Strategies for Confident Communication

Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 592 of The Brainy Business: Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Matt Abrahams, author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. Ready? Let’s get started.

Announcer: You are listening to The Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.

Melina Palmer: Hello, hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business Podcast. Have you ever left a meeting where you were put on the spot and struggled to find the right words to say, only to have them come to you an hour later? Or in the middle of the night? Or in the shower the next morning? It can be so frustrating to realize what you coulda, shoulda, woulda said or done when it’s too little, too late. Especially when you can be pretty sure that the next time this happens, you won’t feel any more prepared and the cycle is just going to repeat itself. But what if it didn’t have to?

My guest today is Matt Abrahams. Matt is a lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with decades of experience. He teaches popular classes in strategic communication and effective virtual presenting and received Stanford GSB’s Alumni Teaching Award in recognition of his teaching students around the world. His online talks garner millions of views and he hosts the popular award-winning podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart. This conversation, which originally aired in September 2023, is around the insights from his classes and podcasts and his book Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. It provides tangible, actionable skills to help even the most anxious of speakers succeed when speaking spontaneously, like when navigating Q&A sessions, job interviews, providing effective feedback, making small talk, and more. As you listen, I encourage you to think of a time when you’re most likely to have your mind go blank and when it would really help you to be able to better say what you would like to in the moment really quickly. Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/592. Now let’s jump right in.

Matt Abrahams, welcome to The Brainy Business Podcast.

Matt Abrahams: I am so excited to be here with you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Melina Palmer: Of course. We’ve had a nice chat. I can tell that we’re people that will talk forever, so might as well have it be recorded as we do.

Matt Abrahams: There you go. Maybe I’ll say something interesting, but no, I enjoyed our pre-conversation.

Melina Palmer: Thank you. Me too. For everyone who doesn’t yet know you, can you share a little bit about your work and your background?

Matt Abrahams: Sure thing. So I am a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where I primarily teach strategic communication. When I’m not doing that, I do some coaching and I host a podcast for Stanford’s business school called Think Fast, Talk Smart. And I’ve recently written a book with a similar name, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, which is all about how to speak more effectively and confidently in what I call spontaneous speaking situations.

Melina Palmer: Right. I did think it was interesting reading through your book and seeing the examples where you’re talking about students at Stanford who are incredibly accomplished, so knowledgeable, so great at this, and also an example of Peter Jackson. Right—people that know what they’re talking about and yet have a really hard time sometimes when put on the spot, being able to say what they want to say and to communicate well in that spontaneous situation. So, can you share a little bit about kind of how you got looped into this world of spontaneous speaking?

Matt Abrahams: Really, three paths led to this point. The first is actually from my youth—growing up with the last name starting with A-B in Abrahams, I was always going first and I was always speaking spontaneously from elementary school all the way through high school. And I can say this as a former high school teacher: sometimes teachers get lazy and they just seat people alphabetically. So I always knew where I was sitting and I always knew I was going first. So throughout my life, I’ve always been spontaneous speaking. So I felt that pressure. And when I went to teach or be at the business school at Stanford, where I’ve been now for 13 years, several years ago, the deans came to me and said, “We have a problem.” Just as you mentioned, our very bright students are not able to respond to—I’m sure you and many of your listeners will remember the dreaded cold call—where the professor says, “What do you think?” and you have to respond. And these brilliant students were stumbling and struggling. At the same time, I was teaching a public speaking class through a different program at Stanford, and my students would say, “Hey, I feel pretty confident giving a planned speech, but I’m really nervous when people ask me questions or I have to facilitate a meeting.” So these three paths all intersected to lead to the creation of a methodology that really helps people feel more comfortable and confident speaking in the moment. And if you think about it, most of our communication is spontaneous; it’s not scripted. And so I believe this can be really helpful to everybody.

