ARTICULACY: From Monkey To Monk (Full Course)

there are only a few dozen people in the entire world who sit at this table this is the table for people who can think clearly speak clearly and are able to articulate their opinions Express how they feel and people listen to them they're what I like to call verbal athletes and every verbal athlete knows how to apply all of the mad scientist chicken scratch that you're going to learn in this video about how to communicate well in fact if you want to achieve the articulacy of your favorite internet figure whoever that may be give yourself

until the end of this video because what you're about to learn is forever going to change the way that you speak for the rest of your life so people have an always will Champion clear speakers in fact if you go to any interview on YouTube of some historical figure like Martin Luther King for example and you view the comments you will find a deep reverence for the way that these people spoke all of this is a skill there's no such thing as natural-born communication if you're not good at speaking articulately it's simply because you don't

know how to practice and at the end of this video I'm going to give you a practice routine that we actually give the elite speakers that we train this here is commonplace Society most people don't know how to speak we're kind of all a troop of monkeys chattering and chimping around trying to be heard and much of society is structured this way to keep us inarticulate confused used and muted so that we can't fully express ourselves the discipline of rhetoric and the study of articulate speaking is something that's been purged from schools because the modern

education system is frankly structured to produce workers and employees not people who can express and lead and when people can't find their voice or can't say what they think they beg for the people who do and this is often how a lot of Cults form where you have lost individuals who are desperate to feel heard and understood clinging to someone who sort of acts as their voice and becomes their intellectual Savior and the person who can express what other people are unable to articulate have an incredible Advantage usually make more money and find more peace

and fulfillment who am I some background on myself here I run the communications company nounce where we train creators Executives politicians your influencers favorite influencer to speak like cultural icons we've studied the speaking patterns of nearly every major thought leader influencing culture today and have developed a curriculum to help you speak like a cultural icon I would ask if you're interested that you consider joining one of our next virtual elitee cohorts we diagnose your speaking struggles bring in actors to roleplay with you train you to use certain thinking Frameworks and how to create mic drop

moments in your speaking so that you could become the leading voice in your field so we need to First understand why most people struggle with speaking clearly there are actually three stages of putting a thought into words that we need to unpack the first stage is what I call inspiration inspiration is like raw materials that exist in the mind it's wheat that we want to turn into bread it's the idea next we have conditions so there are all kinds of conditions that can complement or complicate the process of translating our thought into words for example

we might become anxious and experience that kind of tunnel vision that limits how much of our mind that we feel we can access the conditions are like the millstone that grinds the wheat into flour and finally we have the presentation this is how we package our thought the words we choose our sentence structure volume rate of speech the presentation is is best thought of as like the bake bread it might be crunchy and delicious it might be charred black and completely ined so let's talk about the first stage our thoughts so we live in a

society that often encourages building what I have come to call the quotation brain pack this is the storing and repetition of those sound bites that you can kind of easily pull from your back pocket people feel like they have to hold on to everything that they encounter online or in a book or any form of media because you usually they recognize some TR truth and what is said and they feel that one day that truth will be relevant to them the problem is too much of this state produces what I like to call intellectual obesity

this is a very mentally unhealthy state where our thinking becomes scattered and neurotic and we see symptoms of this all over in the way that people communicate today for example poor thought retention or the inability to develop a thought longer than a few seconds the use of words all the time increased anxiety and anxiousness not being fully present in the moment you never feel like you're you're there with someone excessive swearing in fact our company actually did a study on gen Z linguistic patterns and here's a spreadsheet of the most used words if you look

at some of these top words it's not looking good other physical symptoms that we've looked into as as a result of this scattered thinking are things like rest leg syndrome which I've I've written extensively about clear speech is the result of clear thinking when our Temple isn't sorted our tongue isn't sorted write that down get that I don't know tattooed on your ankle or something because it's going to be a very important theme throughout this course I actually want to jump ahead really briefly and talk about presentation our words now every influential person that exists

