Presence Over Perfection

(gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi. Welcome back. I'm Matt Abrahams, your guest host for the week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace." I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I'm the author of "Think Faster, Talk Smarter," and the popular podcast "Think Fast, Talk Smart." I've spent my career helping people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication, whether it's giving a presentation, making small talks, speaking up in a meeting, or asking for a raise. We're closing out this week of mindful communication by talking about presence. Presence is what allows us to manage our nerves, listen deeply, craft clear messages, and engage authentically. But it's also what many of us struggle with. It's how we use our body and our voice to really emphasize what it is we're saying. Many of us focus so extensively on our content, what we're saying, we want it to land, we want it to be confident, we want it to really help our audience, that we forget to focus on how we are delivering it. We are in our heads so much that we don't think about what people see. That's our body. What people hear, our voices. So what ends up happening is people's presence is degraded by their over-focus on their content. Now, I am certainly not saying that we should not focus on our content. We absolutely should, but we also need to make sure that we spend time practicing and reflecting on how we show up. I have helped many people with their physical presence in lots of different ways. What comes to mind right away is I was working with someone who was relatively new to their management position. They had been a great individual contributor, and they were promoted into a new role where they really needed to exert confidence and influence. So we got rid of the filler words, the ums, the uhs, the likes, and I means, by working on their breathing. They would breathe very shallow as they spoke. As they'd get excited or nervous, they would breathe in their upper chest. And when you do that, there are times where when you're done speaking, you still have air in your chest, and what often happens is, as part of the exhale to get that air out before you speak again, you'll say a filler word. Try it at home. Try saying the word "um" while exhaling. It's very easy. Now, try saying the word "um" while inhaling. Now, that's impossible. So what we trained and worked on with this person was to end the sentences fully out of breath so that they couldn't say um and they couldn't say anything. They needed to take an inhalation, which builds in a pause, which slowed them down and got rid of those filler words. So there are things that you can do to reduce your filler words. Now, this person also looked down when they were speaking, so by...