What, So What, Now What

(air whooshes) (computer mouse clicks) (ethereal music) Headspace Studios. Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Abrahams, your guest host for the week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace." So far, we've talked about managing anxiety and becoming more confident and the power of listening. Today, I wanna focus on how we can bring clarity to what we say through messaging and frameworks. When we're put on the spot, it's easy to ramble and lose track of our ideas. We often take our audience on a journey of our discovery of what it is we want to say as we're saying it, but with simple structures and frameworks, like "What?" "So what?" "Now what?" we can guide our listeners and make our messages stick. When it comes to communicating, it can be quite challenging to take all the thoughts you have, as well as all the input from the things you're seeing and hearing, and really put together a coherent argument. Many of us in these situations just list and itemize information. When you see presentations, people just have a ton of bullet points. Bullets kill. We're just not good at remembering lists and itemizations. Think about this. When you go to the grocery store, how many items do you need to buy before you write it down so you don't forget? Well, if you're like me, it's three. We're not good at remembering those things. So, to help ourselves, we need to rely on structure: a logical connection of ideas. We all know structure. If you've ever seen a television advertisement, you've seen a structure. It's problem, solution, benefit. There's some issue, challenge in the world? The company's product or service makes that better, fixes it, and then you benefit in some way. I don't care if you're selling cars, medicines, alcohol. Most ads follow that structure. When I first started teaching, one of the big challenges I had was to synthesize all of the material that I wanted to get across to my students so that they could understand it, and the biggest mistake I made is I just gave my students lots of lists. List after list. Do this, and then this, and then this, or you should think about that, and that, and that, and while the students were interested in what I was saying, they couldn't remember it all. It was overwhelming. They were trying to take notes, and "Did this go before that? Where does this come in? How does that play out?" I was doing them a disservice by not helping them focus, by organizing the content in a logical way. As I have evolved in my teaching, I was able to better structure my materials so that the students can now engage in the content in a very different way. (ethereal music) My favorite structure in the entire world is three simple questions: "What?" "So what?" "Now what?" "What?" "So what?" "Now what?" What is the information that you're sharing? Why is it important to the person that I'm...