292. Headspace Habits: Lessons for Calm, Confident Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Meditation is a great way to calm your nerves and to get present. Speaking of presence, see what I did there, I was honored to be asked by the Headspace app to produce a series of five short podcast episodes for their podcast. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this special episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, we're stitching together the five episodes I did for Headspace. Take a listen as I provide specific advice on speaking anxiety management, empathy through listening, clarity through structure, audience engagement, and presence.

[00:00:46] The fear of speaking in front of others is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere. In every culture we've studied, we find it. And we find that it develops at the same time. When kids first become teenagers, that's when anxiety really begins to spike. Certainly for me. When I was 14 years old, I was instructed by my English teacher to give a presentation on his behalf at a speech contest. Every teacher in my school had to nominate one student to go to this contest, and I was his choice. The only advice he gave me was, "Do something that gets the audience interested." So I showed up on an early Saturday morning, cold outside, into the big, large auditorium. My friends were there. The parents of my friends were there judging this competition.

[00:01:37] And the girl I liked was even in the room. I had decided to do a speech on the martial arts. This was something I thought that would be engaging. I was so nervous about doing this speech that I forgot to put on my special martial arts pants, the ones that have a little extra room. I did a karate kick to start, and I ripped my pants from zipper to belt buckle. Somehow I managed to get through that presentation, but it was at that moment that I became very interested in how anxiety impacts our communication. And over time, and with a lot of practice, I was able to become much more comfortable and confident in my communication. And hopefully, I've helped lots of others do the same.

[00:02:22] Confidence in speaking comes from a lot of practice and a lot of work. It's a whole bunch of mini experiments that we run. Each of us has to find the techniques that work for us to manage our anxiety, and there are many of them. For me, one of the big sources of my anxiety was worrying about the future consequences of my actions. I was afraid people wouldn't support what I was asking for. They might not like what I had to say. All of these are future thoughts. And the way to counteract that, and what worked for me, is to become very present-oriented. Because by definition, if you're in the moment, you're not worried about a future negative outcome.

[00:03:04] So the question becomes, how do I get present-oriented? And there are lots of ways to do that. Doing something physical can work. Take a walk around the building. Actors and actresses shake their body out. Athletes listen to a song or a playlist, and that gets them present-oriented. Sometimes I've been known even to say tongue twisters out loud. Not only does saying a tongue twister force you to be in the present moment in order to say it right, but it also warms up your voice, which is incredibly helpful, because many of us think we can go from silence to brilliance in our communication without warming up first. Any athlete, any singer, any dancer will tell you, you have to warm up first.

[00:03:45] I distinctly remember a job interview as I was approaching college, and I was working on my anxiety management, given what happened to me in high school. And I had walked into the room, and I, I felt the anxiety. I did some deep breathing. I said a tongue twister out loud before the person came back. And when they came back, I was in a much better place. The interview actually went so well, they made me the offer. And in the subsequent year, I was actually the person who was interviewing for a similar position to what I had. So I had actually switched roles as a result, I believe, of how confident I was in that initial interview. Anybody listening in has likely done some meditation and mindfulness and is very familiar with this type of deep breathing. Interestingly, all of the magic happens on the exhalation. Your heart rate slows down. Your respiration rate slows down, so you speak less quickly.

[00:04:41] The shakiness that comes from adrenaline abates a bit. So as a way of closing today, I'd like to invite everybody to take a deep, grounding breath. The goal here is to have our exhale be twice as long as our inhale. So we're going to take a three-count in and a six-count out. As we do our inhale, we really want to be distending our lower abdomen. I like to joke it should feel like you feel after a really good Thanksgiving dinner. On the count of three, inhale slowly through your nose. One, two, three. Your abdomen is fully distended. Let's hold in that moment for a second here. And now let's exhale on a count of six. We can exhale through the nose or mouth. Six, five, four, three, two, one. If you do that just two or three times, you can really put yourself in a place of calmness, stillness, and readiness for your upcoming communication.

[00:05:52] This week is all about mindful communication. One of the most transformative shifts we can make is focusing less on what we say and more on how we listen to what others say. Today, we'll explore why listening is often harder than it seems, how it impacts our relationships, and how mindful presence can help us truly hear others, connect to others, and build lasting relationships. Many of us don't listen as well as we could. There are many barriers to listening. They all happen to start with the letter P. There's physical noise. Sometimes it's hard to listen just because the environment we're in is loud. Another barrier to listening is physiological.

