ARTICULACY: From Monkey To Monk (Full Course) | Joseph Tsar

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop. And choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest and no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457.

1:01When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at andd.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. There are only a few dozen people in the entire world who sit at this table. This is the table for people who can think clearly, speak clearly and are able to articulate their opinions, express how they feel and people listen to them. They're what I like to call verbal athletes. Every verbal athlete knows how to apply all of the mad scientists' chicken scratch that you're going to learn in this video about how to communicate well. If you want to achieve the articulacy of your favorite internet figure, give yourself to the end of this video because what you're about to learn is

2:09you're going to change the way you speak for the rest of your life. People have and always will champion clear speakers. In fact, if you go to any interview on YouTube of some historical figure like Martin Luther King, for example, and you view the comments, you will find a deep reverence for the way that these people spoke. All of this is a skill. There's no such thing as natural born communication. If you're not good at speaking articulately, it's simply because you don't know how to practice. And at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a practice routine that we actually give the elite speakers that we train. This here is commonplace society. Most people don't know how to speak. We're kind of all a troop of monkeys chattering and chimping around trying to be heard. And much of society is structured this way to keep us inarticulate, confused, and muted so that we can't fully express ourselves. The discipline of rhetoric and the study of articulate speaking is something that's been purged from schools.

3:11Because the modern education system is, frankly, structured to produce workers and employees, not people who can express and lead. And when people can't find their voice or can't say what they think, they beg for the people who do. And this is often how a lot of cults form, where you have lost individuals who are desperate to feel heard and understood, clinging to someone who sort of acts as their voice and becomes their intellectual savior. And the person who can express what other people are unable to articulate have an incredible advantage, usually make more money and find more peace and fulfillment. Who am I? Some background on myself here. I run the communications company Nounce, where we train creators, executives, politicians, your influencers, favorite influencers to speak like cultural icons. We've studied the speaking patterns of nearly every major thought leader influencing culture today and have developed a curriculum to help you speak like a cultural icon.

4:11I would ask if you're interested that you consider joining one of our next virtual elite speak cohorts, we diagnose your speaking struggles, bring in actors to role play with you, train you to use certain thinking frameworks, and how to create mic drop moments in your speaking so that you could become the leading voice in your field. So we need to first understand why most people struggle with speaking clearly. There are actually three stages of putting a thought into words that we need to unpack. The first stage is what I call inspiration. Inspiration is like raw materials that exist in the mind. It's wheat that we want to turn into bread. It's the idea. Next, we have conditions. So there are all kinds of conditions that can complement or complicate the process of translating our thought into words. For example, we might become anxious and experience that kind of tunnel vision that limits how much of our mind that we feel we can access. The conditions are like the millstone that grinds the wheat into flour.

5:12And finally, we have the presentation. This is how we package our thought. The words we choose are sentence structure volume rate of speech. The presentation is best thought of as like the bake bread. It might be crunchy and delicious. It might be charred black and completely inedible. So let's talk about the first stage are thoughts. So we live in a society that often encourages building what I have come to call the quotation brain pack. This is the storing and repetition of those sound mites that you can kind of easily pull from your back pocket. People feel like they have to hold on to everything that they encounter online or in a book or any form of media because usually they recognize some truth and what is said and they feel that one day that truth will be relevant to them. The problem is too much of this state produces what I like to call intellectual obesity. This is a very mentally unhealthy state where our thinking becomes scattered and neurotic.

6:20And we see symptoms of this all over in the way that people communicate today. For example, poor thought retention or the inability to develop a thought longer than a few seconds. The use of vague words all the time increased anxiety and anxiousness not being fully present in the moment. You never feel like you're there with someone excessive swearing. In fact, our company actually did a study on Gen Z linguistic patterns and here's a spreadsheet of the most used words. If you look at some of these top words, it's not looking good. Other physical symptoms that we've looked into as a result of this scattered thinking are things like restless legs syndrome, which I've written extensively about. Clear speech is the result of clear thinking. When our temple isn't sorted, our tongue isn't sorted. Write that down. I don't know, tattooed on your ankle or something because it's going to be a very important theme throughout this course. I actually want to jump ahead really briefly and talk about presentation are words. Now every influential person that exists has developed some kind of a verbal brand.

