How to Speak Effectively Under Pressure with Communication Expert Matt Abrahams
Season 3 Episode 2
Communication anxiety is real. It’s time to start practicing.
This episode of How We Future, features Matt Abrahams, Stanford lecturer and host of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast. Lisa and Matt explore how effective communication is a learnable skill and why we’re rarely taught how to practice it.
Matt shares the frameworks he teaches to every incoming Stanford MBA to help them speak more confidently in spontaneous, high-stakes moments. From managing anxiety to the importance of clarifying your intentions, the episode focuses on practical tools for showing up with clarity, presence, and purpose when the pressure is on.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
The mindsets and methods of effective communications
Simple ways to practice spontaneous speaking before the stakes are high
How to structure answers so people actually remember what you say
Why listening and pausing are powerful leadership tools
Communication is about connection. It will never be perfect, but like all skills, it gets better with practice.
Please rate and leave a comment, we’d really love to hear from you!
Links from the episode:
Matt’s Podcast: Think Fast, Talk Smart
Matt’s Book: Think Faster, Talk Smarter
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Matt Abrahams: Perhaps the best and most important thing I can do in a communicative moment is just to be present, to listen, to paraphrase for clarity and accuracy before I jump into planning and judging and evaluating and moving the conversation forward.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Do you feel anxious when you’re put on the spot to answer a difficult question or nervous when you need to share your ideas with others in a public way? This season is all about the classes we wish we’d been offered sooner, and today’s class on mastering spontaneous communication is one so many of us could use right now. That’s why I’m so glad to welcome Matt Abrahams to How We Future.
Matt teaches strategic communication at Stanford, hosts the wildly popular Think Fast Talk Smart podcast, and has helped millions of people build confidence in high-pressure, unscripted moments. Matt knows that communication is a skill you can strengthen over time, and in this episode, we discuss the mindsets and methods to help you get started. You’ll learn how to warm up before an important conversation, why staying present may be the key to a more positive future’s outcome, and why listening is a pillar of effective communication.
As you listen, I’d love for you to notice one idea or practice that really sticks, and then leave us a comment or rating to share what resonated. Your feedback helps shape this season and lets others know what they’ll gain from listening. Thanks so much for being here. Let’s get started with Matt Abrahams.
I cannot think of a skill more important than effective communication, so it is an absolute honor to have you on the show today.
Matt: Lisa, I am thrilled to be here with you. Your show is fantastic, and I look forward to our conversation.
Lisa: Well, let’s get into it. We’re talking about this as the classes that we wish we had, that we should have had. It’s amazing because you’re actually teaching that class at Stanford Business School, and you have been for many years, about effective communication in different kinds. You’re, of course, tremendously popular around the world. I think one of the things I’m most excited about is the fact that in reading your book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, the ability to communicate clearly, effectively, is something we can all learn. That in and of itself gets me very excited. Can you talk a little bit about that practice?
Matt: Yes. Communication, many of us feel like you’re either born with it or you’re not. Some people have the gift of gab and others don’t. The reality is it is a skill. It’s a skill that we can all learn. As you’ve rightly pointed out, many of us aren’t taught how to communicate. We might be taught how to write, maybe give a presentation, but so much of our interpersonal communication, our spontaneous communication, we’re never really given instruction or feedback on how to do it. It is critical, but like any skill, with practice, with some reflection, with some feedback, we can all get better at it.
Lisa: I love how you break some of these practices down to be very accessible and approachable. You have a gift of really inviting people in to start that practice because it can be overwhelming. It’s like when you look at a blank screen and you’re like, “I don’t know where to start.” You give this great scaffolding. I know that the class you teach is an elective and is always oversubscribed, but if memory serves, the dean asked you to teach something to every student coming into the business school. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
Matt: About 10 years ago, the dean at the time asked me to help with a problem that they were seeing in our Stanford Business School classes. Our students, as you well know, are just amazingly talented, amazingly bright. You’ll also recall that in classes, professors will pick out our student and say, “Hey, what do you think?” A cold call. Many of our incredibly bright students who knew the answers were struggling in those moments to respond quickly, appropriately, concisely. They came to me and they said, “Is there something you can do to help our students?”
That’s when I did a deep dive into lots of different fields and disciplines, psychology, neuroscience, and improvisation. From that, I developed a methodology that we teach to every incoming Stanford MBA student. They come within the first three weeks of their time with us and we put them through this workshop that really is about equipping them to feel more comfortable and confident and to have the tools they need to speak spontaneously, of which cold-calling is an example.