[00:06:37] What's going on in our bodies? If you're tired, if you're hungry, if you're hangry, if you're nervous, it's really hard to demonstrate the focusing required for listening. And finally, there's psychological challenges and barriers that get in the way of listening. A lot of us are rehearsing what we wanna say next. We're judging, we're evaluating, we're connecting ideas. Listening is definitely a skill that we can all develop. Believe me, my wife encourages me all the time to keep developing my listening skills. We learn listening by observing others and, and see what works. And we also learn listening by seeing how people respond to us. It's not innate.

[00:07:22] We can all learn to listen better. To be a better listener, there's several things you can do. I like to teach my students how to ace their listening: pace, space, and grace. To begin, we have to give ourselves space, and I mean space in two ways. One, we have to physically be in a place where we can actually hear. Maybe that means moving to a quieter room, stepping outside. But more importantly, we need to give ourselves mental space. There's a lot going on in our heads whenever we interact. We need to open up a space to actually be present and listen. Beyond space, we have to slow the pace down. Life comes at us very quickly. Interactions are fast. You need to slow down and focus to allow you to truly listen.

[00:08:16] And then finally, you have to give yourself some grace, and grace is all about giving yourself permission, not just to listen, but to listen beyond the words. When people say things, I'll share a story where I messed that up. I came out of a meeting with a colleague, and he turned to me and he said, "How do you think that went?" And our experience in the meeting did not go well. It was very poor. And I immediately jumped into giving feedback. I thought that's what he was looking for. In fact, had I noticed, he came out the back door, not the front door as I did. He was looking down. He was speaking more slowly.

[00:08:48] In that moment, he did not want feedback. What he wanted was support. I had not listened fully and completely. So space, pace, grace put you into a place where you can actually ace your listening. You're primed to do it. Now, tactically, what do you do when you listen? I believe one of the best ways to listen more deeply is to listen as if you were going to paraphrase. Many of us, when we listen, we just listen enough to get the top line of what somebody is saying, and then we begin evaluating, judging, getting distracted. When you listen to paraphrase, that is to repeat back in your own words what somebody has said, you listen for the bottom line.

[00:09:36] You attune in a way that you don't when you're not listening to paraphrase. So I teach my students, and I work on this myself, to listen for what is the bottom line. And then really interestingly, by paraphrasing, you show you care. And it's been demonstrated in a lot of research that when you paraphrase, you begin to build trust, and trust is the foundation of all relationships. I'm not saying you have to paraphrase every single thing somebody says, but by taking the time to paraphrase some of what they say, you actually show that you care, that you heard them, and that you intensely want to understand them.

[00:10:15] One of the best ways I have learned to practice listening is at the end of an interaction, a meeting, a conversation, listening to a podcast episode, ask yourself, "What was that about, and how can I use that information?" This internal interrogation, essentially an internal paraphrase, not only helps you better understand the interaction you just had, but you're training the brain. You're laying down the neural pathways to make your paraphrasing more efficient. The more you practice paraphrasing what you've heard, the better off you will be when you actually have to listen in a situation with another person or other people.

[00:11:01] So far, we've talked about managing anxiety and becoming more confident and the power of listening. Today, I want to focus on how we can bring clarity to what we say through messaging and frameworks. When we're put on the spot, it's easy to ramble and lose track of our ideas. We, we often take our audience on a journey of our discovery of what it is we want to say as we're saying it. But with simple structures and frameworks like what, so what, now what, we can guide our listeners and make our messages stick. When it comes to communicating, it can be quite challenging to take all the thoughts you have, as well as all the input from the things you're seeing and hearing, and really put together a coherent argument.

[00:11:46] Many of us in these situations just list and itemize information. When you see presentations, people just have a ton of bullet points. Bullets kill. We're just not good at remembering lists and itemizations. Think about this. When you go to the grocery store, how many items do you need to buy before you write it down so you don't forget? Well, if you're like me, it's three. We're not good at remembering those things. So to help ourselves, we need to rely on structure, a logical connection of ideas. We all know structure. If you've ever seen a television advertisement, you've seen a structure. It's problem, solution, benefit.