Melina Palmer: Yeah, definitely. And while my name is not at the beginning of the alphabet, I have always been pretty good at spontaneous communication. And I do think it’s funny when someone’s talking to me about coming in to do a keynote or do a corporate training, and they ask, “Well, is it okay to have questions? Can we have a conversation?” I’m like, yeah! I love that stuff. Throw it all at me; I love that kind of communication. It’s funny because it is more of a natural skill for me, I didn’t really think about it as something that is hard for some people in some situations—actually, most people in a lot of situations, right? But I’ve had my fair share of moments where you kind of go, “I don’t know what to say.” But also having had improv training and stuff you talk about in here, it’s like how it all kind of built up over time. But that framework you provide is really helpful.

Matt Abrahams: Yeah, you’re definitely in the minority of people. Most people find these situations very difficult, myself included at times, for sure. So it’s great, and it sounds like you’ve continued to hone and work on those skills, which is an essential part of any communication.

Melina Palmer: Yeah, I found myself relating back throughout your book, which, since you talk a lot about storytelling, that’s helpful as it’s helping me to remember times where I had something similar that happened or whatnot. And so you have your story of the onion. I think job interviews is a really big point where this comes up for people, right? So I want to make sure we talk about that as it’s The Brainy Business and we’re in the meeting or somebody says something. So I’ll let you tell your onion story in a moment.

I’ll tell my thing first, and this was definitely one where it was like, yikes, not great. So I was—I don’t know, I was probably 19 or in my early 20s or something. I was going in for what I was under the impression was more of an informational type of interview where my mom had a relationship with a publisher, and it was for this magazine to be able to do some work for them while I was in college. I thought it was kind of cool. So I went to go have this conversation, and I get brought in, and they sit me at a table that has legitimately the entire company, including the main full publishing editor at this huge table. He’s at one side at the head of the table, and they sit me on the other side, all the way down. It’s like a row of 20 people at this giant conference table. And he goes, “Okay, Melina, why you?”

Matt Abrahams: Wow.

Melina Palmer: And that was it.

Matt Abrahams: Yeah.

Melina Palmer: I have no idea what I said. I didn’t get the job, obviously, where we talk about it not being a great scenario. But I remember that as this super not prepared, no idea what I’m supposed to say moment. Even as I explain it, I feel like my heart rate’s up just thinking about that moment—it was so traumatizing. But isn’t that—

Matt Abrahams: Isn’t that funny how we can be whisked back to something like that? I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I mean, that’s really intimidating for anybody, let alone somebody so young. My hunch is your expectations were very different because you had the connections to that and everything. So not only was it hard, your expectations weren’t in the same direction. But you survived, and you’ve gone on to thrive! So it’s one of these stories we tell as hopefully helpful to other people, right?

Melina Palmer: Right. Yeah. Well, your story has a much better lesson that’s now been looped in.

Matt Abrahams: Well, so I was interviewing for a job I very much wanted to do. For about a decade of my life, I ran learning and development for software companies—so training departments, et cetera. I was interviewing at a very small, hot startup, and the CEO made a point—in those days, I was employee 99, right under 100—he was still interviewing everybody personally as the last stop to getting hired. So I show up, and I was early, but he was already in the room, which already freaked me out because my experience had been executives sort of whisking in on their own schedule. So I was a little taken aback. We sit down, and after exchanging pleasantries, he says, “Okay, let’s get started.” His first question to me was, “If you were an onion and I peeled back three layers, what would I find?” And my mind just exploded! I did not expect a question like this. I was totally caught off guard. I later learned that this was sort of his thing: he liked to put people on the spot to see how they responded. In that moment, I made a decision. I could panic—and certainly my body was going through that response—or I could take it and run with it. One of the skills that I teach people is to take a position, commit to it, and go with it. In that moment, the only thing I could think about—and this is very true for me still to this day—when I cook and chop onions, I tear up. Some people do, some people don’t; I just see a Bambi or something and I cry. So I went with it. I committed to it. I just said, “You know, if you peel back three layers, you’d see that I would be crying. When I peel onions, I cry.” Then I turned this into a conversation about how I lead through connecting through emotion, through really connecting with people and supporting people on an emotional level. I turned it into an answer about emotional intelligence and psychological safety. As I’m going through my answer, he starts smiling. I didn’t know what that meant—I didn’t know if that meant he was going to ask me to leave, but it turned out, as he shared with me later after I got to know him quite well in the subsequent years, that the answer took a course he totally didn’t expect. I was the only person who had ever done that before, and he really, really appreciated it. So the lesson I took from that is, even in the most challenging of situations when they feel really high-stakes, connect to something—in my case, it was the tears—and go for it. Commit to it. That’s what I did. I was very fortunate, got hired by that company, did well by them, and it was a good experience. But man, just like you shared, I can go back to that room. I can see what he was wearing. I can feel the temperature. That was intense.

