"Mental Lag" Is Why You Can't Communicate Well

0:00 When the gap between your thinking and your speaking is large, a person's communication starts leaking insecurity. They sound hesitant. They sound unsure. Not because they're weak or because there's something wrong with them, but because your mind was simply given too much empty space and it jumped in and took over. When this gap is small, when you're thinking and speaking at the same time, everything locks in. It feels smooth. You feel present. you feel sharp. And most people they just give themselves too much space between the preparation of thought thinking and the presentation of thought speaking. And this relationship between these two parts of communication is going to play such a huge role. This graph is going to make a huge difference

0:45 in you understanding why most of your communication challenges are actually overthinking problems. So most people never get to witness their communication be creative, playful precise impactful energetic. Instead, they get stuck in this gap where their their thoughts run unchecked and communication becomes incredibly stressful. Whether it's in a high pressure scenario or talking to someone or casual, their their speech is very tight. It's uncomfortable. the flow isn't there and no one knows how to train themselves out of this. And so that's what I want to give you in this video. I want to give you this superpower. And I actually want

1:32 to start with an analogy. Think of a young child about to enter into a playground. He sees the monkey bars. He sees the the swing and the slides and the dirt pit and the sunshine and the little excavator that you ride on. The laughter other people there. What he's not doing in that moment is overthinking. He's not calculating the angle of the slide, the trajectory of the swing swing or the roundabout thing that you spin around. You know, he's not counting the monkey bars. He's just in the experience. And that's the whole point. This video on communication is built around one simple idea that we find here and that is overthinking in speaking isn't intelligence. It's interference. Overthinking is interference because analysis in any

2:19 kind of creative act kills life. And overthinking can kill the life, the creativity, the generative quality of your speech. The moment you stuff someone into their head and you start focusing on, let's say, the right framework or how to choose which word or the precision, the the mental model, the framework, you shrink someone's ability to communicate. And when you learn to silence your mind and just participate in the playfulness, the playground that is communication, you get extremely agile and there's a flow to your speech that's just unparalleled. And I've seen people to be able to access ideas they just couldn't reach from a very stressed monitoring way of thinking. So this is the big difference that we teach between

3:04 effortless and effortful communication. effort full communication costs someone a lot of mental energy and a person can feel that cost. You probably have felt this cost before. You're spending that fuel. Your brain is extremely expensive to run. Thinking actually burns a lot of calories and the overthinking communicator eventually becomes very exhausted and very avoidant. their nervous system is fired up all the time and they end up developing a very avoidant relationship with communication or with people because people represent a scenario in which they have to communicate and so they end up not wanting to socialize or talk for this very reason. Effortless communication what we have here in green brilliant speaking in insights it happens not when

3:49 you have better words or better frameworks or anything of that nature. It happens when you have a calmer mind. And if you can reduce the influence that your mind has during moments of communication, you're going to start enjoying your communication a lot more. And you'll actually surprise yourself with how good you are when you're not shadow boxing your own thoughts. So when we work with clients, there really three different ways of of measuring their speech and their communication to determine where they're at with overthinking. We call these the three dashboard lights of a healthy engine. The first one is breathing. Specifically, when you breathe, are you beginning at are you breathing at the beginning of your sentences, the middle of your sentences? How many words are you spending per breath? Is it 20 words? Is it 50 words? Is it 30? Number two is

4:35 body. Your body language. How smooth are you? How controlled are your movements? Are they erratic? And then number three is silence. How well can a person hold a gap without panicking? Breathing tells me how much control a person has over their nervous system. The body tells me how much comfort they have in their environment. Are they possibly intimidated by someone who's there? Or maybe the nature of the high pressure scenario. And then silence tells me a lot about a person's self-image, how comfortable they are with not needing to contribute in order to be valuable. And we have a whole software that analyzes this and allows us to measure these. But what

5:21 happens fundamentally when these three are out of whack is you reach a very broken state of communication. And that broken state is something you're probably very familiar with. It's someone who's, you know, their their breathing is incredibly fast and you know their their their body language is very erratic and and violent and and they they don't have any silence. They're trying to fill every pause like silence is illegal or they're allergic to a pause. And when you have all of these aligned, breathing, body in silence, there's a very powerful state that's reached. Your breath is controlled, your body is calm, and you're comfortable with silence. And what you'll find is that you end up choosing the right words in that environment. Your speaking is smooth, and you communicate incredibly well. So, this is the desired state. Let's talk about how we can get you there. Let me

6:08 tell you a quick story. There was a there was a study done in 1994 by a psychologist by the name of Daniel Wegner, and he ran a simple experiment. He told people one thing. He said, "Don't think about a white bear." And of course, what happened? Well, all of his students thought about the bear constantly, even more than the people who were never told to avoid thinking about it. And Daniel called this the ironic process theory, which means in order to suppress a thought, your brain has to keep checking if it's still there, which ends up keeping it there. And this is a lot of what overthinkers are doing in conversation is they are trying to speak while simultaneously either trying to suppress an anxious thought about their speaking or fight

6:54 back a part of their mind that is working against them in the moment. And this is different for every person. You know, there are always different self-sabotaging narratives that we're telling ourselves in these moments where, you know, the gap between the presentation of our thought and the prep the preparation of our thought and presentation of our thought is large. So, for example, a very common self-sabotaging thought might be, what are these people thinking about me? Is this the right word? It's not precise enough. What if this person disapproves of my message? What if they think I'm stupid in some way? And these thoughts typically are less than 10 words. They're very short. They're very simple, but they're very lethal. And the problem is that this creates two different processes that are going on in your brain that are using the same bandwidth.

