Master Communication Skills: Train Like a World Leader

Today on Ultimize Discover, you're getting a short practical sample from the Ultimize universe. Use this on its own, take one idea and apply it today, or go deeper at ultimize.com. Ultimize is the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. Ultimize. The next time you pick up your phone, not later today, but right now, the very next time you reach for it, Say out loud what you're picking it up for before you look at the screen. One specific thing, not checking messages, but the specific text you're returning, the specific calendar item you're confirming, the specific piece of information you actually need. Say it out loud. I know it sounds cheesy, but do that one thing and then put the phone down. Do that once and you'll immediately understand something most people never consciously see. Almost every phone pickup either has no clear purpose at all or starts with one purpose and ends somewhere completely different 20 minutes later. That single moment of awareness is where real phone productivity begins. This course is built on changes exactly that specific and exactly that immediately usable. Not another app to manage, not another platform to learn. But a clear, practical system for using the most powerful productivity tool ever created in a way that actually moves your work and your life forward. Every session delivers one change you can implement the same day. I'm TJ Walker, your instructor. If you're ready to use your phone on your terms, then let's get started. Phone on your term comes down to one distinction: And once you see it clearly, everything else in this series clicks into place. There are exactly 2 ways to use a phone. You can use it reactively or you can use it intentionally. Every productivity problem most people have with their phone traces directly back to which of those 2 modes they're operating in. And most people are in a reactive mode almost all the time without ever having consciously chosen it. Reactive use means the phone drives the agenda. A notification arrives and you check it. An alert buzzes and you glance down. A gap on your day opens up and you fill it automatically by reaching for the phone. You're not making a decision, you're responding to a trigger. And here's the critical productivity cost of that. Every time your brain shifts context in response to a trigger someone else sent, you're not using the phone. The phone is using you. Intentional use is the opposite. You decide when you pick up the phone. You decide what you use it for and for how long. You decide when it gets put down. The phone Executes your agenda, not the other way around. It's the difference between a person who gets in their car to drive somewhere specific and a person who just keeps starting the engine every 8 minutes out of habit, goes around the block, parks again, and then wonders, where did the day go? Think about what a millennial averaging 324 phone pickups a day is actually experiencing in terms of productive work. That's a context switch every 3 minutes. Researchers studying workplace interruptions have found that after a typical distraction, it takes more than 20 minutes to fully return to the level of focus you had before it. If you're picking up your phone every 3 minutes, guess what? You are never Not once during the entire workday operating at full cognitive capacity on anything that actually matters. You're spending the entire day in the shallows. The work that requires real depth, real concentration, and real creative thinking never gets the conditions it needs to happen. That is an enormous productivity loss. And And it's entirely invisible because it accumulates in minutes rather than announcing itself all at once. The people who get extraordinary productivity value out of their phones are not the people who are on them the most. They're the people who are on them most deliberately. They use the phone's calendar and reminder functions to protect— that's right, to protect— their most important work blocks. They use it to capture ideas instantly so nothing gets lost. They use its communication tools to run businesses, manage teams, and maintain relationships across time zones. So they're not Luddites. It's not like they don't have a phone. They extract genuine remarkable value from this device. And they do it precisely because they've decided how and when it serves them. Rather than leaving the decision to the phone's own engineering. That's the entire goal of this series. In our next session, we're going to start building that structure where it matters most, starting tonight before you go to sleep. The most powerful tools available for controlling your phone use and protecting your productive time are already sitting inside your phone right now. And phone on your terms means knowing exactly what they are and putting them to work. Most people have never opened any of them. That's not a criticism of anyone. It's a straightforward fact about how phones get set up. The entire onboarding process for a new phone is oriented toward getting you connected and engaged as fast as possible. The tools that work in your favor, however, Well, those are buried, not because they're difficult to use, but because nobody involved in selling you the phone has any financial incentive to show them to you first. Start with the built-in usage dashboard. Every major smartphone platform now includes a report showing you exactly how much time you spent on your phone today, which apps consume the most of that time, and how many times you picked that device up. If you haven't looked at that report recently, do it right now. Genuinely, right now, not later today. The numbers are going to be uncomfortable. That discomfort is the entire point. You can't optimize what you haven't honestly measured. No serious business professional would run a company without looking at the numbers. Your phone use is no different. The usage report is your data. It tells you exactly where your time is going and gives you the factual baseline from which every intentional improvement you make can be measured. The second built-in tool is scheduled Do Not Disturb. Not the version you flip on manually when you happen to remember, but the version you configure once to activate and deactivate automatically on a schedule Every single day. You set it to engage every evening at a specific hour and disengage in the morning. From that point forward, the phone goes quiet every night without requiring any further decision or willpower on your part. That is structure working exactly the way the best professional systems work. One calm decision. Made once, executed consistently by the system indefinitely. I've said throughout this series that structure beats willpower. Scheduled Do Not Disturb is one of the cleanest examples of that principle in action. The 3rd tool is the scheduled alarm used as a behavioral productivity trigger, and this is the one almost nobody thinks to use this way. You can set a daily alarm that fires at the same time every day, not to wake you up, but to prompt a specific high-value behavior. An alarm at 8 in the morning that signals the start of your focused creative block. An alarm at 1 in the afternoon reminding you to take a 30-minute walk, which is one of the most well-documented cognitive performance enhancers available to any professional. An alarm at 6 in the evening marking the transition to phone-free time. Your phone becomes the system that reminds you to use your phone intentionally. Think about your car again. Use the car's own navigation system to find the most efficient route, its fuel gauge to know when to stop, its own alerts to keep you operating safely. The tools for using the car well are built into the car. Your phone is no different. Here's how I personally deploy these features. I don't check email first thing in the morning. I have a specific production block every day for creating course content and podcast and audiobook content and preparing for client sessions. And that block is protected by a scheduled alarm that starts it. You can have one to end it as well. I've actually turned my phone off for my most productive block. Therefore, I can't hear my phone or use my phone for that alarm because it's off. But if you're not literally turning your phone off, you can schedule it to end your productivity sessions. Outside those windows, I'm not creating, I'm doing other things. And inside those windows, I'm not doing other things, I'm creating. The phone's own scheduling tools are what makes those boundaries reliable without, without requiring me to remember to enforce them every single morning. I run a personal development company. I produce courses and I host a daily live show. None of that gets done by someone who's available to every notification at every minute of the day. It gets done by someone who uses the phone's own architecture to carve out the conditions that serious work requires. In our next session, we are going to talk about what happens the moment you pick up your phone and why that single moment is where most people's productive intentions quietly fall apart. By the way, quick question for you. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to consume content and how hard it is to actually do anything with it? I mean, you can listen to 100 episodes, read 10 books, and your habits are exactly the same. That's the gap most people never close. So if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I want to actually improve, go to ultimize.com. We've got free courses there for you, either on communication skills or building better habits. And it's designed to get you to actually use what you're learning, not just hear it once. No cost, no catch. Just go to ultimize.com and start. Ultimize.