98% of people never learn how to solve their high-quality communication problems. This is not going to be your average video on removing filler words or pausing. This is for people who want to accomplish epic things with their speaking and lead others. This is also one of those videos, too, that I kind of hope doesn't go viral because the world just cannot afford to have everyone using this method. this republic, then it would no longer work. Seriously. Which is why I don't care about making a perfect intro for this video. But we are today going to go on a side quest to answer why the average person never learns how to organize their mind, take what's inside, and convert it into powerful words. This is most people. Most people are babblers like an infant. A babbler. A babbler is someone who doesn't have good control over their tongue. And this is Joseph two years ago. And this might even be Joseph today still. A babbler swears a lot because they haven't learned how to properly communicate emotion or frustration. Their speaking is foggy and unclear. And they do not possess any clarity of thought. They do not have a process for organizing their thoughts. And a babler is simply just a product of how society is structured. Because society is not set up to produce clear thinkers or clear speakers. Why? Well, a person who's able to effectively persuade, lead, and create is a dangerous individual. Too many rats can take over the town. We used to have high societies that valued skills like rhetoric and debate and made them a part of schooling. And now everyone is just getting getting handed out a PhD in yapping. So every person, every babbler is after three highly coveted qualities that the elite speaker, the 2% possess. And there's a process for earning each of these. Number one is clarity. And clarity is the most valuable currency in society today, which is why I've put a dollar sign in front of it. Second is texture. Texture is the ability to bend, twist and and gum words together in creative ways to be able to say phrases that just strike like a lightning bolt. And then third is comfort. Person is at ease with who they are no matter where they are. They don't need to be loud because their presence is secure and it speaks for itself. Now, every person goes through a few stages in life, pivotal speaking moments where life forces you to upgrade your communication. So, it starts with you as a child. You learn the grammar and the mechanics of speaking. And then during college, you take some public speaking training where you're taught to present and remove all filler words. And then you interview for a job and you realize that your words actually win or lose opportunities. And then you enter the workforce where you have to present and pitch and PowerPoint. And then you experience a moment of hard conversation or confrontation. You might get asked to be the best man or maid of honor at a wedding. And you learn how to present and deliver a speech. And then you read some books and you start to become more articulate. You stumble over a new word like inventiculate or exuberant and you experience love and then you realize that you can't express the depth of what you feel. And for most people something happens right around here later in life. They realize that simple speaking is important. Humility is incredibly important. Storytelling is king because you realize that what is most fulfilling in life is sharing you and all the adventures that you've lived and the wisdom gemstones you've sort of plundered along the way. And at each of these stages, you're experiencing a problem that is building toward these three main qualities. This is the goal that everyone is after at the end of their life. Clarity, texture, and comfort. So, it's time that we enter the cave that most are afraid to enter. I hope you're ready because we're about to Frankenstein some some crazy ideas together today. Let's start with clarity. What is clarity with speaking? Well, here's the first principle we're going to learn today. Clear speaking is the result of clear thinking. [Applause] So, how do we find clarity on something? Well, what most people mean when they say clarity, we'll get to that one in a minute, is essence, the bones of an idea, the bedrock. It's like Papa Picasso's 11 sketches of the bowl, where each sketch reduces some unnecessary detail. So, how do we take something complex and simplify its form while still retaining its essence? It's a fantastic question and I'm going to answer this by telling you a story. There were two lions and they set out to climb a mountain. There was a competition between the two of them. Whoever reached the highest point would become protector of all the land. And so they both began climbing. Claws scraping the stone, you know, muscles straining. And the first lion, he reaches the highest ledge that he can find. And he looked over all the land and he and he smiled and he let out this roar. My friend must have given up. I don't see him. But then he heard an equally as loud roar just above him. And he looks up and the second lion had climbed into a tall tree and was laying on the branch just near the cliff's edge. He'd gone just a few feet higher. The first line he growled a little frustrated, but before either could claim victory, there was a sound that cut through the air. It was like a mocking laughter. And they looked up and there, perched on the highest branch, sat a little blue jay looking out over the whole world. The most fragile creature with a better view just a few feet higher than lions. So two things are true with clarity. One is you have to work for it. The price of the view is the climb. And this is not something that chat