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Home » Think Fast, Talk Smart Communication Techniques by Matt Abrahams (Full Transcript)

Think Fast, Talk Smart Communication Techniques by Matt Abrahams (Full Transcript)

Matt Abrahams

Here is the full text and summary of Matt Abrahams, an expert and lecturer in organization behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business talks on Think Fast, Talk Smart: Communication Techniques.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT: 

Welcome! I’m very excited today to talk about effective speaking in spontaneous situations. I thank you all for joining us, even though the title of my talk is grammatically incorrect. I thought that might scare a few of you away.

But I learned teaching here at the business school, catching people’s attention is hard. So, something as simple as that, I thought, might draw a few of you here, so this is going to be a highly interactive and participative workshop today.

If you don’t feel comfortable participating that’s completely fine, but do know I’m going to ask you to talk to people next to you. There will be opportunities to stand up and practice some things because I believe the way we become effective communicators is by actually communicating.

So let’s get started right away. I’d like to ask you all to read this sentence, and as you read this sentence, what’s most important to me is that you count the number of fs that you find in this sentence, please. Count the number of fs. Keep it quiet to yourself. Give you just another couple seconds here.

Three, two, one.

Raise your hand please if you found three and only three f’s. Excellent, great.

Did anybody find four? Anybody find only five fs? Anybody find six? There’s six fs.

What two letter word ending in f did many of us miss? Oh. We’ll make sure to get this to you so you can torment your friends and family at a later date.

When I first was exposed to this over 12 years ago I only found three, and I felt really stupid.