7:30What is a verbal? College football is back. So Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky Jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest in no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457.

8:30When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at and D.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Neatahiring Hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Brand? Your verbal brand are the words that you choose based on your personality and based on your goals. So consider your favorite internet personality that you listen to. There are probably a few key phrases, a few key words that are part of the way that they talk. For example, I use these words a lot. Now the same is true with your friends, with your family. Every person has words that they have a intimate relationship with. Your verbal brand is not the same as your vocabulary. So your vocabulary are the words that you know.

9:33And your vocabulary is usually divided into your surface lexicon and your deep lexicon. Your surface lexicon are those 500 to 1500 words your brain unconsciously defaults to when you compose sentences. Whatever is coming to your mind when you're speaking, you don't have to think about it. Beneath the surface lexicon resides your deep lexicon. Your deep lexicon is made up of those 20,000 to 35,000 words you recognize but don't use. And we know this because we recognize nearly every word that articulate speakers say. So why is it that we struggle to use those same words in conversation? Well, because those words don't register in our surface lexicon, you know good words, they're just dusty swords in your armory. In order to speak well, you have to begin by developing a better relationship with language. And elite speakers are able to explore and explain the world around them in razor sharp detail.

10:34And to use a word like that, like a phrase, razor sharp, this is what is known as the articulate effect. And the word articulate is it's kind of a big, fluffy word that people throw around online. No one really knows what it means. They just know how they feel when they hear something that they'll describe as articulate. This is what I like to call the articulate matrix. When a word or phrase is common in vague, it falls into this zone. When it feels uncommon, not used a lot, and precise, it often feels articulate. Now, if it's too precise and uncommon, it can fall into this danger zone, and we risk confusing people with our high-falutin polysyllabic vernacular, big words. And we often inflict ourselves with anxiety when we force ourselves to use larger words. It's never something I recommend. What's important to understand in all of this is that when you're in conversation, your brain naturally retrieves words from your surface lexicon.

11:34And it does this quite unconsciously. So, how do we access more precise words? Well, it's very similar to taking a deep breath. When we stop to inhale and stretch our lungs fully, we feel a lot more replenished versus trying to replenish the oxygen that our brain needs through, you know, a series of short shallow breaths. What does this mean? Well, it means the longer that you pause, the more time that your mind has to go below the surface and hunt for the right words in your deep lexicon. The second factor that influences better word choice is repetition. The more you encounter a word, the higher it registers in your deep lexicon until usually it enters your surface lexicon, and maybe actually becomes part of your verbal brand. If you ever struggle to retrieve a word that you've recently encountered, it's likely due to not having yet heard that word from your own mouth.

12:35You're speaking apparatus, your tongue, your teeth, your mouth, your jaw, your larynx. If they haven't engaged a word before, you're not going to default to it organically because you don't even know what it sounds like to be used. So, once we understand this, the next step is to begin finding good words and good phrases. What you have to learn in this process is that articulacy is not about choosing big words because trying to sound smart is it's a disease that you have to cure. If you want to speak well, you have to strip away every desire to impress people because really that's when people are the most impressed. When you speak with clarity, conviction, and authenticity or realness. And I want you to understand that your presentation right here, what you've heard you choose is the product of all the language inputs in your life, up until this point. The books you read, the videos you watch, the music you listen to, the words you hear from friends and family, from myself, etch language patterns in your mind that you imitate when you talk.

