What to Say When You Don’t Know What to Say

Ultimize. Let's deal with a very real moment. You press record, you're ready, and you think, what am I actually going to say? And suddenly your mind goes blank. This happens to everyone, even people who've been speaking for years. The difference is not whether it happens. The difference is what you do next. Here's the bad response. You just sit there, you wait for the perfect idea, you don't get it, and you stop. Or you think, well, I'll come back to this later, and later never happens. Now here's the better response. You start talking anyway, not randomly, but using a simple starting point. Let me give you one that works immediately. You start with, let me tell you something I see all the time. That's it. Now your brain has a direction. It might not be the most dramatic hook in the world, but it gets you going. Now you're not trying to invent something abstract. You're recalling something real. For example, let me tell you something I see all the time. People say they want to be better speakers, but they only practice in their head. Now you're moving. Now you have momentum. Here's another one. Here's a mistake I made. Instantly you have material because now you're not trying to be perfect. You're being specific. And all motivational speakers need to talk about their mistakes. Doesn't matter if you were born extremely poor or if you were born a billionaire, you're still making mistakes along your journey. People want to hear about them. So you've got to be specific. Here's another way. Here's something I wish I'd known earlier. Could be a great starter. Now you're pulling from experience. Let me show you the difference. Here's the bad version. Today I want to talk about communication. That's too abstract. It's generic. It sounds like a boring college professor. Your brain has nowhere to go. Here's a better version. Here's something I used to do that made me a worse speaker. Now it's focused. Now it's real. Here's what actually happened. When you try to think of a topic, your brain freezes. When you think of a situation, a mistake, or a moment, your brain responds. Because it's concrete. Let me give you a very real scenario. You're driving, you think of something that annoyed you in a meeting. Instead of saying, 'I should talk about communication skills,' you say, 'Let me tell you what happened in a meeting yesterday.' You have a story, and from that story you get your insight, and from that insight you get your message. So you don't need ideas, you need entry points. Here's the idea to install. I don't wait for ideas. I start with something real. That's the difference. Now, once you start, don't stop, even if it gets messy, even if it's not perfect, because clarity comes from movement, not from waiting. And here's what you'll notice. The more you do this, the easier it becomes to start. You stop fearing the blank moment because you know how to move through it. So the next time you press record and your mind goes blank, Don't panic. Don't stop. Just begin with something real. A mistake, a moment, something you've seen. And once you start, the rest will follow. And I should clarify, I'm a huge, huge fan of going live. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter. I'll leave it up to you as far as your exact social media strategy. Personally, I go live pretty much 5 days a week on on all social media platforms. It forces me to think on my feet, or in this case, on my seat, and to clarify my messages on a daily basis. Now, you could record in advance, do some editing in post, as long as it doesn't slow you down. I've seen people say, oh, I've got a great new motivational bit I'm gonna share with people. I just recorded it. A month later I say, how did that go? Oh, I'm still editing it. That's the problem when you don't go live. The temptation is to edit, refine, snip this, take that, um, out, rearrange this word, and you never hit record and actual play and publish. That's the big problem with that. You wait for something perfect. And it never comes and it freezes you. See what I did right there? I made a mistake a moment ago. I could have spent a ton of time deleting and editing out when I said record when I really meant publish, but I'm leaving it in here to make a point for you. You don't have to be perfect. Get good ideas out, share it with people. They're going to find it motivational even when you make mistakes.