Embracing Risk and Striving for Mediocrity

Melina Palmer: Yeah, it is definitely—I really like what you said there. I talk a lot about confidence, especially in work I do with pricing strategy and pitching, right? People will pick up on it if you’re not confident. It’s like a dog can smell fear, right? Something’s wrong. They don’t even need to know what it is, but you can tell something’s off and that you should be questioning this thing. So even being able to speak confidently when it maybe feels kind of off from what was expected, and being able to, just like you said, commit and go and know that we can elaborate later or follow up later—just owning what’s happening in that moment and moving forward without constantly questioning—is really valuable.

Matt Abrahams: There’s a lesson I take from what I’ve developed in this methodology from many places—academic disciplines like psychology, anthropology, sociology, but also the world of improvisation. You had mentioned that a little earlier. There are a lot of tenets and rules, if you will, in improv, and one of them is: if you’re going to fail, fail big. I take that as “commit,” right? I mean, commit—you might not fail, so just commit. That’s really what I did in that moment, and in that case, it paid off. There are certainly many, many examples I could share—and some I don’t want to share—where I committed and it didn’t pay off. But I like that: if you’re going to fail, fail big.

Melina Palmer: Right, right. That’s one of those things I’ve looked back on—like athleticism and my potential lack thereof, right? But I realized that over time, I cared—and this is a lesson I learned in my own life and career pretty early on, too. This came about from some executive coaching I was a part of and having this realization that I was one who really cared about looking the best. When you’re focused on how good you look, you’re not going to look as good.

Matt Abrahams: Right.

Melina Palmer: It doesn’t quite translate, especially in sports, because you’re not jumping for the ball. You’re not putting yourself on the line to go get it because you’re more in your own head about it. In business, being less concerned about looking good and more concerned about helping the company to be the best helps things go as well as they can. I ended up playing it too safe pretty early on in my career because I was worried about how I was going to look and making sure this all went through. But when you take those risks and they stand out, then things tend to come around better if you kind of trust the process.

One of the quotes I had written down—which is not necessarily fully related to this, but I just thought about it and wanted to make sure to get it in because it was one of my favorite things you said in the whole book—is to allow yourself to get a little lost and embrace all that might be possible. Such a great thought.

Matt Abrahams: Yeah. So thank you, and that’s a real meaningful part of the book, too. I have two colleagues at Stanford, Adam Tobin and Dan Klein, and they’re sort of my improvisation Sherpas—they have guided me along. That’s a story that Dan told that really stuck with me, where he will purposely get lost. Adam has a story very similar where they take time to get lost just to see what’s out there and what’s possible. We like to have control, and in spontaneous situations, we don’t have a lot of control. By forcing control on those situations, we actually restrict and limit what’s possible for us and what’s possible for others. The other thing we do by wanting things to go right and perfect and look good in these situations is we actually increase the likelihood that they won’t. It’s all based on cognitive bandwidth and cognitive load. Your brain is in some ways like a computer: it only has so much processing power. If you’re on your phone or on your laptop running lots of programs, each of those programs runs a little less efficiently because you have so many others running. So if I want to do really well in this circumstance or situation, that means part of my brain is constantly judging and evaluating everything I’m doing in that moment, which means I have less cognitive bandwidth to focus on what I’m doing. So by definition, I will do less well. So this notion of getting lost, embracing the uncertainty, and just going for it can really help. I have the audacity to tell my Stanford students and the people I coach to strive for mediocrity. You should see their jaws drop! I know you teach students—I mean, can you imagine telling your students to strive for mediocrity? But they understand after I explain that when you just strive to get it done, you actually have more resources to do it well. So the whole saying I tell my students eventually is: strive for mediocrity so you can achieve greatness. We get in our own way. I’m often asked, “So how do you do that?” And it gets back to the question you asked: allowing yourself to get lost, taking some risks, trying new things—that broadens what’s possible and allows you to focus in the moment on what’s happening rather than judging and evaluating it. Hard to do, but once you do, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Melina Palmer: Definitely. And “Maximize Mediocrity” is one of my new favorite chapter titles. I really enjoyed it—it was fun.

