how are you doing tonight dr peterson incredible pretty good questions a little on the brutal side i might say but i'm incredibly nervous to uh talk in front of you because you've got to be one of the most formidable people that i've ever heard of or ever listened to or ever seen so my question is again you're one of the best communicators that i've ever listened to if i could be half as good at you or at communicating as you are i would be set how can i teach myself to do that practice you know
really like well there's a couple of things is it helps to read a lot it really helps to write so if you want to make yourself articulate which is a very good idea then not only should you read but you should write down what you think and if you can do that a little bit every day 15 minutes maybe you could steal 15 minutes and do it every day but if you do that for 10 years you really straighten out your thinking if you're going to speak effectively you have to know way more than you're
talking about you know so if you this is often difficult for beginning lectures at university because they'll do a lecture on a topic but they only know as much as they're saying in the lecture and they get kind of stuck to their notes because of it but you want to know 10 times as much as you are saying in the lecture and then you can specify a stepping path through it and elaborate with the other things that you know but to do that you have to do a lot of reading but you also have to
do a lot of reading because that's where the synthesize that's where the synthesizing comes so that's on the input side and then on the output side well there's some tricks techniques let's say is like if you're speaking in front of a group you are not delivering a talk to a group that's not what you're doing the talk isn't a package thing that you present to a group there isn't a group there's a bunch of individuals and you talk to them so when i talk to a group i always talk to people one at a time
and that makes it easier too because you know how to talk to a person it's like can you talk to a thousand people well probably not because it's too intimidating but there isn't a thousand people there there's a thousand individuals and so you just look at an individual and you say something and you can tell if they're engaged they look confused or they look interested or they look angry or they look bored or maybe they're asleep in which case you look at someone else and they give you feedback about how you're doing and so one
thing is to to have something to say yeah but the next thing is pay attention to who you're talking to because unless you're very badly socialized and that seems unlikely in your case because you know you present yourself at least moderately well you know and well i mean i don't know you very well but at first but on first sight you know you're doing fine so the probability that if you pay attention to the individuals that you're talking to that your natural wealth of of social skill will manifest itself is extremely high and so you
don't deliver a talk to an audience that's a really bad way of thinking about you're actually engaged in a conversation with an audience even if they're not talking they're nodding and shifting position and you know looking like this or and you can you can pull that in and and use it to govern the level at which you're addressing the entire audience so the last thing i would say is well having the aim to be a good communicator is a good start and you think well i could buttress that to some degree there isn't anything that
you can possibly this is the whole point of a liberal education there isn't anything that you can possibly do that makes you more competent in everything you do than to learn how to communicate i don't care if you're going to be a carpenter i mean being a carpenter by the way is very difficult especially if you're a good carpenter but if you're good at communicating as a carpenter you're like 10 times better as a carpenter so the and this is something that the liberal arts colleges i think i don't know if they've forgotten it but
they don't do a very good job of marketing it's like what's the use of a bachelor's degree in bachelor of arts it's like well you can think you can write you can speak you've read something it's like the economic value of that is incalculable the people that i've watched in my life who've been spectacularly successful are they have skills clearly that that's a minimum precondition but they're also very very good at articulating themselves and so whenever they negotiate they're successful well that's kind of like the definition of success in life right you negotiate and you're
six it doesn't mean you win because if you're a good negotiator if you're a really good negotiator everybody walks away from the negotiation thrilled and so then people line up to do things with you so and that's all that's all dependent on your ability to communicate so practice thank you very much
