#133 Be ARTICULATE and Speak SMARTLY: Communicate Like A Pro

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There's a moment we've all had at least once. You're in a high-stakes environment. Someone challenges your idea and the whole room turns to look at you and your mind just blanks. And then 40 minutes later, you're in the elevator and the perfect response just hits you. That's what we're fixing today, because thinking fast isn't about being smarter. It's about structuring your thoughts under pressure. So we're going to bring data experience from the best in the world so that you can build any skills, just like speaking, step by step. I'm Codie Sanchez, and this is the Big Big Deal Podcast. Let's go. Okay, really quick also before we start, my producer just pulled me aside and told me 3/4 of our regular Big Deal audience aren't subscribed. So I'd like to ask you something personal. If you've ever learned something or changed your perspective or had a realization because of this podcast, please do me a personal favor and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribing is the single best way to help us grow the show. And I have to say something exciting. Last week, this channel just crossed 500,000 subscribers. Ah, you know, a year ago we were at 37,000, so I still can't wrap my head around that fully. I just wanna say thank you and let's get into it. So I got some stats for us. Why does your brain betray you in those moments? Let's start with the really uncomfortable truth. You don't freeze because you are not smart. You freeze because your brain is overloaded. There are actually 3 things happening instantly when you're on the spot. The first is called cognitive overload. Like you're trying to understand the question, think of an answer, judge how you sound, predict how they'll react. That's 4 processes at once. Your brain literally wasn't built for that. And the second is stress overload. You know, when pressure hits, your brain shifts actually from the prefrontal cortex, that's like your thinking brain, to the amygdala, your survival brain. And I see this all the time in execs and people who work in my company, so I wanna help you get better at it because you make more money and you get more of what you want outta life if we can help you respond better, including me. There's actually an amazing 2005 study that was in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and they looked at performance under pressure and found that pressure reduces working memory capacity. So basically your ability to hold and manipulate thoughts in real time, well, uh, that gets severely impacted when you're under stress. So that's the killer. You start thinking, actually, how do I sound smart? What's the perfect answer? What if I'm wrong? Or maybe that's just me. And instead of speaking clearly, you stall. Let me tell you how this can hurt you in business and life. How many times have you sat in a meeting with a group of other people and you had a brilliant idea and that brilliant idea was at the tip of your tongue, but you couldn't kind of get the balls up to say it? And so when they asked you what you had to say or contribute, just said, "Oh, you know, nothing. I think, oh, let me just add on to her point. I think that was a good point." Just add on. That happens to me all the time. And I remember one time in particular, I was early in my career at a company called Vanguard.. And there was a group of us, we were in the accelerated development program. And I had talked last night with one of my friends, Ian, about a brilliant idea in my mind, a brilliant idea I had that was what we should do as a group in our like next basically mission set. And my idea, you know, was that we should build something out in Spanish and for Latin America because this company hadn't done anything there yet. Now I actually speak Spanish, I've done business in Latin America even back then. So this was like my idea. And I remember paddling it back and forth with Ian, and the night before. And then when they came around to ask us our questions, I felt like other people had better answers than I did. So I kind of like waited till the end. And so they were like going around, who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. What do you think happened? Well, they went to Ian first and all of a sudden Ian talked about their Spanish expansion that they should do. And so this is actually normal. It's not just you and I. Like Warren Buffett was actually terrified of public speaking in his career early on, which is crazy. And he wasn't just like bad at it, he says he was terrified of it. This is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. He avoided classes, he didn't do presentations, and then he realized something. His fear wasn't about public speaking. His fear was really, are you gonna judge me while I'm thinking? So he trained to have a structure to think. That's why Warren Buffett actually kind of got famous for mental frameworks, which is fascinating. If you know Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they're very famous for frameworks. So they'll talk about inverse thinking, they'll talk about killing complexity, they'll talk about a reverse to-do list. All of that is because he forced himself into situations where he had to develop his public speaking ability and because he was still too scared, he had to come up with frameworks to help him speak better. And so it's kind of fascinating because he later volunteered to teach at University of Omaha just so he could overcome this fear. And then soon, you know, his signature, what is now old-timey sense of humor, was like everywhere. You know, his keynotes became marquee moments in culture and his Berkshire Hathaway, that's