197. Prep or Perish: Mastering In-the-Moment Communication (1 of 3)
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This episode was brought to you by Stanford University. Over the years, we've shared advice from my Stanford colleagues on how to be more confident and compelling in your communication. You might remember Kelly McGonigal sharing ways to harness your anxiety to help you feel empowered.

Stanford faculty contribute to the world in many other ways. I was really impressed by Stanford Medicine's Michelle Monge and Crystal Makel, who led a clinical trial that could revolutionize the treatment of a lethal and incurable pediatric cancer that attacks children's brains and spinal cords. Michelle and Crystal's team reprogrammed the sick kids' immune systems to fight the tumors. This improved their symptoms and shrank the tumors for most patients.

Exciting breakthroughs like these seem to happen every day at Stanford. To stay up to date on the next great discovery, sign up for Stanford Report at connect.stanford.edu. You know, the overthinkers make mistakes at the same rate as the people that are quick to pull the trigger. It just takes them longer to make the mistakes because they're overthinking it.

I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this spontaneous speaking, think fast, talk smart mini-series. I want you to think back to the last time you were put on the spot. Your boss asked you a question. A friend wanted advice. You had to make small talk or maybe just introduce yourself. How did it feel?

If you're like most of us, it was awkward, uncomfortable, and probably nerve-wracking. Planned communication, the presentations, pitches, meetings with agendas, those are hard enough. But when we have to speak in the moment, on the spot, that can be even more difficult. But the good news is, with a little preparation and practice, we can all get better.

In this three-part Think Fast, Talk Smart miniseries, we've put together a team of coaches to help you improve your spontaneous speaking skills. Your coaching team is made up of people whose jobs require them to speak on the spot every day. They do this stuff for a living. Everything from a Sotheby's auctioneer to an NFL referee to a former FBI negotiator.

In this first episode, we'll tackle preparation and mindset, focusing on how we can approach speaking spontaneously in a way that makes us feel more comfortable and confident. And we'll see a lot of this starts way before we actually speak.

To start, we're going to speak with a sports broadcaster and a Paralympic champion among many other swimming accolades. Her job is to get to the heart of the race and make people feel in their hearts connected to those that she speaks with.

Before we get started, I wanted to thank all of you for listening and supporting Think Fast, Talk Smart. We know the content means so much to so many of you. We see it in your LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube posts. It takes a lot of work to bring the show to you, and I invite you to consider joining Think Fast, Talk Smart Premium to help us continue creating useful content and to reach more listeners. Check out faster, smarter.io slash premium.

I know for the majority of people, public speaking, especially spontaneous public speaking, is a huge fear. And I've been asked so many times, you know, why do you like doing this thing, this thing that most people absolutely despise? And I think it's because in many ways it mirrors being an athlete. You have to prepare a lot. There's a moment in time where you know you're going to be live and in that moment you have to perform. And it either goes really well or it goes really poorly.

And if it goes really well, you get the same sort of adrenaline rush afterwards. And if it goes poorly, you have to grapple with that challenge and then embrace a mindset to go again or figure out how you're going to do it better, often with a pretty short turnaround time. On live television, sometimes it's moments from one interview to the next. And if you think one didn't go well, you've really got to figure out how to forget about that, put it behind you, move forward. And that's similar in a sporting context.

So you've actually just captured what I often share with people that you can prepare to be spontaneous. And it sounds like that's what you're doing both when you train as an athlete, but also training to respond to what you're seeing as a commentator unfold in front of you. That's exactly right. And I think preparation is the absolute key. I do a lot of research about every single one of the athletes to know what their typical style is. And so you have to adjust your energy and your response.

and give them the platform they deserve in a very short period of time. And a lot of that comes down to preparation in advance and trying to anticipate how someone's going to go in an event because it's almost impossible to do that live. So we've just heard from Annabelle Williams about how researching in advance helps you stay on your feet during interviews. But what if your job came with the pressure of one wrong word sparking diplomatic disaster?

That's the everyday reality for our next coach, Giampaolo Bianchi. As a UN interpreter, he relies on meticulous preparation to manage the intense cognitive demands of translating complex conversations in real time.

For simultaneous interpreting, we have this concept, which is the cognitive load. And so the idea when you're interpreting is to try to use that working memory as efficiently as possible and avoid overwhelming yourself. And there are strategies to do that.

it does mean that you are going to have to concentrate very hard for a sustained period of time. So it's very taxing. Yeah, I can imagine that you might be exhausted after some of the simultaneous translations. But would you mind sharing like one thing you do to try to maximize your cognitive bandwidth? Because I think all of us find ourselves in situations where our bandwidth gets tested.

