video. So they’re seeing the different channels and that actually highlights more of what they’re working on.

BERMAN: Given how central communication is to everything, to relationship building, to presentations, why don’t we spend more time teaching this, especially starting early? Why isn’t this more core to our curricula?

ABRAHAMS: So I’m heartened, at least here in the United States, that we’re seeing a bit more of that. I look at what my kids went through and I have a young nephew and what he’s going through, much different than what you and I went through. We’re of the same vintage. So I think there is a recognition that communication is important. Coordination of activity is important. I think part of it is that we just do it naturally. And most people by the age of one are communicating in some way, and we just feel like it’s just something we do. But when you think about the impact communication can have, it becomes very clear that it’s something we should study and look at.

When I talk to people who’ve graduated from our MBA program, one of the things they will say is either they’re so thankful they took communication training because they see how valuable it is in their work life, or they really wish they would’ve taken more. So it’s one of these things where we take it for granted, but then when we get exposed to it, we really see the value that it brings.

BERMAN: Yeah. And my rabbi, Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Amen Effect. It’s a beautiful book. But there’s a little anecdote in the book about going to the grocery store and going to the self-checkout. And looking up and seeing a person working at a cash register and switching, going over and having that moment of human interaction, and it completely changing her day as a consequence. As you’re engaging with college students, what are you asking them to do, encouraging them to do in their daily lives where they can practice being better communicators and in the process, perhaps build more community, build more civility, more connection?

ABRAHAMS: So a few things. One, I ask them just to observe others’ communication and see what is it that people are doing. We can be so internal-focused that we don’t see that that person pauses before they speak and that gives a little extra space for the other person to complete their thought. Or like my mother-in-law would do, she was a black belt in small talk and she would just say, “Tell me more.” And just noticing the subtle little things that people do to encourage communication or shut down communication. So part of it is observation. The other part is really helping people listen better. Most of us are not good listeners. So really teaching listening skills, which force people to be more present and connective and then paraphrasing skills. So it’s not enough just to get your point across, but when you hear somebody else’s point, demonstrate that you heard that point.

So giving them tools and techniques and then encouraging them to practice and then come back and reflect and report out. And it’s amazing where students will say, “I learned so much more from this person I was getting to know because I listened and I paraphrased and I gave the other person the confidence to say more.” So it’s helping them, scaffolding them to a point where they can feel more connected and comfortable doing those things.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Matt Abrahams on how to craft the perfect pitch.

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Copy LinkHow to improve your pitches

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel, and be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. I wanted to run Matt through a set of scenarios you might be facing and see how we can get better at communicating in each one of them. We started with pitching a new start-up concept. When someone’s taking an idea out to market and raising money for the first time or trying to persuade an advisor to come on, what are the mistakes that you most commonly see and where are the opportunities to get better that are just the lowest hanging fruit to coach people up on?

ABRAHAMS: So you and I both know Guy Kawasaki. So the first mistake people make is they take too long. I love his jet fighter versus a big Boeing analogy. It takes a long time for a big plane to take off. You need to take off quickly. You’ve got to get to the punch first. I like to tell people you should start pitches and presentations like an action movie. There’s something there right away. A lot of people have long preambles. You need to get yourself into the audience’s perspective. This is a fundamental tenet. I host a podcast, Think Fast, Talk Smart, all about communication. The number one bit of advice across hundreds of guests is always know your audience. A lot of people craft a pitch and that same pitch they give everywhere, you have to adjust and adapt. What’s relevant and salient to the people you’re talking to.

You also need to focus on benefits and salience, not features and functions. Many people get so immersed in what’s going on. My mother has a saying, I think, everybody should live by. It applies to pitches. “Tell the time, don’t build the clock.” Many people say much more than they need to. Get to the punchline more quickly. And then finally, show, don’t tell. Show what this means. Don’t just tell us all the different features and functions. What does this look like? If you can demonstrate it, demonstrate it, but help us in our mind see what it is. If you can do those things, you will engage people more.

