Shadowing Practice: The Most Powerful Speaking Frameworks To Speak CLEARLY - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Today, I want to introduce you to the three most powerful communication frameworks I've ever come across.
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I've spent hundreds of hours watching every major communicator that you can think of online.
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I live and breathe this material.
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I love it.
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It's in my bones.
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And I want to offer up to you a framework on solving rambling.
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a framework on solving your nervous system, and a framework on Clarity.
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Specifically, we're solving the problems of how do you not wander around with your thoughts?
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How do you calm yourself before speaking in a high pressure scenario?
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What is the framework for that?
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Thank you.
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And then how can you, from the very first word, Speak clearly.
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Thank you.
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Let's go through the first one, and then I'm going to offer a very powerful reframe, a thought on how you can think about mental models.
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So the very first framework that I want to introduce you to.
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is what I call setting the campfire.
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And I want to tell you, A very brief story here.
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I'm going to paint two different realities.
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And Reality number one on the left hand side.
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is you have a forest. And it's at night.
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And these lines are trees.
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And you begin your path.
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your little red riding hood route through the forest.
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And you might wander around a tree and you might loop back around
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because you lose your way because it's nighttime and there are owl eyes
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and noises and wolf howls that are scaring you and you are looking for the way through the forest and then.
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What you end up seeing is, is in the distance.
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You see a campfire.
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And that's what this is right here.
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This is a campfire.
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And suddenly, you know where you are.
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Okay.
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You know where home is a sense of direction.
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That fire gives you hope.
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This is scenario number one.
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is there's a winding path, a winding journey that's necessary before you know where you're going.
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Scenario number two is actually very similar.
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And what scenario number two does, is one thing slightly different.
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You start...
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By lighting the campfire.
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That's your first step.
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And by lighting the campfire, what this allows you to do, is when you go to explore, when you begin your Little Red Riding Hood path,
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And you walk around the trees when you don't know where home is.
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All you have to do is turn around.
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You see the campfire that you lit and you can go back.
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And then you can branch off to a new thought, a new adventure.
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And you can go back.
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And you can take a completely different direction and you can go back.
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You always have a sense of home.
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So what most people do when they speak, is they follow this first option.
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They begin talking aimlessly when they're trying to articulate a thought in a meeting
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or on a sales call or in an investor meeting or they're.
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talking to a client, Whatever the high stakes environment is, they haven't set a campfire.
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What we need to do is kind of ask the obvious question here, which is how do we set this campfire first?
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And what is the campfire?
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So that if we get lost in our rambling or if we find ourselves speaking excessively using too many words, We know what home is,
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and we can return there.
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So, Let's talk about this briefly.
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What is the campfire?
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Well, what the campfire is is a single sentence.
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And I'm going to illustrate with this with just a line.
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It's a single sentence that aims to capture 50 % of your idea.
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And 50 % is just a rough statistic.
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All this should really translate to in your mind is half.
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You're not looking to compress your entire idea, all the emotions, the images, the associations, the memories.
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You're not looking to compress that into a single sentence.
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You're just looking to capture a little bit, a slice, not the entire thought, just a slice.
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And you want to try to contain that into a single sentence.
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So let me give you an example.
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Let's say I was asked, Joseph, what is leadership?
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Haven't been asked that question before, but Joseph, what is leadership?
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What I would probably do is I would stop and I would think about it for a minute.
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I'd say that's a great question.
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To mean leadership, is certainty not clarity.
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now I don't know if that should be entirely true.
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That's what comes to mind in the moment.
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But now that campfire, that home base, That first sentence captured
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close to 50 % of what I was thinking or roughly a little bit of what I was thinking.
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And now I can develop that thought and I can branch out and I can say, "Well, what do we mean by certainty?
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What do we mean by clarity?" And that's my version of stepping away from the campfire and coming back home, stepping away from the campfire, coming back home.
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And what you have are these very intentional steps away from home base that come back to home base.
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And it looks like a very ordered geometric aesthetic pattern of speaking versus this very wasteful winding route. to the same destination.
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So setting the campfire simply means that first sentence you say use time to think.
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Use time to pause.
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And think about how can you compress your idea?
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How can you accelerate your thinking?
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And by virtue of giving yourself that pressure, you will accelerate your thinking.
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to one sentence.
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And that sentence doesn't need to be perfect.
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It just needs to capture about 50 % or even 30%, just a little shadow.
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of what's inside your mind, and then you can expand from there.
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So let's talk about mental models and frameworks.
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in a deeper level.
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Before we get to the second framework, and this is my favorite one out of the three.
