Hadar Shemesh, an English communication coach, recommends recording yourself speaking for two minutes daily on any topic. Prepare for one minute with bullet points, then record without stopping or redoing. Review each video to spot three things to improve and one strength.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Hadar. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to give you a tip that will help you improve your fluency and confidence when communicating. But before we begin, if you don't know me, my name is Hadar. I'm a non native speaker of English and I am here to help you communicate with confidence, with clarity, with flow, with freedom and with joy. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to my channel and come say hi on Instagram Hadar Accentsway, where I share with you a lot more about getting to where you want to be. Okay, so today's tip is something that I've been sharing with my community members and my students for years now, but I haven't talked about it here. And this is why I want to share it with you. Because it's so simple and so incredibly effective. So if you struggle with sorting out your thoughts, organizing your thoughts and delivering your thoughts with flow and precision, which means what you say is actually aligned with what you want to say with your thought, one of the ways to do that and to get there is to get better and develop the skill of organizing your thoughts and communicating them when there is not so much at stake. So when it's not in a situation that is demanding an important meeting, or when you're interviewing for a job, because then you might be a bit more nervous or you might be thinking about so many things and then you can't develop a new skill that requires you to be open and vulnerable and free. And this is why you need to do it when it's not important. You need to do it on a daily basis. I've already talked here about the importance of developing healthy habits. Creating the habit of organizing your thoughts and delivering it is something that you want to do. So here is a fantastic way to do that. Start making daily videos where you discuss a certain topic about life, about your job, about anything that you're interested in, about anything that you'd like to learn more of. And give yourself one minute to prepare. So don't over prepare, don't do it in advance because again, the secret here is to learn how to think fast and express what you're thinking, right? So preparing well can help you with, you know, delivery and with doing the right research. But if you want to get better at thinking fast and speaking what you're thinking, then you need to do that again and again and again, right? To be able to improve a certain aspect, you've got to do that thing again and again and again. You can't expect yourself to be good at delivering something spontaneously without the experience of doing that a lot. So, as I said, make a daily video where you choose a topic. And, you know, if you go online, there are dozens and dozens of resources where you have a list of conversation topics. So you can go to Google and type in conversation topics or different questions or controversial questions, and you choose one, you give yourself one minute on the clock to think about it, and you can write bullet points, or you can organize your thoughts really quickly. And then you turn the camera on and you start speaking for two minutes without interrupting yourself and without stopping the video. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to start talking and then you're going to get stuck. And then you'd want to stop the video and start again. So, no, you will have to learn how to come out of a situation where you're stuck. There is this expectation, the video, right? And then you will have to speak through it anyway. That's a skill in and of itself. So you want to practice organizing your thoughts, delivering it on video, but also dealing with the stuckness and coming out of it like a queen or a king. Okay? So you do that. You keep going for two minutes, and at the end of the two minutes, that's it. You don't redo it. You have the next day for that. You put the phone down and you come back to it the next day, okay, you choose another topic, you think about it, and then you start speaking. I guarantee that with time, on your 7th, 10, 10th, 15th video, you'll start feeling more comfortable speaking. You start recognizing after, you know, the 10th and 15th and 20th video, that you are able to think and speak at the same time, that you're able to finish a sentence, that you're able to get stuck and come out of it without, you know, starting over. Because when we're in real life and when you're in a meeting or a job interview or you're at the store speaking to someone, you can't say, okay, wait, let me start over, right? You gotta deal with those moments where you get stuck. And yes, you know, making a video is uncomfortable. And yes, we don't always love seeing ourselves on video and we don't always love hearing our voice recorded. But that is the only way to improve, okay, getting comfortable with your voice. Start loving your voice, recognizing the good things, and then what I want you to do. So it's an option. You can either put the phone down and move on with your day, or you can watch the video and decide on three things that you'd like to improve for tomorrow, and you want to recognize one thing, or at least one thing that you did really well. You need to start recognizing the good work that you do. You need to start recognizing what is working and not just what's not working. That's easy. That's easy to do, right? What's hard to do is to be able to celebrate what is going well. So I want you to give yourself points for improvement because we're always about improving our performance, but also what is going well for you. Okay, so are you up for the challenge? Are you ready to improve your fluency and your stance, speech delivery and organizing your thoughts quickly and bridging the gap between your thoughts and what comes out of your mouth? If the answer is yes, then put yes in the comments. Okay, that's it. I'm sure you're going to love this the moment you get past the awkward feeling of seeing you on video. If you're not comfortable with videos and by the way, in the influency community we have weekly discussions where I post a question and people post their videos and start a discussion there. So if you haven't joined the influencee Community, our free community on Facebook, then I will post a link to it in the description below. I can't wait to see you inside the community and to see your comments. Thank you so, so much for being here. Good luck and I'll see you in the next lesson.
