Join Anne Morriss, a CEO and best-selling author, and Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School Professor, as they discuss the art of communication. They explore the pitfalls of perfectionism and self-doubt, emphasizing that great communication is about connecting with your audience. Discover strategies for managing anxiety, mastering spontaneous speaking, and turning communication challenges into opportunities. Gain insights on how to refocus your energy from yourself to those you speak to, enhancing both clarity and collaboration.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Audience-Focused Communication
Focus on the audience's experience during communication.
Ensure they receive the information needed to succeed, prioritizing their needs over your own.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Connection Over Perfection
Give yourself permission to simply communicate your message.
By focusing on connection rather than perfection, you'll likely communicate effectively.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Pants Ripping Incident
Matt Abrahams ripped his pants doing a karate kick during his first speech in high school.
This experience sparked his interest in communication and anxiety.
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In 'Think Faster, Talk Smarter', Matt Abrahams offers tangible, actionable skills to help even the most anxious speakers succeed in spontaneous communication. The book provides strategies for managing anxiety, responding to the mood of the room, and making content concise, relevant, compelling, and memorable. Drawing on stories from his clients and students, Abrahams offers best practices for navigating Q&A sessions, job interviews, providing effective feedback, making small talk, fixing faux pas, persuading others, and handling other impromptu speaking tasks.
Future Tense
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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
“Anything is fixable,” say Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. As cohosts of the Fixable podcast, they’re typically the ones doing the fixing, but on this special episode, they turn to Matt Abrahams for tips on what to do when communication breaks down.
Both Frei and her wife Morriss are public speakers; the former, a professor at Harvard Business School, the latter, a CEO and best-selling author. As they discuss with Matt Abrahams, perfectionism and self-doubt can often creep in, both during preparation before speaking and after the fact. According to Matt, effective communication is about “connection, not perfection.” Instead of putting pressure on ourselves to “get it right,” Matt encourages us to shift our focus from ourselves to those we’re speaking to. “Whenever you're communicating, you're in service of the audience you're communicating to,” he says. “It's not about you, it's about them and what you can do for them.”
In this podcast episode, Frei, Morriss, and Matt explore frameworks and strategies for speaking more spontaneously, building confidence, managing anxiety, and course-correcting when communication goes awry.
Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques 
