How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot

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Effective communication is a crucial leadership skill, yet speaking spontaneously when put on the spot can trigger anxiety for many professionals. So how can you confidently communicate, even under pressure?

I recently sat down with communication expert Matt Abrahams to discuss strategies from his latest book “Think Faster, Talk Smarter”. Matt has decades of experience coaching executives on impromptu speaking.

Here are some of his research-backed techniques that resonated with me:

👉 Managing anxiety and nerves is critical to being an effective communicator. He shares science-backed methods for controlling symptoms and sources of speaking-related anxiety.

💡 Matt outlines a 6-step methodology for honing communication skills. This includes mindset shifts like reframing mistakes and seeing spontaneous situations as opportunities, as well as structuring your messages effectively.

👉 Small talk is extremely valuable for making connections, though many dread it. Matt suggests being interested rather than interesting, using questions and comments to keep conversation flowing.

🧠 Generative AI can bolster communication by providing information quickly, improving clarity/concision and enabling practice through conversational interactions. But it currently lacks human empathy and connection.

The great news is we can all get better at thinking on our feet if we apply repetition, reflection and feedback. As Matt put it, “Communication ability is critical for success personally and professionally”.

I highly recommend tuning in to this eye-opening episode with actionable tactics you can start applying immediately. What did you find most valuable? Share your takeaways in the comments.

Episode Highlights:

Science-based strategies to overcome and manage speaking related anxiety
6 steps to hone and improve your communication
4 mindset shifts to help you communicate better and get your points across
How generative AI can help our communication

Recommended Resources

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
📕 Grab a copy of his book - Think Faster, Talk Smarter
Learn more about his services

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Matt 0:00

To me, the most important thing is realising that communication is critical to your success. And we can take steps to improve our communication and those steps are well worth it. And they aren't big giant leaps. They're small baby steps and those steps will help you be more effective in your communication more confident and concise and compelling. And those are what will make a difference in your personal life in your professional life.

Chris 0:30

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Matt Abrahams, who's one of the world's leading communication experts with decades of experience as an educator, author, podcast host, and coach. Today we're going to be talking about his new book, Think faster, talk smarter, how to speak successfully when you're put on the spot. During the podcast, Matt shares science backed strategies to overcome and manage speaking related anxiety. He also talks about the six steps to hone and improve your communication, the four mindset shifts to help you communicate better, and get your points across and how generative AI can help your communication. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. Matt, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Really excited to be with you today. Nice to see you again. How's your how's the new year?

Matt 1:30

It's been good. It's been good doing lots of teaching lots of lots of talking about talking. How about yours?

Chris 1:36

Lots of talking about talking. I love that. Yeah, it was a good, good holiday period managed to relax and recharge and now just settling into a wild New Year. It's just it's already going so fast. And we will need to start so January just disappeared. We're already at the end. So

Matt 1:54

no, I feel like there was no real break.

Chris 1:58

That's that's the always was that way. How soon is going to book super excited to obviously get it in everyone's hands. It's behind you on the shelf. Right? If you think faster talk smile. Yeah,

Matt 2:08

the book is doing really well. You know, this time of the towards the end of last year, a lot of people realised Hey, I've got to give toasts. I'm with my family, I got to make small talk. So a lot of the issues around spontaneous speaking, speaking in the moment really hit home for people. So it's been good. I've been enjoying sharing the methodology and hearing people's success stories. And that's really what the book was written for is to help people speak better in the moment. Well,

Chris 2:31

we'll get into the weeds. I got so many questions about this. But tell everyone, firstly, a little bit more about you personally. And then kind of the inspiration behind this new book. Sure. So

Matt 2:39

I'm somebody who's passionate about communication. I think it's critical to success not just in our professional lives, but our personal lives. And I started in graduate school studying it, I left graduate school to pay off some loans and worked in the corporate world I ran learning and development worked very closely with HR in that capacity for over a decade. And then I came back to my true passion, which is teaching and research. And I've been teaching at Stanford's Graduate School of Business now for about 13 years. And I do some consulting on the side and host a podcast called Think fast talk smart. I'm not very creative with names. But I really work to help people hone and develop their communication skills. As we've seen, they're critical to being able to get our ideas across and motivate people towards our point of view.

