Практика Shadowing: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Изучайте разговорный английский с YouTube

So if you clicked on this video,

⏸ Пауза

Скорость:

335 предложений

Если предложения слишком короткие или длинные, нажмите Edit, чтобы их изменить.

So if you clicked on this video,

then that means that you're interested in improving your speech and how you communicate with other people.

Articulacy is a skill that literally anyone can benefit from.

It doesn't matter what field you're in,

whether you're in academia or you're in corporate,

regardless of what industry or type of job you're doing,

whether it's technical or non-technical,

being good at explaining shit to other people is a skill that has literally zero downside.

If you work in a job where you have to deal with other people,

which is 99% of jobs out there,

then it can only serve you to be better at explaining stuff to your colleagues,

to your boss, to your friends and your family.

And so today I'm going to share with you some of the highest value things

that I've learned about how to be a great communicator.

Hi, if you're new to the channel, my name is Matt.

I'm currently working in strategy and ops at Google.

Before that, I was a management consultant and I make these videos because I enjoy it.

But without further ado, let's get right into the video.

So make sure you lock in,

turn off the notifications, full screen the video and follow along.

The first thing we have to ask ourselves is what does it even mean to be articulate?

Now, some of you probably have preconceived notions about what it means.

You probably know that being articulate means that you are very good at speaking or maybe you're very good at communicating,

but let's break it down into the actual definition.

And so one that I really like

and I think really gets to the essence of what it means to be articulate is to express an idea

or a feeling fluently and coherently.

There's two components of it.

There's expressing the idea fluently and then expressing it coherently.

Now if you look at what fluent and coherent mean,

you'll understand that fluent means to do something with ease and with grace,

and coherent means to do something with a clear, logical, concise manner.

And so if someone is good at speaking and they are considered very good at articulating their thoughts,

for example, then that means that they can explain their thinking to someone,

or they can explain an idea or a feeling to someone in a way that is clear and logical,

but not only clear and logical,

because they're also doing it in a way with a lot of ease and grace.

And so how do we get to the point where we can deliver a message,

whether it's in a meeting with our boss,

or whether it's in a job interview where we have to explain our experience or walk the interviewer through our resume,

or whether it's even just in a normal conversation with a

friend where maybe you want to explain to them something that you saw,

book that you read recently and you want to do it in the most articulate way possible.

How do we do that?

Well it's simple and there's actually two parts to it.

So the first, if we look at the word fluently,

is really going to come down to the delivery and the way that you're actually delivering that message.

And then the second part of it which is,

you know, is the message itself clear and logical?

Well that comes down to the content and the structure of what we're actually saying.

And so today I want to talk about both of these things,

the delivery and then the content of the message itself.

But let's start now with the content and the structure.

So the content and the structure of whatever you're explaining always is going to start in your head.

And so step one is always actually understanding the thing or the idea that you want to explain.

Because how on earth can you try to properly explain to someone how you're feeling

if you don't even really understand the feelings that you have?

Or how on earth can you explain to someone quantum physics if you don't have a very deep,

base-level, first principles understanding of how quantum physics works?

No matter how good you are at speaking and no matter how big your vocabulary is,

you're just going to fall flat on your face as soon as you open your mouth

because the words are going to come out,

and maybe they sound good,

but they're not going to mean anything,

and the listener is not going to comprehend what you're actually saying.

And so step one is you need to understand the topic or the issue that you want to explain.

And this seems so simple,

but you'd be surprised how many people start talking about something

and they only have like a 50% grasp of the concept or the issue that they're trying to explain to someone.

And as a result, the message comes across kind of muddied

and the listener might have to ask them to restate what they said

and they have to ask follow-up questions because really the listener just doesn't really understand what that person said.

And so step one is all good communication starts with good understanding

and clear thinking about what the topic or issue at hand even is and then knowing what your objective is.

are you trying to get out of this conversation?

If you're going into a meeting with,

say, a high-level executive, what are you trying to get out of them?

And it can't just be,

oh, I'm just trying to tell them or give them an update on what I'm working on.

Like, no, you think they're going to accept that?

Their time is extremely limited.

You have to remember, if someone is a very high-level executive at a large company,

for example, every day there are many,

many, many people asking them for this and that.