has developed some kind of a verbal brand what is is a verbal brand your verbal brand are the words that you choose based on your personality and based on your goals so consider your favorite internet personality that you listen to there are probably a few key phrases a few key words that are part of the way that they talk for example I use these words a lot now the same is true with your friends with your family every person has words that they have a intimate relationship with your verbal brand is not the same as

your vocabulary so your vocab are the words that you know and your vocabulary is usually divided into your surface lexicon and your deep lexicon your surface lexicon are those 500 to 1500 words your brain unconsciously defaults to when you compose sentences whatever is coming to your mind when you're speaking you don't have to think about it beneath the surface lexicon resides your deep lexicon your deep lexicon is made up of those 20,000 to 35,000 words you recognize but don't use and we know this because we recognize nearly every word that articulate speakers say so why

is it that we struggle to use those same words in conversation well because those words don't register in our surface lexicon you know good words they're just Dusty swords in your Armory in order to speak well you have to begin by developing a better relationship with language and Elite speakers are able to explore and explain the world around them in razor sharp detail and to use a word like that like a phrase razor sharp this is what is known as the articulate effect and the word articulate is it's kind of a big fluffy word that

people throw around online no one really knows what it means they just know how they feel when they hear something that they'll describe as articulate this is what I like to call the articulate Matrix when a word or phrase is common in vague it falls into this Zone when it feels uncommon not used a lot and precise it often feels articulate now if it's too precise and uncommon it can fall into this danger zone and we risk confusing people with our high futin poly syllabic vernacular big words and we often inflict ourselves with anxiety when

we force ourselves to use larger words it's it's never something I recommend what's important to understand in all of this is that when you're in conversation your brain naturally retrieves words from your surface lexicon and it does this quite unconsciously so how do we access more precise words well it's very similar to taking a deep breath when we stop to inhale and stretch our lungs fully we feel a lot more replenished versus trying to replenish the oxygen that our brain needs through you know a series of short shallow breaths what is this this mean well

it means the longer that you pause the more time that your mind has to go below the surface and hunt for the right words in your deep lexicon the second factor that influences better word choice is repetition the more you encounter a word the higher it registers in your deep lexicon until usually it enters your surface lexicon and maybe actually becomes part of your verbal brand if you ever struggle to retrieve a word that you've recently encountered it's likely due to not having yet heard that word from your own mouth your speaking Apparatus Your your

tongue your teeth your mouth your jaw your your larynx if they haven't engaged a word before you're not going to default to it organically because you don't even know what it sounds like to be used so once we understand this the next step is to begin finding good words and good phrases what you have to learn in this process is that articulacy is not about choosing big words because trying to sound smart is it's a disease that you have to cure if you want to speak well you have to strip away every desire to impress

people because really that's when people are the most impressed when you speak with Clarity conviction and authenticity or or realness and I want you to understand that your presentation right here the words you choose is the product of all the language inputs in your life up until this point the books you read the videos you watch the music you listen to the the words you hear from friends and family from myself etch language patterns in your mind that you imitate when you talk your surface lexicon is the size that it is because you encounter those

500 to 1500 words daily and this is why Elite speakers the 1% of communicators read profusely and talk profusely it's because they're trying to create a fresh stream of language that is flowing and expanding and putting more words in their surface lexicon so let's talk about this for a few minutes language inputs the most obvious unregulated input in people's lives is music confucious the Chinese philosopher had once said from music I can tell what people are thinking whether thoughts are corrupt or virtuous and when we attempt to articulate an idea our brain defaults to the

packaging of that idea in the way that we've always heard it expressed so think about the most popular phrases in society's lexicon here are some examples most of these are shaped by the music that Society listens to the average person consumes around 2 to five hours of Music a day that's two hours of programming yourself minimally to think and speak about things in a certain way and your speech Bears the weight of any idea you infect your mind with this is true with all kinds of input this is why by the way unregulated social media

use usage can very quickly poison someone's Clarity of thought because social media naturally amplifies vague and poorly worded ideas to appeal to the lowest common denominator and none of this is helped by the fact that those who mastered technology earlier are usually younger people younger people have a lot of immature ideas that aren't fully developed and that kind of unclear thinking is what gets Amplified and everyone thinks that that's the norm that's what everyone thinks so I want to underscore this point the lead contributor to unclear speaking is not having good sources of clear language