Matt Abrahams: I had fun with the chapter titles in my book, and I have to say that’s probably my favorite as well.

Melina Palmer: Oh, good! Yeah, it was one that definitely made me laugh. As someone who—another random thing, I’m brought back to college from all of this because of striving for perfection and everything—I had my own misstep right here where I could have focused on perfection. I can say it better now, but I got a C once. There was a professor that graded on a curve and I was in the middle of the thing, and that was not something that happened for me in general. I came home and I was so overwhelmed, I was crying about it. I said, “I’m average!” Weeping over it!

Matt Abrahams: If this makes you feel better, Melina—when I teach in my strategic communication class on the very first day, we help our students to understand that this is a process and that we all are starting at different places in the process and we can all improve. I show a report card from Martin Luther King Jr. His first year in seminary, he got a C-minus in public speaking! So the point is this: from average can come greatness. You’re a demonstration of that, and certainly he was. So we label ourselves with those grades, and maybe that’s not the best thing. If a grade can be motivational, then I think it’s a good thing. If it’s detrimental to our psychological well-being, then I think it’s not the thing to focus on.

Melina Palmer: Right, for sure. Well, I feel like this is a good time—I appreciate you allowing me to jump all over the world as we’re starting the conversation, and let’s let you hone it back in to some structure.

The Six-Step Methodology for Spontaneous Communication

Melina Palmer: Let’s talk about those six steps that you outline in the book from Part One that we go through, including maximizing mediocrity. You can go through them in your order.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you. So, I put together a methodology originally designed for MBA students to feel more comfortable with cold calling. But I’ve now used this in my coaching and my teaching. I have a video that a lot of people have seen and have written to me that they’re using it for job interviews, for wedding toasts, for eulogies. So it’s a methodology that hopefully can help people feel more comfortable and confident. It starts first with anxiety management. Anxiety looms large in all communication. We need to work on managing anxiety. So the first step talks about how we can manage both symptoms and sources of our anxiety. The symptoms are the things we physiologically experience; the sources are the things that initiate and exacerbate it. The next step is to get out of our own way. We talked about that—that’s that strive for mediocrity piece that can really help you get out of your own way. Our judging and evaluating really puts us at a disadvantage. The third step is to reframe spontaneous speaking. Many of us see these situations as challenges and threats. When somebody says, “I’m going to ask you some questions,” we don’t go, “Oh, yay, that’s great!” No, we see it as, “Oh, they’re going to challenge what I’ve said. They’re going to test my credibility.” If we can change those circumstances to be opportunities—opportunities for collaboration, connection, extension of our ideas—it can fundamentally change the way we approach communication and spontaneous speaking in particular.