They're in meetings all day.

They're tired.

They're thinking about a million different things

and then all of a sudden you come in

and you have 30 minutes

and you start spewing all this nonsense uh maybe giving a ton of background context that's totally irrelevant

or not helpful

and by the end of it they don't even understand what

you want from them do you need a decision from them

do you need them to say yes this looks good to me

or are you trying to convince them to change their mind

about something you need to be extremely clear on what your objective is because

Even if you do understand the topic or the issue,

if you don't have an objective when you go into a meeting,

nothing that's like your north star,

100

then every word that comes out of your mouth is really not going to be

101

that helpful for the other person to understand.

102

Because the question that they have in the back of their mind is going to be,

103

okay, he's saying all this stuff.

104

What do I need to do?

105

What does he or she want from me?

106

Right?

107

That's the question that people are going to be thinking.

108

But that leads me to the third part,

109

which is once you do understand,

110

okay, this is the topic I need to bring up,

111

this is the issue I need to raise,

112

and the objective of this conversation is that I need this person to say yes,

113

to go ahead with this program.

114

Then what's the fastest path to explain that?

115

And you'd be surprised.

116

A lot of people tend to ramble in meetings,

117

and they think that more airtime equals better comprehension because you're giving them more details.

118

But the problem is what you don't understand,

119

and something that I'm going to talk about in the delivery section,

120

is that you're actually just increasing the mental load for the listener,

121

the more details, especially if you're including more irrelevant details to your explanation.

122

And so you need to understand,

123

first of all, what is the fastest way to explain this to my audience?

124

And then once I've understood that,

125

then I need to execute on it.

126

So for example,

127

let's say that I am coming to the police station

128

and I need the police officer to help me find a criminal who just stole my laptop.

129

So in one scenario,

130

I could come into the police station say I was just in my house at 5 p.m

131

and I was cooking dinner with my mom

132

and then we were eating dinner

133

and all of a sudden we heard a noise in the back

134

and I went to the back to investigate and I opened the door

135

and I saw a shadow running across the yard

136

and then I realized that it was a person

137

and they were holding my laptop and then I yelled at them

138

and I chased them but they were too quick and

139

so I wasn't able to get my laptop back and

140

so we decided to come to the police station and now I'm begging you police officers,

141

please help me open a case ticket for this stolen item.

142

Now that probably took me,

143

I don't know, 20, 30 seconds to say, maybe longer.

144

But what if I just went to the police station and said,

145

look, I need your help.

146

My laptop was stolen.

147

How much quicker is it for the police officer to understand what I need from him?

148

And now it's such a simple and honestly silly sounding example.

149

But if you apply this thinking to high level executive meetings,

150

or you apply it to job interviews,

151

things like that, then you begin to realize,

152

oh, the best speakers are the ones who are able to express the idea

153

or the thing that they need from someone in five to ten seconds or less.

154

Any longer than that and you honestly don't understand the thing that you're trying to explain.

155

But going back to this list of key considerations with content and structure,

156

the last one is anticipating key questions.

157

Now this is kind of a second level thing.

158

Once you've gotten better at structuring your thinking,

159

understanding the thing that you want to actually talk about,

160

and knowing your objective, and laying out the path to explain it in the most concise way possible,

161

then the next level is like,

162

okay, I foresee that when I say this one thing,

163

they're going to think this.

164

And so they may have this question.

165

So I should actually preempt that by explaining the answer to their question.

166

And so an example of this is say I'm explaining to my boss

167

that we've been seeing declines in revenue from this specific product in the business and we're not sure why.

168

Now, I'm going to stop there.

169

Now, imagine if I just told my boss that.

170

Okay, we're seeing declines in revenue for this product and we're not sure why.

171

Then what is he going to be thinking?

172

He or she is going to be thinking,

173

okay, well have you looked into this and that?

174

Have you tried talking to this and this person?

175

Have you tried to determine whether this is an external issue that is affecting all of our competitors in our entire industry?

176

Or is it like something that's localized to our company?

177

A good communicator will know this and they will think about it

178

and take action to address some of these questions so that in their delivery they can say something like,

179

Like, look, we're currently investigating this decline in revenue for a specific product line.