13:38Your surface lexicon is the size that it is because you encounter those 500 to 1500 words daily. And this is why elite speakers, the 1% of communicators, read profusely and talk profusely. It's because they're trying to create a fresh stream of language that is flowing and expanding and putting more words in their surface lexicon. So, let's talk about this for a few minutes. Language inputs. The most obvious, unregulated input in people's lives is music. Confucius, the Chinese philosopher once said, from music I can tell what people are thinking, whether thoughts are corrupt or virtuous. And when we attempt to articulate an idea, our brain defaults to the packaging of that idea in the way that we've always heard it expressed. So think about the most popular phrases in society's lexicon. Here are some examples. Most of these are shaped by the music that society listens to.

14:39The average person consumes around two to five hours of music a day. That's two hours of programming yourself, minimally, to think and speak about things in a certain way. And your speech bears the weight of any idea you infect your mind with. This is true with all kinds of inputs. This is why, by the way, unregulated social media usage. College football is back. So, Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal? Shop your favorite online stores like Yide, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop.

15:43And choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus, pay in four with no interest in no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash payin four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ND.com slash podcast. That's ND.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Can very quickly poison someone's clarity of thought. Because social media naturally amplifies vague and poorly worded ideas to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And none of this is helped by the fact that those who master technology earlier are usually younger people.

16:47Younger people have a lot of immature ideas that aren't fully developed. And that kind of unclear thinking is what gets amplified and everyone thinks that that's the norm. That's what everyone thinks. So I want to underscore this point. The leading contributor to unclear speaking is not having good sources of clear language. Now I'm not recommending that you delete Spotify. I am recommending that you become more aware of what you feed your mind. In fact, if you want to audit your language inputs, I created this worksheet that you can use. I've used this for myself multiple times in my life. What I recommend doing is creating a good language diet. That consists of nutritious words and phrases. So for example, one of the things I did for myself was create an audio file that includes the most impactful phrases that have given me a good bedrock of language to build upon. Actually, if you want my personal file, I'll just link it below. I recommend listening to something like this once a day. I just read it out in my own voice while looking at the transcript right next to it.

17:50We actually find that this practice is something that is a part of nearly every articulate speaker in history. Not the audio file, but they called it keeping a commonplace book, which was a repository of all words and phrases they wanted to use in their speeches and in their conversation. We find that most articulate answers and artistic word choices that we hear, you know, in those short form clips that we see everywhere. Those stem from commonplace books. In fact, one of my favorite speakers, the screenwriter Rod Surling, once said in an interview, were developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think. I used to think when I heard that phrase, how can someone jump from cereal to automobiles within the span of a second? Like, my mind could never fathom being so resourceful with words. That was until I stumbled upon that same phrase, cereal and automobiles, in Surling's writing, his speeches, and other interviews that he did.

18:56It was also in his commonplace book, or what Surling called his writer's diary. What we understand is that these verbal gymnastics that we hear others say is just the result of good documentation of the language that they find interesting. So start becoming a collector of excellent language. If you want to know where to start, here's a collection of some articulate books, speeches, and movies that you can begin mining. And when you do this, your aim should be to find resonant words and phrases, words that resonate with you and mean something. Perhaps you like the imagery of the phrase, or the rhythm of how it sounded, or the emotion. So let me quickly show you a real example of what collecting articulate language looks like. So last night, actually, I was watching this interview with the psychologist, Jonathan Hight. And I was listening to this video here, and I encountered him at one point using the phrase intellectual heritage. Now, when I heard that phrase, my mind immediately thought, that's a cool phrase. I want to use it.

19:58So what did I do? Well, I added it to my commonplace book here, under the Creative Frazes category. And this is what elite speakers do. In fact, I think it was Martin Luther King, who would frequently use phrases like cosmic significance was one, rabble, rousers, and agitators, depth, and dimensions of the problem. Someone like Thomas Jefferson used to say human life and happiness, and the machine of man, Muhammad Ali would say my style, stamina, and system. All of these sort of intelligent phrases and expressions we hear from elite communicators, these aren't things that are just generating on the fly. They are pre-assembled in advance. One of the most important sections of a commonplace book is understanding the power of thought wrappers. So what are thought wrappers? These are short creative expressions that help introduce the substance of our thought. One of the epiphany moments that I had a few years ago was learning that you can cast ordinary opinions in a smart fashion by using specific phrases to introduce the idea.