[00:12:33] There's some issue challenge in the world, the company's product or service makes that better, fixes it, and then you benefit in some way. I don't care if you're selling cars, medicines, alcohol, most ads follow that structure. When I first started teaching, one of the big challenges I had was to synthesize all of the material that I wanted to get across to my students so that they could understand it. And the biggest mistake I made is I just gave my students lots of lists. List after list. Do this and then this and then this, or you should think about that and that and that. And while the students were interested in what I was saying, they couldn't remember it all. It was overwhelming.

[00:13:14] They were trying to take notes and did this go before that? Where does this come in? How does that play out? I was doing them a disservice by not helping them focus, by organizing the content in a logical way. As I have evolved in my teaching, I was able to better structure my materials so that the students can now engage in the content in a very different way. My favorite structure in the entire world is three simple questions. What? So what? Now what? What? So what? Now what? What is the information that you're sharing? Why is it important to the person that I'm speaking to? And then the now what is what comes next.

[00:13:59] Structure is something you have to practice. You have to practice putting your ideas in a structure. Here's a great way to do it. When you're done learning something new, participating in a meeting, listening to a podcast, ask yourself, what was it about? Why is it important to me? And what can I do with this information? Not only is this a form of paraphrasing, which helps with listening, but this is a way of, yet again, training your brain to leverage a structure. You're training your brain to respond so when you're in a situation, perhaps one you're not prepared for, you can use it fluidly and easily.

[00:14:38] Today, we're talking about engagement. Too often, people think engagement means being flashy, funny, or performing. But real engagement comes from connection, from making your audience feel like you're speaking to them, not at them. We'll explore why people lose attention, how energy and presence make a difference, and what small shifts, like telling a story, asking a question, changing your tone of voice, can reignite curiosity. I believe attention is the most precious commodity we have in the world today. Our attention is constantly being pulled in different directions. It's hard to get attention, but what's even harder is engagement.

[00:15:20] It is critical to get engagement because when you do, you then truly can form the connection that you want. I'm often brought in to coach senior leaders on how to be more engaging in their communication. We've all been part of those all-hands meetings or planning meetings that just drone on and on. They're full of lists and facts and spreadsheets. And while that information is essential and critical, it can be delivered better. There's one situation I was brought into where I was working with a leader who was trying to unveil a new strategy, and his strategy had 14 pillars to it. Let me tell you, that was the first warning sign.

[00:16:08] What we did is we got rid of the 14 pillars. We found that they aligned nicely with three key values the company had. And with each value, we made sure to have some kind of engaging point to it. In one case, he told a story that reflected the value. In another case, he used an analogy that we could all relate to. And then finally, what he did was he had a participative activity where he asked us each to think about something and how that could be reflected in what this particular strategic idea was about. We took a very boring, very dry, hard-to-understand communication and made it interesting and engaging. When it comes to engagement, there are four primary ways that you can do it.

[00:16:57] One is by getting people physically engaged. Where people's bodies go, their brains will follow. So tactics and techniques might include taking a poll, having people write something down, sharing a video that they watch, turning to somebody and having a conversation. When you're virtual, it could be using the chat, the reaction buttons, maybe putting people in breakout rooms. Mental engagement comes in a different variety. We have lots of research from neuroscience that says when you ask somebody a question, their brain lights up and activates in a way that it doesn't when you just tell them things. So can you ask a question even if you don't want a response?

[00:17:37] The third is linguistic, language. If you can refer to people by name or use inclusive language like you, us, we, that pulls people together. We've all been trained since we were little kids that when you hear your name or the word you, that you should pay attention. And finally, there is shared experience. If you can lean into some common experience, some common attitudes or values people have, that connects us. Now, there's another way to be engaging as well, and that's your presence, how you show up. You can bring a lot of energy. You can bring a calm subtleness. The variation in your presence, your tone, your volume, your gestures, that variation invites engagement. That's why I try to vary my voice or my rate.

[00:18:34] That's why I try to change the emotional tone. So we have things we can do with our messaging and with our presence that are likely to invite people in and be more engaged. The other thing that we tend to do is we tend to be very conversational in tone. That's what really helps us feel close to somebody. If you can mirror that when you are in front of a larger group, that helps you. So how do we do that? Well, use conversational language. I once coached a leader who was giving a big talk at a conference, and as part of the beginning, he said, "Knowledge workers should blah, blah, blah." And I said, "Who are you speaking to?" And he said, "Knowledge workers." And I said, "Why don't you just say you? You is much more conversational."