180

And we've already ruled out the fact that this is a market-wide issue

181

because our competitors' similar products are doing very well, except ours.

182

And so we're looking internally right now at X, Y, and Z.

183

And we're going to talk to X,

184

Y, and Z about this to try and get to the bottom of what's actually causing this issue.

185

So you see how the second way that I just talked about

186

that gave a lot more detail

187

but the details were around what we've been doing to address key questions that you anticipated would come up.

188

And so this is a second level ability,

189

but if you can make this a habit of always thinking about,

190

okay, when I tell this person this thing,

191

he or she is obviously going to start thinking about that.

192

And if you can start like preempting and introducing the answers into your explanation,

193

then that makes it so much more easy for the person to understand and comprehend what you're trying to say.

194

But let's move to the last part, which is the delivery.

195

So how do we make the delivery effective?

196

And here, I've kept it really short with three main things.

197

The first is you need to always remember,

198

decrease the mental load of your listener.

199

If you decrease the mental load of your listener,

200

then that gives them more bandwidth to actually think about what you're saying and thereby understand what you're saying.

201

Now, what do I mean by mental load?

202

Well, mental load is literally anything that you say or do

203

that makes the other person have to use more brain power in order to understand whatever you're trying to explain.

204

So a great example of decreasing mental load is being smart about your word choices.

205

And so a very easy way to make things extremely difficult for someone to understand

206

is to use an insane amount of adjectives,

207

especially long verbose words that don't actually contribute to the meaning of a sentence.

208

And so a great example of this is,

209

you know, if you had a sentence like he voraciously read through the Victorian era novel Jane Austen

210

and finished it in just under six hours.

211

You can actually shorten

212

that sentence to get to the essence of it by literally saying he read quickly through Jane Austen

213

and finished it in six hours.

214

Or he read through Jane Austen in six hours.

215

That's the essence of the sentence, right?

216

Now, if you're an English major right now or you're a literature buff,

217

you're probably looking at me with absolute horror thinking,

218

wow, you've stripped out the soul of the entire sentence.

219

But look, that's not the goal of today's video.

220

What I'm trying to explain to you is how to deliver the message with ruthless effectiveness,

221

which often involves taking out any flowery language.

222

Flowery language might be okay in a novel,

223

but it's not okay when you're trying to explain something quickly to someone who has limited time and mental bandwidth.

224

And so be very selective about your word choice.

225

You should make sure that whatever words and sentences you add into your delivery,

226

they have to fight tooth and nail to stay there.

227

If you can strip it out without losing the meaning of the message or the sentence,

228

then you should strip it out as a rule of thumb.

229

Now, the second thing is top-down communication.

230

Get in the habit of communicating in a top-down way.

231

What this means is you always start with the answer first,

232

or maybe it's the main idea,

233

or maybe it's the question that you need to ask them.

234

You always say, hey, so today we need your input on this program that we're working on.

235

We need your thoughts on this project or this paper that we're writing.

236

And these are the three things that we need your thoughts on.

237

Or this is why we think that the product is not doing well.

238

But up front, you say,

239

okay, look, the product's not doing well,

240

and this is why we think it's not doing well.

241

And then you have supporting evidence under each of it.

242

The reason why top-down communication is so effective and is taught at firms like McKinsey and BCG is because executives,

243

again, have very little time and mental bandwidth.

244

And by doing top-down communication,

245

you're actually decreasing the mental load.

246

you're minimizing it because they don't have to wait for you to do this whole explanation before understanding,

247

oh, like that's the final outcome or that's the actual thing that they wanted to ask me about.

248

Because then instead of holding all of these thoughts in their head,

249

then they understand immediately what you're trying to get out of the conversation.

250

Second is storytelling.

251

Now, storytelling, I will say,

252

is effective in certain scenarios where you really want to illustrate an idea or a feeling.

253

and when you use it accurately and when you're good at storytelling,

254

it can be extremely, extremely effective for the delivery because you captivate the audience.

255

And I'm telling you, the best storytellers out there,

256

they're also really, really good at articulating their thoughts and they understand what people actually pay attention to.

257

Now, I'll probably make a video about storytelling later on,

258

but high level, how to get really good at storytelling is you need to understand

259

that details are really important when it comes to storytelling.