his company, his conferences that he holds, it is a stock conference, you guys. Those things are so boring. They usually have to pay people to attend them. This one is like a rock show. So for a man that used to hate to speak publicly, used to be scared of how to respond, to now run a rock concert for a stock conference is fascinating. But the thing is, his confidence came after he made structural adjustments to the way he thought. So if you don't perform well under pressure, yes, you need to put yourself under pressure frequently, but you also need to figure out the core skills on how to structure your thinking. Hot take: fast thinking or being quick on your feet is actually a myth. So I think what you're really seeing is fast structuring. So all the research that we've been doing shows the best communicators aren't improvising. They're slotting ideas into frameworks they use hundreds of times. So when you see them sound smart fast, it's really just like their recall, recall, recall. They're not thinking on the spot. So the golden rule is kind of like, if your thoughts have structure, your speech will have speed. Structure equals speed. There's a great phrase we're going to teach you today to help you. When in doubt, PACE IT OUT. Okay, this is cute. P is for point, as in make your point. A is for add context. C is concrete example. And E is end clean. So here's an example of the PACE method. Let's say you're asked a question, why do most people fail financially? Why are most people broke? A bad answer might be like, well, you know, I think it's about bad decisions and people don't do budgeting. A good answer to that using the PACE method would go like this. Most people fail financially because they spend before they invest. That's the point. That creates a cycle where money never compounds. Add context. You see it with high earners living paycheck to paycheck, reckless businessmen. Concrete example. If your money isn't working first, you're already behind. End clean. Now, why does this work? Put simply, it's fast, It's substantive and you're reducing thinking into one idea, one explanation, one example, one conclusion. So your brain actually treats it like a filing cabinet basically, and your brain can handle that under pressure. Fun fact, do you know that this is also how they train politicians? I've become friends with a lot of— do I want to use the word friend? I've become acquaintances with a lot of politicians because I think they control our world and we got to work with them one way or the other. And it's fascinating. I was sitting in a room actually last week with some of the leaders of the free world. I'm not allowed to talk about where I was. I'm not allowed to talk about that I went. I'm not allowed to talk about who was there. You know what I can talk about? I sat in a room where these couple of guys literally brought in governors from different states, sat the governors down, listened to the governors get peppered with questions. And then in the end, they circled around. I don't know why they let me in here, you guys. We should talk about that. At the end, They looked at each other and they just said, "Should we run him?" I felt like it was like a diabolical, you know, but what did they mean? You know, they meant run him for president. They were like literally prepping presidential candidates now for next run. And so why was one governor considered good or bad? They used the pace method or they didn't. Now think about even a less diabolical one would be like Steve Jobs. So he didn't speak quickly. He spoke with massive intention. And it's the reason we have so many incredible quotes from this guy. Like, One of my favorite books is actually the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. And he has this one line, which is basically that people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. It actually means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. He also talked about being a yardstick for quality or how some people aren't used to the environment where excellence is expected or your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life. That one's my favorite. He used very few words, but he had a pretty big impact. And I think the secret to basically thinking quickly is this preloading of your brain. So that's your first cheat code. You don't have to rely on thinking fast in the moment. You need to prep. So how do we prep for these high-stakes conversations? I like to think about it like building mental assets. So high performers don't memorize answers. They prep these frameworks collecting stories, analogies, and they always seek to reduce to first principles. Why? Because your brain can retrieve faster than it can create, right? It's kind of obvious. Like, how fast can you grab a book versus how fast can you write one? In fact, Charlie Munger had a mental framework for this. He says, "I carry a latticework of mental models in my head." So good. But what does he mean? He means like in his head he has all these things he can throw back to. And sometimes, you guys, like not to toot my own little horn here, but when I'm on a podcast, people will say, "Well, you talk in tweets," or, "You have a high signal-to-noise." You know what I'm doing? I'm just going to, in my head, I have a series of ladders on which I can climb to get to different points that are just sort of stacked. I'm not solving the answers to these problems from scratch in real time. Neither is Charlie. If you memorize isolated facts, that's not going to help you solve problems at scale. Instead, what do you got to do? Construct these interconnected networks of key ideas from multiple disciplines and you use those to interpret the world. And that's actually really the job