Podcasts · The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
712: Matt Abrahams - How to Become a Better Communicator: Speaking With Confidence, Structuring Your Message, and Thinking Fast on Your Feet
· 55 min
Episode 712: Matt Abrahams - How to Become a Better Communicator: Speaking With Confidence, Structuring Your Message, and Thinking Fast on Your Feet
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
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My Guest - Matt Abrahams is one of the world's foremost experts on communication. He's a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and bestselling author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. His focus is the hardest kind of communication: not the rehearsed speech, but knowing what to say when you're put on the spot: in the interview, the Q&A, the hallway, the toast.
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What you'll learn in this episode:
• Matt's father was quiet but not shy. A lawyer, skipped a couple of grades so he was always younger than his colleagues, a man of few words and very detailed ones. Matt says what he most wants to live up to isn't the intelligence, it's that his father believed in being truthful and trustworthy. • His parents asked two different questions about communication, and he's still answering both. His mother taught elementary school and wanted to know how you make it engaging and how you hold attention. His father wanted to know how you organize it and make it structured and understandable. They debated it constantly at home. Attention and structure are still the two halves of everything Matt teaches.
When You're Interviewing Someone
• The best interview question he was ever asked: "If you were an onion and I peeled back the first several layers, what would I find?" It was the CEO's opening line, before anything else. Matt's answer: "Onions make me cry." He got the job. When he asked about the question months later, the CEO said he uses it to knock people slightly off center, and what he remembered was that Matt committed to an answer and connected it to something bigger. • That's the whole move when you're put on the spot. Commit, then connect what you said to the larger picture. The content matters less than refusing to hedge. • Warm call, don't cold call. Matt doesn't cold call at Stanford and won't do it in an interview either. He tells candidates up front: I'm going to ask you things that are difficult, the goal isn't a right answer; the goal is seeing how you process and how we'd collaborate. Then he asks the hard question. Blindsiding someone tells you how they handle being blindsided, which is not the job. • Watch how they treat everyone who isn't you. Matt always asked whoever greeted the candidate how the interaction went, because plenty of people are rude to the front desk and flawless with the hiring manager. • Teach candidates how to answer. Matt tells people at the top: answer the question, give me an example so I understand what it means, then connect it to what that would look like if you worked here. Otherwise people ramble, and you're left wondering why they told you any of it. He says it changed his interviews completely.
When You're Giving a Talk
• Intention, attention, then relevance. How are you showing up, what energy and emotion are you bringing, and what will grab the room? Then, fast, why this is worth their time. "Attention is a gift people give you. If they don't see a return on that, they're gonna check out." • Start like an action movie. How does an action movie start? With action. Not "hi, my name is, and today I'm going to talk about," which is also just reading your first slide out loud. Tell a story, ask a question, take a poll, give a startling statistic, and introduce yourself afterward if at all. • The first thing Matt's students hear him say each term: "Communication is critical to your success in business and in your personal life." • If you're a nervous speaker, NEVER pre-apologize. Saying you're a nervous speaker feels like buying empathy. What it…
Links in the notes 5
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