260

You want to show, not tell.

261

So for example, instead of saying something like,

262

I almost got killed last night.

263

Instead, if you put them into the actual situation,

264

you include details on the location,

265

on how you're feeling, what you were thinking in that moment,

266

and you don't just tell them,

267

you say something like, last night at 11 p.m.

268

I was walking home after a late night of dinner

269

and drinks with my friends in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.

270

And as I was walking to the subway,

271

I go through the turnstiles,

272

I'm waiting on the platform,

273

and suddenly out of the corner of my eye,

274

I see this black shadow moving.

275

And there's this like man in a black coat and with a mask on carrying a knife.

276

And he's slowly walking towards me.

277

And in that moment, I honestly thought I was in a horror movie and I froze.

278

Like my blood literally ran cold.

279

And I was like, holy shit,

280

I need to get out of here.

281

And so I run

282

and thank God the subway comes like two seconds later as I'm running in the opposite direction down the platform

283

because I turn around and this guy's like starting to like move a little quicker and he's starting to run at me.

284

And I'm like, oh my god,

285

and I see the conductor,

286

he sees me, and he opens the door,

287

and then quickly closes it after I run through the subway.

288

And only then am I able to take a sigh of relief,

289

and I turn around, and this guy is staring at me through the windows of the subway,

290

and he's holding this knife,

291

and he's like screaming all this random gibberish at me,

292

and it was just absolutely horrifying.

293

And I couldn't sleep last night,

294

even after I got home.

295

Okay, so you see how that story that I just told you had a ton of detail,

296

and it also had a lot of suspense, right?

297

Because I was being chased by this guy with a knife.

298

What that does when you put people in the actual moment is it captivates them

299

and it makes them think about what if I was in that situation?

300

And the little details around like what I was thinking in my head and how I was thinking like,

301

oh my god, I'm screwed.

302

I need to get out of here.

303

Like those things, those are the kinds of details that captivate people with a story.

304

You don't just say, oh, I was really scared.

305

Like that's boring.

306

You say, you know, I saw my life flashing before my eyes.

307

You say something like that.

308

That gets people paying attention.

309

But anyways, the last thing is just the energy with your communication.

310

Again, different people have different levels of energy.

311

If you're naturally someone that is high energy,

312

then good for you, because high energy tends to be a little bit more engaging for people to listen to.

313

But if you're someone like me,

314

who's naturally a little bit more introverted,

315

a little bit more reserved,

316

what you might need to do is you might need to dial up the energy

317

when you're giving a presentation or you're in an interview, for example.

318

The reason why you need to dial up the energy is because it engages the audience more,

319

because they can feel the energy.

320

And whatever energy level you think that you're projecting,

321

you need to dial it up and turn that dial up by at least two or three X more,

322

probably like five X more energy.

323

And what this is going to do is in reality,

324

you're going to feel like you're coming across like super energetic,

325

but to them, it's not going to be as energetic as you think.

326

So keep all of this in mind.

327

And if you do all of the things that I've just laid out,

328

you improve your content and the structure of your messaging,

329

and you actually improve the delivery,

330

then you're going to find that when you do have to explain things to people,

331

You're going to be that much more effective

332

and you're going to avoid situations where you have to keep explaining yourself again

333

or people are looking at you weird and asking questions because they don't really understand what you just said.

334

That's all I got for you guys and I'll see you in the next one.

335

Peace.

TRENDING

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

☕ Угостите нас кофе

ShadowingEnglish остаётся 100% бесплатным благодаря вашей поддержке. Стоимость серверов и ИИ высока — ваш кофе поддерживает нас! 🙏

Пожертвовать через PayPal

ShadowingEnglish.com – Практика Shadowing английского

Практика Shadowing: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Изучайте разговорный английский с YouTube

Популярные

Почему стоит практиковать речь с этим видео?

Грамматика и выражения в контексте

Распространенные ловушки произношения

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Практика Shadowing: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Изучайте разговорный английский с YouTube

Скачать приложение

Почему стоит практиковать речь с этим видео?

Грамматика и выражения в контексте

Распространенные ловушки произношения

Что такое техника Shadowing?