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Stop Saying Um

The Art of Manliness

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  • Delivery-Content Cycle
    • Focus on delivery to improve speaking, thinking, and presence.
    • Better delivery unlocks a virtuous cycle, improving content and thinking. Transcript: Michael Chad Hoeppner What I’m always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life, which is the following drill, hold up your hands as though you’re looking through some imaginary binoculars. If you hold your hands up, like you’re looking through binoculars, you will see that your left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand, like the outer half of a capital D. So So your left hand stands for content. That’s the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer half of a capital D and that stands for delivery. And that’s everything besides the words. Now, if you put your hands together, you’ll see that they create this reinforcing loop. And what many people don’t know, and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the contexts You just mentioned, including first dates, not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example, of course, is if you build the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in and therefore have the fuel to have vocal variety in your voice And also avoid saying um because in that silence you can’t say um. Not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority, but in that gap, you’re giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen. So this is something that people do not understand about delivery and they ignore it at their peril. And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it. Yeah. (Time 0:02:24)
  • Focus Outward
    • Effective communication comes from focusing on the other person, not on oneself.
    • External tools like eye contact are outputs of genuine connection. Transcript: Michael Chad Hoeppner Also get trapped where we think delivery is a bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets taught typically in a really reductive way. Give you an example we get told to make eye contact for eight to twelve seconds why what if your thought is longer than eight seconds or longer than 12 seconds even or shorter than eight Seconds i should say any of those things and we get this coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us. But that’s an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication are eye contact and gestural ease and freedom and posture and enunciation. They are outputs. They come from focusing on the other person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you’ve discovered when you’re kind of in that flow state is exactly right. (Time 0:04:19)
  • Avoid Thought Suppression
    • Avoid thought suppression; “don’ts” make you fixate on the negative.
    • Replace vague instructions like “slow down” with physical actions. Transcript: Brett McKay Speaking of common advice that people get when they think about delivery, a lot of it’s particularly bad. It’s not very helpful. Like you said, you gave the example of the one just then, but also there’s other advice about, well, just don’t say, um, or be more confident or don’t do this. And a lot of it’s just about thought suppression. It’s about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery? Michael Chad Hoeppner Yeah. Well, let’s break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery is not just not helpful. It’s usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it’s utterly unactionable. And then they get a suggestion, which is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. And I’ll walk you through this step by step. Let’s do one that’s very common, which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now, the typical advice they get, first of all, is thought suppression, which is don’t rush. Okay, well, as soon as you hear a don’t, the first thing your brain is obligated to do is to fixate on whatever comes after the don’t. I titled this book, Don’t Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up because everyone wants to avoid saying um, but the challenge is that’s the very worst instruction you Can give yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it’s a bit of a trick to get the reader picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it. Thought suppression is the pink elephant trick, essentially. It’s built off distinction. When you give yourself a don’t, you’re obligating your brain to fixate on the don’t versus everything else in the known universe. So if someone says to you, don’t rush, you are obligated to think about rushing and also even more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first. Then what comes second? General feedback. And the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time? Every word? In between words? In the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague. And then the third thing is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like remember to breathe. But then you’re giving the person you’re coaching or suggesting this to something else they have to remember in their jam-packed brains when in fact breathing is a totally physical Thing so these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong and really the problem is this is that people who are already struggling then tend to blame themselves And they think oh god i’m such a failure because I couldn’t implement all this really smart coaching or advice I got. And it wasn’t smart coaching. It wasn’t smart advice. And it’s not even their fault that they were not able to do it. (Time 0:05:14)
  • Lego Exercise
    • Practice pausing and structuring thoughts with the Lego exercise.