Spontaneous speaking is much larger than that. We do most of our communication spontaneously, but it’s really designed to help them with a toolkit so that they can feel better about it. The great news is that we see improvement. Students feel more comfortable and confident. Faculty feel like they’re getting better discussion and dialogue. It has been a success.
Lisa: I love it. It’s one of those skills that lift all boats. The experience is better. The learning is better. One of the things I really appreciate about how you approach this is it’s not just the skill of learning to actually say words that are clearer or more resonant, but it’s also a mindset. Can you talk about that?
Matt: The methodology itself breaks down into two major components; the mindset piece, as you said, and then the messaging piece. Mindset’s critical. In the mindset focus, there are really four areas that we need to look at. First and foremost is managing anxiety. Most people are nervous in high-stakes communication, be it planned or spontaneous. We then have to see these situations as opportunities, things we can learn from. Many of us, in all communication, but especially spontaneous communication when people ask us questions or feedback in the moment or small talk, we feel very threatened. We have to reframe that as an opportunity.
We also need to make sure that we are focusing on connection, which is really, I think, the goal of communication, rather than doing it right. We have to reframe what success looks like. To me, it’s connection, not perfection. Then finally, we have to listen well. Listening is a mindset, and listening is critical to all successful communication. In order to get better in your communication, you have to adjust your mindset first before you can actually work on the messages that you deliver.
Lisa: I think that is so important, particularly for these high-achieving students that put so much pressure on themselves to be perfect right out of the gate, this idea of lowering the temperature, of naming, that if you feel anxious about speaking, great, that means you’re a human. How awesome.
Matt: That you care.
Lisa: Right. I’m luckily married to a very successful athlete, among other things, and he used to say he got nervous when he wasn’t nervous ahead of a match. Already that reframe, that physiological response is telling you that you are alive, that you’re human, that you care, and that it’s really not about reducing it, but it’s about managing it productively.
Matt: Very well put. Actors and actresses, and even some executives I coach feel the same way, that if they’re not nervous, that’s a signal that they don’t care, and they need to adjust and adapt. There’s information both in having the anxiety, meaning, “This is important to me,” and not having the anxiety, which is, “Maybe I need to do something to make this more important and relevant.”
Lisa: You also have some great strategies about, I wouldn’t say silencing, but let’s call it managing our inner critic. I know even starting this podcast was a big learning curve for me. I’ve been facilitating conversations for years. I even wrote a book about it, but starting off, was I nervous? I just took a while to find my voice, and listening to you helped me realize that was also natural, that I wasn’t supposed to be fantastic out of the gate.
Matt: No, not at all, and yet many of us worry very much about what others think. Those of us who study anxiety around communication believe this is hardwired. We see it in all cultures. We see it develop at a certain time, in kids development into early teens, this fear of communication and being judged and evaluated, and we think it’s just part of being human. That said, we can learn to manage it.
A few things can really help. We have to realize that in these moments, people want us to succeed. They’re there because they want to get value from us. Sure, the judgment happens. People are evaluating and trying to figure out, “Are you the right person to be delivering this message? Is your message credible?” At the same time, they want to get something out of you.
Our communication is not American Idol. It’s not where people are judging, and there’s a winner and a loser. In fact, I like to tell my students and the people I coach, there is no right way to communicate. There are better ways and worse ways. We get often up in our head about all the things that could have been or should be. Really, when we can clear that and just focus on connecting, it makes a lot of difference for us and for the people we’re speaking to.
Lisa: I think that’s so powerful to remind folks that we are working with that may be listening to this that the people in the room want you to be successful. That’s a huge shift that they’re there for you, and particularly for my younger students where I say, “They’re excited for you. They’re ready to support you,” and it’s a total shift. One of my favorite phrases that a colleague of mine who specializes in thought leadership, Denise Briseux, talked to me about the term of the itty-bitty shitty committee. Nobody invited them to the party. Nobody invited the itty-bitty shitty committee. You can go home.
Matt: I know Denise, and I love her work and her saying. A good friend of mine puts it another way, is that we do a lot of shooting all over ourselves, we should do this, we should do that instead of just being present. That voice in our head is telling us, “You should have done this. You should do that.” Let’s not shoot over ourselves. Let’s not be victimized by our itty-bitty shitty committee. Let’s remind ourselves that our job is to be in service of the people we’re communicating with. When you take that reframe, it really makes a difference.
I actually have a personal mantra. I say, “Some people like affirmations, some don’t.” It works for me. I just remind myself I have value to bring. There’s value I have to bring in this situation and others have value to bring to me in this situation. That reminds me to be audience-centric and it’s about the information, not about the evaluation.