The fourth step, which shouldn’t surprise anyone but often is a little surprising, is listening. The number one skill to be a better communicator, I believe, is not to speak, but to listen. Listening is so important in spontaneous speaking because we tend to respond in a reflex heuristic way to many circumstances. Imagine you and I are in a meeting, and we come out of the meeting and you ask me, “Matt, give me some feedback. How did that meeting go?” I hear “feedback” and all of a sudden I jump into all the things I think you could have done better or could have gone better. But if I would have really paused and listened for a moment, I might have noticed that the way you asked for feedback sounded different than you normally sound. It sounded a little more muted. Maybe you were looking down. Maybe you went out the back door, not the front door of the meeting room. If I paid attention to that, I might realize you’re not really looking for feedback—what you’re looking for is a little bit of support in ways of connecting because you don’t feel so good about how that went. So if I’m not listening and fully present, I might respond inappropriately or not in a way that can maximize the interaction. So step four is about listening. Step five is about structure. I believe ultimately the most important thing we can do in all communication is have a structure to it. And then finally, we have what I call the F-word of communication, and that is focus. In spontaneous speaking, many of us are discovering what we want to say when we’re saying it. So we tend to go on too long—and I fear this answer is going on too long! But we need to actually really focus. So it’s all about managing anxiety, getting out of our own way, reframing the circumstance, listening, structuring, and focusing. Those are the six steps that make a big difference.

Melina Palmer: Yeah, I loved insights from all of those chapters. And I also really like, just for everybody who’s listening: you look at this sort of book and you think, “Okay, I’m going to read it, and then I’m kind of left to my own devices. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to go do. It’s informational, but I can’t go do anything with it.” And that is not this book! This book has lots of these “Try It” sections where you get to go test it out yourself with insights on how you would do this, translating it from if the example is coming from improv and you’re like, “Great, but I’m not looking to ‘yes, and’ my way through life.” It shows how this would work for most people so you can see how you do that thing. Drilling down at the end of those chapters is really, really helpful—lots of practical experience to be able to go use the tips, which matters as people are wanting to use the information that they learn about.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you for highlighting that—that’s important to me. The only way we get better at communication is by doing it. And so I purposely included the “Try It” and the “Drill It” sections that you’re talking about to give people guidance. My publisher asked me, “How will you know if your book was successful?” And I said it’ll be successful if people have it on their desk, dog-eared, underlined, and going back to it. Because that’s how we get better at communication. You don’t read one book and all of a sudden you’re a master at spontaneous speaking. You have to do it, you have to practice it, you have to reflect on it. That’s really how I tried to write the book. So thank you for calling that out, because that’s important to me.

Melina Palmer: Awesome. I am all about applied—my books are very applied as well.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you, yeah.

Melina Palmer: I know that the audience really loves and appreciates that because we want to go do things, and that’s great. I want to talk about all the things, but I need to decide what I’m going to commit to. I had a commitment, and then I saw a note, and then I went, “Oh right, I wanted to talk about that,” and it veered me off. So I’m going to take that path because I saw it for a reason. I really liked the example which came from someone from IDEO looking at the hospital ER and the pit crews, right? Taking the step back and looking at things in a different way to understand the problem and existing in it.

Breaking Heuristics with Metaphors and Active Listening

Melina Palmer: I guess we’ll revisit this for a moment before we move on to another one, but do you want to share that?

Matt Abrahams: Yeah, so I’m happy to share that story. It came from a colleague of mine, somebody I co-teach with—his name is Brendan Boyle. It’s in the part of the book where I talk about heuristic thinking. As somebody who studies behavioral economics, heuristics is something you’re familiar with. These are patterned sets of behavior, ways of thinking and approaching. Heuristics help us tremendously in our lives—in fact, I would argue we probably couldn’t be very successful without relying on heuristics. However, they can also get in the way because they box you into a way of thinking. As part of this chapter in the book, I talk about how if we’re not going to always follow heuristics, we need to really expand beyond them. What are some ways to do that? One way is through analogies. Thinking through analogy and metaphor can help us break down or escape from heuristics. My favorite story about thinking through metaphor and analogy is something that IDEO did. IDEO is a creativity company known for design thinking. They were hired by a hospital chain to come in and help improve the efficiency of emergency rooms. Emergency rooms are, as you know, high-stress, high-pressure, high-stakes. They wanted to make their emergency rooms more effective. Most people, if asked to do that, would go look at other emergency rooms and see what the best emergency rooms do, and then make recommendations to do those things. Well, these folks at IDEO who were doing this believed in thinking through metaphor and breaking down heuristics. So what they did, instead of going to emergency rooms, was ask, “Where are situations where people are in high-stakes situations and have to move fast?” They came up with Formula One racing pit crews! So they went and observed and watched what pit crews do to get cars out again safely and quickly. They found lots of things that they then translated into emergency rooms. The one that many of us are most familiar with if we’ve ever been to an emergency room is this notion of kitting. If you are a Formula One pit crew, there are several scenarios that could develop that are very common: a car runs out of oil or needs a tire change. So you create a kit of everything you need for when that happens. You see the car coming in with a bad tire, you grab the kit, and it helps you be much more efficient. So they started creating kits for strokes, for heart attacks, for people with other conditions like diabetic shock, et cetera. They learned that by watching pit crews. So I love that as an example. As somebody who has been a patient in an ER room, I love that because it helps, but I also love it because it shows us that sometimes getting out of our comfort zone thinking can open us up to so much possibility.