Chris 3:21

Yeah, there are so many books out there right on on communication on speaking what makes this different? Well,

Matt 3:27

most of those books focus on planned presenting the presentation, the pitch the meeting with the agenda, but most of our communication happens in the moment. It's when people ask questions, ask for feedback, small talk, you have to introduce yourself. And there's really nothing out there that helps people in those moments where you think, Oh, my goodness, the spotlight is on me. And I have to respond. And that's what we're trying to address here.

Chris 3:51

Why is it not something that we were learning earlier in life? Yeah, because, you

Matt 3:55

know, we've been communicating our whole life since he won, and we just feel like we should know how to do it, or we do know how to do it. And in fact, it's in those really intense moments that we realise I could use some help here. And the reason I think it happens when you're higher up in an organisation is because people recognise the consequences are quite significant. sahaya Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so that's why people bring in media training and other things to just help begin to address this problem. People don't look at it holistically. They look at it in little compartments, answering questions at the end of a big presentation or introducing somebody when you're up giving a keynote but they don't look at it holistically across all the situations we

Chris 4:40

have is this come more natural to some people than others.

Matt 4:44

Certainly Yes, there are people for whom either their past experience like me my last name is Abraham's AB I've been going first my entire life. So I'm a little more comfortable being put on the spot. others based on their temperament. Maybe they're slightly more extroverted. But here is the True fact, all of us can get better at it, we have to work at it. I look at it as sort of like ascending a mountain people are at different points along the journey up the mountain, but everybody can move up in terms of their ability to speak in the moment. I

Chris 5:14

think one of the experiences that unlocked this for me, people a lot people don't realise a novice. But when I was younger, I was quite shy, and quite quiet and introverted. And then I got a job in sales. If somebody would have met me sort of 10 years later, like who are you, and because of the training that I had in sales, it really unlocked a different, a whole nother level of communication and understanding of all of this as well. So that was an eye opening journey for me to realise, you know, you're not just born with it. It's also something you can develop and you also have to put the reps in.

Matt 5:52

That's absolutely right. The only way you get better at communication is the way you get better at anything three things repetition, reflection and feedback, you need to practice, you need to practice a lot and then practice some more you need to reflect many of us in our communication, live out that definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. If you don't think what's working, what's not working, what works for Chris, maybe I can use some of that what works for that person over there. We have to reflect and then finally, we need feedback. We are not the best judges of our communication. My hunch is Chris is you are learning sales skills, people gave you feedback to help you hone and develop those skills. And that's critical. So it's repetition, reflection and feedback to get better, what

Chris 6:32

are the best, most practical and effective ways to for repetition?

Matt 6:37

Well find low stakes situations, do it in environments that are safe for you. If you have a working group that has a regular meeting, practice these skills, they're not up in front of the potential investor. Join a group like Toastmasters. It's a wonderful organisation, as somebody who teaches classes, find classes and organisations are in schools and universities that you can take, you have to put yourself in circumstances that allow you to practice it. If you're trying to study how to be better speaking on the spot, you need to find those spots to speak on. And of course, low stakes at first and then gradually crank up the volume. And that's what will help.

Chris 7:14

And would you say to reflections is something that you schedule time to do? Absolutely.