I would say like the number one thing that I do to avoid cognitive overload is just preparation. When a conference interpreter works at a meeting, they have to know

almost everything about the meeting before it even begins. And that includes looking up the organization charts, figuring out who's the director general, who's the deputy director general. Sometimes you might even go so far as to look up the delegates online and see if there are already recorded speeches of them so that you can listen to them and prepare by getting used to their accent. We'll look up the jargon that's used in the organization because

If you prepare that information beforehand, and if you really study it and learn it by heart, then you can almost automate the process of thinking about those things so that you can then dedicate your mental resources to something else. Every second that you spend thinking about, oh, what does that acronym mean?

is a second that you're not spending on understanding what is being said and interpreting it. That's phenomenal. So it is in that in-depth preparation that you are freeing up your cognitive bandwidth in the moment. When you and I first spoke, we talked about this notion of pattern recognition. And what you're doing is you're identifying some of the patterns in advance. From the world of UN diplomacy, we're heading straight to the gridiron.

where high stakes and fast calls sound a bit different. - There are two fouls on the play, both by the defense. Offside defense, number 98, who is unabated to the quarterback. We were blowing the whistle to shut the play down. Personal foul.

That's the voice of our next coach, NFL referee Brad Rogers. His job? To spot violations, make split-second decisions, keep players safe, and announce those calls to a packed stadium of passionate fans, all while maintaining order on the field. So, Brad, many of us struggle to remember what we want to say. In your role, you're asked in the moment to decide if a rule was violated and then assess a consequence for that violation.

How do you remember all the things you need to remember in that moment? You know, a little of it is the fact that this is my 33rd year of officiating. I've had 33 years of bad announcements or bad experiences. So you learn from those things. As referees in the National Football League, we work through reciting announcements for fouls.

I say them in the car. I say them to my wife. Our wives as referees are probably some of the most learned in what to say and what not to say. But we have prescribed verbiage that's shared with us on a lot of different fouls that we are messaging the same thing from one game to the next.

I work through every announcement made each week. So I watch every game of announcements and I listen to my peers and I hear what they say. And I'm like, boy, that made sense. That's something I need to add to what I need to communicate next week. I listen to their language that was used in their announcement and I try to implement those. I also listen to the TV announcers.

And I see if they are confused or if they make positive comments about the announcement. I can control only my preparation and then learn from those mistakes. From penalty flags to life or death decisions, we're raising the stakes. Brad Rogers relies on predetermined rules and regulations to make quick calls on the field. But what happens when there are no clear rules? And every word could mean the difference between chaos and calm.

The answer comes from our next coach, former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss. You've negotiated in incredibly high-pressure situations where life is on the line. How do you stay calm and collected while thinking on your feet and trying to manage to a positive outcome? It's just practice. It's preparation. It's putting in the hours ahead of time. Anything that looks easy, that somebody makes look easy, they put a lot of time in.

And so like any skill, you break it down into small pieces and you practice it live. And then you practice it in small stakes interactions. As a hostage negotiator, I had enough confidence in the process. And I'm like, all right, I don't know for sure how this is going to come out. But the best outcome is if I just follow the process. This is the best chance of success. That's my former boss, Gary Nessner, his phrase he used all the time. What's the best chance of success? Which means it's not going to be perfect.

but it means it's going to work more than anything else does. So it sounds like there was a bit of a ritual to your practice, but it's really about relying on what you have done and know that you can get through it. When you're under pressure, how do you quickly gather information and adjust your approach?

You constantly must be reading the circumstances and then making adjustments. Do you have mental shortcuts, heuristics, things you use to help you make those decisions? Or are you using some kind of pattern recognition? Your gut does the pattern recognition. It's not a conscious process.

The practice of the preparation is about building my gut instinct. So when you get to the point where you can lean back enough to let your gut kick in, then you're going to be fine. Again, my gut's not perfect, but it's better than anything else. Even with preparation and practice, it can be difficult to overcome arguably the biggest obstacle when it comes to successful spontaneous speaking, your own mind, that constant overthinking, analyzing, and second-guessing.

There are, however, many tips our coaches have to help you turn down the mental noise and keep your focus.