[00:19:26] A great way to practice being engaging is to observe how others are engaging. So I'm gonna give you all a challenge. I would like for you, for the next few days, to watch communicators that you find really engaging and ask yourself what techniques are they using. Are they doing something physical to get people physically engaged? Are they using stories or questions or analogies? Are they using some kind of language to really pull you in, or are they referring to common ground? One of the best ways to get good at communication in general, but engagement in particular, is to observe what others do and then begin to incorporate some of that in your own authentic way into your communication

[00:20:14] We're closing out this week of mindful communication by talking about presence. Presence is what allows us to manage our nerves, listen deeply, craft clear messages, and engage authentically, but it's also what many of us struggle with. It's how we use our body and our voice to really emphasize what it is we're saying. Many of us focus so extensively on our content, what we're saying, we want it to land, we want it to be confident, we want it to really help our audience, that we forget to focus on how we are delivering it. We are in our heads so much that we don't think about what people see. That's our body. What people hear are voices.

[00:20:57] So what ends up happening is people's presence is degraded by their over-focus on their content. Now, I am certainly not saying that we should not focus on our content. We absolutely should, but we also need to make sure that we spend time practicing and reflecting on how we show up. I have helped many people with their physical presence in lots of different ways. What comes to mind right away is I was working with someone who was relatively new to their management position. They had been a great individual contributor, and they were promoted into a new role where they really needed to exert confidence and influence. So we got rid of the filler words, the ums, the uhs, the likes, and I means by working on their breathing.

[00:21:44] They would breathe very shallow as they spoke. As they'd get excited or nervous, they would breathe in their upper chest. And when you do that, there are times where when you're done speaking, you still have air in your chest. And what often happens is, as part of the exhale to get that air out before you speak again, you'll say a filler word. Try it at home. Try saying the word um while exhaling. It's very easy. Now, try saying the word um while inhaling. Now, that's impossible. So what we trained and worked on with this person was to end sentences fully out of breath so that they couldn't say um, they couldn't say anything. They needed to take an inhalation, which builds in a pause, which slowed them down and got rid of those filler words.

[00:22:34] So there are things that you can do to reduce your filler words. Now, this person also looked down when they were speaking. So by practicing speaking while staring intently, they became more comfortable with looking more casually. So there's a lot of things that go into presence. Filler words are one of them that we need to reduce, and then looking people in the eyes really does make a difference when you speak. When it comes to presence, we are not the best judges of our presence. So we have to do a few things. One, we have to solicit feedback. Go up to people and just say, "What is one thing I can do to make my presence stronger?" Another thing that you must do, I believe, to improve your presence is to digitally record yourself.

[00:23:27] You can do this when you're virtual, you can do this when you're in person live. A great way to practice presence is to record yourself and then watch it not once, not twice, but three times. I make all my students do this. They hate it, but they love it because they learn so much. After recording yourself digitally, watch without sound. Second, listen without video. And then finally, watch both together. I want you to pay attention not just to the things you'd like to change, but pay attention to the things that go well. That's really important, too. All of us have a strong presence, some of us stronger than others, but we can find things that we like and we need to lean into them and keep doing them, and we find things that we need to change.

[00:24:18] I'm often asked how presence and authenticity connect. It is absolutely true that you should be authentic to yourself and be who you are in your communication. That said, a large way that we establish our authenticity is how we show up. So I never recommend that people be disingenuous or do things that are phony for themselves. That said, really reflect on what's true for you and how can you mirror and demonstrate that in your presence. So if you're somebody who's really passionate, maybe you'll speak a little quicker than I might like or you might gesture faster. That's okay as long as it's being consistent with who you really are. So it starts by you thinking about, "What's important to me? What do I wanna portray?" And then do so in a genuine, authentic way.

[00:25:16] Thank you for joining us for this special episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast, produced by the Headspace podcast team. To learn more about communication topics like these and many more, please check out our past episode library at fastersmarter.io. Special thanks to Ryan Campos, Katherine Reed, and Podium Podcast Company for bringing this episode to you. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. Please consider joining our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, my AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community.