Melina Palmer: Yeah, definitely! When you look at solving those problems in a different way, it really works. I know I mentioned to you that as I’m debating about what the refresh will be in advance of your episode, it might be my interview with Warren Berger on A More Beautiful Question. At least we’ve connected this, so it could be that that ends up making sense. We’ve been talking about metaphors and cognitive semiotics a lot on the show recently, so there are lots of good links in the show notes for everyone.

The other thing that I would say—you talked a bit about listening, and that was one of the chapters that actually stood out to me the most. People talk about how you need to listen all the time—you have two ears and one mouth for a reason, those things that people say all the time that we hear, and you’re like, “Okay, fine, cool, great.” But a couple of the points that I wrote down here that I haven’t really heard anyone else talk about when I’ve had conversations or seen things is how listening helps the listener, for one. What’s in it for me, right? Why it’s valuable for you to be listening in a really thoughtful way. And also that those who have a listening mindset believe that the answer lies within the speaker. That is so smartly presented when you think about people that approach the conversation in the way where “I wanted to be seen as the best,” relating it back to an example earlier in my career—showing how I’m smart and I’ve got this, because I think I have the answer to everything. Whereas if I’m helping you to understand and uncover this, I’m listening and asking questions to help you get there yourself in a way that I think is really interesting. So I will let you expand on it, but those really stood out to me.

Matt Abrahams: Yeah. So there is an academic researcher at the University of Haifa—his name is Guy Itzchakov. He and I had a fantastic conversation. Imagine interviewing a listening researcher—I mean, he listens so well! It’s one of those interviews where I’m like, “I think I spoke a heck of a lot more than he did,” which is not the way it was supposed to go! But he highlighted that notion that first, listening is a muscle, and if we don’t strengthen that muscle, it atrophies. So we need to work on listening as if we were working out and exercising. I think that’s important for people to think about. We often think of listening as passive and something that, unless we have hearing issues, we just do. In fact, it’s a conscious effort. But he also talks about how a good listener is helping the person speaking solve their problems—it’s not stepping in and solving the problem for them. I have this issue still to this day. I’m probably revealing more about myself than I should, but when I teach listening or talk about listening, if my wife is within earshot, she will always come afterwards and say, “You need to practice what you preach.” Because I tend to try—I’m a problem solver! When somebody presents an issue and I listen, I immediately jump into problem-solving mode. So when Guy was telling me that information, it was really helpful for me. I actively work to take that mindset that my job in this moment is to listen and help the other person solve their problem. It changes the way you listen not just mentally, but physically. You’re open, you’re more connected, and that’s very powerful. The whole chapter on listening to me boils down to what my colleague Collins Dobbs teaches: this notion of space, pace, and grace. We have to slow down. We have to give ourselves space—that might be psychological space, distance from the issue, or it might be physical space where we can be quiet and actually absorb. Then we have to give ourselves some grace—we aren’t always going to get it right, but the effort is worth it. So that mindset you mentioned—pace, space, grace—I think is so helpful to being better at listening.