Matt 7:19

So I'll share what I do personally, and I'll share what I recommend. At the end of every day. I will sit down in for two minutes, I'll think about what worked during the day in my communication, what were some things I did that went really well. And then I'll think about what are some things that could have gone better. And I literally note them down. And then at the end of every week, for me, it happens to be on my Sundays, I'll look across the week and I'm looking for patterns any one day, everybody can have an off day, but I'm looking for patterns. And it's those patterns that I then seek to either repeat if it's positive, or to work on in the work world. When I'm actually coaching I recommend that at the end of every meeting, you spend one minute reflecting on the quality of the communication, not rehashing what was said, but saying things like Chris, it was really helpful when you paraphrase what was said earlier, or you know, Sally, you interrupted a couple times. And that took us on a different path than we were on then that might have caused some issues. Again, we're not blaming people, we're hopefully have psychologically safe environments where people can take the feedback. But when you take a moment to make those reflections, that's where you can truly change and learn.

Chris 8:24

One of the things I learnt recently, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this was the importance of when you start a relationship from the from the onset to agree with each other how you'd like to communicate with each other. Absolutely.

Matt 8:35

So setting expectations is critical and leading with here's how I work best in communication. So and it doesn't have to be just when you meet, you can actually do this in meeting invites. I think people underutilised meeting invites, we slap a name and a URL, and then we're meeting but you can do a lot of expectation setting in meeting invites for people. So if you're running a meeting or participating, you can share some expectations you have but also some requests about how best to interact with you. To me, that's not selfish. To me that's actually trying to benefit the whole group. I'm trying to maximise this interaction. And I can tell you that I work best in this circumstance. How do you work best? And then we can figure things out?

Chris 9:16

Yeah, it's only something I've really just recently discovered. And it's been amazing. And I felt I realised I've been doing it all wrong, how I assumed how I assumed I think someone wants to be how you communicate and it's normally wrong. So don't assume, don't assume anything.

Matt 9:31

The fundamental mistake many of us make when we communicate is we take it from our perspective, and we need to be other focused we are in service of the other people we're talking to, which means we have to investigate and ask and figure out what works best for them. One of

Chris 9:46

the things I loved was when you talk about the six steps to hone and improve your communication. And you talk about things such as daring to be dark and we talk a bit about all those I love that I love him so much. Sure.

Matt 9:56

So the book is divided into two parts. It's The first parts of methodology, the six steps you're talking about. And then the second part applies those six steps and very specific in the moment speaking situations, answering questions, giving feedback, introducing yourself apologising, making small talk, the methodology starts with the first four steps being about mindset how you will approach your spontaneous speaking. And then the last two steps are about how you actually create the messages that you deliver. Very first step is all about managing anxiety. We get nervous in speaking situations, regardless of their planned or spontaneous In fact, we have research that suggests up to 85% of people feel nervous in high stakes situations, and I think the other 15% are lying. So we have to attain the anxiety beast. And we do that through managing symptoms and sources. And in the book, I talk about ways to do that and happy to share some, the second step is exactly what you were talking about. Dare to be dull, I actually like to frame it maximise mediocrity. Many of us put tremendous pressure on ourselves to do our communication, right? We want to give the right answer the best feedback, we want to be the most interesting and small talk. And that puts so much pressure on ourselves. And I gotta tell you, Chris, there is no right way to do any of these things. There are better ways in worst ways. But there is no one right way. So I like to say it's about connection, not perfection, focus on connecting with the person that reduces the cognitive load you're putting on yourself to do it, right? So that's step two, maximise mediocrity. Dare to be dull, just get it done. Step three is about seeing these as opportunities, not threats. Many of us when we find ourselves in spontaneous speaking situations, we find ourselves being challenged, because we feel like somebody's judging us, or they're trying to make us look bad. We can reframe that as something that allows us to see it as an opportunity as a potential. And then the fourth of the initial mindset steps is critically important that is to listen and you're a very good listener. And and what you were just talking about is listening to what the other person needs. If we don't listen, well, we might miss what's really needed in the situation. So we might think somebody asking for feedback, wants feedback, but in fact, what they really want is support. So we have to listen for the nuance. And then the last two steps have to do with messaging, we have to structure our messages. We don't just list and itemise and ramble we structure. And then the final step is what I call the F word of communication. It's not the naughty one, its focus. Many of us when we're talking spontaneously take people on a journey of our discovery of what it is we want to say. And that means we ramble and we're unfocused. So by focusing on what's relevant and important to the audience, we're much more clear. So those are the six steps, you can practice any of them to help yourself get better. And if you practice all of them, you will catalyse and jumpstart your ability to speak in the moment, one