21:03These are phrases like something that I wish to add that will complement what this person is saying is, and then you'd introduce your idea. Or this is a very common sense, and I think many people miss this. Can I share an observation with you? Can I offer some pushback to what you just said? Hey, help me make sense of a puzzle I'm trying to solve. These are all thought wrappers. I'll actually show you an example of what this looks like in practice. In fact, in this next clip of the linguist Stephen Fry, try to identify the thought wrapper that he uses. The mental health question is a very important one, and it's fortunately one that is being talked about far more than it ever used to be. I had a rather terrible experience. In this example, Stephen presents his thought using this thought wrapper. This question is a very important one, and it's been talked about far more than it ever used to be. One easy way to think about thought wrappers is kind of as the runway before the takeoff of your main idea or your main answer.

22:03You can be confident with your thought wrapper and not confident with whatever the main substance of your thought is, and people will still interpret everything you say as confident. Because how you frame the intro sets the emotional tone of your idea. So here's a list of thought wrappers with some of history's greatest speakers. I'll leave this resource below. When you know how to say things differently than most people or set out on a very strong first step, it gives you a tremendous amount of confidence in continuing to develop your answer. This is one of those high... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at and.d.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs.

23:03Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Ode to Parfume is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current central jasmine, woody cashmurren, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womow Born in Roma Ode toilet, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger and mineral salt. Shop at macy's dot com. The impact things that we've seen change the way that people speak because many of us, many of us would be far more assertive if we knew how to introduce our thoughts well.

24:11Let's go ahead and return to our main graph here for a moment. All of this presentation that we've been talking about is important because it teaches us how to have better ingredients at our disposal that we can create better recipes with. Now, none of this matters if you're afraid to enter the kitchen because keeping a commonplace book doesn't matter if you can't be at ease with yourself in the moment. When we're nervous or the conditions are terrible, we seek perfection with our words. We are over analyzing the engineering of every one of our sentences. All of this, it sabotages our ability to access our inspiration and our intelligence. And no amount of fancy word tricks are going to make you feel satisfied with what you say. In order to be satisfied with what you say, you need to understand how to create comfortable conditions for yourself. Which means we have to be ourselves.

25:11And when we are ourselves, we are satisfied with what we say. Now, this sounds rather obvious. However, most people are unable to do this. Most people are unsatisfied with what they say because most people are not themselves. Why is this? Well, we've looked into this a lot and having worked with a lot of people, I've noticed three negative thought patterns that are preventing most people from being fully themselves when they speak. And I call these the three blocks to authenticity, the three lines of faulty code that are preventing them from creating good conditions for speaking articulately. The first is what I call the, I need to say something because I'm uncomfortable with silence problem or the babble problem. We speak to simply populate the air because uncomfortable silence is our worst of fear. Don't you hate that? I hate what? I'm comfortable with silences. Why do you feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit and where you become comfortable?

26:15I don't know. The problem is we just don't have a comfortable relationship with silence. Silence creates a centeredness in a person that's incredibly hard to fake. We guarantee that your favorite communicator, they know how to use silence when they speak. And it's not the kind of like fake pausing where we pause before we speak and all that happens is our mind is racing. I've got to use this time to come up with something intelligent to say, the longer I wait, the more people expect me to drop some revolutionary mic drop quote. There's no room at this table for people who just talk to talk. When you just talk to talk, you put pressure on yourself to make sense. The exercise we give our students to address this babble problem is to sit in silence for 10 minutes a day. Wild, right? You have to go somewhere quiet where you can sit and just settle your thoughts. And this is the perfect antidote to this problem we discussed earlier of intellectual obesity where we have a world that focuses a lot on external things, right?