of a CEO. If you wanna figure out what the job of a CEO is, it's communicate well, get other people to buy into your dream, and understand how to solve complex problems using a series of unrelated disciplines or networks. You know what the job of a CEO is not? Memorizing thousands of individual facts. That's not gonna do it for you. Here's an exercise for you to build this skill. You guys, you wanna do this live with me so we can all, you know, make more money, become better people, get what we want outta life? Here's what I think we should do. So I want you to pick any topic you care about, build 3 frameworks, 3 examples, 3 strong opinions. We call these spiky points of view. You'll be surprised how often these mental models will become useful. Right now I'm interviewing people. Let me know in the comments if any of you guys are looking for a job right now. One, we're hiring a bunch of people. Also, I know it's miserable out there, so I'm sorry if you are. A lot of people interviewing right right now are fucking awful at interviewing, with so much love, so bad. You guys might be really good, but you're really bad at interviewing. And so let's have a topic you care about, such as why you should hire me because I'm a stud. I want you to build 3 frameworks. And so what would those look like? It might be like, what does every boss want? Work hard, you know, I care too much, you know, I do too much, whatever. Those could be your 3 frameworks. But the frameworks might be like, my number 1 core value is the day isn't done until the job is done. I believe in completion in things because I think that's what makes people successful. Oh, bosses are going to love that. Two, if we go, I care too much. I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. What does that tell them? Oh, they're going to be really detail-oriented. Three, I believe in constant learning. If you were to scroll through my Twitter or my Instagram, you would find it full of X that we do at this job because I'm obsessed with this game. You're going to have to drag me out of this industry By my cold dead fingers. Great. You've got 3 frameworks. Then I want you to find 3 examples. 1, when did you do something really hard in your career, they might ask you. So your first example is going to be like, my last job, we had— like, just pick a project, any project. We had to ship this video out by this date, and if we didn't get it done, we were going to lose a $50,000 sponsorship, and I worked the job until we got it done. Right? Just give me 3 examples like that. And then 3 strong opinions. One strong opinion may be, I only like to work with A players. My goal is to be on a team of other people who want to succeed. And the one thing that is a downside to me is if the team is full of B players. That's a strong opinion. Also a good aligned opinion. Second strong opinion could be like, I want to work on companies that are using and interested in AI. I think the future is going there. And so I'm curious for you, how are you guys using AI in your business right now? Turn that question around on them. You will be surprised at how often mental models are useful because now your brain is not actually answering their questions. It's just selecting the idea. Also, we talked about this in my 3-2-1 episode on speaking. You should go back and listen to it after this one if you want to get better at speaking. But we talked about the power of the pause. Here's it a different way, which is if you don't know the answer, shut the fuck up for a second. Give your little brain time to catch up. It's actually totally fine because it's a signal of confidence. So that 2-second gap might going to give your little my little monkey brain at least time to catch up. Could do the same for you. And you know, when I think that I feel uncomfortable and it's too much, I go back and I watch Barack Obama. He is like one of the most famous pausers of all time. He uses the pause all the time. He's so famous for pausing that there are entire compilations online of him pausing to collect his thoughts. And he's a smart guy. Is it hesitation? I don't know. But it looks like control. There's actually a great paper that was written in 2025, and it was called Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. And it basically found that brief pauses in speech increase positive listener responses, whereas when you do fillers like yeah, uh-huh, that actually decreases their responses. Okay, so moral of the story, pausing is okay. Don't freak out. It also reduces that cognitive load we were talking about, making it easier for whoever you're talking to basically to process what's going down. Now, the opposite of this is rambling, which is— it's the great vibe killer of all time. So what is rambling? That's just you not structuring your thinking. And sadly, it signals incompetence and dishonesty, even if it really is not that. But we fix it by giving ourselves some constraints, which I kind of think of like bumper lanes on the bowling alley to how we speak so we only hit strikes, right? I like the 3-point rule. So instead of leadership is like a lot of things, great leaders do 3 things. They set direction, make decisions, take responsibility, right? Now you're in control. The idea is that the 3 ideas gives clarity and that clarity signals intelligence. One of my other tricks is if you can't speak well, write well. So how do you control the frame? Let's say you're just like, Codie, I'm just an introvert. I don't want to talk. Too much, set the frame in a meeting. You know, one of my favorite stories about a founder insisting on clarity is Jeff Bezos banning PowerPoint presentations at Amazon and mandating a brief at the beginning of every single meeting. So you could do