GPT can hand you with its cold metal hands, you know. Like you can sharpen your words, but you cannot speedrun clarifying the heart. And I think people can feel what you've earned through struggle. Just like the at the end at the end of this video, you're going to have clarity on everything here because you've made the decision to crawl through this video. So the second truth with clarity is that it requires humility. Humility and recognizing that someone else is always above you who knows more. In fact, clarity becomes poisonous the second that you think you're the singing blue jay on the top branch. Now, clarity on anything is influenced by two dials, inputs and outputs. Most people don't know what their inputs are. They don't. Their inputs are anything and everything. Any music, any people, any book, any content, any idea. So, step one is you have to diagnose your inputs. If you want to improve your clarity of speech, this is the first thing that we take clients through. If you don't like what you say, ask yourself, how is my thinking being influenced? What content is sculpting my mind? An elite speaker knows how to establish good cognitive cognitive security. They're able to defend their mental territory from any threatening or lethal input. And chances are, you're probably being fed ideas that aren't getting digested. And when things don't get digested, the mind gets inflamed. You get constipated when you excessively consume and you don't create. And that's the second part of understanding clarity is output. Output is any form of creative expression. Writing, speaking, voice memos, filming videos. The formula for clarity on any idea is clarity equals bad output times frequency. You cannot expect to have an idea tightened if you are outputting it for the first time. It's only after you drive the road that you can then start taking shortcuts. And each time you move forward, you discover blind spots in your thinking. And so the best way that you can achieve clarity in your life is to either increase outputs or block inputs. And so what you need is a system for outputting. This is step two. Identify 10 topics in your life that you want clarity on. Choose a new topic to talk about each day for 10 days. And then repeat repeat those same 10 topics for another 10 days, 20 days total. We have clients do this and then they create a private YouTube channel where they upload every day a 3minute video of them discussing a topic. I'll explain what we do with these videos later. There's a very special process you're going to love. And a lot of people ask, "What about writing? Can writing be a form of output? The answer is yes, but you have to be cautious. I found that writers are just often terrible speakers because they overdevelop an editor in their brain. I call it Hemingway's curse. It's like it's like their brain downloads the Grammarly Chrome extension or something and they overthink all the word choices and just have a hard time detaching from the need to engineer the perfect sentence and it just kills a lot of the flow and the spontaneity that you need to speak well. So I s I suggest just sticking with recording yourself speaking as a system of output. Let's talk about the next elite quality of speaking. This is texture. Texture of speech. So texture is about word choice. It's the difference between saying, "Yeah, that's a tough challenge and that's a thorny problem." It's the difference between he was wearing too much perfume and he was baptized in perfume. Now your word choice can be soft and delicate. It might be coarse, aggressive and bombastic. The words you use are the result of your relationship with language. And if you want to improve your relationship with language, you have to understand the surface lexicon and the deep lexicon. This is your vocabulary. what the words you know. And when someone uses a word, they're either retrieving retrieving it from their deep lexicon, their deep vocabulary, or their surface lexicon, their surface vocabulary. And every person has between 1,500 words that sit in their surface lexicon where they don't have to think about these words to use. You retrieve them without ever needing to engage your conscious mind. Most of what you say on a daily basis. Beneath the surface lexicon is your deep lexicon. And this is this consists of 25,000 to 35,000 words for the average native adult English speaker. And these words require a tremendous amount of thought. And you can move a word from your deep lexicon into your surface lexicon by simple repetition. For example, it might take using a word 200 times consciously in order for it to enter your surface lexicon where you don't have to think about it to use it. Now, every person's surface lexicon is different. There's there's a pattern in the way that every person selects words, often reflective of their personality. And why do patterns matter? Well, because patterns influence people. The Greeks, they identified over 250 rhetorical devices that move people. When someone opens their mouth, it exposes the patterns that they've been exposed to from their upbreaking, from their parents, books or content. Inputs, right? All programs are the result of inputs. And unless you have some sort of debilitating condition, there are very few speech patterns that cannot be rewritten with enough exposure to new inputs. And so if you don't use textured language, you're simply not exposed to enough textured language. And there are three steps to solving this. One is finding articulate language. Two, collecting articulate language. And then three, practice cultivating a practice routine with art that articulate language. So let's talk about what we mean by articulate language. Well, when