And then there’s one thing that I’d love to get your opinion on. When I see pitches, a lot of people put their bios and their experience upfront. I’m not a big fan of that. I want people to tell me what the idea is, what the value is, and then let me know who you are versus who you are upfront. I don’t know if you have an opinion on that. Everybody I talk to thinks the bio company slide needs to go in a different place.

BERMAN: Well, there’s a fundamental tension for me in a lot of these conversations that are pitch conversations ultimately, because yes, jet fighter, get to it, be adept. By the way, as a way to get a meeting, I often say, “Look, can we please set 30 minutes or an hour? But if in 5 or 10 minutes you don’t think this is going to be valuable for you, kick me out. And I will, with a smile, shake your hand and give you 45, 50 minutes back in your day.” Because if in 5 minutes we’re not in it, it’s probably not going to happen anyway, most likely. But the tension for me, and I learned this… My first job in the private sector was at MySpace of all places. And ultimately, I was overseeing the sales function and I hired an absolutely incredible sales leader, a guy named Andy Weedland, who I went out on a sales call with. And we sat down and he didn’t pull up a deck and he didn’t start by saying what we’re here to talk about.

He started by asking them how they were doing and what was keeping them up at night and got them talking about their problems and five, six, seven minutes in, he completely adjusted the conversation to speak to what their needs are. And so that tension is often you walk in the room and you don’t know your audience as well as you should. So how do you get them in conversation so you can learn what you’re actually wanting to be speaking to?

ABRAHAMS: I think you ask questions. You do your homework, you do your cyber stalking, you’re checking out their LinkedIn profiles, you’re looking at their blog posts and Substacks, but you come in inquisitive. I think curiosity is the best place to come in most communication, especially in pitching situations. You reflect what you’re hearing, that’s where paraphrasing comes in and you’re watching for nonverbals and you’re trying to see how they are responding and reacting.

Nonverbals are not always the most accurate, but paying attention can be very helpful. And then start down a path and test and check and see if this is of value to them. One of the things you said that I really want to emphasize is setting expectations at the beginning of the meeting when you said, “Hey, if we’re not connecting in 10 minutes.” Most people don’t do a good job of expectation setting leading up to meetings and events. I’ll give you an example.

Copy LinkWhat great meetings do differently from bad ones

I think the single best expectation-setting tool for communication that we seldom use is the calendar invite. We all send invites out with URLs. You can do so much in a calendar invite to set expectations. I challenge you the next time you schedule a meeting, don’t put the word meeting in the title. It forces you to make it something that’s more active and engaging. Put your expectations, your goals, maybe even your behaviors that you want people to have or the tools you intend to use in the meeting in the invite. So people come in ready to go. I put in every invite I have for every meeting I run, either a question that we’re going to start discussing or a challenge that I want us to address.

Most people start meetings by reviewing the previous meeting, which I think is ludicrous. Most people don’t like going to meetings. So I’m going to start this meeting by reminding you about the previous meeting you didn’t want to be in. Let’s do something active to get engaged and then if we have to talk about the previous meeting. So expectation setting is critical. In the moment, determining who your audience is and what you can do to help them is critical, but it involves listening and being silent. And many of us, because we’re excited, we’re nervous, that’s hard for us to do.

BERMAN: To your point, most of us hate meetings. They’re a time suck. It feels like I only need to be here for 5 or 10 minutes, but we’ve set it for half an hour, an hour. Especially focusing on an internal meeting, what makes for a great meeting?

ABRAHAMS: I think a good meeting is where people feel that value has been provided to them and that they’ve had an opportunity to contribute and be heard. And that boils down to a lot of the pre-work that has to be done. Do you actually need the meeting? Meetings are often band-aids for bigger problems. When I come in and do some of my consulting work, one of the first things I’ll do is a communication audit, and I look for the number of meetings that people have and how many people and who are those people in those meetings. And it’s often a canary in the cold mine for a bigger, more challenging issue. So crafting purposeful meetings that have a clear goal. If there’s not a need for a meeting, don’t do it. Meetings don’t have to be 30 minutes and 60 minutes. They can be 17 minutes. Take meetings outside, walk.