Many of us in these high stakes situations, clearly different than the high stakes situations you've lived through and live in, we get in our head and we overthink. And that overthinking actually gets in the way of us just hearing what our gut is saying and being present. Do you have ways that help you turn down that volume of overthinking? I'm reading Creativity, by Ed Catmull, the guy who founded Pixar. And he's talking about this very dilemma. Exactly. The

the people that work for him that are the overthinkers versus the people that are quick to pull the trigger. And he says, you know, the overthinkers make mistakes at the same rate as the people that are quick to pull the trigger. It just takes them longer to make the mistakes because they're overthinking it. And I thought that makes all the sense in the world. The entrepreneurs are

They say, make the mistake now, gather the data, fail fast, move forward. You see it over and over and over again. And that insight in Ed's book just really opened my eyes to the dangers, the perils of overthinking. One, we have to recognize we're doing it. And two, we have to realize that it's not serving us any better than just being present and going for it. That's the hard part. The reality is...

you're not going to be successful at a higher rate with the overthinking. So you might as well pull the trigger and get the dad. Annabelle also had some helpful tips for dealing with the stress of spontaneous speaking. Anxiety around speaking in the moment looms large. And she says one thing that helps her is taking things one at a time. So I think one of the most important things with respect to live television is the mindset to compartmentalize things.

When you go live, I literally think to myself, all I'm allowed to focus on at this point is this two-minute segment. And then when it's done, move and go to the next part. There is no point me thinking about, I know I've got an interview with X athlete in an hour and a half.

You just take one interview at a time, one segment at a time. The idea of being very present focused and being focused on the moment or timeframe you have now and not what comes next can really help you do your best as well. Well, those listening likely won't need to speak in situations like you do, but

What advice would you give for them to be better speakers in the moment? Make it about them, not about you. I think a lot of people, whether or not they have to stand on stage or in front of a team or in a job interview, they think, oh my goodness, how am I coming across? Do I sound okay? What's the style of my answer? Do I look okay? Very self-conscious in that moment. And my answer would be forget entirely about yourself.

And then you think, what can I do to connect with this audience? And my entire focus is on making the experience a positive one for whoever I'm speaking to. And then when I have that mindset, I'm much less focused on myself. I'm much less self-conscious. I can ad lib in a different way. I look much more relaxed. Super important. And embedded in that answer beyond think about the audience, focus on their needs, was that notion of be present so you can do that.

In some situations, it can be beneficial to refocus attention to objects in the room to allow yourself to clearly communicate what needs to be said without becoming distracted by others' faces. Brad, you do your work, your high stakes work in front of millions of people.

live and recorded. And there's technology that's there to assess, essentially, if you got it right. How do you personally handle that stress of being evaluated by that many people and checked on by technology? How do you manage that? One of the things when you make an announcement, you're looking up towards

And I made the mistake one time at a game. It was a college game. And I made an announcement. It was a player that was going to be disqualified from the game late in the game. And it was an All-American, their prized player. And he was going to be removed from the game. And I made the announcement and I happened to be looking at a fan directly in the upper levels.

And this fan, I could almost sense the hate, rage, anger coming from them as they were doing this, you know, pointing at me and they were demonstrative with their frustration at what was happening. And I learned at that point, you don't need to look at people, find an object, find something to look at as you're making the announcement.

And so when I make an announcement, I find something to focus on. Maybe it's like the ribbon around the stadium. I'll look at a clock and I'll talk to that. Even though I'm talking to the people, I need to have something that's not going to give me any reaction back. Help me stay focused.

Typically, it doesn't matter what the call is. If it's in a home stadium and it's not going their way, they're going to boo no matter what. I tune that out and it's almost as if I can turn the volume down to the place and it lets my brain flow what needs to be said. As we'll hear from Annabelle, there are also physical practices that you can utilize to help mentally prepare yourself for spontaneous speaking.

What do you do to help you manage the anxiety that you feel in these circumstances? Okay, so the main thing I do, and actually I learned it when I was at Stanford, one of the improvisation classes we did. And I've done it ever since then. And I do it for any time I'm speaking, whether or not it's live television, spontaneous, prepared keynotes. I find a place five, 10 minutes before I know we're starting. And I jump up and down and I shake my hand and arms and

and laugh or try and smile. And I find that it almost does the opposite of what you would expect. If I feel a little nervous and my voice sounds a bit shaky, jumping and shaking everything out, it's almost impossible after that point to have shaky hands or to have a quivering voice. The other thing is I just talk to myself. I talk myself into it. I'm always nervous, always. I'm always nervous before I go on television or do any kind of speaking. And I think that is really important. It helps you to perform.

And this adrenaline surge is essential to get into that state of flow where you're sharp and alert and ready to perform. So I think, great, thank goodness I feel this way. Thank goodness I have these nerves and this kind of energy. If I didn't, you know, if you felt, oh, well, this is just another day in the office, then...