Chris 12:49

of the things that I wrote down was when you spoke about reframing your mistakes as a missed take. And so could you just wait, where does that fit within the five I love, I just, I also buy I just love that in general, by the way, that says this is great, and a great way of reframing it.

Matt 13:06

Thank you. So let me share that. So in that third step, where we're trying to see these things as opportunities and not threats, I list several mindset shifts that can help you get there one is what you're talking about. Mistakes are great. We all know this, we learn from mistakes, yet we hate to make them so I like reframing mistakes as a missed tape. I love if you know anything about television production or film, yes, they do lots of takes of every scene. In fact, they have that clapboard where they say take one, take two, no one take is wrong or bad. They're just looking for different versions. So maybe the actor stands versus sits or has one emotion versus the other. So when something doesn't go the way you want it to. It's not wrong. It's just one take. Now you can do it again, maybe immediately or maybe the next time. So I literally think to myself, Okay, take two. And that takes the pressure off, it lets me see that there's an opportunity for another take. Rather than that being a failure that can't be remedied.

Chris 14:02

Love that devil when you shared was all which I thought was really cool was thinking about striving for connection, not perfection. You're

Matt 14:09

the goal of communication. In fact, the word communication derives from the word to make common your goal in communicating is to connect and make the information common. And the best way to do that is to focus on the other person, we get so locked up in our head judging and evaluating that it takes cognitive bandwidth and energy away from focusing on the other person. So when we strive for connection, big things can happen. One

Chris 14:35

of the interesting things you mentioned before we hit record on the podcast was the feedback you're getting from people around the value of small talk. What is it about small talk to so valuable? Well, so

Matt 14:49

first and foremost, and you helped me to realise this in our initial conversation is that small talk has a bad rap. We need to rebrand small talk to really good important things happen during Small Talk. And yet many of us dread it. I would ask everybody to think about your friendship network. How did you meet some of these folks? My hunch is many of us met some of our close friends through small talk encounters. So the first thing we have to do is reframe it. Big things happen during small talk, we connect, we learn, we grow, we build trust. The challenge for us is many of us go into these wanting to be super interesting. And I learned from somebody I interviewed for the book and on my podcast, her name's Rachel Greenwald, fascinating moment. She's an academic, but also a professional matchmaker. And she told me that in small talk, the goal is to be interested, not interesting. Many of us go into these situations feeling like we're playing tennis, we want to ace the ball over the net, we want to say the best thing we can to make ourselves look good. But that actually puts the other people at a disadvantage. I'd rather people reframe Small talk is like that game hacky sack, you know, where you have that beanbag ball, and you kick it back and forth. And the goal is to keep it just off the ground. If you see small talk that way, you remind yourself that your job is to set the other person up to share something good that they can then set you up to share something else back. It's about being interested in curious not about being interesting. And once you make that mindset shift, you realise all you have to do is approach with questions, commenting on things in the environment, and you can get a good conversation going. Yeah.

Chris 16:24

And I use my example in sales, right? When we when we spoke about it, because you saw the most effective high performing salespeople on the floor 80% of the time, the actual client was speaking, and they were asking questions and delving deep down. Whereas if you're just talking, trying to impress, and share, here's all our features and benefits. Here's all the amazing things about our product, it definitely transfers to say I was the same way. I'm sure it'd be the same for dating, if you just sat there talking, talking at someone about all of the great things about yourself for a date, I don't think is gonna go well. No,

Matt 17:00

not at all. I think I think the people who are curious and good listeners are the people that make progress in sales, and probably relationships.

