Matt Abrahams on How to Think Faster and Talk Smarter EP 425

If you often find yourself overwhelmed by your task list and obligations, Organize Tomorrow Today can help. With sports and travel writer Matthew Rudy, authors Jason Selk and Tom Bartow teach you how to increase your productivity, maximize your time, and set yourself on the path to success. Combining backgrounds in athletics, psychology, and finance, Selk and Bartow have worked for decades as advisors and coaches in both the sports and business worlds. Their programs have helped countless athletes and business professionals improve their job performance and become some of the most successful members of their fields.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to prioritize and prepare for your tasks every day. We’ll also discuss how you can improve your life through positive habits, evaluate your daily progress, and communicate effectively with yourself and others. In our commentary, we’ll touch on other authors’ advice for improving your productivity and examine some of the science behind Selk, Bartow, and Rudy’s strategies.

Do you want to improve your communication skills and positively affect others’ actions? Do you want to become a more persuasive presenter? If so, you may benefit from the communication strategies René Rodriguez offers in Amplify Your Influence. Rodriguez explores numerous ways you can connect with people, help them reach their goals, and help them change their behavior for the better. He argues that we’re all capable of guiding and shaping others’ actions, as long as we have the right tools.

In this guide, we’ll cover Rodriguez’s basics of persuasion, including how to use four of Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals to connect with any audience and how to apply the author’s three essential steps for effective communication. Then, we’ll dive deeper into Rodriguez’s strategies for one type of communication: presenting successfully. In our commentary, we’ll touch on communication strategies from other voices in the field and further explore ways you can apply the author’s advice to your everyday communication.

Avoiding tasks like public speaking because they’re intimidating limits your professional growth. Try a few simple steps to overcome your fear.

Do you avoid small talk because you find it intimidating or lacking in value? If so, The Fine Art of Small Talk is your ticket to conversational success. According to Debra Fine, small talk is a skill well worth developing because our careers, romantic prospects, and social lives depend on connecting with other people. Indeed, it’s difficult to succeed socially without small talk because it establishes the emotional tone of our interactions and helps us gauge how deeply we’d like to connect with each other.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through Fine’s small talk tips and her ideal conversational process step by step—from first introduction to exiting the conversation—teaching you everything you need to appear confident and engaging in any context. We’ll also compare Fine’s ideas to those of other communications experts—for instance, Dale Carnegie—and weave in psychological research that sheds light on the mechanics of communication. Learn how to break the ice with strangers, keep a conversation going, and avoid the most common conversational pitfalls—in a way anyone can follow.

Communicating effectively with others is a crucial skill—it’s how we build and maintain relationships, solve problems, and accomplish tasks. However, James Williams explains that good communication skills don’t come naturally—instead, they’re built up over time through intentional practice. In Communication Skills Training, Williams outlines the core abilities of effective communication and how to develop them so you can communicate well, build your charisma, and win people over.

In this guide, we’ve broken Williams’s advice down into two main sections. In Part 1, we’ll explore four core abilities of effective communication—active listening, establishing connections, controlling emotions, and being accurate and clear. We’ll outline why they’re important and how to develop them. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to communicate effectively in three scenarios—handling misunderstandings, navigating feedback discussions, and giving public presentations.

Throughout the guide, we’ll supplement Williams’s recommendations with advice from other communication books like Thanks For the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

Most people communicate from their own perspective, but great communication comes from understanding and connecting with other people. Written by communication expert Jay Sullivan, Simply Said is a blueprint for effective business communication. Top-notch communication skills are essential to success in any professional field—after all, you can only get clients, colleagues, and audiences to buy into your ideas if you’re able to communicate them clearly.

Sullivan argues that you can deliver a clear and compelling message by focusing on what others hope to get from the exchange and communicating in a way that serves them.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Sullivan’s advice on how to:

• Create and deliver memorable presentations
• Write documents and emails that people will actually read
• Navigate communication in specific business scenarios

Our guide will compare Sullivan’s ideas to insights from other communication experts and suggest how to adapt communication to other cultures.