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Third one is the most powerful, but the second one I personally used before I started this video.
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Okay.
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What I want to share about mental models is something
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that I've noticed working with hundreds of clients over the last few years, and that is that each mental model, each framework doesn't work for every person.
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And that's because oftentimes I hear things like, well, I want to speak like Steve Jobs.
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I want to speak like Mahatma Gandhi.
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I want to speak like Muhammad Ali.
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I want to talk like Martin Luther King Jr.
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What they're forgetting are the ways that these great titans of speech constructed their thoughts
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but very much the byproduct of their thinking and their lived experience.
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Steve Jobs, for example, would almost always root everything that he said in a story or some lived story.
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principle, some event that taught him something very profound and universal
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that had like a cosmic significance to it you know he would tell a story
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and then he would say something like and i realized that people are always inherently motivated by their own good.
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Something like that.
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I mean, I'm botching words here.
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So this is why frameworks have to be approached with caution.
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You have to try them on like a shoe.
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And if it doesn't fit and it doesn't feel like your personality, don't force it.
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Ultimately, you're wanting to take your thinking, understand that and then translate that to speech.
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And so I offer up these frameworks to you as new thought patterns to try on, because I've seen many people want to speak like Steve Jobs
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and we can give you Steve Jobs top five frameworks and they won't work for you.
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They'll feel very foreign and artificial.
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So approach these with caution.
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The second one I want to introduce you to my personal favorite.
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It's called the Giving Getting Scale, and this one is designed to help with nervousness.
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And the reason this is designed to help with nervousness is
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because what often shuts people down in meetings and what causes them to.
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Titan like a ball and go into a tunnel vision and just feel like, Every single second that ticks by is wasted potential.
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And then they walk away with this bit of a social hangover feeling like, my goodness, this could have been so much better.
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All of this is because they're not calm
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and they do not know what to do to set their mind and their framework right before they even open their mouth.
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And so the giving getting scale, what this is, is a very simple idea.
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Here it is.
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We are most at ease.
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and we are calm.
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When we are giving to other people.
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We are unsettled.
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And there's pressure.
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When we put the expectation on ourselves to get from.
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other people.
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So you could see these arrows pointing up and down on the right hand side.
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The red arrows, the titles next to them are people or positions that we typically want to extract from.
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An employer, celebrity, relationship partner.
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Now, these aren't always true.
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These could actually be people that we give to.
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But on average, these are people that people want to get from.
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Give to.
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We can give to a child.
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We can give to an elderly person.
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We can give to a homeless person.
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And a close friend is usually someone who's very neutral and reciprocal.
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Someone we're not anxious around and we're not trying to give to excessively.
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Now, these don't represent where people should be.
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These just are for most people where people are.
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So when we're getting from people, when we want something, when we want validation, when we want resources, when we want respect, when we want time, when we want money, when we want a sale,
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when we want funding, That expectation causes us to tighten.
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It causes us to lose access to what's in our mind.
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because we're not calm, because our nervous system is fundamentally misregulated.
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And it's misregulated because our breathing Typically, is not controlled.
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We're breathing very fast.
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We're breathing from our chest instead of breathing from the belly, from the diaphragm.
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Our breaths are probably...
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twice, maybe three times every 10 seconds.
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And this is something that we moderate inside of Elite Speak with the clients
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that we work with is get your breathing right first.
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before you even start thinking about your words.
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But there's a really, really simple reframe that can help you.
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Change your breathing.
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Change your nervous system.
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so that when you give to other people
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and i'll tell you what you're giving to other people in just a minute You feel calm,
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you feel relaxed, and you feel exactly the same in front of whoever you're speaking to as if you're with yourself alone, talking to your daffodils on your kitchen table.
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Okay.
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So, What we're giving, And what I'm giving to you right now is the gift of my time, my attention, and my presence.
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And that's what I say often when I start my YouTube content, before I even hit the camera, before my videographer even starts recording.
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I say, I'm here to offer the gift of my time, my attention, my presence to the people before me.
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That line is called a mental primer.
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And a mental primer is something that every major communicator who I've spoken to, I've received coaching from, will use before stepping on stage.
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Not that specific mental primer, not the giving, getting mental primer, but some version that they've created.
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And it's to align their focus on serving and giving to their audience.
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This is the biggest framework that I can offer you
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that can help regulate your nervous system and calm you before you have to perform.
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Because if you're focused on getting from other people, getting attention, getting applause, getting a standing ovation, you doom yourself to never being able to achieve that.
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Or if you achieve that, you're not satisfied with it.