I don't think I would perform as well. So I use the adrenaline as much as I can in a positive way. So that movement and shaking around is a very common technique used by performers for sure, athletes as well. And you're right, what it does is it gives an outlet for that energy and it helps you focus your behavior and calm down when you're done with it.

And then I love this reframing that you're doing on the anxiety and saying, hey, this is good for me. This is giving me the energy I need. This is helping me focus. Gio Impalo, our UN interpreter, also has a couple of things he always physically does right before he starts translating, which we got to see him do in real time. Could I put you on the spot? I'm going to ask you a question. Would you mind translating the question that I ask and then answer it back in English? Would that be okay? Sure.

You've translated in really high pressure situations with super important conversations happening. How do you stay calm and collected while thinking on your feet during these tense moments? You have worked in situations of great pressure and in situations where very important conversations are established.

¿Cómo mantiene usted la calma y la serenidad sin dejar de pensar en esos momentos de tensión? That's basically my interpretation of the question. And as for the answer, there are a lot of smaller actions that you can take to help you focus. For example, this might sound a little silly, but your posture, the way that you hold yourself while you're working, you have both feet planted on the ground, you keep your back straight, you

Try to anchor yourself to the ground and that helps. Remembering to breathe is also very important. As people get stressed, they tend to hyperventilate. So you have to remember to keep your breathing in check. And on a mental level, the best thing that you can do is try and zero in on the present moment. Just focus on what you're doing at that exact moment. Don't dwell on anything.

anything else. Try and really zero in focus on what you're doing. So I like that there's a physical component. You get your body physically present. And then there's a mental component, which is extreme focus and breathing helps you do that. I want to just point out for our audience who can't see you, but I can.

Two things happened. When I asked you to translate, you actually did go into that position naturally. It's not that you were slouching or leaning, but all of a sudden I saw you become more formal as you were listening. And I definitely saw you take a breath

Okay, so we've taught you the skills. Now it's your turn to take this advice and put it into action. At the end of each episode of our mini-series, we'll be giving you, our listeners, some homework. A couple of ways you can try to implement what you've learned in your real life. Remember, it comes down to preparation, practice, and having the right mindset. And that's what this homework is all about.

Gio and Paolo's first exercise shows us how listening and observing the people around us can help us become much better communicators.

I would advise people perhaps to analyze what people are saying. When someone is speaking, really listen to them and try and suss out what is the idea that they're trying to communicate and how are they communicating it? Why are they saying what they're saying? Why are they using certain words and not others? Or why are they avoiding the use of certain words? And really try and analyze what they're saying.

what people are saying and how and why. And that'll help you when you have to do it yourself. Your next homework activity focuses on improving your precision when you speak.

The language that we speak is our primary tool when we're interpreting. And you should learn to use that tool as efficiently as possible. And one of the ways to do that is to practice different ways of saying things. For example, there's an exercise interpreters do when they're studying, when they're preparing. They'll take a concept and they'll think of as many different ways of saying the same concept as they can. So for example, how many different ways do you know of...

saying go up, something can go up, but it can also grow. It can escalate. It can hike. It can balloon. It can skyrocket.

And then the opposite for things that are going down, they can descend, they can plummet, they can bottom out and really practice those things over and over and then try to use them in your everyday language. Instead of saying the same thing more than once, just use a synonym or use a different register, make it more formal or less formal. And that's a fun exercise.

Thank you for elevating our game without lowering our abilities. That was really helpful, and I'm going to practice that. I think that's a wonderful tool. Much like an athlete might do lots of different drills to accomplish the same thing in their sport, you're suggesting we do the same thing.

So there you have it, the best advice from our team of coaches on how to prepare and get in the right mindset for spontaneous speaking. As we've heard from Annabelle, Gianpaolo, Brad, and Chris, there's a lot of work you can do in advance to help successfully communicate when put on the spot. These include research, practice and preparation, mental reframing, compartmentalization, physically shaking out your body, and other physical and mental practices to help you prepare.

In our next episode, we'll tackle mastering the moment. Our

Our coaches, some you've met and some you have yet to meet, will share how they stay present and adaptable while still connecting with their audiences. Thank you for joining us for this first of three episodes in our Spontaneous Speaking miniseries. To continue learning more about how you can become a better spontaneous speaker, please tune in to our next two episodes, which will feature more exciting coaches and all of their tips and tricks.

This episode was produced by Aru Nair and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.

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