that if you're like, I know I'm not going to be able to get my stuff out as clearly as I want right now. Send a brief, control the beginning of the meeting and say the first 5 minutes we're going to read the brief. You control the frame without even having to say anything. And this makes so much sense to me because he was actually annoyed that his pre-meeting memos were getting ignored. And he realized, he was like, "All right, I'm going to carve meetings time into my meetings for the team to get on the same page." And so that alignment process meant no PowerPoints because you could say a bunch of stuff and it could take forever. And he would find that people in slides would do a bunch of graphics or images and it would hide bad thinking. Instead, you know, Bezos would say a PowerPoint is kind of like a sales tool, and internally the last thing you want to do is sell. You're truth-seeking, you're trying to find the truth. So he made sure that actually all his leaders wrote a page of well-structured narrative text that everyone would read silently at the beginning of every meeting. And once they had finished, the meeting began. So why don't you try that? Like structured writing equals structured thinking equals structured speaking. And if you don't feel confident enough in your speech, Write that bad boy down. Because I think actually Bezos figured out something that most newsletter writers, for instance, still haven't. When he banned PowerPoint, he solved a meeting problem by doing structured writing, which made his thinkers think better, which gave them better outcomes because garbage in versus garbage out. The memo doesn't just communicate the idea, it is the idea. So the best newsletter writers understand this. You know, they're not just publishing, they're building an asset. And the gap between a newsletter that stays a hobby and one that becomes a business usually isn't the writing, actually. It's the infrastructure underneath it, which is why I use Beehive. Like last year, Beehive Publishers sent 28 billion emails. Isn't that crazy? And they reached more than 255 million unique readers. And like, that's super interesting. But I think the only reason they got to that level was the tools. Like the analytics don't just tell you open rates, they tell you who opened, what they clicked, where they came from. So every issue you send is a little sharper version of the last one. The referral program also turns your existing readers into a growth engine. The ad network brings brand deals to you like no pitching, no back and forth. Beehive handles the reporting and the invoicing and the paid subscriptions all built into the dashboard, not bolted on. So if you're already running a newsletter somewhere else, this is the time to move. The analytics are insane. They answer the right questions. The revenue tools are really revenue driving. Beehive is worth a serious look. For newsletters launched on Beehive in 2025, the median time to first dollar was 66 days. Head to beehive.com/codie and use code CODIE30 for 30% off of your first 3 months of beehive.com. So let me give you some of my hacks for getting tactical about real-time thinking so that you can push off a few seconds to get a good response. One of the ones I like the best is rephrase the question. What does this do? It gives you time. It allows you to kind of clarify your thinking because you're clarifying the question. So let's say that they ask you a question and you understand the question. You might just reframe it and say, "So you're asking why people struggle with X?" Now your brain catches up, right? They usually will reframe the question and they'll do more than just one sentence response. They'll give you a little fluff room. That's your time to think. Two would be thinking opposites. So if you're stuck, flip it. So say somebody asks you, why do people fail? Do Charlie Munger thinking, just invert it. Think, why do people succeed? This is a classic inversion technique. By inverting the question, you're introducing an anti-signal that helps make your signal clearer. And as we learned earlier, clarity wins. So for instance, Why do people fail? Maybe you don't know the answer to that. Well, you do know the answer to why people succeed. Okay, great. Now you run with it. Number 3, default to first principles. So I want you to strip complexity out of this. Some of the ways you can do that, you can start with sentences like, "At the core," or, "This comes down to," or, "Ultimately," or, "The immutable laws of physics tell us that." Like, whatever you can do to just strip down all the extra layers And you're signaling to us that you're at the core. That seems more grounded, it seems more clear, and it seems more data-backed. 4, I like using simple analogies. Analogies are like thinking shortcuts. You know, Elon Musk loves to use these. He would take something incredibly complex like rockets or batteries, and he would ask NASA not why do you build these really expensive, overly complicated rockets that have XYZ and, you know, 1, 2, 3, and all of these mechanisms, he would just ask, "Hey NASA, why do you build rockets like Ferraris for every launch when Honda Accords would do?" Ah, it's great. It's basically saying we only need something simple to do this. Let's stop making it so expensive. He also has this other line where he says, he describes factories as the machine that builds the machine. And so that's a way to help his engineers decide on machine layouts and product flow. Like how many times have you guys worked with somebody? They're like, "Oh yeah, we're operating that," or "We have a process for that." You're like, Yeah, you do. That process is awful. That's a terrible process. Okay, you still got it. But the process, which