There is lots of evidence that there are ways to be more productive in meetings. So really being value-driven, having expectations, maybe even seeding some ideas with people to contribute. So if I have a big meeting coming up, I might come to you and say, “I know you’re really passionate about this. I’d love to make sure you bring up the points you’re concerned with.” Giving people permission to contribute. So there’s a lot of work that goes into a meeting before it happens. I actually think facilitation, leading meetings, moderating panels, anytime you’re facilitating others communicating what you’re doing right now, I think it’s the hardest communication skill because you have to manage so much simultaneously.

BERMAN: Why is it so hard?

ABRAHAMS: Well, in this case, it’s just you and me, but imagine a meeting where there are multiple opinions. I’ve got time, I’ve got goals, I’ve got to make sure that this connects to something else. There’s a lot going on that I have to navigate through and make people feel psychologically safe, make sure people are contributing. I should be paraphrasing and connecting. There’s just a lot going on at the same time, and that’s why many people find it very difficult. So a good meeting is a meeting that’s well thought through and that people feel like they have presence and are getting value from it.

Some of the biggest mistakes people make is they don’t plan, they don’t listen, they don’t connect the dots of what they’re trying to accomplish to what has been accomplished, what needs to be accomplished. And they schedule too many meetings or spend too much time in the meeting. So really, if you are mindful of the experience and plan it, you can actually have people excited to come to meetings.

BERMAN: Yeah. You said earlier that repetition is one of the core elements of effective communication. And I think for so many leaders, they get tired of hearing themselves say the same thing over and over again. And I’ll never forget Jeff Weiner said, “Until I start hearing my team say it back to me, I know I haven’t said it enough.” But there is that tension of like, “I know you all have heard me say this 37 times and I feel like I should acknowledge that, but I don’t want to acknowledge that.” How do you help leaders get better at this piece of it?

ABRAHAMS: So part of it is calling it out. Part of your job as a leader is to repeat and the goal is to get alignment. So repetition is in service of something and reminding yourself of that. That said, there are lots of ways to repeat things without saying the same thing. You can give examples, you can use analogies, you can tell stories. So find different vehicles to communicate the same message.

Copy LinkHow to better prepare for job interviews

BERMAN: I want to set up another scenario-

ABRAHAMS: Sure.

BERMAN: … where communication can be complicated and ask for both sides of it. It’s a job interview.

ABRAHAMS: Yes.

BERMAN: From both the candidate and from the hiring side, again, what are the most common mistakes and what are the most coachable opportunities?

ABRAHAMS: Let me start with just the methodology I recommend people follow. When you go into a job interview, prior to getting there, obviously you should do your work and research on the organization and the role. Come up with themes that you want to make sure you get across. Maybe one of my themes is that I have deep expertise in this. With each theme you come up with, come up with support of that theme. A support might be a story you tell, maybe it’s a testimonial, you won an award or your boss said something. Maybe it’s some data, you saved X amount of money over this amount of time. So you have different types of support for your themes. So when I’m in the interview and you ask me a question, I think to myself, that’s a great opportunity for me to pull in this theme. And because I have the support already there, I’m just assembling my answer.
If you go to a fancy restaurant, they don’t make every meal from scratch. They have things prepared and they assemble it quickly. If you can do that, that means you’re more present and connected in the interview because I don’t have to sit there and figure out everything from scratch. I’m a huge fan of structure, structures and frameworks. They’re great ways to structure answers. One of my favorites is what I call ADD for adding value. Answer the question, give a detailed example, describe the relevance. So if you ask me a question, I’ll answer it. I’ll give you an example and I’ll describe the relevance. In doing so, I have just made it easier for you, the interviewer, to see the value I can bring, to see that I can think quickly on my feet. And I give you an example that’s concrete.