now I'm not recommending that you delete Spotify I am recommending that you become more aware of what you feed your mind in fact if you want to audit your language inputs I created this worksheet that you can use I've used this for myself multiple times in my life what I recommend doing is creating a good language diet that consists of nutritious words and phrases so for example one of the things I did for my myself was create an audio file that includes the most impactful phrases that have given me a good Bedrock of language to

build upon actually if you want my personal file I'll just link it below I recommend listening to something like this once a day I just read it out in my own voice while looking at the transcript right next to it we actually find that this practice is something that is a part of nearly every articulate speaker in history not not the audio file but they called it keeping a commonplace book which was a repository of all words and phrases they wanted to use in their speeches and in their conversation we find that most articulate answers

and artistic word choices that we hear you know in those short form clips that we see everywhere those stem from commonplace books in fact one of my favorite speakers the screenwriter Rod Serling once said in an interview we're developing a new citizenry one that will be very itive about cereals and Automobiles but won't be able to think and I used to think when I heard that phrase how can someone jump from cereal to automobiles within the span of a second like my mind could never fathom being so resourceful with words and that was until I

stumbled upon that same phrase serial and Automobiles in Sterling's writing his speeches and other interviews that he did and it was also in his commonplace book or what sirling called his writer's diary so what we understand is that these verbal gymnastics that we hear others say is just the result of good documentation of the language that they find interesting so start becoming a collector of excellent language if you want to know where to start here's a collection of some articulate books speeches and movies that you can begin Mining and when you do this your aim

should be to find resonant words and phrases words that resonate with you and mean something perhaps you like the imagery of the phrase or the rhythm of how it sounded or the emotion so let me quickly show you a real example of what collecting articulate language looks like so last night actually I was watching this interview with the psychologist Jonathan hate and I was listening to this video here and I encountered him at one point using the phrase intellectual Heritage now when I heard that phrase my mind immediately thought that's a cool phrase I want

to use it so what did I do well I added it to my com one place book here under the creative phrases category and this is what Elite speakers do in fact I think it was Martin Luther King who would frequently use phrases like Cosmic significance was one rabble rousers and agitators depths and dimensions of the problem someone like Thomas Jefferson used to say human life and happiness and the Machine of man Muhammad Ali would say my style stamina and system all of these sort of intelligent phrases and expressions we hear from Elite communicators these

aren't things are just generating on the Fly they are pre-assembled in advance one of the most important sections of a commonplace book is understanding the power of thought wrappers so what are thought wrappers uh these are short Creative Expressions that help introduce the substance of our thought one of the Epiphany moments that I had a few years ago was learning that you can cast ordinary opinions in a smart fashion by using specific phrases to introduce the idea these are phrases like something that I wish to add that will complement what this person is saying is

and then you'd introduce your idea or this is very common sense and I think many people miss this can I share an observation with you can I offer some push back to what you just said hey help me make sense of a puzzle I'm trying to solve these are all thought wrappers I'll actually show you an example of what this looks like in practice in fact in this next clip of the linguist Steven fry try to identify the thought rapper that he uses the mental health question is a very important one and it's fortunately one

that is being talked about far more than it ever used to be I had a a rather terrible experience in this example Steven presents his thought using this thought rapper this question is a very important one and it's been talked about far more than it ever used to be one easy way to think about thought rappers is kind of as the runway before the takeoff of your main idea or your main answer you could be confident with your thought wrapper and not confident with whatever the main substance of your thought is and people will still

interpret everything you say as confident because how you frame the intro sets the emotional tone of your idea so here's a list of thought rappers for some of History's Greatest speakers I'll leave this resource below when you know how to say things differently than most people or set out on a very strong first step it gives you a tremendous amount of confidence in continuing to develop your answer this is one of those high impact things that we've seen change the way that people speak because many of us many of us would be far more assertive