Lisa: Having a mantra, one that really resonates with you is so important. Sometimes when I’m really out of my depth, I’m going to have a little reveal here, I think, “There’s a lot I don’t know, but here’s what I do know, day’s going to start, day’s going to end, something’s going to happen in the middle. Let’s try to make it a good thing.” [laughs]
Matt: Absolutely. I like that idea and focus on making something positive in the world. I think that’s great.
Lisa: Just connecting to the purpose, staying present. Now, this podcast series is all about helping people shape new futures. A lot of your communication coaching is about helping people bring new futures to life and yet I know one of the things you say is one of the most important skills you can learn is to stay present in doing that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of staying present even when you’re excited about something in the future that you’re trying to get others to be on board with.
Matt: I really like this question, Lisa, because there’s a lot in the work I do that talks about the future. You should have a clear goal. A goal is what you’re trying to achieve. That’s a future state. You should put a structure together so people can remember what you’ve said in the future. Communication happens in the moment and there is so much that’s going on in the moment that can be helpful to us being successful in what we’re trying to achieve.
I really have to be present. I have to listen. I have to observe what’s going on. This can be very hard because it’s very natural as somebody’s communicating with me to judge and evaluate and plan. It’s a very fine line. You do need to do some of that, but when you do too much of that, you miss the moment. Part of what I do and the work I do is I rely a lot on improvisation activities. I know you know a lot about improv and we have lots of friends in common who do improv. Improv is not about being funny. Improv is about being present and responding. There are very low-stakes activities that you can do and learn to help you feel what it feels like to be present and to see the benefit of it.
Reminding ourselves that perhaps the best and most important thing I can do in a communicative moment is just to be present, to listen, to paraphrase for clarity and accuracy before I jump into planning and judging and evaluating and moving the conversation forward.
Lisa: I think improv is so powerful because it allows you to practice when the stakes are a little lower. I often say the time to practice this is not during your crisis.
Matt: No, not at all.
Lisa: That’s not the moment. Nobody goes off the bench to shoot the three-pointer in the championship game without thousands of hours of practice. I love that. You have a lot of other techniques that actually I’ve started using that. I want to thank you. Even before this call, I grounded myself in getting present by- I’m going to just admit here, by having a little dance party with myself, just putting on some music.
Matt: Physical movement is great for getting present. Athletes listen to songs or playlists. I like to have conversations with people before I go into a big presentation or meeting because it gets me present-oriented. My favorite way, you do a dance party, I say tongue twisters because you can’t say a tongue twister right and not be in the present moment, and it has the added benefit of warming up your voice.
I am so amazed at how people don’t take time to warm up before their communication. Anybody who exercises, anybody who plays a sport knows that warming up is a critical part, yet we think we can go from silence to brilliance in our communication without warming up first. I’m a big fan of tongue twisters. I said a tongue twister before we logged on today for our call, and it’s just a way of warming up for me and being present.
Lisa: That’s fun. You can’t help but smile, even when you get it wrong. Stakes are low. Do you ever mess up your tongue twisters?
Matt: I do. The one I like to say the most has a naughty word in it, so it purposely challenges me to be present so I don’t mess it up. If I do, I do. It’s fine. I just try it again.
Lisa: Your work has a number of elements to it. One is actually giving presentations and speaking. As you said, we tend to think that that’s all of what it is, but this later body of work, which is really about helping people with the majority of their communications in the spontaneous moments, introductions, small talk. I want to start with the first part just for a little bit around what you’ve seen work for leaders, entrepreneurs that are trying to share a big vision about the future with their team or with funders or others that they want to get on board with. Are there some tips or just best practices for leaders that are trying to get others excited about this future vision?
Matt: Oh my goodness. Okay. Fasten your seat belts. Lots to say on this, so let me start. First and foremost, it is critical to have a goal. You need to know where you want to take your audience. A goal to me has three parts: information, emotion, and action. What do you want them to know? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Most entrepreneurs, most people focus on the information part, “I’m just trying to get information across.” That’s very important. It has to be clear, concise, accessible, targeted to the right audience, absolutely.
Feeling matters a lot. How do I want people to feel? Do I want them excited or concerned, validated? Do I want them just confident? For entrepreneurs, for people talking about the future, that emotion matters. In fact, we know people will be moved more by the emotion than the information in most cases. Then finally, what is the action? A lot of people who want to motivate and inspire aren’t clear on what the takeaway and action is. It has to be measurable. It has to be specific.
