Spontaneity takes preparation

- [Announcer] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Host] When it comes to think faster, talk smarter, overall, what's the big idea here? - [Guest] Well, first and foremost, I think the most counterintuitive idea is that you can prepare to be spontaneous. That's the big thing. And then the second thing is that many of us feel that there are people who are just born with the gift of gab, and they can communicate effectively regardless of if it's planned or not. And I'm here to tell you that you can actually learn to get better at it. And most people can improve dramatically by taking some time, putting in some practice and adjusting their mindset to do this in a way that they might not have thought to do it. So really, you can practice to get better. Everybody can do it. And the process that I teach has six steps to it. The first four are really around mindset, and the last two are around what I call messaging. - [Host] Okay, well, I'm excited to dig into these six steps. Maybe before we do that, can you share with us a cool story of someone who felt pretty flustered when they were called upon to speak and what they did, and the transformation they saw? - [Guest] So one that comes to mind is an individual who was attending a meeting. He was an engineer in a company. He was going to learn about the future releases of the product, and different people around the table were sharing their pieces. His boss, who was supposed to share his work, you can see where this is going, didn't show up. It turned out that his boss's wife went into labor and he was obviously doing what was most important for him. But that left the person who was working with me in a moment of utter panic. He had to now represent his whole team's work without having prepared to do so. He did okay, it wasn't the end of the world, but he was definitely stressed out about it, a little bit traumatized. And that's what brought him to do some work with me. And when I walked him through the methodology I introduced just a few moments ago, he later had a subsequent situation, not the same situation, but another situation where he had to step up and speak. His team was doing a tribute to that part of the project he represented several months prior. They were celebrating what they did, and he was put on the spot by his boss to stand up and say something as a way of congratulating the team for their success, and he was able to do it with much more confidence and it came out much better. So just in a few short months, he developed the ability to speak better on his feet, and he felt really, really good about it.