if we knew how to introduce our thoughts well let's go ahead and return to our main graph here for a moment all of this presentation that we've been talking about is important because it teaches us how to have better ingredients at our disposal that we can create better recipes with now none of this matters if you're afraid to enter the kitchen because keeping a commonplace book doesn't matter if you can't be at ease with yourself in the moment when we're nervous or the conditions are terrible we seek Perfection with our words we are overanalyzing the

engineering of every one of our sentences all of this it sabotages our ability to access our inspiration and our intelligence and no amount of fancy word tricks are going to make you feel satisfied with what you say in order to be satisfied with what you say you need to understand how to create comfortable conditions for yourself which means we have to be ourself and when we are ourselves we are satisfied with what we say now this sounds rather obvious however most people are unable to do this most people are unsatisfied what they say because most

people are not themselves why is this well we've looked into this a lot and and having worked with a lot of people I've noticed three negative thought patterns that are preventing most people from being fully themselves when they speak and I call these the three blocks to authenticity the three lines of faulty code that are preventing them from creating good conditions for speaking articulately the first is what I call the I need to say something because I'm uncomfortable with silence problem or the babble problem we speak to Simply populate the air because uncomfortable silence is

our worst fear don't you hate that hate what uncomfortable silences why do we feel it's necessary to yak about in order to be comfortable I don't know problem is we just don't have a comfortable relationship with silence silence creates a centeredness in a person that's incredibly hard to fake I guarantee you that your favorite Communicator they know how to use silence when they speak and it's not the kind of like fake pausing where we pause before we speak and all that happens is our our mind is racing I've got to use this time to come

up with something intelligent to say the longer I wait the more people expect me to drop some revolutionary mic drop quote you know there's no room at this table for people who just talk to talk when you just talk to talk you put pressure on yourself to make sense the exercise we give our students to address this babble problem is to sit in silence for 10 minutes a day wild right you have to go somewhere quiet where you can sit and just settle your thoughts and this is the perfect antidote to this problem we discussed

earlier of of intellectual obesity where we have a world that focuses a lot on external things right the social media is very external and learning to command silence allows you to explore that inner world and the natural result of this is that you get very clear on what your values are who you are yourself and this leads to a deeper understanding of the way that you think when you have a deeper understanding of yourself and the way that you think since clear speaking is a result of clear thinking the natural outcome is usually a more

peaceful presence and better Clarity of speech you seem a lot wiser because you're more at ease with who you are when you're at ease with who you are everything you say feels aligned because it stems from a person who is grounded and this is true for most of those who have a seat at this communication table there's a direct correlation to how much of your truth that you share and how satisfied you are with what you say the problem is we have a lot of people in society saying what they think others want to hear

but not what they themselves feel so we've removed one of those blocks of authenticity now now there are two more lines of B code that we need to solve the second is the I always have to choose the right words problem otherwise known as the disease of perfectionism and perfectionism is one of those incredibly deadly speech cancers because in order to speak greatly we have to be okay with not sounding great in our program we have this stage that we talk about called Perfection deception perfectionism we find to be really more of the avoidance of

mistakes in our speech than the pursuit of the best phrases that exist out there the catalog of language and in studying this what we've noticed is that the main cause of perfectionism in people is people who have a large response lag so what is this well this is the time between preparation of thought and then presentation of thought delayed responses delayed responses have become increasingly the norm in society because of well for one technology and phones we let emails sit around all day before we respond we let a text sit well we give ourselves I

don't know 30 minutes to try to piece together the the most perfect reply you know we want everything to be a strike of lightning with what we say how we communicate and what this does is reinforce in our mind the habit of needing lots of time in in order to say something adequate this is simply not normal unless you were writing a letter like a hundred years ago most of your sponses responses they had to to be instant and this response log was very short and the closer that these two circles are together between preparation

and presentation the more satisfied that you are with what you say because you have less time to overthink and when these two circles are nearly on top of one another this is what people call Flow or the Flow State flow state is where you're speaking as you're thinking you've entered into a dimension that marries thought and speech a Harmony between your mouth and your mind we like to often play this game with ourselves where we tell ourselves we need more time to access our intelligence and because you've told yourself that you can only produce a

