Hi Reader, Something happened at home recently that made me smile. My son recently participated in an elocution contest. And naturally... I was tempted to coach him. I mean, public speaking is kind of my thing. I started thinking about everything I could teach him. How to pause. How to use his voice. How to make eye contact. How to remember his words. How to connect with the audience. Then I stopped. Because my wife had already stepped in. She was the one coaching him. And honestly, she did...

Hi Reader, Hope you are off to a great start this week. If you remember (if you had read!) in my last email, I promised I'd share the shift that helped me bridge the gap between understanding something and explaining it clearly. It's a very simple shift and here it is... I stopped preparing for myself. And started preparing for my audience. At first, that sounds like the same thing. It isn't. When most of us prepare, we ask questions like: Do I know this well enough? What if they ask me a...

Hi Reader, Yesterday, I promised I'd tell you what Jerry meant when he looked at me after that speech contest and said, "Rama... you're not intelligible." At the time, I honestly thought he was talking about my speaking. Maybe my pronunciation. Maybe my delivery. For a moment, I even wondered if he meant I wasn't intelligent! (Thankfully, that's a different story.) I couldn't have been more wrong. It took me almost fourteen years to understand what he was really trying to tell me. And when I...