The Most Unprofessional Moment of My Life
The most embarrassing and unprofessional moment of my career occurred, and I don't know if anyone
else has felt this way before. I remember that moment so clearly. I was in that dreadful white,
stark bathroom, holding back my tears because I couldn't stop replaying the moment where I froze
during an investment strategy presentation. I was talking to my team; the managing director was
there, and I just froze. My heart was pounding, I was looking for any word that I could use, but
I couldn't access anything. So, I did the second worst thing that could happen after freezing: I
rambled. I just said whatever came to mind, and it didn't make sense.
I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stop crying, and it was the most embarrassing,
unprofessional moment of my career.
**1/ Organize your thoughts with structure**
The CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, famously said, "Your strategy is only as good as you articulate
it," and mine was really going down the drain. I wasn't going to let that happen again. After many
years of rabbit holes, trial and error, and very embarrassing moments, I found there are three
non-negotiable things you need in order to articulate your thoughts effectively.
Number one, you have to organize your thoughts with structure. This means
putting hierarchy into your ideas, having a logical flow, seeing connections,
and building connections between ideas.
Number two, you have to prioritize that
structured thought through some sort of filter. It's important to include things,
but equally important to know what to exclude. Just saying everything you know
isn't the best strategy to be articulate and concise. And to be honest, these days,
who has any time or attention to listen to everything?
**2/ Prioritize your thoughts through filters**
Three, you have to summarize the key ideas into easily recallable chunks for your audience as well
as for yourself. So, whenever you're under that pressure, you don't have to formulate it in your
head by yourself; you already have a preformulated chunk that you can pull from and articulate.
**3/ Summarize into easy to recall chunks**
The thing that helps you do all three, if
you've been up for a while, you know what I'm going to say, is frameworks. If you're
new here, I am Vicky. I've done a bunch of videos on which frameworks to use. There's the
2500-year-old one that Steve Jobs used, there's the four-letter acronym that helps you turn ramble
into an immediate structure. I'll put them in the description below so you can check it out after
this video. And I say after because some of you have reached out and said, "Okay, they sound
great in theory, but how do I practice them?"
So today, let's take one of my favorite frameworks
and walk through how we can actually practice it. I use the game that I'm going to show you
today in my course, in my communication cafes, so you know exactly what to do. I'll give
you all the resources down below.
First, let's talk about the framework, and
today we're going to focus on the one-two-three framework. This is so simple, right? It
is the one thing, two types, and the three steps. This immediately helps us prioritize
with one thing, segment with the two types, and summarize with the three steps. So yeah, just
simply using these three numbers, you can already add structure to what you want to say.
Alright, sounds nice in theory, right? So how can we actually use this? This is where the
game comes in. I already built a deck with more than 100 topics, and I'm going to add to
them as we go. And what you're going to do is, when you see a topic, in 30 seconds come up with
the one thing, the two types, and the three steps. For example, the topic is ChatGPT. What is the
one thing you want the other person to know about ChatGPT? Let's say for me, the one thing you
have to know about ChatGPT is that the answers it gives you are directly related to how articulate
you are. The more articulate you are, the better answers you're going to get out of ChatGPT.
Alright, second, the two types of ChatGPT answers: one, vague and unhelpful; two, specific and
insightful. And the three steps for getting specific and insightful ChatGPT answers are:
one, watch my communication framework videos; two, pick one of your favorite frameworks; and
three, structure your ChatGPT prompt with that framework to start seeing the difference.
And the idea is you want to do these three things in 30 seconds or less. What you'll notice doing
this exercise is, one, you'll start to see your circles of competence. In my example, I focus
my answers around communication because this is where I nerd out. This is where I have a lot of
information and knowledge. For you, it's probably different. You might be a technologist and you
focus on the technology and how it's different from all the software we've known before. Or,
you might be really sensitive to trends and you're talking about the hype and what's real
and what's going to disappear. We all need to figure out what are our circles of competence,
so whenever we're under pressure, we know where to look for ideas that we already have.
The second thing you'll notice is you actually engage a different part of your brain. When
you articulate, what happens is usually we are responding to pressure with our primal part of
our brain, like fight or flight, and that is where we cannot access any of the executive functions of
our brain. So what we need to do is build evidence for ourselves that under 30 seconds, right, this
pressure, we are able to think of something. And once we've built enough evidence for ourselves,
then we ease the response of fight or flight, and we actually access the prefrontal cortex,
where we do all of the executive functions like prioritizing, structuring, and summarizing.
So this is so crucial, and it comes with practice because most of us have a habit of, there's
a pressure, we're all tensing up, and that's something we have to practice to let go.
And the third thing you'll notice over time is your brain is rewired to focus on prioritizing,
organizing, and summarizing. Frameworks use neuroplasticity to really create a new
way of thinking. And once that happens, you can easily structure your thoughts as
you go because you've had so much practice, and we can articulate ourselves and access
those prepackaged ideas so much better.
If you want more frameworks on how to
practice using frameworks, how to structure, how to organize your thoughts, check out this
video here. And if you want hands-on practice, check out my cohort links in the description
below, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.