I encourage everybody, before you start any endeavor that has communication as a component, be able to articulate clearly your know, feel, do. If you’re doing this in conjunction with others, let’s say a couple entrepreneurs together are launching a company, coordinate and make sure there’s alignment. I might have a goal that’s slightly different than your goal, Lisa, and that’s going to cause trouble if we’re not aligned when we go start sharing it with the world.
Step 1, have a goal. Step 2, figure out a way to package the information so that it is understandable. Many of us, we just list and itemize, especially if we’re excited about something. Our brains aren’t wired for that. I know you know the power of storytelling, but stories are structured, logical connections of ideas. Once you have your goal, think about, “How do I message it in a way that’s structured?” I can talk a lot more about structure.
Finally, what all of this is in service of, is relevance and salience. People are misers with their attention. I believe attention is the most precious commodity we have in the world today. If you don’t convince me what you’re talking about, your vision of the future is relevant to me, has salience for me, then I’m not going to pay the amount of attention that you want to it. Have to have a clear goal, have to have a structure or a framework, and then you have to make sure that you target it in a way that makes it relevant and salient to me. If you do that, then you can really advocate for your vision of the future and have it resonate with people.
Lisa: It’s such a powerful framework to go back to with a lot of flexibility in there. As you said, one story is not the same as the other story. That emotion piece, I just think it’s one of these things where we have to unlearn because I don’t know about you, but I certainly, when I was in business school, never took a class on emotion. Even the idea of storytelling is relatively new as a business practice. It used to be like, “Oh, yes, those artists,” and yet we’re humans, luckily. We are still not robots. It is just a reality of how we’re built to respond and make meaning. It’s something, again, we can learn.
I’m always amazed when people talk about the future, they tend to use a metaphor or a story that’s already out there. You hear a lot, for example, about AI, “Oh, it’s the Terminator. Oh, it’s the Iron Man.” That’s a shorthand for a story that then has meaning. I’m often thinking about when we talk about the future, sometimes people talk about The Jetsons. That was over 50 years ago. Why is that still relevant? It’s really a story of a nuclear family. There’s all these opportunities, I think, to use those to our advantage, to talk about it. Your work is just about being more aware of that.
Matt: Stories provide shortcuts to connection. Our species is wired for them. Long before we had the written word, the way in which information was transmitted was through folklore, through legend, through story. If you can tap into that-- and analogies are a really powerful way to do that.
Lisa: There’s another piece about your work that I think a lot about is that a lot of times, people think that the outcome is to get the answer, versus the outcome is to get engagement, the license to have the next meeting, the next conversation. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the coaching you do around that.
Matt: The goal of most communication is the next communication. It’s very rare that something is going to happen in that moment. “You’re going to sign on the dotted line after I do my pitch initially.” No, there’s always future steps. We need to be thinking about that and appropriately targeting our messages.
Engagement is critical. To me, engagement is sustained attention. As I said, attention is our most precious commodity. Getting attention actually isn’t that hard, sustaining it is. There are several techniques that we can use. They fall into pretty much four categories, and I’ll run through them very quickly. There’s physical engagement. Get people doing something physical. Where their bodies go, their brains follow. If I’m giving a big presentation, I take a poll. You raise your hand, you’re now engaged with what I’m doing. If I’m virtual, I have you type into the chat or use a reaction button. Maybe I show you a video and you watch. All of these are physical ways of getting you to engage and focus. Contrast that to cognitive engagement. We’ve already talked about one, storytelling, very engaging, but using analogies, as you discussed, and asking questions. Our brain responds to questions very differently than information. It lights up. More areas of our brain are engaged when you ask questions. When I lecture my MBAs, I never say, “Today we’re going to cover three topics.” I say, “Today we’re going to answer three questions,” and I pose things as questions.
We’ve got physical, mental. There’s linguistic engagement. My favorite way to engage people is through words. Think about this. Instead of me telling you something, Lisa, what if I were to say, “Imagine what it would be like if--” or, “Picture this,” or, “What if you could?” Those phrases cause you to see it in your mind’s eye rather than just passively receive it from me, using what I call time-traveling language, where I take you into the future, “What if you could?” “Picture this,” “Imagine.”
Then the final way to engage people is through shared experience. This is why in organizations, mission, vision, value are so important, because if I can connect what I’m advocating for to a vision that we’ve already had or a value that we’ve already established, that consistency, that connection brings it together, connects us to it. Physical, mental, linguistic, and common ground are four major techniques to engage people. I know that any speaker you enjoy, Lisa, or any of your viewers and listeners enjoy, go through, and almost like bingo, just check off, “Oh, there’s a physical engagement. Oh, there’s a cognitive engagement technique.” Communicators who are engaging use these techniques.