Chris 17:08

If you find yourself in one of those spontaneous situations, you can't plan for it to some extent by definition. Yeah. So how do you? Are you thinking about these these tools and methods in the moment? Like, how do you teach people to utilise it in the mind, right?

Matt 17:25

So one of the foundational principles in the book is counterintuitive, which is that through practice, that repetition we talked about, you can actually prepare for some of these spontaneous situations. So the first thing we need to do is we need to realise that we don't have to respond immediately, we feel this intense pressure to respond right away. We can take a beat, we can take a breath, I might say, Let me think about that for a moment. Or maybe I ask a follow up question to clarify, or I paraphrase, there are things we can do to give us a fraction of a second, to remind ourselves of the prep preparation and practice we've done in advance. So it's in that moment that we can actually adjust and adapt, think of an athlete, an athlete does lots of drills, they do lots of practice. So when they get into the game, they can respond agilely in the moment, and most athletes will take a breath before they do something when a batter gets into the box, you see them take a deep breath, when a basketball player goes to do a free throw you see them take that one moment before they act spontaneously. So it's about drilling and practice. It's following the methodology. But it's also about giving yourself just a fraction of a second to adjust and adapt.

Chris 18:33

I love that that's that's something that always impresses me. Whenever I'm interviewing someone, for example, when they say, give me a minute to think about that, to your point, I'm immediately impressed the fact that they are actually being taking the time because they want you to give me a great answer. And they're not rushing, just to say, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is a really important skill. And as you said, you can also use a tactic of asking the question in backtick, delaying it to give yourself a bit more time. What do you mean by that? You know, just asked another question. I have a question. Oh, this is what I mean. And then you're giving yourself a couple of minutes to formulate an answer, right? What would you say? Is all of the research that you've done? What What would you say is the common misconceptions people have about communication? Well,

Matt 19:17

one is that we can't get better at it. And and the reality is that we can many people think I'm an introvert or I'm shy, or I had a bad experience. And I'm doomed to this life of not being able to communicate well, which is not true. All of us can get better. As somebody who has been teaching and writing and coaching. For decades, I've seen great success, you can get better. That's probably the fundamental problem or issue that people have. And then the next is that again, as we talked about, people start from the wrong place. They start by thinking about what's important for them rather than what's important for the audience. And if we can just remind ourselves that we are in service of our audience. And then the third thing is we suffer from the curse of knowledge and the curse of passion. We know too much and care too much about the topics we talk about, which leads us to use language that's too complex, or jargon or acronyms, or we make assumptions. So it's really about empathy, we have to understand where the other person is at relative to our concepts, and adjust and adapt to make our content accessible to them. So those are the three biggest challenges and mistakes I see people make in their communication. I

Chris 20:25

think everyone can relate to one of those, what are some of the sort of techniques that you give to people to prepare, for example, if they're gonna go out and do a Keynote or speak in front of a group, the first thing that comes to mind when I thought about that was the sort of the picture of Tony Robbins on his little trampoline, we ever seen that. Before he goes out and does any speaking is a little trampoline, he jumps up and down on gets his heart rate, and he goes out into stage. That's, that may be an extreme one. But what are some of the things that we can do? Prepare just before we got on stage, for example, and speak to a group,

Matt 20:57

first we have to meet, manage the anxiety that we might be feeling the jitters and what Tony Robbins is doing by bouncing up and down, he's taking that energy, and he's directing it into something that's fun, and something he's excited about. And actors do the same thing, they shake their body out, you can do it the opposite way and calm yourself down by taking some deep belly breaths, reminding yourself, you're in service of your audience. So there are things you can do to manage those jitters, I like to remind myself right before I speak, that I am in service of my audience, it's not about me, it's about them, I will literally say I have value to bring doesn't mean I'm an expert, or things are gonna go great. It just means it's about them, not me. And then I remind myself of the structure that I have, I believe firmly that we have to structure our content to be effective. That means it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's not just a list. It's a logical idea. So structure provides a roadmap, and it's not word for word, what you're saying it's just a general direction. So I remind myself, here's the roadmap I'm taking for this particular talk. And if I do those three things, it helps me connect to my audience. It helps me be excited and not nervous. And it gives me the energy and focus that I need. Now, I

Chris 22:08

love that is that what you mean, when you speak about perfecting presence?