For giggles, imagine you’re interviewing me to be a teacher of strategic communication at Stanford’s Business School. So you’re interviewing me for the job I have, because at least that way I might have some qualifications. What might be a reasonable question you ask?

BERMAN: Why should we not hire you?

ABRAHAMS: Why should we not hire you?

BERMAN: Why should we not hire you?

ABRAHAMS: One of the things that I have a tendency to do is to over-index on applied information. And some of our students would benefit from more theoretical approaches. For example, when I teach crisis management, I’m teaching very specific messaging techniques, not the theories as much. So if you are looking for somebody who is theoretically oriented, I’m not that candidate. But if you want your students leaving knowing how to communicate and having practiced it, then I’m the person you should hire. Answer, detailed example, describe the relevance. So I didn’t know the question you were going to ask, but I knew exactly how I was going to answer it. And that makes life easier for me.

BERMAN: What’s the question I should have asked you in that mock job interview?

ABRAHAMS: That’s the question. That’s actually it.

BERMAN: That’s the question?

ABRAHAMS: That’s it. So I always recommend that somebody have a question because they always say, “Do you have any questions for me?” And a lot of people say, “No, no.” And there’s no way. You have lots of questions. So I will always ask, “What’s the question I should have asked?” Or I say, “What do you wish you would have known when you were interviewing? Or what’s the question you would have asked?” And in my own life when I’ve done that, I have received such great insight. And when I’ve been on the receiving end of that as a hiring manager, it showed me that this is somebody who really wants to understand the inner workings and the details, which made a mark on me. As an interviewer, my job is to figure out not just if you’re the best candidate, but are you a good fit? So I am giving you space to share information with me.

And I’m asking follow-up questions because that lets me really see your depth of thought. And the last bonus or bit of advice I’ll give is leverage AI. LLMs can be really helpful. Not to help you create answers, that’s not what I’m looking for, but to help you get questions to practice. All athletes do a lot of drills. All musicians do a lot of scales. We can do the same thing. Go to your favorite LLM, say, “I am interviewing for this role in this company. Generate five questions for me.” As those questions come up, practice answering them. That’s how you get better at it.

Copy LinkHow to speak to big audiences

BERMAN: We’ve been focused more on small group communication. I want to go back to bigger stages. You’re standing in front of a room of hundreds or even thousands of people. If it is the National Association of Realtors, you probably have a pretty good idea of your audience and you can speak to your audience. But often, leaders are speaking before much more diverse groups of folks. What do people not get right in those rooms and what’s coachable there?

ABRAHAMS: There’s several things I could say. First and foremost, have a clear goal. Understand what you’re trying to do. To me, a goal has three parts, information, emotion, and action. What information do you want to get across? And based on what you know about your audience, what’s the best way to do that? What’s the feeling? A lot of us don’t think about feeling. We just want to get through the information, but we’ve known for millennia, thousands of years, that emotion matters. Neuroscience has taught us emotion gets into our brains differently than information. Gets in faster, stays longer, motivates behavior. So do I want people excited or concerned? Do I want them to have FOMO, fear of missing out, or be validated or just be confident? Think about that emotion. And then is there an action? Most communication, especially for leaders up in front of big groups, involves action. What is it? Is it clear? And is it measurable?

I coach a lot of entrepreneurs and during their pitches, they’ll say things like, “I want your support.” What does that mean? Do you want a check? Do you want a social media like? Be specific. So having a clear goal helps you focus. That’s the number one place I think people make a mistake. They aren’t clear. Or the person who wrote their presentation was clear, but they weren’t clear because a lot of leaders don’t write their own content and that can be a problem. If you’re not writing your own content, you need to be very closely aligned with the people who are, and they need to understand your process.