27:22The social media is very external and learning to command silence allows you to explore that inner world. And the natural result of this is that you get very clear on what your values are, who you are yourself. And this leads to a deeper understanding of the way that you think. When you have a deeper understanding of yourself and the way that you think, since clear speaking, it is a result of clear thinking, the natural outcome is usually a more peaceful presence and better clarity of speech. You seem a lot wiser because you're more at ease with who you are. And when you're at ease with who you are, everything you say feels aligned because it stems from a person who is grounded. And this is true for most of those who have a seat at this communication table. There's a direct correlation to how much of your truth that you share and how satisfied you are with what you say. The problem is we have a lot of people in society saying what they think others want to hear but not what they themselves feel.

28:28So we've removed one of those blocks of authenticity. Now there are two more lines of bad code that we need to solve. The second is the I always have to choose the right words problem, otherwise known as the disease of perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of those incredibly deadly speech cancers because in order to speak greatly, we have to be okay with not sounding great. In our program, we have this stage that we talk about called perfection deception. Perfectionism we find to be really more of the avoidance of mistakes in our speech than the pursuit of the best phrases that exist out there in the catalog of language. And in studying this, what we've noticed is that the main cause of perfectionism and people is people who have a large response lag. So what is this? Well, this is the time between the preparation of thought and then presentation of thought. Delayed responses. Delayed responses have become increasingly the norm in society because of well, for one technology and phones, we let emails sit around all day before we respond.

29:32We let a text sit while we give ourselves, I don't know, 30 minutes to try to piece together the most perfect reply. We want everything to be a strike of lightning with what we say, how we communicate. And what this does is reinforce and remind the habit of needing lots of time in order to say something adequate. This is simply not normal unless you were writing a letter like a hundred years ago, most of your responses, responses, they had to be instant.

30:32This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok Shop, and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest and no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash pay in four. Paypal Incorporated NNLS 910457 When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 Sponsored Job Credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

31:32This response log was very short. And the closer that these two circles are together between preparation and presentation, the more satisfy that you are with what you say because you have less time to overthink. And when these two circles are nearly on top of one another, this is what people call flow or the flow state. Flow state is where you're speaking as you're thinking. You've entered into a dimension that Mary's thought and speech, a harmony between your mouth and your mind. We like to often play this game with ourselves where we tell ourselves we need more time to access our intelligence. And because you've told yourself that you can only produce a great reply after you sit for 30 minutes under a tree with an iced tea and a massage chair like that's become true. That's become the norm. And this is the biggest harm actually of not socializing, of not speaking to people is you are not practicing reducing that response lag. When you're exposed to more situations where you don't have a lot of time to think about what you say, you shrink that response lag and that's what you need to do in order to battle perfectionism.

32:42With verbal communication, you were only as good as what you can come up with in the moment. So what do we do? Well, we have to force ourselves to respond without hesitation. Now, will you say imperfect things? Of course, you know, the analogy that I often use is imagining a running faucet of water. The water represents your thoughts. The dirty water begins to flow out initially when you turn on the tap and the more that you open the tap, the cleaner the flow of water becomes. Now, if you never open the faucet because you're scared of muddy water, you're never going to access the pure flow and never be refreshed. You have to force yourself to say thoughts out loud as you think about them. And what's going to happen is you'll stand out automatically because most people have a thousand layers of filtering. The more time that you give yourself to overthink, the more you will focus on trying to engineer the perfect delivery. When you're give yourself enough time to be perfect, of course, you won't be because it's in the freedom to say anything that you end up saying something great.