most people describe the effect of hearing something articulate, there are two results that are happening. Their word choice was either very precise or was fresh. It was new. In other words, words were sharpened or a person was surprised with words. I call these filling in the outline or turning black and white into color. So, an example of filling in the outline might be, let's take a sentence like, I was I was nervous walking over to speak with that person. And then you could say, "I was wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans walking over to that person." And the effect there is one of a sharper mental picture. An example of turning black and white into color might be, let's take a phrase like um I just burned out at work and saying something like, "My motivation just evaporated." So in this example, we're using an uncommon expression. That's the color and the effect is one of surprise. Oh, I haven't heard that before. It's surprising. So how do we develop the ability to sharpen first our speech? Well, there's a very special technique and it is to populate or color your speech with your life. Use your life and your experiences to color in the outline. So what do I mean by that? Well, the number one question I have people ask themselves when they're wanting to sharpen their speech is the question, when have I experienced this? When have I experienced this feeling or this emotion? And the simplest formula we teach to find that and describe it is called takes. Time, audio, kesthetic, eyes, and smell. Time, audio is sound, kesthetic is feeling, eyesight is sight, right? And smell is what you smell. So, if I'm describing, let's say, running, I'm let's say I'm talking about myself going for a run. I don't run, but let's say Joseph decided to use his legs for once. I would say something like, "Well, I'm running across the cracks on the sidewalk with the wind brushing through my hair and I can smell the the freshly cut grass and my feet are slapping on the cracks of the pavement. I'm jumping over the cracks in the sidewalk. I'm, you know, I'm I'm stepping through in this case takes time. Like I mentioned, morning audio what I hear. And all of this will breathe life into what you say. And so one of the best examples of this is Robin Williams from the film Goodwill Hunting. Go watch his famous monologue. It's an example of someone outlining their idea and drawing upon their life to give what they say just blood and bone and breath. It's incredible. I'll link it below. What you're going to discover with this practice of using takes, and you only need to use just one of these is that you're either going to be very happy with the amount of times that you're able to fall back on an event, or you're going to be very sad because you realize you don't have many events to fall back on. Because thinking creatively like this is not the same as actually having lived life. And what I've noticed is that people who want to say intelligent things often want to substitute for having lived life. It's kind of like the perspectives that you want or in the events that you have to go through. And I say this a lot about charisma. Charisma is just the totality of everything that your spirit has endured. And there are some perspectives in life that you I don't know. I think you you kind of just have to trade speaking stupid for like that's a lot of youth is the imperfect output, the bad ideas in the pursuit of perfect understanding or at least better understanding. And this is why I think the clearest speakers are the hermits, the monks, the wise old wizards that are tucked somewhere under a boulder. Like you have to earn looking like that. You have to earn looking like Gandalf. So, let's talk about the second way that you can use texture, which is surprising. Here we go. It's on this page. Now, surprising hinges on how well you've collective you collect you've collected creative language, which introduces principle number two. You can only explain the world as much as you've explored it. You can only cook with what you know is in the cupboard. If you don't like the ingredients, you have to go shopping. So, how do you go shopping for good words? Well, this introduces the vocal ego. What What is a vocal ego? Well, what if I told you there was a way to figure out how your future self speaks and chooses words and thinks and you can have that future version of you review what you say now? Do you think it would close the gap faster? So, this is the practice of creating what I call the vocal ego. And a vocal ego is this has been my weapon of choice for the last year in helping clients accelerate their selection of words. And we can do this in just a few weeks. The vocal ego is a representation of the elite version of you. That 2% version of you. Here's how future Joseph speaks. And what I've done is I've just created a custom chat GPT model. That's what this is of this future Joseph. And you can do this quite easily. And it's trained off of all the language that I've collected for myself. and I use it to analyze what I say today. I give it the transcripts of my conversations and it suggests how future Joseph would surprise or freshen with his speech. Remember all those YouTube videos that you filmed the 10 videos of the for the 20 days when you're working on clarity? We have it review those videos and then you repeat those videos using the surprising phrasing suggestions. And what we're doing here is engaging in the deliberate practice of choosing language outside of conversation. That's what texture is all about. You never want to spend that energy on choosing words in the moment, thinking about what the the right word is for this sentence. It's