Melina Palmer: Yeah. When you were introducing it as one of those six main concepts in the methodology, showing how especially when you’re on the spot and you think, “Oh gosh, what am I going to say?”, you look at yourself and run the heuristic of, “Feedback? I say this, right? How did it go? Oh, you were great, the end.” But if you take a moment and look at what’s happening in this situation—listening is more robust than just with our ears, right? We’re listening with our eyes as well, observing that situation around us to see everything that’s happening, like their body language, as you take that intake of the room. You slow down a little bit and say, “Why are they asking me this?” This is an interesting point when you get feedback, too. You shared something—it might have been in a different area of the book—where people have a complaint or you feel like you’re being attacked. Having books and things, negative reviews are real things, people! I recently had somebody whose book didn’t fully download on Apple, so they bought the book and it only had the first hour of one of my books. The person then emailed me and was frustrated about it. It’s easy to have the reaction where you want to say, “Oh yeah, because I control Apple, right? What do you expect? I had nothing to do with it!”

Matt Abrahams: Yeah, right, right!

Melina Palmer: Imagine yourself in that situation: you were excited about a book—and how amazing, someone was so excited about my book that they bought it, someone I’ve never met before, that’s so cool!—and they went to download it and it wasn’t the full book. I would be frustrated too, right?

So, relating to that and taking the time to go fix the problem, reaching out to my publisher saying, “I’ve already started this process, I’m so sorry, truthfully, because that sucks. I wouldn’t like that either.” Then it turned into this great conversation and kept someone engaged. Taking that step back—the pace, grace, space—where we’re able to step back is really, really important.

Practical Frameworks for Structured Communication

Melina Palmer: That leads to the last thing that we have time for. I’d love for you to talk about all the things, but you have really fantastic frameworks for when you’re getting into presentation and prep. We talked about confidence and being able to speak spontaneously. You talked about heuristics and how we need to get away from them, but it’s also like building new rules that we can run, right? Having the prep—yes, you can and should and must prepare for spontaneous conversations.

Matt Abrahams: Yes!

Melina Palmer: Can you share a bit about that? Because I think that’s like the whole point.

Matt Abrahams: Yes, absolutely right! The most ironic thing in the entire book is this notion that you can prepare to be spontaneous. And yet, if we think about it in other domains of our life, we see it happen all the time. Jazz musicians don’t just play random stuff; they’re playing certain chords and patterns that exist that they’ve learned. Improvisers don’t just do crazy things; they follow rules—”yes, and,” “dare to be dull,” all these rules that they follow. Athletes drill and train certain patterns of behavior so in the game they can respond with agility in a spontaneous way. So when we think about it that way, it’s like, “Oh, that makes sense!” The key to me is what you’re talking about, which are frameworks or structures. Structures really help. I like to say a structure is a recipe: it gives you an ordering, a logical connection of ideas. I am a lousy cook, but I am a much better cook when I follow a recipe! It allows me to improvise and try new things, but it gives me guidance and directionality. There are many structures that can help. My favorite structure, the most multipurpose—I call it the Swiss Army knife of structures—is three simple questions: What? So What? Now What? What is your idea, your product, your service, your offering, your belief? So What is why it’s important to the person you’re talking to. We know that relevance and salience are really important in trying to connect, convince, and motivate people. And then finally, Now What is what comes next. Maybe it’s “Let’s sign on the dotted line,” “Let me show you a demonstration,” or “What questions do you have?” By simply answering What, So What, Now What, you can package up information in a way that’s easy for your audience to digest and easy for you to prioritize what you need to say. That’s the value of a structure. So if you write an email, the subject line should be your “Now What”—it’s what you want to follow up on. The body of the email is “What” and “So What.” If you’re giving feedback, the “What” is my feedback, the “So What” is why it’s important, and the “Now What” is what I’d like you to do with it. So I might say, “Melina, this podcast was fantastic! You did such a great job of asking detailed questions about my book. My only concern is we didn’t have enough time—I would have loved to get more feedback from you. So that’s my feedback. When we rush through things and miss things, I feel so bad that people might not have gotten the information they wanted. So let me get another time to chat. What, So What, Now What.” So the structure really helps you in the moment formulate what you need to say. It’s these frameworks that can really help.