33:42Let's move to the third block of authenticity. And this is what I call the, what if I don't know what to say or the edge of the map problem? What happens if I reach somehow the edge of the conversation? What will happen if I don't know what to say? Well, let's play this through. You might be uncomfortable. You'll probably sit in silence. You fear being embarrassed or looking less than. What if this person thinks I'm stupid because I can't say anything intelligent? Like those kinds of thoughts. And so as long as you continue to avoid that embarrassment or that social humiliation, you always will be caught in a trap of needing to plan your next slot. I once did this in a relationship which caused me to never be fully present in the moment. I was always planning ahead with my thinking. And this is natural for us. It's natural for our brain to want to plan ahead because our brain does not want to be placed in territories that you haven't mastered or that you can't control.

34:42And that perspective just does not lead to a lot of confidence and conversation because you only become as good as your ability to follow the script. And what we see with 1% communicators is a flexibility and adventurousness with speaking. They understand that they actually always do have a map with them. What is that map? Well, it's their current emotional state and the ability to express how they feel in the moment. If I'm being honest, like right now I didn't plan content here. I don't quite know what to say in this section. But that's me being authentic. Authenticity is not the same thing as perfectionism. Authenticity is being human. It's being imperfect. And humans connect with other humans. So much of us we like to limit ourselves by what we can memorize. And then when we throw away the paper, we see who you really are. And one of the most helpful exercises we've taken our students through is to write a list of everything that they don't like about the way that they communicate.

35:45And then what we do is we usually role play those worst case scenarios and build out challenges around them. But what you'll find is even writing it out. There's a tremendous amount of relief in putting all of your discomfort about the way that you sound and the way that you talk on paper. It is like I always like to use this analogy of like it's taking a flashlight and shining it into that black box that we all carry around. And when you know what's inside, it's no longer a dark mystery that weighs on you and that knowledge, it impacts how much it ease you are when you speak. Now this is a great segment to one of the most important parts of this course, which is that we achieve a clear understanding of ourselves and we achieve clarity of thought and therefore become more articulate when we engage in consistent output. Now output can be writing, it can be conversations, it can be recording, videos, voice notes. The modern media world likes to dictate that we should have all of these clear answers every time we speak.

36:46We see people online speaking these mic drop moments, all the short clips of people spraying wisdom and we feel like we should be able to do the same in some regard. And we forget that most of us haven't been provided that amount of output opportunities to figure out what we think. Something that is well-worded that you hear is the product of a lot of thinking and a lot of output. Usually a lot more output than you think. One of the things our company did was study the high impact activities that help people achieve clarity in their thinking and we developed an exercise called essence writing. So here's how it works. Open up a note document or Google Doc in every night before bed, set a timer for five minutes and you're going to pick a topic you struggle to articulate and just... You got to, you want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky.

37:47Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Holiday Rush? Skip the mall traffic and shop online with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores like eBay, Fanatics, Walmart, Sephora, Target and TikTok shop and choose to pay now or pay later at checkout. Plus pay in four with no interest and no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Pay in four subject to approval. Learn more at PayPal.com slash pay in four. PayPal Incorporated NMLS 910457. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

38:50Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at and D.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Start writing about it in three stages. You're going to do this in 100 words, in 50 words and then in 25 words. You can use a word counter to track the word count or just use this Google template and it'll be linked below this video. What this does, writing out your thought in three sections, is it trains yourself to develop an internal compass of what a lean, clear answer feels like. So here's an example of something that I was writing last night. Never mind the topic here. Essence writing is all about taking that archaeological brush and brushing off the layers of dust to reveal the bones of your thought. And when you do this multiple times, slowly you begin to find a connection between different ideas and this builds a skeleton of the world that makes sense that you can articulate when you speak.

39:56Now it doesn't mean that it's right. It doesn't mean that your understanding of everything is right. But it does mean that you understand it and can explain it. This is what we describe as a bulletproof golden-tongued speaker. And in my mind, only five people in the world who are at this level who have refined their thinking through a tremendous amount of output. Okay, so output produces clarity. What is clarity? Well, clarity oftentimes is simplicity. The opposite is true. Anxiety is complexity. Elite speakers have eliminated complexity from their manner of speaking. There's a simplicity to their sentences. In fact, one of the things that we've studied is the science of clear communication. And we found that in the clear speakers in the world, their flow of information is usually limited to one idea per sentence. They've mastered this moving forward of an idea at a very digestible pace.