Imagine you have a product or service that can change people’s lives—one that can help them reach their most ambitious goals financially or personally. If you don’t know how to effectively market it, your idea won’t make a difference in anyone’s life. Russell Brunson, who made his name selling online marketing tools and advising startups on building a brand, aims to solve this problem with Expert Secrets, a how-to guide for creating excitement for your idea that turns potential customers into lifelong buyers.

In this guide, we’ll give an overview of the main “secrets” Brunson discusses, focusing on how you can tap into your audience’s emotions to create loyal customers. Along the way, we’ll examine the human instincts that drive purchasing decisions and how other sales experts advise you to close a sale.

Most people communicate from their own perspective, but great communication comes from understanding and connecting with other people. Written by communication expert Jay Sullivan, Simply Said is a blueprint for effective business communication. Top-notch communication skills are essential to success in any professional field—after all, you can only get clients, colleagues, and audiences to buy into your ideas if you’re able to communicate them clearly.

Sullivan argues that you can deliver a clear and compelling message by focusing on what others hope to get from the exchange and communicating in a way that serves them.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Sullivan’s advice on how to:

• Create and deliver memorable presentations
• Write documents and emails that people will actually read
• Navigate communication in specific business scenarios

Our guide will compare Sullivan’s ideas to insights from other communication experts and suggest how to adapt communication to other cultures.

Does the thought of speaking in front of an audience make you anxious? You’re not alone: Many people say they fear public speaking even more than death. But public speaking is also one of the most important and widely applicable skills in life, and the good news is, anyone can master it. By learning proven skills and techniques, you can become an effective communicator and confidently deliver your message to an audience.

In Shortform’s Master Guide to public speaking, we’ve compiled leading experts’ insights on how to prepare and deliver your speech. Whether you want to persuade, inform, entertain, or motivate your audience, this guide will walk you through the process of crafting and delivering a powerful speech that captures your audience’s interest.

A great speech has the power to inspire and change the world, but most people believe that public speaking is an innate talent. As curator for TED since 2002, Chris Anderson knows better—he has seen hundreds of speeches succeed and fail, and he has figured out the secret formula. Published in 2016, TED Talks is a nuts-and-bolts guide to public speaking that takes you from the initial idea to your final bow.

In this guide, we go through Anderson’s advice piece by piece and explain what works in public speaking and what doesn’t. From scripting to wardrobe, and everything in between, we compare his advice to that of other public speaking experts and supplement his ideas with actionable methods.

Being a strong public speaker is one of the most powerful talents you can possess. Effective speakers can captivate their audience with new ideas and revolutionary concepts, inspire people to try new things, and even influence people’s opinions. According to communications coach Carmine Gallo, the key to becoming a good public speaker is applying nine key principles, including speaking with passion, incorporating a shocking moment, and presenting something new to your audience. Gallo formulated these principles after watching hundreds of successful TED talks.

In Talk Like TED, learn how long your speeches and presentations should be; how to use humor to make your audience like you; and how one TED speaker successfully used a real human brain as a prop.

Do you avoid small talk because you find it intimidating or lacking in value? If so, The Fine Art of Small Talk is your ticket to conversational success. According to Debra Fine, small talk is a skill well worth developing because our careers, romantic prospects, and social lives depend on connecting with other people. Indeed, it’s difficult to succeed socially without small talk because it establishes the emotional tone of our interactions and helps us gauge how deeply we’d like to connect with each other.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through Fine’s small talk tips and her ideal conversational process step by step—from first introduction to exiting the conversation—teaching you everything you need to appear confident and engaging in any context. We’ll also compare Fine’s ideas to those of other communications experts—for instance, Dale Carnegie—and weave in psychological research that sheds light on the mechanics of communication. Learn how to break the ice with strangers, keep a conversation going, and avoid the most common conversational pitfalls—in a way anyone can follow.