great reply after you sit for 30 minutes under a tree with an iced tea and a massage chair like that's become true that's become the norm and this is the biggest harm actually of of not socializing of not speaking to people is you are not practicing reducing that response lag when you're exposed to more situations where you don't have a lot of time to think about what you say you shrink that response lag and that's what you need to do in order to battle perfectionism with verbal communication you are only as good as what you

can come up with in the moment so what do we do well we have to force ourselves to respond without hesitation now will you say imperfect things of course you know the analogy that I often use is imagining a running faucet of water the water represents your thoughts the dirty water begins to flow out initially when you turn on the tap and the more that you open the tap the cleaner the flow of water becomes now if you never open the faucet because you're scared of Muddy Water you're never going to access the Pure Flow

and never be refreshed you have to force yourself to say thoughts out loud as you think about them and what's going to happen is you'll Stand Out automatically because most people have a thousand layers of filtering the more time that you give yourself to overthink the more you will focus on trying to engineer the perfect delivery when you give yourself enough time to be perfect of course you won't be because it's in the freedom to say anything that you end up saying something great let's move to the third block of authenticity and this is what

I call the what if I don't know what to say or the edge of the map problem what happens if I reach somehow the edge of the conversation what will happen if I don't know what to say well let's play this through you might be uncomfortable you'll probably sit in silence you fear being embarrassed or looking less than you know what if this person thinks I'm stupid because I can't say anything intelligent like you know those those kinds of thoughts and so as long as you continue to avoid that embarrassment or that social humiliation you

always will be caught in a trap of needing to plan your next slot I once did this in a relationship which caused me to never be fully present in the moment I was always planning ah head with my thinking and this is natural for us it's natural for our brain to want to plan ahead because our brain does not want to be placed in territories that you haven't mastered or that you can't control and that perspective just does not lead to a lot of confidence and conversation because you only become as good as your ability

to follow the script and what we see with 1% communicators is a flexibility an adventurousness with speaking they understand that they actually always do have a map with them what is that map well it's their current emotional state and the ability to express how they feel in the moment if I'm being honest like right now I didn't plan content here I don't quite know what to say in this section but that's me being authentic right authenticity is not the same thing as perfectionism authenticity is Being Human it's being imperfect and humans connect with other humans

so much of us we like to limit ourselves by what we can memorize and then when we throw away the paper we see who you really are one of the most helpful exercises we've taken our students through is to write a list of everything that they don't like about the way that they communicate and then what we do is we usually roleplay those worst case scenarios and build out challenges around them but what you'll find is even writing it out there's a tremendous amount of relief in putting all of your discomfort about the way that

you sound and the way you talk on paper it is like I always like to use this analogy of like it's taking a flashlight and shining it into that black box that we all carry around and when you know what's inside it's no longer a dark mystery that weighs on you and that knowledge it impacts how much at ease you are when you speak and this is a great segue into one of the most important parts of this course which is that we achieve a clear understanding of ourselves and we achieve Clarity of thought and

therefore become more articulate when we engage in consistent output now output can be writing it can be conversations it can be recording videos voice notes the modern media World likes to dictate that we should have all of these clear answers every time we speak we see people online speaking these mic drop moments all the short clips of people sprain wisdom and we feel like we should be able to do the same in some regard and we forget that most of us haven't been provided that amount of output opport unities to figure out what we think

something that is well worded that you hear is the product of a lot of thinking and a lot of output usually a lot more output than you think one of the things our company did was study the high impact activities that help people achieve Clarity in their thinking and we developed an exercise called Essence writing so here's how it works open up a note document or Google doc and every night before bed set a timer for 5 minutes and you're going to pick a topic you struggle to articulate and just start writing about it in

three stages you're going to do this in 100 words in 50 words and then in 25 words you can use a word counter to track the word count or just use this Google template and it'll be linked below this video what this does writing out your thought in three sections is it trains yourself to develop an internal Compass of what a lean clear answer feels like so here's an example of something that I was writing last night never mind the topic here Essence writing is all about taking that archaeological brush and and brushing off the