The other thing that people do is they don’t practice. Think about a standup comedian. How many times does a standup comedian work on their routine? I coach some of the most senior leaders here in this valley and they’ll say, “I got it.” I say, “Oh, how much did you practice?” “I read the slides last night.” You need to live it. You need to speak it out. I don’t know about you, but in my mind, I’m amazingly eloquent. When I open up my mouth, I’m not always as lucky. So getting that practice in and practice in the environment where you move around the stage, you feel the lights, you hear the sound of your voice through the speakers.

BERMAN: One of the paradoxes of the modern moment is it has never been easier to reach people because there are more platforms and they’re open platforms. But it’s never been more difficult to build a real audience because it’s so crowded and AI is only making that more complicated by the day. Whatever you may think of his politics, it has been said of Zohran Mamdani that he is just as good in a 30-second social media hit as he is in a 3-minute cable news appearance, as he is in a 30-minute speech, as he is in a 3-hour podcast. He’s kind of mastered each of those media. When you’re working with leaders who now have to appear in many different formats on these wildly different platforms, how do you help them get good across the board?

ABRAHAMS: I think you take a step back and you really think about what do you stand for? What’s important for you? What are your key values? And you start from there. And so essentially what I’m saying is you have to be authentic and you have to be true to yourself. You then have to think about how the message plays best on the different channels and platforms. And you might have a really good stump speech or a really good position statement or pitch at five minutes. It’s not just about truncating it to fit the 30-second TikTok. It’s what’s the core essence of that or a piece of that core essence? And how can I say that in the best way? So helping people understand that it’s not just message, but channel all coming from an authentic place, and then it boils down to practice. You have to practice for the different modalities.

People think if I can do a 30-minute presentation, I can do it in 5. Not at all. It’s very different. And so you have to get that experience and you have to practice it. And you’re right, if you don’t, people question. It feels disingenuous. And I think younger people have an advantage over those of us who are older and that they’re used to managing personas in different modalities, much more so than I am. I barely can do it in front of somebody, let alone on technology.

BERMAN: So what are you saying to leaders who do need to be on platforms where it is just wildly uncomfortable for them to get there?

ABRAHAMS: Whenever I ask anybody to do something they’re uncomfortable with, I ask them to think about another time they did something they were uncomfortable with and what helped them do that. And it could be everything from the first road race somebody ran to the first time they had to let somebody go during a reduction in force. Helping people understand that, one, you can do it. And then helping scaffold the different pieces. So if I’m trying… And I am learning how to be on TikTok myself, which is wildly disturbing to my kids. They do not want me there.

But the point is that you need to understand what’s expected on that channel, what works, and then figure out how you can connect to it. You have your own freedom on ramps to these different channels. I help people try to figure out where’s the best place to start? Is it that you’re really good at being funny or you’re really good at asking questions? So let’s lean into that when you move to a different platform or a different way. So let’s find a strength that will play well in that platform, but first you have to be encouraged.

BERMAN: Matt, you referenced… Where was I going? I just fully lost my train of thought. It’s quite all right. Forgive me.

ABRAHAMS: No worries.

BERMAN: Surreal. Let me go in a different direction.

ABRAHAMS: We can talk about blanking out.

Copy LinkWhat to do when you lose your train of thought

BERMAN: Let’s talk about blanking out because I just blanked out. I had exactly where I wanted to go with my next question. I lost it. What do we do in those moments?

ABRAHAMS: When you blank out, a great thing to do is to do what you do when you lose your phone or your keys. Go back to go forward. Repeat yourself. Say what you just said before. Most of us can remember that. And that often gives us enough to get on track. If not, find a way in conversation to distract your audience. So I teach the same class very often. I can’t remember, did I say this in this class? Did I say that yesterday? So I’ll lose my train of thought. So what I’ll do is I’ll just pause. And if you ever hear me say this, it means I’ve forgotten what I need to say. I will say, let’s pause and think about how what we’ve just discussed impacts your life. And what my students do is they think about that, and that gives me that fraction of a second.

So can you leverage a question? Can you get somebody responding or doing something to buy that time for yourself? I call it a back pocket question. You should have something you can pull out. So when you blank out, repeat yourself. If that doesn’t get you back on track, ask some other peripheral question that you’ve thought about. Just like you asked me earlier, you could simply say, “What’s something I should be asking you?”