    • Pick up a Lego, speak one idea, place it down, repeat, clicking blocks together. Transcript: Brett McKay So why are you having people play with Legos while they’re public speaking? Sure. The Legos are a practice exercise. Michael Chad Hoeppner And the reason I suggest people do it is because it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things like pause, like tolerate silence, like be concise, like structure their ideas, Like remove filler. And the way it works is this. You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of Lego blocks, but you don’t start just speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first Lego block before you begin speaking. And then you share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this like the first sentence of your content. And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to the next thing, no. In silence, you place down that Lego block and you live through that silence. Pick up the next Lego block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have or the second sentence. Same thing at the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the Lego block, but this time you click it in place with the previous. So that clicking action even takes a moment to complete. So it enforces some silence. Then you pick up the third one, still being silent. Once you have it in the air then you can say your idea out loud third thought blah blah blah blah blah blah blah whatever it is at the end of that idea in silence you click the lego block in Place and you keep doing this and then you’ll probably run out of legos maybe you use six or eight or ten or whatever it might be and if you have more that you want to say you simply unstack Them and continue. But what you’ll probably find when you try this exercise is that you can actually complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four Sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner. And it’s a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we talked about. Brett McKay So if you have a problem with rambling, for example, this is a great drill to do to help you not ramble anymore. And I have this problem. Sometimes I’ll start a thought and I’ll start speaking it. And then I’m like, oh yeah, there’s another thought I want to get to. And I just go into that and it just sounds like a mess. What’s interesting about this drill is not only is it going gonna help improve your delivery, you’re not gonna sound like you’re rambling and jumping from thought to thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content because you actually have to stop and think about what you’re gonna say before you click on the next Lego. (Time 0:12:21)
  • Finger Walking
    • Practice “finger walking” to choose words precisely and reduce filler.
    • Walk your fingers across a surface for each thought, pausing if you use filler words. Transcript: Brett McKay And it actually doesn’t make sense. Like someone will say, yeah, they’re sort of pregnant. It’s like, okay, well, you can’t be sort of pregnant. You’re either pregnant or not. So this goes to the title of your book. Don’t say, um, I know a lot of people when they’re thinking about delivery, they want to be better about not saying, um, or like, so what can people start doing? What are some drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words? Yeah. Michael Chad Hoeppner So the title of the book is Don’t Say Um, It’s a Trick. The antidote to that is a chapter on linguistic precision. Now by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said, your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called finger walking, and I’ll talk you through it right now, and then also talk about what filler is and how To think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger of either hand, and you, though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian you walk your fingers across the table or desk in Front of you walk your ideas one thought at a time so when you’ve completed a thought bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again and what you’re trying to Do here is you don’t have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by word. You’re using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table. If you feel yourself say an um or a like or a kinda or a sorta or have another non-fluency of some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you’ve regained your focus and then you continue. Now, if you say an um, it’s not a problem with your brain. It’s not a problem with your mouth even. It’s a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it’s super versatile. You can do this on remote calls. No one knows you’re doing it. I mean, you and I could be doing it right now, every single word if we wanted to. I’m not right now, but I certainly could because this is audio only. And it helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I’ll give you another example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid, no one says, it’s kind of sort of like a bus coming. Because in that moment, we’re totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment, we choose words. This exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words yeah (Time 0:18:33)
  • Enunciation Slows Speech
    • Improve enunciation to slow down speech and add impact.
    • Clearly pronouncing multi-syllabic words requires time, naturally reducing pace. Transcript: Brett McKay And now back to the show. All right. So another delivery issue I have, I’m going to use this as some private, this podcast has some private coaching, but another delivery issue that I’ve been battling for a while is enunciation And speaking too fast. Sometimes I’m the micromachine guy. Remember the micromachine guy on the advertisements? Michael Chad Hoeppner You’re talking my generational language right now. So yes, I do. Brett McKay Yes. You talk about how improving your enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some drills for that? Michael Chad Hoeppner Yeah. Well, you don’t have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of technical jargon or some multi-syllabic phrase. Now, notice that in order to enunciate that multi-syllabic phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. Silly example, actually. Only silly because it’s a single word. If I don’t give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could sound like I’m saying tied or tight or type, as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that’s just a single syllable word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing, time. But what about a multisyllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with multisyllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. (Time 0:29:16)
  • Impediment Drill
    • Use an impediment (cork, pen, etc.) to practice enunciation.
    • Speaking around it improves clarity and slows down your speech. Transcript: Michael Chad Hoeppner If you were thinking of a sport, again, in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something, it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your enunciation actually can slow you down. This is profoundly important to people because part of why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean words often sound like the thing that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if you don’t enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these. So the question becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the side benefit of slowing you down, if you are a very, very rapid speaker, How do you use or how do you practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you’re going to read is things that i’ve invented so lots and lots of drills that i’ve developed working with professionals but the next one that i’m Going to tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me i can take no credit for it i will give a shout out to andrew wade he was a voice and speech teacher i worked with at the guthrie theater In minneapolis but he’s former head of the voice and speech at the royal shakespeare company in london but even he doesn’t get the credit because he learned it from someone who learned It from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that. So if that does not give it some historical cred and you want to try it, I don’t know what will. Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. End of a toothbrush works, end of a pen, your pinky finger. A slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give. So you have a little cushion there, but people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking. Okay. But you put the impediment in between your teeth, just over to the side. So not right in front where it might block your tip of tongue sounds like T and D and N and L, T, D, N, L. Put it just to the side. And then you practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally clear, even with that impediment. And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged. And of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak. (Time 0:30:47)
  • Vocal Variety Is Natural
    • You already know vocal variety; it’s natural for conveying meaning and emotion.