just mentally taxing and it stalls the flow of thought. The process of giving your ideas texture is very simple. Speak poorly. Compare poor speech to great speech and then repeat the great speech. And if you do this with a 100 phrases, people will notice within just a few days how you've improved. It's a very simple process. By the way, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business professional, a coach, creator, consultant, and want to speak with vibrancy and authority and put your thoughts into words, we've opened up a few slots inside of Elite Speak. Elite Speak is it's a transformation where we guide you through every red action item that we've discussed on the sketch pad. We've had some incredible people go through recently, hedge fund managers, salespeople, managers, entrepreneurs, and we'd love to talk about how we might be able to take the best of both of our brains and give you an incredible set of communication skills. schedule a call below or you can visit our Inerson location here in Austin, Texas where you can train with me personally. I'd love to meet some of you. Are you following me so far? We're going to enter the final stage which is comfort. And comfort is what everyone is after. Realize I had these out of order. I think most people are fooled into chasing charisma. Charisma RZ is one of those it's one of those words that has entered society's lexicon and most people don't know what they're after. What they want is comfort. If your internal state is unstable or anxious, your your speech is always going to feel unsatisfying. You're going to be caught up in the trap of thinking there was a better way you could have showed up, which is true. Most people are wildly uncomfortable most of the time. And out of the hundreds of people I've coached over the last few years, I realized that discomfort comes down to three lethal viruses. So, one is your body isn't calm. Two, your mission isn't clear. And three, your words don't match your beliefs. Body, mind, spirit. I draw a lot of parallels between speech and athleticism. Speech is very much like any form of athleticism, any sport. It requires preparation, stretching, mindset, belief. An athlete who's stepping onto the field, who knows how to put themselves in the right state of body, mind, and spirit is going to claim victory. And speech is no different. The same thing is true with comfort. And this is principle number three, which we can get to now. Comfort is built before you speak. Comfort is built before you speak. What you might not know actually is that I did a warm-up routine before this video that got my mind, my body, and my spirit into the state that I need to be in in order to speak and think comfortably. If your body feels physically comfortable, you remember what to say. And making your body comfortable is a result of learning how to breathe properly. Now, this means making sure that you breathe from your diaphragm and you have a breathing exercise that you can use to calm and control your nervous system. So, let's talk about both of these. Breathing from your diaphragm. You have to learn how to breathe using this sheet of muscle that sits below your lungs. Sits below your rib cage. These are lungs. So instead of, you know, shallow chest breaths that kind of shake and rattle, you breathe deeply into your belly, engaging your diaphragm. You expand your stomach as you breathe in and you contract your stomach as you breathe out. And what this does is it steadies your voice. And I can tell when someone is breathing from their diaphragm because their voice just has a strength to it. It has a groundedness to it and when you have a steady voice, you feel better. You're more calm. Number two is box breathing. Now, box breathing is a breathing exercise that is going to allow you to sharpen your focus and reduce anxiety. I actually did not think this would work. It would work on me until I tried it. So, trust me, as someone who's study who's studied all of this for a living, box breathing works if you do it correctly. You inhale for 4 seconds. You hold for 4 seconds. You exhale for four seconds and then you hold again for 4 seconds. You do this four times. You like tracing the inside of a rectangle. In, hold, exhale, hold. You'll notice that your heart rate slows and it also increases blood flow to the brain which helps you feel more composed, alert, present, most importantly comfortable. So that's how you tame the body. Let's talk about the mind. Now for the mind, you need to know why you're there. Why are you here? One of the things that I've noticed about public speaking anxiety the more that I've studied it and fear is that fear and anxiety disappears when the mind is focused on serving. And so before I speak, before I started this video, because I know that I can get anxious if I think about what I'm about to do and I'm not focused on my message, I repeat the phrase, I'm here to offer the gift of my time, my attention, my presence to the person before me. I'm offering you a gift. And this is a concept that I call creating a mental primer. It's a mental primer line. It's a sentence that you repeat to yourself to reestablish your mission because wandering about aimlessly is just a very terrible feeling that kind of eats you away inside. Why am I here? What am I supposed to say? What am I doing? It's it's it's like an insane asylum inside your own head. So, let's talk about spirit. A lot of speaking challenges arise from people who are not grounded in something something deep inside. There's a lot here we're going to explain. A lot of people come to me saying, "I haven't found the right mental model." I get this question a lot. It's it's the most common