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Matt Abrahams is one of the world’s foremost experts on communication. He’s a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and bestselling author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. His focus is the hardest kind of communication: not the rehearsed speech, but knowing what to say when you’re put on the spot: in the interview, the Q&A, the hallway, the toast.

You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

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What you’ll learn in this episode:

  • Matt’s father was quiet but not shy. A lawyer, skipped a couple of grades so he was always younger than his colleagues, a man of few words and very detailed ones. Matt says what he most wants to live up to isn’t the intelligence, it’s that his father believed in being truthful and trustworthy.
  • His parents asked two different questions about communication, and he’s still answering both. His mother taught elementary school and wanted to know how you make it engaging and how you hold attention. His father wanted to know how you organize it and make it structured and understandable. They debated it constantly at home. Attention and structure are still the two halves of everything Matt teaches.

When You’re Interviewing Someone

  • The best interview question he was ever asked: “If you were an onion and I peeled back the first several layers, what would I find?” It was the CEO’s opening line, before anything else. Matt’s answer: “Onions make me cry.” He got the job. When he asked about the question months later, the CEO said he uses it to knock people slightly off center, and what he remembered was that Matt committed to an answer and connected it to something bigger.
  • That’s the whole move when you’re put on the spot. Commit, then connect what you said to the larger picture. The content matters less than refusing to hedge.
  • Warm call, don’t cold call. Matt doesn’t cold call at Stanford and won’t do it in an interview either. He tells candidates up front: I’m going to ask you things that are difficult, the goal isn’t a right answer; the goal is seeing how you process and how we’d collaborate. Then he asks the hard question. Blindsiding someone tells you how they handle being blindsided, which is not the job.
  • Watch how they treat everyone who isn’t you. Matt always asked whoever greeted the candidate how the interaction went, because plenty of people are rude to the front desk and flawless with the hiring manager.
  • Teach candidates how to answer. Matt tells people at the top: answer the question, give me an example so I understand what it means, then connect it to what that would look like if you worked here. Otherwise people ramble, and you’re left wondering why they told you any of it. He says it changed his interviews completely.

When You’re Giving a Talk

  • Intention, attention, then relevance. How are you showing up, what energy and emotion are you bringing, and what will grab the room? Then, fast, why this is worth their time. “Attention is a gift people give you. If they don’t see a return on that, they’re gonna check out.”
  • Start like an action movie. How does an action movie start? With action. Not “hi, my name is, and today I’m going to talk about,” which is also just reading your first slide out loud. Tell a story, ask a question, take a poll, give a startling statistic, and introduce yourself afterward if at all.
  • The first thing Matt’s students hear him say each term: “Communication is critical to your success in business and in your personal life.”
  • If you’re a nervous speaker, NEVER pre-apologize. Saying you’re a nervous speaker feels like buying empathy. What it actually does is prime the room to notice every piece of evidence that confirms it, and it pulls attention off what you’re saying. Just start.
  • How you end matters almost more than how you start. We remember what we hear last, and it recolors everything before it. A wonderful vacation gets remembered a little less wonderfully if the flight home is delayed and the luggage is lost.
  • But the second you signal you’re ending, people leave. Say “in conclusion” on a video call and, like Pavlov’s dogs, they’re opening their calendar. You don’t have much runway, so know exactly what the last thing is.
  • Know, feel, do. Every communication should have a goal in three parts: what you want people to know, how you want them to feel, what you want them to do. Build everything on it, then close by restating it in your own words. It summarizes and gives a sense of completion at the same time.
  • Don’t memorize. It’s connection, not perfection. A memorized script means part of your brain is permanently comparing what you’re saying to what you meant to say, like having too many apps open and each one running slower. That’s the bandwidth you need for the actual goal. There’s also research showing the more you memorize, the more you forget.
  • Write it out, then distill it to a structure. Writing the whole thing out is fine, especially if you’re new to the topic or not a native speaker. Then reduce it to a roadmap. Problem, solution, benefit is one, and most people already know it because television ads are built that way. Practice from the structure, not the script.
  • What, so what, now what. The what is the information. The so what is why it matters to this particular person. The now what is what happens next. It fits an update, a teaching moment, an email, where the subject line becomes the now what and the body carries the rest.
  • Structure isn’t decoration; it’s retention. Cognitive neuroscientists have found structured information is remembered at least 40 percent better. The goal is fidelity, and a leader’s job isn’t just to communicate but to deliver a message other people can repeat accurately.
  • If a number or a quote has to be exact, read it and say you’re reading it. “I wanna make sure I get this right.” That’s cleaner than memorizing, which just makes you more nervous and builds distance.
  • Slides should simplify, amplify, or clarify. If a slide doesn’t do one of those three for your audience, it doesn’t need to exist. TED proved you can give a powerful talk with none.
  • A slide full of words forces people to multitask. Spoken and written language run through the same part of the brain, so text on screen competes with your voice. Images and charts run through visual processing instead, and the two together make the point more memorable. Slides are for your audience, not a teleprompter for you.
  • Humor is black belt level engagement. It’s the riskiest tool there is. Never run a joke for the first time in a high-stakes room, and listen to what happens when you test it. Questions, stories, and asking people to do something physical are all safer ways to get the same engagement. And the rule that keeps you out of trouble: humor about yourself, not about others.
  • Never lose your tour group. Matt was a campus tour guide in college, and the single most important thing they trained him on wasn’t storytelling or vocal variety. It was not losing anybody. The same applies to an audience: set expectations so they know where they’re going, connect where you’ve been to where you’re headed instead of jumping between points, and keep them motivated to move. And notice where every campus tour ends. The bookstore. People need something to take away.