Matt 22:12

Absolutely. So being present in the moment is what allows you to have a confident presence. So reminding yourself, I am here now for these people, we can very easily distract ourselves with everything that comes next or the goal we're trying to achieve. But all of that is in the future. And we all know when somebody's not present with us. So really work to be present, really focus on listening for the bottom line of what the person is saying, if you're in conversation, or really focus on what you're seeing, if you're giving a big presentation. These are ways to get present oriented, and people will feel it and you'll enjoy it more because you're actually having the experience rather than being partially somewhere else mentally, I love

Chris 22:53

it on to switch gears for a second and talk about technology, just throwing a curveball into the conversation. There's been so much disruption in communication with the advent of AI, large language models, chat, DBT, etc. How do you see generative AI helping, communication? And also, are there any concerns that you have? So the answer

Matt 23:17

is yes, yes. Yes, very much. So. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Obviously, I teach at Stanford, I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley AI is omnipresent, just like it is everywhere. So when AI first came out, for the podcast, I do, I was like, we have to do an episode on it. And we were thinking, who should we interview and we just decided to interview AI itself. So we interviewed Chet GPT. And we asked at these very questions, how are you going to be able to help and bolster communication? And I agree with the answers that we're going to be able to get much more information more quickly, will help to be more clear and concise, assuming that the information we get back is truthful and accurate. That's an issue still, and I use it daily in my in my classes. So for example, to help with spontaneous speaking. Imagine, Chris, you have a job interview, go to generative AI, say, give me five questions for a job doing this at this company. And it'll spit out five questions, and you can practice immediately answering them, so you can use it as a tool for practice and repetition. For my non native speakers, it's a lovely tool to help them see how things could be said differently. I use lots of examples in cases and when I teach, I used to have three or four now I have eight or 12 Because generative AI helps me craft them more quickly. So I clearly see benefits. I am worried though that people will become more reliant on it rather than the tools that we use ourselves. And I've come to the conclusion that at least currently the fundamental distinction between the type of communication AI does and the type of communication we do boils down to what we talked about earlier connection. Human beings have the ability to empathise and connect in a way that AI can't and that's what makes it special and that's what makes it different. So AI AI is a tool that can help us be more clear, more concise, perhaps more detailed, but it's not going to replace that connection that we have at an interpersonal level. I couldn't

Chris 25:11

agree more of everything you just said it. Also, the use cases have changed as well, right? I'm seeing companies where you can practice your communication with an AI avatar, as in you can have hard conversations and they have different scenarios, right? That they put you in wherever it's being given feedback as a manager, or wherever it's dealing with a conflict. And now you've got this AI that you can kind of go back and practice with it's feels more real than a than you. Yeah, that makes sense.

Matt 25:39

No, it actually it gives you reps. And I think it's great. It's something really interesting, I learned I had a guest on my podcast, and they are looking at how do you get the best out of AI in terms of your interactions, many of us interact with AI from the mindset or the analogy of a search engine. So it's about asking one question, getting one answer. And what they found that in terms of being more productive, more creative, in terms of solving problems, is actually to treat AI as a conversational partner. So when you actually have conversations with it, you get better results, rather than just asking a question and taking those results. So the ability to communicate, actually, is what's helping us to leverage the benefits of AI. And I find that really interesting that we're worried about what it's going to do to our communication, yet what makes us most effective with it is our communication. So I find that really fascinating on a meta sort of analytical, and