Lisa: Again, such a powerful scaffold for people to, as you say, first of all, be a better observer, be a better learner about who’s doing it well. I used to do that a lot with facilitation. I’d be like, “Wow, what did they do there to really engage?” Because their styles can be different than mine. Just being aware of it and then, again, practicing it in small ways, even if it feels uncomfortable. I can imagine some folks, and I know this is something you talk about a lot, are memorizing their opening lines and they’re not pausing to be like, “How do I invite? How do I get them into this conversation?”
Matt: It’s a conversation. Even though I might be standing in front of thousands of people, I am having a conversation, and that changes the way we approach it. We respond much better to conversation than somebody who’s just delivering a memorized presentation.
Lisa: Which again, goes back to the goal. My goal is to not convince you. My goal is to engage you. Let’s take some pressure off. Let’s talk a little bit about questions because, as you were saying, in that more spontaneous practice, people are terrified of Q&A. You have such a great approach to making Q&A a healthy part of this practice. If you could talk a little bit about how you think about Q&A.
Matt: Again, it’s mindset and messaging. Many people, as you rightly say, are fearful of Q&A. We don’t know what they’re going to ask. We don’t know if we know the answers. We don’t know how it’s going to go. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Instead of seeing Q&A as a crucible, as a test, as a challenge, which has very direct effects on our communication, I retreat, my tone is curt, my answers are short. See it as an opportunity to collaborate, to connect, to learn.
When I get a question, even if it’s hot and spicy, even if it’s challenging, there’s something I can learn there, there’s some way I can connect to somebody. Even if the person is diametrically opposed to us, there’s something we have in common. We both care about this issue and I can connect on that.
First is approach. Q&A is not a challenge, not a threat. It’s an opportunity to collaborate. Once you have that in mind, you then have to have a way of responding. Here’s a structure. I’m a big fan of frameworks. I like answering questions with a three-part scaffold. I call it ADD for adding value. Answer the question, give a detailed example, and then describe the relevance. Why is it important to the person?
Each of these components serves a very important function. One, a question was asked, you need to answer it. When I give a concrete example, a detailed example, people remember it more. Our brains are wired to remember detail more than high level gist. Then when I make it relevant, when I explain the value, that really connects it to you. If you’re willing, Lisa, can we demonstrate this?
Lisa: Oh, yes.
Matt: You’ve been asking me several questions and I’ve been trying to answer them in this structure. Would you imagine you’re trying to hire me? You’re a hiring manager and I’m interviewing. This is something all of us can relate to being interviewed. Can you ask me an interview question? Imagine that I am interviewing to do the job I do at Stanford, to be a lecturer at Stanford on strategic communication. What might be a reasonable question you would ask? I’m going to try to answer it in ADD so the viewers and listeners can hear how this structure works.
Lisa: Fantastic. I love it. Matt, thanks so much for your interest in this job. I’m wondering, how do you know if you’ve done a good job? How do you have a sense of if you’ve actually helped your students?
Matt: Assessment of effective communication is critical. I look for two things. One, I look to see if the information the student or the person I’m working with, delivered is clear, concise, and accessible. I’m observing that. Then second, I want to understand, does the person feel like they have learned something that’s helping? In my class, for every assignment, we digitally record the students and give them feedback on a rubric. I give them my feedback on clarity, accessibility. Is it concise? They watch themselves and they write their own self-review and reflect on how they feel. I use both my assessment and their own self-assessment to judge if we were successful.
What this does for the student is it gives them very tailored feedback that helps them see a learning path to help them get to where they want to be. Let me take a time out there and I’ll just dissect what I did. You tell me, was that a good answer? Did it give you what you were looking for in an answer?
Lisa: Yes. The thing that I really appreciated, first of all, you had a lot of clarity about the content. What I got from that was like, “I have a point of view. I actually know how I’m going to assess.” You also provided some context about why does that matter? It matters for you as the instructor and also, importantly, matters for them and why that matters. I definitely got a full answer in that. It wasn’t a listicle, which I loved.
Matt: Right, no list. I answered the question. I said, “Here’s how I do it.” I gave you a concrete example of what it looks like so you could see in my class that’s what that experience would be like. Then I explain the value of it. A good answer answers the question, gives a detailed example, and describes the relevance. When you approach your Q&A the way that I talked about as an opportunity and you have a structure, you are in a great position to handle that spontaneous challenge in a way that is helpful to the person or people you’re working with, but also helps you feel comfortable and able to respond.