    • Monotone voices lack novelty, causing disengagement. Transcript: Brett McKay We’ve got stuff to do. I love this. Let’s talk about vocal variety. That’s another thing people often think about when they’re presenting. It’s like, am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety? How should people think about vocal variety in their public speaking? Or should they not think too much about it? Michael Chad Hoeppner They should think about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget it for the rest of their lives. And here’s a cool reason why. You know it, you know how to do it and you know it in your bones because humans use vocal variety for some really important things like communicating the meaning of what they’re saying Like communicating the emotion of what they’re saying like framing things with some context or orientation and also crucially to surprise each other we use vocal variety to keep people Engaged Monotone voices actually don’t use any novelty. When there’s no novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won’t change, you can ignore it forever because it’s no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other. How do you improve it then? So here’s a quick system and then you can forget it. Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn’t invent that at all, but I did invent this naming system. You’re about to learn to make it alliterative and therefore hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high and low. Pause is silence and varied lengths of silence. Power is volume. So that’s loud and soft, loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That’s our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend with a really nasal voice, what’s happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that, of course. What we’re aiming for here is more vocal variety, for the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when they’re nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind. Or to your point, the example of being on a date even, when we’re under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety and we should instead be trying to expand it. For the most part, you can go too far and we could talk about that if you want to, but that’s very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to expand it. And the cool thing they’re very interlocked. So you honestly can expand any one of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a couple of exercises to do that if you want to know. Yeah. What are some exercises that people can start doing today to improve their vocal variety? Yeah. Here’s a fun one. It’s called silent storytelling. (Time 0:35:54)
  • Silent Storytelling
    • Practice “silent storytelling” to improve vocal variety.
    • Exaggerate facial expressions and gestures while lip-syncing to expand physical expression. Transcript: Michael Chad Hoeppner I want you to talk, but you don’t get to use any sound. So you have to basically mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot, lots of facial expressions to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hands to gesture with freedom and ease because you don’t have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing a little bit. You’re not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You’re not acting things out per se. You’re just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication because you don’t get to use sound. So you’re lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for a few minutes and then put sound back into the equation, but you’re not allowed to contract everything. Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big. Your facial expressions, just as big. Your gestural ease and freedom, just as expanded. What happens, like magic, is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I’ll teach you a phrase I learned from Ralph Zito who taught at the Juilliard school when I trained with him. And the phrase is, your voice is your body. And I’ll say it differently. I’m going to pound my chest for a second. You can hear this. Your voice is your body. And I’ll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling exercise does that. I love that. That’s a great one. Okay. So (Time 0:39:08)
  • Eye Contact as Evaluation
    • Eye contact isn’t a possession; it’s an active evaluation of message reception.
    • Look at individuals to gauge their nonverbal cues and adjust accordingly. Transcript: Brett McKay We’ve talked about things we can do to improve our delivery with our voice, enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let’s talk about eye contact. I know a lot of people when they’re speaking in front of a group or a large audience, they might be thinking, okay, where am I supposed to look? Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we’re speaking to a group? And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you’re speaking to a whole bunch of people? Michael Chad Hoeppner It’s essential to think about it because the way we talk about eye contact, it’s a misnomer. I mean, in fact, I don’t even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like it’s something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it’s a possession or a trait even, but it’s not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is reaching your audience or not. That’s why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn’t speak English understand something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it’s crucial when you’re talking to large groups as well. And this is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is, again, the reductive. Make eye contact for 8 to 12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people. They say, well, that’s about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No. Look at individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your message is resonating and look at different people around the room. Now, if it’s a huge audience, you don’t have to look at every single person. If it’s an audience of thousands, you will never be able to look at everybody but if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience what happens because of how we’re put together As communication instruments your communication will improve because of that eye contact it will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to reach that person you’re going To gesture you’re going to enunciate more, you’re going to use vocal variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people, try to elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way, you may not get that. That’s okay. Even in the act of trying, you’ll still get some success. And then throw out all the garbage 8 to 12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room, look at people’s foreheads so you don’t get distracted, scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise at all. (Time 0:40:40)
  • Liberate Your Gestures
    • Liberate your hands to gesture naturally by practicing silent storytelling and ball throwing.