is highly complex and has all these components but doesn't output anything? No. So he describes the pain of entrepreneurship also, great line, as eating glass and staring into the abyss, which I've been there recently. And why do I like that? Memorable, easy to understand. And if you've ever felt it, that feels visceral. You can also ask a question back. I think this is really underutilized. Like, if you're unsure, ask back. Like, do you mean from a business perspective or a personal perspective? Do you mean in absolute terms or relative terms? You know, do you mean an immediate outcome or a long-term outcome? This is letting you buy time. It's also allowing you to narrow the scope a little bit, which might help you figure out how to answer. You know, I have a background in journalism and as a journalist I was forced to learn how to think and speak on the spot. This is really important when you want people to tell you things they probably shouldn't. And so a common technique we used to ask better questions is called the DOS method. So one of the most important things as a journalist is like, don't bullshit. D is for direct, just be clear. O is for open-ended, like get depth, don't ask yes or no questions. And S is for short, Don't give them fluff. Let them tell you the fluff. If you can train yourself to ask questions that are direct, open-ended, and short, you also train yourself to communicate that same way back. So now you know the steps, you gotta do the reps, right? I think the only way that any of this changes for you is if you take a minute, you can even write your questions in the comments and we'll respond back to you, 'cause I want you to train like a pro. Like one little training drill you could do is like see if you can answer things in 60 seconds all day today. Like anytime somebody asks you something, look at like your watch sort of nonchalantly, look at your phone, and see if you can give them an answer in 60 seconds. What you're gonna have to do then is use structured, thoughtful responses. Also, you're gonna be shocked at how many more conversations you can have in a day. Another one you can do is compression training. Like once you nail the 60-second answers, explain something in 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, then one sentence. It's also really scary to do that. So for instance, I was just in a room with our product team and we were talking about one of our products, which is called topprompt.ai. Actually, I'll give you guys free access to it. If you wanna figure out a way to have AI build you things, but you don't know the right way to ask questions to it and you wanna do what's called a one-shot, like one question to a result of a product, a script, anything you wanna build with AI, TopPrompt will help you do it. So anyway, I was building this tool that I use daily and telling my tech team like, hey, I need something different on TopPrompt. I want to do this different component. By the way, I'll put TopPrompt down in the link below in the show notes so you guys can play with it. But what I realized is that I was overexplaining. And so instead, with compression training, I just said, I want 5 sections, no more, in TopPrompt. So it's really easy to understand. And then in my compression training, I wanted to get to that one sentence. And I just said, what if you could ask one question and get 5 prompts back. Really simple. Great. One of the ways to see if you're any good at this or not is record yourself. I learned so much, like, from myself on being on this podcast. I watch it back, which is, woo, that is stressful. The first couple of times you do it, it's still stressful sometimes. We all hate the sound of our own voice, but you'll notice your filler words, your weak endings, your rambling, where you have weird intonation in your voice. And then you can start building out this story bank. So like today on Twitter, actually, I was— this is such a good idea. I thought this guy was talking about how he has a— let me find it. What do you call it? Yeah. He was saying that he has a huge swipe file of inspiration clips from movies. And he's like, I like this because you can 10x the quality of your videos by like, oh, I remember that one scene from Marty Supreme. Okay, I've got that. Remember that one scene from Fight Club? And because he creates videos all day, he has this swipe file of videos he can steal from. Well, what if you have a swipe file in your head? Like build like 5 go-to stories that your husband or your wife is going to fucking hate by the end of this because they're going to hear it so many times, but it's going to get laughs. This is your go-to. This is your first date. This is your hottest story you got. I like to think of them in varying subjects like, what's your failure story? What's your big lesson story? What's your, "I'm so proud of myself, I could have built me a damn statue," AKA your win story? What's your turning point? "Oh man, my life was this and then..." What's your insight story? "Wow, do you know this is happening in the world right now?" Now you've always got material. You're like the comedian, ready to go, baby. You think they do that every single time brand new? No way. So to sum it up, get structured. The people who win in conversations, they're not the smartest. They're usually the ones that have a database, a system to pull from. And once you install this, like, database, you actually stop fearing questions, you stop overthinking answers, and you can almost respond to just about anything. And then people will listen to you. I'm Codie Sanchez, and this is The Big Deal Podcast. I'll see you on the next one. You guys tell me if this was useful. Also tell me if you love TopPrompt. I do. I use it a lot.