Lisa: Again, I’m seeing these great patterns, Matt, about, first of all, mindset. It’s an opportunity. It’s not a threat. They’re not there to shoot holes in it. They’re there to learn. Even if you get a tough question, it’s ideas-- somehow they are still confused. There’s an opportunity there. The mindset piece. Then the other piece around the message, how do you actually get prepared to structure it? Again, going back to these are just so valuable. Then I wonder if you coach your entrepreneurs or your students about practicing Q&A. This is another thing. We don’t practice.
Matt: No, that’s right. If somebody said, “Practice your pitch or presentation,” most of them would say, “I see that I should probably do that.” When we say, “Practice your spontaneous communication,” people are like, “What? How do you even do that?” Think of it. We’ve already alluded to the fact that athletes practice a lot. They prepare. We can do the same thing. There are drills we can do. Let me give you a couple examples.
One, when you are in your business, your organization, do you have FAQs? Do you have frequently asked questions that you document so that you can get people aligned or help others in your organization? Go to those and just draft them in the structure we talked about. That act of doing it will help lay down the neural pathways that make it easier. I think a wonderful use of AI is to give us an opportunity to practice.
Go to an AI tool and say, “Giving a presentation on X topic for an audience like Y, generate three questions that they might have.” As each question comes in, practice answering it, not to memorize your answers, but just to get comfortable doing it. Just like an athlete would dribble around cones, this is your way of practicing. You go into it confident that “I’ve done it before.”
Lisa: So helpful. I often say, better rehearse the future than be blindsided by the present.
Matt: Oh, I love that. I want to borrow that. Thank you.
Lisa: Please. All this is just encouragement. We don’t do it because we’ve never been taught how to do it. We’ve never thought about it. I want to talk a little bit about something I’ve also heard you talk about around a growth mindset when mistakes do happen. I want to, again, admit something. I didn’t know this was going to be true confessions. Here we go.
Recently, I facilitated something and I did something I’ve never done before, which is, one of the two people I was hosting a panel on, I introduced them with the wrong name. It took me a second to realize. I was like, “We’re live. Uh-oh.” You actually have some strategies for what happens when you make some mistakes. I wonder if we could talk about it.
Matt: Absolutely. One, mistakes are normal and natural. We make them all the time. It’s part of being human. Second, you have to make a split-second decision if it needs to be remedied or not. In your case, probably needed to be addressed because the person’s coming up and we don’t want them thinking they’re somebody else. We probably do have to do something.
Many of our mistakes, we’re the only ones who really know we did it. We are the only ones who know what we intended to say versus what we did say. Sometimes it’s just something we’ve noticed that others might not notice, and drawing attention to it actually might disrupt the flow and the connection. You have to make that decision in that moment.
We also tend to beat ourselves up and ruminate a lot on the mistakes we make. In my research and the work that I have done learning about this, work by Carol Dweck has been really informative. Carol’s work on growth mindset talks about this one area that I’ve really gravitated to, which is this idea of “Not yet.” If I make a mistake or I didn’t do it right, it doesn’t mean that I am incapable of doing it, I will never do it well. No, what it means is that I’m just not ready yet. When we take that attitude, it means the future is bright. There are things I can do to get ready, so it can be very empowering. I like this idea of “Not yet.”
Another lesson that I think can be really helpful comes from the famous basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. He has this notion or trained his players on this idea of next play. Many of us, when we make a mistake, in that moment we ruminate, we beat ourselves up, we think about, oh, all the things that might go wrong. If you’re doing that on a basketball court, for example, you are now not in service of your team. If I miss a shot and I’m saying, “Oh, I can’t believe I missed that shot, I practiced all that,” the other team and your only four other players are down court already.
This is not to say that reflection is not important, but rumination in the moment gets in the way. We need to remind ourselves next play. When I make a mistake, I simply say to myself, “Next play, keep moving on,” and then I decide, “Do I need to correct later?”
Then the final thing I’ll say, and I know I’m going on a long time, Lisa, I’m sorry, is reframe mistakes. I like to call mistakes missed takes. In television production, movie production, they do multiple takes. We know that clapboard, take 1, take 2. They don’t do multiple takes because any one take is wrong. They’re just trying different things out. When I say something that I didn’t want to say or it didn’t go the way I want, mentally, I just say, “Take 2,” and maybe I repeat myself and say it correctly. Maybe later I send an email that corrects what I wanted to say, but I don’t beat myself up over it. It’s just another take.
These attitudes and some of the techniques that come from them can help you to address the mistakes you make and actually learn from them so you make fewer in the future.