Chris 26:35

I love that I think the more I'm using it now, the more I'm moving towards what you're describing, for example, I will ask it often, I have this idea or I'm thinking about doing this, but what do you think there's only gives

Matt 26:46

you an answer back, you then come back and say, Yeah, that's what I was thinking about telling me. Yeah. Right. And it becomes a conversation. And what these folks I interviewed told me, which I think is really fascinating is we should not be using AI on laptops and desktops, we should be using it on our phone. Because when we sit in front of a computer, we go into that mindset of this is like a search engine, but on our phone, we're used to having conversation. It just Yeah, so just the modality that we interact with affects the way in which we interact with AI. And I find that fascinating to me, that's a quick hack. It reminds me I have to be conversational, because I'm doing it on my phone.

Chris 27:19

What we're building now and I'll send you some login details, which is really cool is within our HR copilot Atlas. We it's now been able to reply both in audio, video and even documents. So if you ask a question, it will give you the normal chatty witty reply, or be trained on our model and our contents, obviously, it's tailored, but it will then take you to the exact second in a podcast where a leader says this is how I am solving this, or an exact line in a document that gives you an answer. There's also changing the way we interact with video and audio content. So rather than spending hours reading a white paper, or hours listening to a an online Summit, you can use AI now to go to the exact moment in time to get an instant answer to any question. And I think that's also going to change how we communicate. And this is fascinating to be able to have I love

Matt 28:12

what you're building, I think that's so useful. The one of the biggest advantages from my perspective of AI is efficiency. And what you're talking about is very, very efficiency efficient. It's getting me what I need when I need it, which should hopefully free me up to do more connecting, and more of the things that we as humans are really good at. So I like that That's great. I would love to learn more. And I'd love to use it. That's

Chris 28:35

one of the times just for most leaders, especially HR leaders, right, they want to kind of replace that time to focus on more value, add strategic conversations or tasks, and kind of remove sort of the admin, or the time burden to know I speaking to an HR leader recently that said, in order for me to do that, Chris, I have to call up the company that we're paying hundreds of 1000s of pounds a year for research Veda and send someone to go and find that information, then come back to me, then send it to me, and then I have to read it all. In order to find the answer, and it just made me think wow, like the fact that you can ask a question now and just immediately get the answer, and then go and execute on that. That itself is just fascinating. I wish I had that in my younger days in my career. Yeah.

Matt 29:20

I think about kids today and the advantages they'll have because of that now we have to be concerned that we don't lose the ability to connect and communicate and we have to still verify the veracity of what it is that's coming out of it. But absolutely, I think it's going to expedite a lot of things. Before

Chris 29:39

I let you go, what would be sort of one parting takeaway that you want to leave with the audience? And then and then we'll say goodbye.

Matt 29:47

To me, the most important thing is realising that communication is critical to your success, and we can take steps to improve our communication and those steps are well worth it. And they aren't big giant leaps there. have small baby steps and those steps will help you be more effective in your communication more confident and concise and compelling. And those are what will make a difference in your personal life and your professional life.

Chris 30:11

Amazing and Western expats when he was to grab a copy of the book,

Matt 30:14

so the book is available anywhere you get books, it's it's a you can listen to it, you can find it, Amazon's a great place to start. You can learn lots about me and get access to the book through my site, Matt abrahams.com. I do a lot on LinkedIn and I invite your listeners to listen to think fast talk smart, the podcasts amazing.

Chris 30:31

And I'm assuming available on all everywhere podcasts exist. You bet amazing. Is it weekly just like us it is we

Matt 30:40

release every Tuesday. In fact, we just have an episode come out this morning.

Chris 30:44

Nice. And I'll also say for our listeners, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn. I post some great content in there as well. And that's mainly where most of our audience live. So definitely connect with Matt there all of the links that to the book and the website and everything will all be in the description wherever wherever you're listening or watching right now. But apart from them, I really appreciate your time and I look forward to chatting again soon. Chris Thank

Matt 31:03

you This has been a true pleasure.