layers of dust to reveal the bones of your thought and when you do this multiple times slowly you begin to find a connection between different ideas and this builds a skeleton of the world that makes sense that you can articulate when you speak now it doesn't mean that it's right doesn't mean that your understanding of Everything Is Right but it does mean that you understand it and can explain it and this is what we describe as a bulletproof golden tonged speaker and they in my mind only five people in the world who are at this

level who have refined their thinking through a tremendous amount of output okay so output produces Clarity what is Clarity well Clarity often times is Simplicity and the opposite is true anxiety is complexity Elite speakers have eliminated complexity from their manner of speaking there's a Simplicity to their sentences in fact one of the things that we've studied is the science of clear communication and we found that in the clearest speakers in the world their flow of information is usually limited to one idea per sentence they've mastered this moving forward of an idea at a very digestible

pace and when each sentence moves the idea forward there's no redundancy the idea feels lean I'll show you an example of this in fact watch this following clip of the American investor Nal ravikant related to this is you know the the practice of meditation one of the reasons why people don't like meditation or find it hard to meditate is because when you first sit down all of your unaddressed problems that you've been ignoring come barreling up to the service and assault you and some of these have been sitting there for a decade waiting for you

to address them and I think the same thing applies in a business context like if you get busy busy busy busy what happens is the real nagging problems like hm are we actually building the right product did I actually recruit the right team oh my God I raised money from the wrong investors in this example notice how each sentence introduces a new point and develops the main idea there's no redundancy the information is lean there are no hazy vague points that take three sentences to unpack and this is because Naval actually practices a form of

essence writing he does this in the form of tweets I tweet a lot so Twitter forces me to gather my thoughts to0 characters exactly in fact he a rule where he doesn't speak about things that he hasn't first written about the clarity of a philosopher like this begins with getting your mind's inner contents outside so in these final few minutes together what I want to do is give you a few practices that you can start today to instantly enrich your speaking the first is to reduce erosion tags erosion tags are weak phrases that we often

tag to the end of our sentences that paper off the discussion they Whittle away at our confidence these are phrases like and yeah that's my opinion so yeah that's kind of what I think that's what I got and yeah what these phrases do is introduce a lot of insecurity and uncertainty into our speech but that's just my opinion see do you see how a weak ending can undermine the en of your entire idea there's a phrase I like to use a few careless words Kenny wrode a great many careful ones when you feel when you're

you're speaking that you're you're reaching the point where you're kind of exhausting what you wanted to say and you don't feel like there's a lot more that you want to add stop at that point I could have said a lot more for like that sentence right there but I stopped short and the funny thing is you didn't know that that's the beauty of committing to an end is people always will think think that you said everything that you wanted to the next one is to commit to completing each sentence the lack of Direction in our

speaking the winding sort of scattered nature of a lot of our thoughts is actually the result of us giving ourselves permission to abandon a sentence every single time our starting words are poor in fact if you develop the practice of forcing yourself to work with the words you've spoken aloud what you do is you improve your mind's verbal agility with words and you realize that you can kind of make anything work the next technique keep your mouth closed until you've defined your starting words the most vulnerable moment in our speech particularly for those pesky filler

phrases or filler words um like uh it's always at the start of our sentences if you refrain from that initial um you don't let your mouth open and commit to it because it so desperately wants to lead with that you will find you'll be able to start your sentence with a strong beginning and that confidence will carry through usually until the end of the sentence the final and most powerful technique that I've used in fact several times in this video is what I call the runway and takeoff method here's how it works so think of

a plane taking off the first sentence acts as the runway and at the end of the runway are a set of words that get repeated at the beginning of the second sentence and this transition between sentences this can be done with a single word or an entire set of words what this does is create a very logical flow to your speech and when you create a logical flow to your speech listeners understand you and when they understand you they're more likely to be persuaded or moved by your words so if you want to embody everything

that we've discussed in this video and become a verbal athlete check the links below that nouner vision is simply to help train the most influential speakers on the world stage I'd love to see you there