Lisa: Such a powerful frame for thinking about mistakes as missed takes. You get to try again. How great. What did you learn? The misplaced energy of beating ourselves up when it’s like, “How does that help you?” That reframe of, can you reflect to learn forward as opposed to staying in the past? Again, having that itty-bitty shitty committee come out. Particularly when you present, there’s the presentation you prepare for, the one you give, and the one you obsess about on the way home. Never the same.
Matt: Right. No. My students are digitally recorded presenting. They have to watch it three times, once with sound only, once with video only, and once both together. The biggest learning across all the hundreds and thousands of students I’ve ever taught is they realize, “I didn’t look as nervous as I felt,” or, “I looked more confident than I felt.” There’s this perception gap so that the one that you ruminate over, once you actually see it, you realize it wasn’t as bad as you thought because you only show people what you show them. They don’t have insight to all the stuff going on in your head and in your body.
Let’s try to get rid of that third of those three, the one that we ruminate over and over again. A great way to do that is to record yourself, watch it, even though that’s painful, and you realize it’s not as bad as you thought it was.
Lisa: I think that’s so important to give yourself time. As you said, time, attention is a thing that increasingly has more value because it feels more scarce. To practice that in a way that allows us to grow as opposed to judge. I do worry a bit, particularly for our students, the younger generation, so much of their communication is online, is about did they get the like? Yes or no? Did they get the comment? Yes or no? Which is a binary response versus a growth mindset, as you said, about “Not yet,” and how we can get better.
Matt: I also worry about that with the younger generation as well. It’s very disconcerting when communication is all about getting the likes or appeasing the algorithm so you get more exposure. I think that’s a very dangerous place to be when it comes to our communication.
Lisa: I agree. Again, I’ll go back to something you said earlier, which I think is so powerful, that when you engage authentically, you feel something different in your body. A lot of times I think our students just haven’t felt that. If you can get that feeling of, “Oh my gosh,” they’re watching themselves, “Wow, look at my presence, I didn’t know,” they can’t unfeel that.
The idea is to put out- I talk about as optimistic offense, put out a better feeling so they’re not just in reaction mode. They want to search to get more of that. I think that’s the gift that you give your students and the leaders that you work with.
Matt: I like optimistic offense. Thank you for sharing that. That’s a really great way to be persuasive about what you’re talking about without people raising their hackles. I like it.
Lisa: It connects to something that I think this whole series is trying to do, which is to help expose people to things we can learn that gives us outsized agency and influence. In a world that feels like it’s happening to us, how do we build the skills to feel like we can shape the future? That’s at the core. How do we do it humanely? How do we do it with hope? How do we do it with connection with others and with a spirit of gratitude? Again, this idea that these are teachable and learnable skills, I think in and of itself is a powerful place to start.
Matt: Right. You have to invite people in to make those changes because change, it requires work. I like the framing of the way that you just said what you said, but also this idea of, we need to connect and have those feels so that that motivates us.
Lisa: Absolutely. I want to talk about one more topic. So much of the conversations we find ourselves in about where we want to go are filled with ambiguity because the world is changing so fast. My colleague, Scott Doorley, talks about this notion that we are living at a time where we never feel up to speed. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you coach some of your students and entrepreneurs about how to be in conversations that have high levels of ambiguity, about how to still have presence and still find clarity amid some of the complexity.
Matt: This is very tricky and tough. What I have found most helpful in my own life and those I work with find valuable is to have some stakes in the ground. I need to first do some introspection. What’s important to me? What are my values? What’s motivating me in this moment and generally? Because when things are amorphous and ambiguous, you need to have a compass, and that compass is who you are and what’s important to you.
The next step when it comes to communication, again, comes back to having a clear goal. What is it that I would like to achieve? Not that I will achieve it, but where’s that magnetic north taking me so that as a conversation unfolds, as the experience comes out, what is it that I can do to help bring me back to what I’m trying to achieve? Yet at the same time, I have to challenge myself to remain open because while I have a goal, others I’m interacting with have their own goals, and they might get me somewhere I didn’t think I could go or wanted to go, but actually learned that I do.
You have to have some of these foundational grounding principles. What are your values? What is important to you? What’s your goal? Then there’s an openness.
Finally, and this is probably the hardest of all of these, we need to train ourselves for pattern recognition. We need to begin to see where things are going, where things could potentially go. You are a master facilitator. Not only outside of this, but even during our conversation, you do an excellent job of facilitating, paraphrasing, keeping us on track. That’s a skill that in ambiguous situations, in amorphous communication, is really helpful. I really think facilitation comes down to at least two critical ingredients, one is listening, and two is pattern recognition. Those, I think, are the skills that help, and yet, a lot of us don’t take the time to focus on those. As this whole conversation has been about, these are learnable skills. Those are the ingredients, I believe, that are critical for handling ambiguous situations.