Melina Palmer: It helps too, for one, yes to a follow-up conversation! I’m sure the audience would love to have that. I know it was just an example, but for sure we can go into all the things—I’m sure everyone will be delighted. Having that structure—I’m all about clear and concise when I’m working with clients or on the podcast or whatever. I teach a class on creating better presentations.

Matt Abrahams: Yes.

Melina Palmer: I always say you need to figure out what’s the least amount you need to say to get the person to where you want them to go, and then stop! You need to be prepared for all the things they might ask and have a response for that. But if you think through the arc and where we’re looking to go, it’s: “I want you to get from A to B. What’s the least I can give you to get there? And in case you have questions, I’m ready.”

Matt Abrahams: Absolutely, absolutely! If you’re teaching those skills, your students are benefiting 100% because that’s exactly what you need. What helps you be concise and clear is all that pre-work you talked about: knowing who you’re talking to, what’s your goal, and having a structure that helps you be more concise. My mother had this saying that just echoes in my ear—I know she didn’t create it, but all throughout my life she has always said, “Tell the time, don’t build the clock.” As communicators, we need to be time tellers, not clock builders, for sure.

Melina Palmer: Love it! And I think that is a perfect spot to end on here. Everyone definitely wants to pick up Think Faster, Talk Smarter. You’ll want to check out the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast—we’ll have links in the show notes. For everyone who wants to connect with you to learn more, what’s the best place for them to go and do all those things?

Matt Abrahams: Well, first and foremost, thank you for the opportunity. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation! To find me and more of my stuff, I have a ton of resources available at mattabrahams.com. I’m also a big user of LinkedIn and Instagram. If you’re on both of those platforms, come find me—happy to share information there as well.

Melina Palmer: Awesome. We will definitely link to all that in the show notes to make it easy for everyone to complete their task to learn more about how they can be better spontaneous communicators in all these ways. So again, Matt, thanks so much for the time. It was a lot of fun to chat with you today.

Matt Abrahams: Melina, thank you so much.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Matt Abrahams for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, whenever I think about this conversation with Matt, I go back to the grad students who are so smart and really do know their stuff, but when put on the spot, they freeze. In most cases, it isn’t about intelligence or what you know; it’s about getting into your own head and all the stuff your body and brain might do that unintentionally self-sabotages and keeps you from having the right words in that right moment. That’s why you can realize what you wish you would have said or have the perfect retort hours later. Once your body has relaxed a bit, you aren’t in that fight-or-flight situation that keeps you from reacting in the way you want. But that’s why practice is so important: putting yourself in those uncomfortable situations so they don’t feel so scary, but also so you can practice the experience of coming up with anything to say on the spot to just go with it, know that it’s often better to say something than nothing, and condition yourself so you’re not going to get in your own head about stuff.

The reason I thought to refresh this episode today is really inspired by last week’s conversation with Liz Tran about her new book AQ, which is all about that agility quotient that we need these days to be successful. She talks about how some change can feel like a rupture today, but once you’ve dealt with it a few times, it’s more like a hiccup. You can become more agile and open so things that used to scare you become easier and you can continue to stretch and grow. It felt so much like what Matt talked about here today and what he shares in his book, so it felt like a really natural pairing to have hand-in-hand here on the show. If you haven’t already checked out that episode, I highly recommend it—it’s episode 591, which you can find at thebrainybusiness.com/591.

So now I’m curious: what are you going to apply from the insights that Matt shared today on the show? What really stuck with you? Whatever it is, come share it with me on social media. You’re going to find me as @TheBrainyBiz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links to my top related past episodes and books including Think Faster, Talk Smarter, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/592.

Thank you again to Matt Abrahams for joining me on the show today—it was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another brainy episode of The Brainy Business Podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun, you don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.