the key to becoming exceptionally articulate with organized thoughts when you speak is to get those thoughts clear in your mind before you share them with anyone you might have had an experience where you jump into a conversation and you hope that you'll get clarity on your thoughts as you speak now if you're an experienced public speaker or if you know your content really well this can happen but for most of us this often leads to being repetitive in conversations to overlapping our point point or to including unnecessary information that's only going to distract bore or confuse our listeners and the way out of this is to be super organized with your thoughts so you can become exceptionally articulate as you speak and there are three methods that will help you do this these three methods I'll share with you in this video the idea behind these three methods is that you move your internal thoughts to an external stopover where you find structure where you find patterns and where you organize them before you go on and communicate them verbally to another person essentially you're moving your internal thoughts to an external destination and over time when you do this you will train your mind so that you can organize your thoughts and speak in an articulate way on the spot and the first method is to organize your thoughts visually now even if you're not a visual person I do recommend that you at least try this method out because it will help you to uncover new Pathways to thinking it will help you to become more creative and it will help you to get clarity on what you want to say visual organization basically leverages the way the brain works where we process meaning before details where it's better to step back and to look at the big picture before we zoom in and look at the specifics or the details because this is where a lot of the confusion happens when we get caught in the details think of the way that you process information when you receive it if you were given a list of 20 tasks that need to be performed for three different projects and you receive those tasks in one long list without any organization at all it would probably seem really overwhelming and you might not know where to start whereas if you visually organize what needs to be done on a whiteboard and you have the three projects that you're working on one in each column and then you list the T tasks that need to be performed under each project this would help you understand exactly what you need to do because it is organized in a clear way it's exactly the same with your thoughts when your thoughts are one long list or not even a long list just a chaotic mess in your mind without any clear connection between one thought or another there's no way that you can make sense of those thoughts that are in your mind let alone communicate them in an articulate way when it comes to organizing your thoughts visually there are two options sticky notes is the first one and this is where you have a big pile of sticky notes and you write one thought on a sticky note one thought per sticky note and then you stick those sticky notes on a wall or on a mirror using this method you essentially download your thoughts from your mind to an external stopover which is the sticky node and then you can visually see what your thoughts are instead of just having them rattle around in your mind and you can then go on and organize them better now downloading your thoughts onto sticky notes has three distinct advantages it helps you learn by doing just like when you learn how to drive a car you will learn much better if you get into the driver's seat rather than sit at home and read a book on the rules of driving it's that physical aspect that helps you learn and remember so well and sticky notes really helps to leverage that you can flag unique Thoughts with different colors which will help you to remember them better because we don't pay attention to boring things just like in your University days professors who use stories or examples throughout the class as they were teaching probably kept you awake in class and also helped you to remember the points that they wanted you to walk away with it's a flexible way of thinking you can move the sticky notes around on the wall to find the best order for your thoughts you can also remove unnecessary information or things that you don't need to to talk about by taking a sticky note off of the wall sticky notes are a fun and effective way to organize your thoughts so you can make sense of them before you tell anyone about them mind mapping is where you download your thoughts onto a piece of paper a whiteboard or some kind of digital software like Miro or exm mind neither of these are sponsoring this video by the way you can find connections between your thoughts you can find an order with steps or you can expand your thought with substeps or sub substep and what I like about mind mapping is that you can actually draw arrows and lines to visually state that you have connections between thoughts and those connections will be more obvious to you you can Circle those thoughts or you can use different symbols to associate a different order or a meaning to those thoughts my mapping is similar to the sticky note method in that your thoughts are written separately on the board which means that you can move them around and you can find different orders that work best for the way that you want to communicate them next you can use writing to organize your thoughts this is the method that I use the most because it feels more natural to me I usually go about using writing to get clarity on my thoughts in three different stages first I start with a mind dump this is where I get out a blank piece of paper or a Google doc and I just blast out the thoughts in my mind I don't worry about putting them in any particular kind of order I just write them as they come to me I usually use a linear list when I'm writing out my thoughts but you can also use a visual mind map like we talked about before find a connection and patterns then I look at what I have on my piece of paper and I try to find patterns or connections between my thoughts so I can pull out some kind of structure from them sometimes those thoughts are very separate thoughts but other times I find that one thought could easily be folded into another thought as like a subth thought lastly I get to writing and this is where I embellish on the thoughts that I've identified previously here I try to write a paragraph of between 200 to 300 words to put my thoughts into words I've already identified a structure in the previous step where I talk about Connections and finding connections and patterns between my thoughts so I simply use that structure to write a coherent paragraph that best communicates what is in my mind and without fail every time I use this method to organize my thoughts I come out on the other side feeling a greater sense of clarity in my thinking I move from a state of confusion to Precision which naturally shows up when I communicate my thoughts to other people I'm confident that you can achieve this kind of result too if you adopt this process so to give you some motivation and ideas on how you can go about this I want to challenge you to a small activity pick out a non-fiction book on a topic that interests you currently I'm reading this book from Joan didan which is is called let me tell you what I mean I purposely chose this book because the author is renowned for writing in a way that combines elegance and sharp insight and the author herself she even says that she writes to find out what she is thinking what she is looking at what she sees and what it means so I thought who better to learn from than a renowned author like this this particular book is a series of essays so each essay is really quick to read it's probably about five pages per essay and the structure of how the author puts her thoughts into words is easily identifiable you can see how she uses a paragraph for each idea or for each thought that she has you can see the structure of how she puts her thoughts into words as well you can see what vocabulary she uses what sentence structures she uses as well to help her articulate her thoughts in a clear CLE and a very precise way you can use any book that you want for this activity but if you do want to check this book out um I will put the affiliate Link in the description below once you've chosen your book read a chapter or in this case read one essay and then go through the three steps that I shared with you previously first do a mind dump of what you read about what are the main topics the consequences the benefits or the pitfalls number two find connections and patterns are they separate thoughts or can you fold one or two thoughts under another number three write two to 300w paragraph that summarizes what you read the practice of writing will help you find the most structured clear and efficient way of communicating what is in your mind and efficient is a key word here because this will flow over into your verbal communication preventing you from overlapping your thoughts from being repetitive or from including unnecessary information when you talk about what is on your mind what you're essentially doing here is you are training your mind to get clarity on your thoughts so that you can organize them better if neither of the other two methods work for you then you might benefit from this method which is where you organize your thoughts through speaking don't confuse this with communicating your thoughts to your intended audience that is the final destination like in a meeting or a public presentation and we're not at that stage yet we're still at the stage where we are organizing our thoughts in order for us to be able to communicate them efficiently and effectively at the Final Destination what I mean by organizing your thoughts by speaking is you either speak to yourself to get clarity on those thoughts you speak to a voice app so you can listen back and see what those thoughts sound like when they're spoken out loud or you speak to a friend so you can get an idea of whether they are understanding your thoughts or not any of these methods will force you to put your thoughts into words to externalize them and to mold them into an articulate form that other people will understand now because this isn't the Final Destination I want you to consider it to be a safeer Zone where you can try out things like using new vocabulary or varying your vocabulary to see how you can best explain what you want to say you can use more complicated sentence structures to see if that works for you or if you should STI to more simple sentences and you get practice communicating your thoughts so that when it's time for you to be on stage so to speak that Final Destination you're already familiar with your thoughts you've already organized them you already know how you're going to communicate them which will help you sound exceptionally articulate when you speak now when it comes time to publicly share your thoughts with other people you will need a solid structure to do this so in this video I share with you three communication structures that will help you to think fast and smart on your feet I recommend you watch that video or save it to your watch later list on YouTube thank you so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one