BERMAN: Yeah.

ABRAHAMS: And that’s something I can respond to and that gives you time to think.

BERMAN: Yeah. What have we not talked about that we should have talked about here?

ABRAHAMS: I alluded to listening a little bit earlier, but listening really is critical in all communication. And listening means we actually have to slow down. I have a colleague who jokingly says, I hope it’s jokingly that listening is that thing I have to do before I get to speak. So when I teach listening, I teach a few things. I learned this from a colleague of mine. His name is Collins Dobbs. Pace, space, grace.

BERMAN: Pace, space, grace.

ABRAHAMS: It’s a way to ace your listening. So you have to slow things down.

BERMAN: Yeah.

ABRAHAMS: Listening is one of the only skills where we actually have to slow down to take advantage of it. So you have to slow your pace down. You have to give yourself space. For me, as I get older, everything’s loud and I can’t hear. I have to move to a space that I can. But more importantly, I have to give mental space. I have to stop all the chatter and focus. And then grace. Grace to give yourself permission, not just to listen to the words, but how those words are said, where those words are said. That can give you a lot of insight. I’ll tell you a quick story. I came out of a meeting with a colleague and my colleague said, “How do you think the meeting went?” And I immediately heard feedback. So I gave all the constructive feedback because the meeting didn’t go well.

What he really wanted was not feedback. He wanted support in that moment. I didn’t recognize he came out the back door, not the front door with me. He was talking quietly. He was looking down. He was sending me all these signals that I was not listening to. So pace, space, grace helps you listen better. And then the single best tool, I’ve said this, I’ve mentioned this before, paraphrasing. When you listen to paraphrase, you have to listen more deeply. You listen for the bottom line, not the top line.

So if we give ourselves a little pace, space, grace and we listen to paraphrase, we learn to listen better. Now I have to be very candid with you. My wife thinks I’m a fraud when I talk about listening because she thinks I need a lot of practice, but we are all working on it.

BERMAN: We’re all working on it and you’re still married. So-

ABRAHAMS: As far as I know.

Copy LinkThe keys to building real connection

BERMAN: … you’ve done something right here. You referenced earlier that often if someone’s not agreeing with a speaker, that speaker doesn’t feel like they’ve been heard.

ABRAHAMS: Yes.

BERMAN: We’re in a moment in this country where we really struggle to hear each other and to make each other feel heard. And it feels like there is so much more that divides us than unites us. I reject that perspective.

ABRAHAMS: I agree. And the research suggests that too.

BERMAN: It feels like to build back, we have to start local. We have to start one-on-one and then in small groups and in communities, what have you. But as you observe this, what do you wish we were doing differently so that we could connect more and find those things that unite us more than divide us?

ABRAHAMS: Stepping back and looking and listening to different perspectives. I really applaud my wife. She does this better than I do. She will look at multiple news sources from different parts of the political spectrum for a particular topic. And that gives her perspective that I don’t necessarily always have. So taking that step back and appreciating that there are different perspectives and hearing those different perspectives. It’s trite and cliche to say we’re all living in our own little bubbles, but it’s true and we need to peer out and see. And leading within inquiry and curiosity, I think are the ways to really get that going.

When you come in, guns blazing, here’s my position, this is what’s going to happen, that’s off-putting. That puts somebody on the defensive. But if I come in with curiosity, help me understand that. What perspective do you hold? That invites at least conversation. And again, understanding that we don’t always have to agree and we can appreciate somebody else’s perspective. That lays the groundwork for the kinds of conversations you’re hoping for and I’m hoping for.

BERMAN: I love that. What a great place to wrap. Thank you for being with us.

ABRAHAMS: Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation.

BERMAN: Thanks again to my friend Matt Abrahams for joining us. His brilliant podcast is Think Fast, Talk Smart, and his book is Think Faster, Talk Smarter. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.