    • Focus on telling a story with your hands instead of suppressing movement. Transcript: Brett McKay Let’s talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about when they’re public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega N where they’re like, I don’t know what to do with my hands. So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures when you’re speaking? Michael Chad Hoeppner Yeah. Here’s the hilarious thing, folks. There’s a good reason that you’re confused about that because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, ten don’ts about gestures. It’s like, don’t point at your audience. Don’t make distracting hand gestures. Don’t cross your arms. Don’t fidget your fingers. Don’t keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t jangle the coins in your pockets. Don’t put your hands behind your back. That looks like you’re hiding something. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like, well, okay, what the heck should I do with them? And all those don’ts back to the idea of thought suppression and the title of the book, of course, just makes people chronically self-focused, which is why you end up with these limbs Hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you’re focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. For most people, that means moving your hands more than you might think. I am not a fan of the don’t make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said, but one of the most brutal is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, They tend to constrain everything else too. So their vocal variety vanishes, their face becomes totally stoic and still. Oftentimes their enunciation even becomes less dynamic and they just look like a more boring version of themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to do what they want to do, to speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I’m not saying make just like general hand-waving repetitive motions. I’ll give you a funny example. I one time was involved somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures like keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay. So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again. Now, the idea, of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good, but the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn’t actually unlock how people Speak in real life. So instead, what I would suggest is there’s two exercises in the book that I list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again, how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness and yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you’re talking about so that an audience watching with no sound could Understand your message. And what happens, of course, is your hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you’ve done that a bit, let it go. Put sound back into your speech and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized. So that’s one. This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall, like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking, whatever content you want to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now this time, try to throw the ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the rebound. And then talk while you do this. Now, it’s going to be difficult because your brain’s doing two things, catching the ball and talking. So it’ll take some coordination to get it down. But then what you’re going to realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy. And then hold the ball in your hand, don’t throw it anymore and continue to speak, but allow your hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their gestures way too much. The rare overtalkers with their hands, it’s not that you’re overtalking, it’s that you’re telling the same darn story over and over again. They’re just doing the same thing. So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of don’t make distracting hand gestures or don’t talk with your hands, instead challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story. And those would be some tools for gestures. I (Time 0:43:23)
  • Navigate Nerves
    • Navigate nerves by focusing on physical actions, not fighting them.
    • Ground your feet, focus on enunciation, or breathe deeply. Transcript: Brett McKay Love that. So we’ve talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there’s a change you’ll still get nervous when you’re speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when they do arise when they’re in a public speaking situation, or even it could be a first date situation. Michael Chad Hoeppner Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point, if you go to the book’s website, don’tsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free. And I call that Navigating Nerves because that should be the goal, not stopping, not preventing, not battling, navigating. And we’re going to keep that chapter free because whether or not people buy this book, I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self-defeating cycle for a long, Long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it navigating nerves because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it’s back to this idea of thought suppression. So if you’re telling yourself, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, stop being nervous, or even putting some self-judgment on there, like, why are you always nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don’t be nervous. Stop being nervous. You can hear the voice. All you’re doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up your feelings of failure about that. So step number one, you’re going to be nervous and you might in fact be nervous for the rest of your life and they might even get worse. Why? Because you’re going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life. Your career and your life and your goals and everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons they’re learning on the Art of Manliness podcast, you’re going to get better and better, which means you’ll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more nerve-wracking to be at that new height. That’s good. It means that you care. It means that you’re invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good things. So stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you’ve reset them, your goal is not to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary, like just imagine your audience in their underwear, because now your brain has To multitask. Naked people, and what am I trying to say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Message. Naked people. Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on that gives you a positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip of tongue sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things, but put your focus on something physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get at putting your attention 100% on that thing, what happens is the nerves begin to fade away. But not because you fought them, but because you’ve put your focus elsewhere and somewhere more productive. (Time 0:47:48)