Lisa: I loved how you talked about facilitation as so important. It is one of those overlooked skills. It’s incredible to me, as well as something we talked about earlier, which is improv. We have Dan Klein in common. He was an earlier guest, and he shared a lot about how improv helps navigate ambiguity, the power of, “Oh, good,” leaning into mistakes with some joy.
Robert Poynton is another inspiration of mine. I don’t know if you know his work. He teaches over at Oxford. He talks about how life demands an improvised response. If you just pause and say, “Is there ever a world where you’re going to know everything?” It’s absurd to think the answer is yes. What’s your response then? Learn how to make decisions and act without all the information. That requires the practice and the presence, as you said, the North Star. Then I want to share one other thing I’ve learned from you that, frankly, I’m in a growth mindset about, which is slowing down, the power of the pause.
Matt: Yes. It is very hard for me, but life happens in that moment. That’s where life is happening, is in that moment. Pausing does several things. One, for you, it allows you to collect your thoughts, to ground yourself, to focus. Pausing also gives permission to the other person or people to continue. That’s space allows them to say more. There’s so much beauty that can happen there.
My mother-in-law had a black belt in small talk. She could connect in ways I have never really met anybody who can do it as well as she did. She had just a few tools. Pausing was one. She would give people space, and then she would say, “Tell me more,” in a way that was a genuine curiosity. Those two tools really allowed her to connect. My wife’s from the Midwest. When my mother-in-law would come out, she’d come off the plane with three best friends. I’m not joking. When she was visiting us, they would go out together because they met on the plane because of that connection she was able to make.
Lisa: Again, speaks to that engagement and curiosity, talking to strangers and actually learning about them, a great place to practice. We just finished teaching View from the Future where we bring in different guests every week, talk about where the future is going. Some of my students said to me- they said, “Lisa, we love the guests, but we loved how you met the guests.” Inevitably, they were on a plane or just standing in line waiting for something at a conference. You build up a conversation and you show curiosity. Next thing you know, you’re staying in touch.
So many amazing things can happen. This, of course, connects to an earlier guest this season, Tina Seelig, our shared friend, whose beautiful new book, What I Wish I Knew About Luck. This is a strategy of capturing luck, being curious.
Matt: Being open and being present. I think that’s great. I just interviewed on Think Fast, Talk Smart, my show, Nick Epley, who actually studies talking to strangers. He finds that it is far less awkward than people think it is and far more beneficial and rewarding to do it. Take the step to really, one, initiate communication with people you might not know well and allow yourself permission and the grace to pause and really appreciate what comes after that.
Lisa: Matt, that is a great segue to my final question, which is where can people learn more about your strategy? You mentioned your podcast, which is extraordinary and a huge congratulations to you for not only all the reach that you have, but the spirit of generosity. It’s really a gift to help people feel like that these are skills they can learn, they can learn from other people that you bring on. Your podcast is one of them. Where else can they learn? I know you’re always putting out new lesson plans and new communities.
Matt: Thank you. Think Fast, Talk Smart is a great place to go to learn more from me, but more importantly, the amazing people I talk to. Mattabrahams.com has a lot of my work. Fastersmarter.io is dedicated to the podcast and other learnings. I am an avid user of LinkedIn as well. Would love to connect with anybody in your community and really to find and learn from people who are passionate about the future and about communication.
Lisa: Matt, in the spirit of a future that we know is filled with lots of uncertainties and lots of unknowables, one thing we do know for sure is that when we connect authentically with other humans, our days are better, our ideas are better, and what we bring to the world is filled with more possibility and connection and inclusivity. Thank you for all that you do, for bringing your expertise forward in such a generous and caring way.
Matt: Thank you, and thank you for the work you’re doing. Keep up spreading the word about the future and how we can learn skills that we never learned to help all of us improve and be better human beings.
Lisa: Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Before you go, here’s something to carry into your week from this conversation with Matt. The next time you feel that rush of nerves before speaking, pause and remind yourself, “This moment is all about connection, not perfection.” You can also try a small warm-up beforehand, say a tongue twister, move your body, or even sing a song.
If this episode helped you think differently about communication, leave a comment and let us know what you’re practicing next. For deeper reflections, episode notes, and ways to keep building these skills, check out the How We Future Substack. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next week.