When You’re Making Small Talk

  • Small talk leads to big things. Think about your actual friends, not your social media ones. At least one of them exists because of small talk.
  • The goal is to be interested, not interesting. From Rachel Greenwald, who studies how people form relationships. Which means asking questions and then leaving room for the answer.
  • Three words make you good at it: “Tell me more.” Ask a question, listen, then ask for more, and mean it.
  • Exit with a white flag. Not surrender. In auto racing, the white flag goes out on the final lap. Most people end small talk by reaching for biology, saying they need the bathroom or another drink, which backfires the moment the other person needs the same thing. Instead: “This has been great. In a minute I’m going to go talk to someone over there, but before I do, I want to hear more about…” They know it’s ending, you get one more real question, and you both walk away clean.

When You’re Trying to Get Better

  • A few filler words now make you sound human. Some disfluency is normal and natural, and in a world where anything can be polished by AI, a few verbal foibles are evidence a real person is talking. The problem is only volume.
  • The breathing trick that kills the filler words. Try saying “um” while inhaling. You can’t. Speaking is an exit-only event. The filler words that stand out are the ones sitting in silence between sentences, so if you train yourself to land every phrase out of breath, you’re forced to inhale before the next one, and nothing can fit in that gap except a pause. To practice, read a list out loud once or twice a day, your calendar works, and run out of air at the end of every item.
  • Watch and listen to yourself, and read out loud. Reviewing your own recordings is awful, which Matt compares to the dentist: nobody enjoys it, everybody’s glad they went. Reading aloud builds vocal stamina the same way a treadmill builds a marathon. Nobody wakes up and runs 26 miles untrained, and most leaders aren’t used to speaking for long stretches either.
  • Costco credibility beats college and career credibility. Your background and your resume are real credibility, and they matter. But Costco hands out free samples because an experience of the thing beats a description of it. Most people over-index on listing credentials. Tell stories, give examples, use testimonials, and let people taste it.
  • There is no right way to communicate, only better and worse ways. Matt resists the word expert. Early in his teaching, he’d gesture and watch an entire class decide that was the correct way to move your hands. Saying it out loud takes pressure off the room and off him.
  • Matt’s champagne moment a year from now: people being more confident, clear, and compelling in how they communicate. He thinks the world needs to hear everyone’s voice and that clarity is what makes that possible. He knows it’s working when an email arrives from a town he has to look up on Google.
  • Daily reflection, one minute, for 16 years. Every night before bed, Matt writes down one thing that went well in his communication and one thing that didn’t. Every Sunday he spends about five minutes reviewing the week and picks one thing to work on. 

Action

  • Take the next talk or meeting you’re running. What are the first fifteen words out of your mouth, and would they work as the opening shot of a movie?
  • Who did you talk to today where you were trying to be interesting instead of interested? What would have happened if you’d said “tell me more” one more time?

    If you enjoyed this episode with Matt Abrahams, check out episode #709 with Vanessa Van Edwards: How to Connect With Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 

01:36 Meet Matt Abrahams 

02:56 What He Carries From His Father 

04:53 “If You Were an Onion…” 

07:16 Warm Call, Don’t Cold Call 

08:52 How He Got Better at Hiring 

13:35 Going From Silence to Brilliance 

16:20 Know, Feel, Do 

19:04 Never Tell Them You’re Nervous 

21:34 Why Memorizing Backfires 

23:50 Simplify, Amplify, or Clarify 

25:34 Start Like an Action Movie 

27:03 The Question That Moves a Room 

29:56 Never Lose Your Tour Group 

32:21 Humor Is Black Belt Engagement 

33:44 Three Words: “Tell Me More” 

36:51 One Minute Every Night for 16 Years 

40:06 What, So What, Now What 

42:42 Breathing Out Your Filler Words 

46:00 Read Out Loud for Vocal Stamina 

47:44 Costco Credibility 

49:43 The Champagne Question 

52:25 EOPC