40:57And when each sentence moves the idea forward, there's no redundancy. The idea feels lean. I'll show you an example of this. In fact, watch this following clip of the American investor, Naval Ravacant. Related to this is the practice of meditation. One of the reasons why people don't like meditation or find it hard to meditate is because when you first sit down, all of your unaddressed problems that you make during come barreling up to the service and assault you and some of these have been sitting there for a decade waiting for you to address them. And I think the same thing applies in a business context. Like if you get busy, busy, busy, busy, what happens is the real nagging problems. Are we actually building the right product? Did I actually recruit the right team? Oh my god, I raised money from the wrong investors. In this example, notice how each sentence introduces a new point and develops the main idea. There's no redundancy. The information is lean. There are no hazy vague points that take three sentences to unpack. And this is because Naval actually practices a form of essence writing. He does this in the form of tweets. I tweet a lot. Twitter forces me to gather around 140 characters, right?

42:00Exactly. In fact, he has a rule where he doesn't speak about things that he hasn't first written about. The clarity of a philosopher like this begins with getting your mind's inner contents outside. So in these final few minutes together, what I want to do is give you a few practices that you can start today to instantly enrich your speaking. The first is to reduce erosion tags. Errosion tags are weak phrases that we often tag to the end of our sentences that taper off the discussion. They wittle away at our confidence. These are phrases like, and yeah, that's my opinion. So yeah, that's kind of what I think. That's what I got. And yeah, what these phrases do is introduce a lot of insecurity and uncertainty into our speech. But that's just my opinion. Do you see how a weak ending can undermine the integrity of your entire idea?

43:02There's a phrase I like to use. A few careless words can erode a great many careful ones. When you feel when you're speaking that you're reaching the point where you're kind of exhausting what you wanted to say. And you don't feel like there's a lot more that you want to add. Stop at that point. I could have said a lot more for like that sentence right there, but I stopped short. And the funny thing is, is you didn't know that. That's the beauty of committing to an end. This people always will think that you said everything that you wanted to. The next one is to commit to completing each sentence. The lack of direction in our speaking, the windings sort of scattered nature of a lot of our thoughts is actually the result of us giving ourselves permission to abandon a sentence. Every single time our starting words are poor. In fact, if you develop the practice of forcing yourself to work with the words you've spoken aloud. What you do is you improve your mind's verbal agility with words. And you realize that you can kind of make anything work.

44:06The next technique, keep your mouth closed until you've defined your starting words. The most vulnerable moment in our speech, particularly for those pesky filler phrases or filler words, like, uh, it's always at the start of our sentences. If you refrain from that initial um, you don't let your mouth open and commit to it. Because so desperately wants to lead with that, you will find that you'll be able to start your sentence with a strong beginning. And that confidence will carry through usually until the end of the sentence. The final and most powerful technique that I've used in fact several times in this video is what I call the runway and take off method. Here's how it works. So think of a plane taking off. The first sentence acts as the runway. And at the end of the runway are a set of words that get repeated at the beginning of the second sentence. And this transition between sentences, this can be done with a single word or an entire set of words. What this does is create a very logical flow to your speech. And when you create a logical flow to your speech, listeners understand you.

45:09And when they understand you, they're more likely to be persuaded or moved by your words. So if you want to embody everything that we've discussed in this video and become a verbal athlete, check the links below. That now and star vision is simply to help train the most influential speakers on the world stage. I'd love to see you there. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Ode Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current, central jasmine, woody cashmurren and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womow Born in Roma Ode Toilet, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com Brussels clean up nicely at sweet green. Maple glazed, roasted and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet greens fall harvest is back on the menu. And the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured.

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