The Secret To Becoming A Confident Speaker - Matt Abrahams - #948

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you describe what you do?

**Matt Abrahams** (0:02)
I'm somebody who helps people develop and hone their communication skills. Communication is critical for our success in business and in life, and that's what I help people do through my teaching, my podcasting, my writing.

**Chris Williamson** (0:15)
Is that a problem people are having more of in the modern world?

**Matt Abrahams** (0:19)
I think that's true. I think that's true. As we become bombarded with more information, the ability to communicate clearly is critical for us to succeed. So yes, there's just a lot more information. It's important to be clear and concise and to really understand what's relevant for those you speak to.

**Chris Williamson** (0:36)
What are the biggest problems that the people that you work with come to you complaining about?

**Matt Abrahams** (0:41)
Well, first and foremost, people are really anxious, especially in high-stakes speaking situations. So anxiety and learning to feel more confident is number one. And then number two, the big mistake people make is they just don't focus their messages, focus on their audience, make it concise, make it clear, interesting and engaging. So when I work with people in the classes I teach at Stanford or in the coaching I do, it's really around those elements.

**Chris Williamson** (1:04)
Okay. So speaking anxiety, I keep hearing data or studies around it's the scariest thing that anybody ever has to do. If this was you in a tribal time, you would have been put on the spot and you had to defend yourself, and maybe you'd have lost status or whatever.
Why is it that people feel that way in your understanding of the literature? What's going on inside of the mouth and the brain and the tongue?

**Matt Abrahams** (1:33)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (1:33)
Give me a breakdown.

**Matt Abrahams** (1:35)
Yeah. So you hit it on the head. It's part of being human to be concerned about being up in front of other people. We see it in every culture that's been studied. It tends to start around the same time, as kids are entering their early teens is where we really see spikes in anxiety, and this spans culture.
It has to do with status and not the status of who drives the fanciest car, who has the most likes on social media. It's all about your relative status in a group. And as we were evolving, we would hang out in groups of around 150 people, and your status in that group mattered a lot. It meant you got access to resources, reproduction, food, shelter, and if your status was low, you didn't have any of that. It was literally a matter of life and death. So it was critical to not do anything that jeopardized your status. Like making a mistake or full of yourself in front of others. And we carry that with us. Now, even though it's part of who we are, we can go about doing things to manage that anxiety so we can be successful.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
Okay. Why do you think it is that good ability to public speak would be an adaptive skill when someone's put on the spot tribally? You know, it doesn't really relate to your capacity to bring down a deer or to gather berries. It doesn't necessarily really even relate that much to being pro-social in terms of what you can contribute. It kind of appears pro-social in that most people who are good at talking to people develop the ability of being good at talking to people, so they're around people a lot and presumably the people that are around people a lot aren't assholes.
But I'm just trying to work out, is it simply that language is a crucial vector that humans use to communicate? Is it as simple as that?

**Matt Abrahams** (3:27)
Well, I'd ask you to take a step back and say, what purpose does communication serve? And when you think about that, communication is operationalized empathy, and empathy is critical to our species' survival. One of the things that differentiates us is the ability to collaborate and connect with other people, and anything that helps us to do that gives us an evolutionary advantage. So collaboration, connection are important, empathy drives that. And there are people who study what I study who would argue that our ability to communicate verbally and non-verbally is the result of that drive towards empathy. So it's solving a problem. So I actually believe that communication is critical for survival.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
Operationalized empathy. Interesting. Okay. So we are ancestrally justified in our fears around communication.

**Matt Abrahams** (4:22)
I don't know if I use the word justified, but certainly it's ingrained.