Hi, everyone.
I'm Matt Abrams, your guest host this week.
Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday Morning.
I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business,
and I'm the author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter.
and the popular podcast, Think Fast, Talk Smart.
I've spent my career helping people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication,
whether it's giving a presentation,
speaking up in a meeting, or just having an important conversation.
This week,
we'll explore how mindfulness and simple communication tools can help us express ourselves with calm and clarity.
The fear of speaking in front of others is ubiquitous.
It exists everywhere.
In every culture we've studied, we find it,
and we find that it develops at the same time when kids first become teenagers.
That's when anxiety really begins to spike.
Certainly for me, when I was 14 years old,
I was instructed by my English teacher to give a presentation on his behalf at a speech contest.
Every teacher in my school had to nominate one student to go to this contest, and I was his choice.
The only advice he gave me was, do something that gets the audience interested.