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Let's talk about the third framework.
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This is also a very powerful one.
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In fact, power is in the name.
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The power arc.
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In the PowerArc, we teach this to CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, any high performer who...
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is speaking in a meeting, that specifically is agenda driven.
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So it's not just a casual creative strategy session.
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There's something that you're looking to persuade people to do, or a call to action that you're looking to implement.
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The power arc is three parts.
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The bottom line up front, Why does this matter?
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Specifically that phrase asking that rhetorical question.
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and then saying, think about it, specifically using some pointed hand gesture.
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So what this looks like is...
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Joseph.
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Why are mental frameworks important?
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Okay.
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Mental frameworks are important.
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because they allow you to respect the listener's time.
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Why does this matter?
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Because people's time is valuable.
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Think about it.
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If I walked into a conversation or a meeting, And I treated your time like it was dirt.
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or sand from the ocean and I just threw it there
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and threw it there and wasted your time with just random bits of information
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that weren't related to what we were talking about would you feel respected?
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No. So stepping outside of that rehearsal, Very similar to the...
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beacon, the setting the campfire, You're going to compress your thought into one opening line.
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Once again, the bottom line can be about 50%.
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30 to 50 % of your idea.
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And I say the percentage because it does not have to be perfect.
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Perfection is not the goal.
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Just a slice.
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That's the bottom line up front.
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You say that in the beginning.
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And then you ask the question, why does this matter?
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And you're asking this not to the person or people you're speaking to.
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You're asking this to yourself.
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It's what they call a rhetorical question.
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It's ask for the purpose of reflecting back on what you said, not ask literally to be answered by the person.
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Very powerful.
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And then, You add, think about it.
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Think about it.
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And what I love doing is I love pointing to my temple.
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Think about it or think about it.
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Use your fingers.
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It's very persuasive.
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It makes it seem like you're calling attention to something that's almost timeless and universal.
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So the power arc, He is.
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a very important framework in helping you clearly communicate what needs to be done and why it needs to be done.
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This is a clarity framework.
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There's a whole category when you study communication, there's a whole category of frameworks that are called clarity frameworks.
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And this is one of them.
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This is the best one.
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It's very simple because it just involves memorizing two phrases
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and knowing one simple technique that we already talked about very early on, something anyone can do.
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but it allows you to come off very assertive, which most people aren't.
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It allows you to come off as persuasive and very ordered and structured in your thinking.
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So what I would encourage all of you to do is practice with these.
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And if you want my help
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and our team's help in baking these into the way
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that you speak and helping you role play through your worst case scenarios and solve these communication challenges forever, click the links below.
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And I hope this video helped.
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About This Lesson
In this powerful lesson, you will explore effective communication frameworks that can transform your speaking skills. You will learn about the concept of "setting the campfire," which serves as a starting point for organizing your thoughts before speaking. The aim is to reduce rambling and enhance clarity, allowing you to navigate discussions with confidence. By understanding how to establish a clear mental framework, you will be better equipped to manage nervousness in high-pressure situations and deliver your message clearly from the very first word.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Framework: A structured approach to organizing thoughts or ideas.
- Campfire: A metaphor for providing a sense of direction and comfort when speaking.
- Rambling: Speaking in a disorganized way, often without clear purpose.
- Nervous system: The body system that can affect your physical responses during speaking.
- Clarity: The quality of being clear and understandable in speech.
- Explore: To investigate or consider different ideas or topics in conversation.
- Thought model: A specific way of thinking that can help structure your communication.
- Signal of home: A point of reference that helps guide your speaking journey.
Practice Tips
To make the most of your learning experience, consider using a shadowing app—a fantastic tool for practicing alongside native speakers. When you listen to the video, pay close attention to the speaker's pace and tone. Aim to use shadow speech techniques by mimicking the speaker’s rhythm as closely as possible. This can greatly enhance your ability to communicate clearly.
Start by playing the video at a slower speed to ensure you grasp the speaker's intonation and pauses. Repeat phrases or sentences as they are spoken, allowing you to internalize the framework of clear speaking. Remember, the goal here is to learn how to shadow speak—capture not just the words, but also the confidence and clarity of the speaker. By effectively utilizing a shadowspeak approach, you’ll enhance your ability to structure your thoughts and communicate more effectively in English.
Finally, make use of a comfortable shadowing site that facilitates this practice. Consistency is key in building your speaking skills, so dedicate a few minutes each day to practice with these powerful frameworks in mind!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was asked · been asked · be approached |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've ever come · I've spent · haven't set |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.