question I get. Joseph, what mental model do you use? Or what mental model can I use? like there's a magical Steve Jobs framework that will make everything that they say or everything that they think of sound like it's seasoned with intelligence. You're not looking for a mental model. What you desire that you don't know is speaking from your values, your beliefs. Your values are the scaffolding of speech. And when you seat in when you sit in the saddle of your values, you always know which way to go. You know what to say. And I think people are really good at detecting at some detecting someone who's just not in alignment with their values. There's a stench of inconsistency. It's like something rotting in the refrigerator. Person says they like blue, but you can sense red inside of them. And it's because the person just hasn't decided on what they stand on, what they stand for. And that's most people. That's the babbler. In fact, the book of Proverbs in the Bible discusses often how those who constantly twist the truth or speak out of alignment with who they are carry a lot of unrest. And from a spiritual perspective, the soul cannot settle when the mouth is dishonest. You cannot calm the waters if you're always, you know, throwing stones in the pond. So, you have to define your values. And every one of us refracts the world. We see the world through a set of internal values. What kind of values? Well, things like gratitude, compassion, humility, respect, simplicity. There's a whole list of over 100 values that you can see that I'll link below this video. There's hundreds of them. Where do they come from? Well, they come from your upbringing, your culture, your parents, your religion. It's what makes something feel right or satisfying to you. If I say something that doesn't align with your values, it's what causes you to feel uneasy. Now, it doesn't mean your values are right. That's a conversation for another time. But when something doesn't align with your values, it feels artificial. It feels fake. Especially when you say it, which is why, you know, paring the common opinions of others is just very dangerous because you haven't worked for that conclusion on your own based on your values. It's like reaping the harvest from an orchard that you never planted the trees in. You know, you can go to market and sell all the apples and oranges, but you're just not going to get the same satisfaction as the farmer who watered those trees, planted the seeds, picked the oranges and apples, and then sold the fruits in the market. So, how do you choose values? You just have to pick some. You have to pick a value, act on the value, and every single time that you do that, you strengthen the value, you test the value, and every time you speak, you reinforce that value. And that value is the answer to the question, by the way. How do I know what to say? And it's rare that this kind of person who's grounded in their values is ever going to be at a loss for words because they know what their values are. And for me, my values are simplicity, experience, honesty. I value simple speech. I speak on what I've experienced. And I try to be intellectually honest with myself. If I don't know something, I'm not going to pretend I do. And having those options gives me a tremendous amount of deep comfort. I also value imperfection. I don't have to put on a mask of intelligence. I'm not scrambling to compose an intelligent sentence because I've oriented myself correctly, or at least I'm trying to. And so that's how you bring comfort to yourself with the spirit. All right, we're going to talk about two bonus topics that I want to take a crack at today. We're going to open up the science can of worms. These are two things that impact speech that sound incredibly primal but make a large difference. Food and sleep. I like to think these don't matter at all. They do. And they mattered because that they affect your thinking and they affect your speaking. And I've basically treated my body as kind of a science lab, a science experiment for the last few years. I've experimented with a dozen diets. I've sleepmaxed myself into the third heavens. And the practice that is absolutely worth doing if you haven't already is to track your sleep and track your food for one month. There's a Google spreadsheets template that I'll link below this video. You can steal it. Write down how many hours of sleep you got, the quality of sleep every hour during the day, what you eat, your clarity of thought afterwards, and then your satisfaction with speech. And then after 1 month or just 2 weeks, give it to Chat GPT. Ask it to analyze it for patterns and you will discover patterns. I did this for myself and I discovered two patterns. One was clarity of thought and by virtue clarity of speech improved immensely when I didn't eat any carbohydrates, carbs until 2:00 p.m. to about 400 p.m. No breads, no oatmeals, no rice until 2 p.m. As soon as I would eat carbs, my body would just crash. My body would shut down and I would want to sleep. I could not think. So, I would only eat proteins or light food until about 2 p.m. and then my body could handle carbs. So, my suggestion to you, if you're wanting to improve your speech, start tracking your food. And for sleep, I noticed, this is the second pattern, was that 6 to 7 hours was my golden zone. Any more than 7 hours, my brain would be a little bit foggy, a little bit woozy, wouldn't be able to think. any less than six and my eyes would burn and I'd feel like I'd want to start looking for comfortable mattresses on Airbnb. That's all I have for you today. I hope it helps. It's 2 PM now. I'm going to go get lunch. Thank my girlfriend, maybe some hummus.