7:40 The first processes is you needing to spend mental energy to engage that thought. And the second one is that it's competing in real time with the exact resources that you need to speak well and to access your brilliance and your intelligence. And that's what effort in speech looks like in speech. That is effortful communication. So what we have to develop and what elite communicators have been able to develop is building good cognitive security, your cognitive defense. And what cognitive security is is your ability to catch one of those lethal thoughts, those monitoring thoughts, those self-doubt. It could be something as simple as I'm not worthy to speak right now or anything that doesn't serve you in the moment. And elite communicators are able to take that thought and they're able to

8:25 do something special with that thought that we're about to explain and they're able to keep talking and keep their resources focused on the idea or the emotion or the intent behind their communication. And this, by the way, is not a personality trait. Cognitive security is a skill. And I've seen people who've been able to go from these excessive almost ADHD fractured thinking over thinkers and they're able to go to a calmness and a clarity because they've trained cognitive security. I didn't used to have this and this is something that I've developed and strengthened in myself and I've developed this through repetition just like any real skill is built. Hundreds of reps. It's very unsexy but it's incredibly effective. So here's what you're going to practice. I want to break this down

9:11 so that you can develop better cognitive security. This is one of the highest leverage exercises that I can give you for someone who's wanting to access their brilliance and be more present in the moment and show up effectively in the scenarios, the moments of impact that you operate in, whether it's high pressure or simply casual. So, the first main thing that you're going to practice is simply observation of thought. So, when a thought hits mid-con conversation, it could be a thought like that word was wrong. They look bored. my voice sounds weird. You're gonna notice the thought and then you're gonna do something very boring. You're not gonna fight the thought. You're not going to suppress the thought. You're simply going to watch the thought pass like a storm or weather. And you're just going to observe the thought. You're going to say, "That's interesting. It's just a

9:57 thought. That's just a thought about that person's facial reaction." or that's just a thought about that person's tone of voice. So, what you're going from is this mental chaos to separating yourself from the storm and putting it outside of yourself. And you're viewing your thoughts like weather. The thought is just a cloud. It's just a season that's passing by. And something that I find incredibly helpful to develop this further to maybe make it more concrete for you is to view yourself as having these thoughts almost from a bird's eye view. So, I will visualize myself communicating and I might have a self-sabotaging thought. And it could be something like, well, what if I stumble midvideo and I have to start all over because I I made the

10:43 most, I don't know, inappropriate trip of the tongue. What I'll do is I'll just I'll stop and I'll observe myself from bird's eye view. I'll close my eyes and I'll look down on myself and I'll say, "Oh, Joseph is having that thought. Look at the weather around Joseph's head. That condition, that weather condition of fearing, stumbling mid-sentence." And what I'd strongly suggest that you do is put on your calendar, write this down observation time. This is time where you're going to observe your thinking. And you're just going to set aside 10 to 15 minutes a day where you're going to sit in silence and you're going to observe observe your thoughts. And what this is going to develop is good cognitive security. You're going to develop this ability to look at yourself from a bird's eye view and just notice the weather that's happening in your

11:29 mind. And what you're going to notice in about four weeks if you practice this, that's all it takes. You don't have to do it every day, but you have to schedule this out. The people who schedule this out and who reach the end of this goal or the end of the four weeks always see a change. I've never seen this not significantly benefit people and give them the ability to slow down the rate of their thoughts. And that's what you're going to achieve. You're going to change the tempo of your mind. This is going to give you the ability to swat away the thoughts very fast. And it's building good cognitive defense, good cognitive security, stopping the thoughts before they influence you. And once you have that ability to notice the weather of your mind and just notice, oh, that's a cloud. I'm not actually in the storm. It's just a little bit of

12:15 snow or it's just a little bit of sleep that's passing by. You've already won the mental game. And now we're going to go one level deeper past the thoughts. So we need to understand how some of these thoughts are influenced or triggered and there really two different kinds of triggers. It's the simplest way of understanding this and this is all you need to know. There are the internal triggers which might be something like doubt, fear or insecurity or some influence from within. And then there are the external triggers and this might be anything that our senses pick up. the faces that we see, the swear words that we pick up from other people or anything that our senses pick up. External triggers can be once again facial reactions or something we hear or something we smell that

13:01 encourages a thought or a sensation. So we talked about how to handle the internal, how to build good cognitive security and observe the weather of your thoughts. The external is a little bit more challenging because our brain will often interpret something that our senses pick up as a threat. This is very normal and then it launches into the response and it could be something like seeing someone frown at us and now we think they don't like our message or we think we said something that offended them. So, one of the best exercises that we've built for our clients to help moderate the impact that external thoughts have on us is to practice delivering an answer to a question or short speech while watching disapproving faces and while also listening to a booing crowd. It sounds funny, it's

13:48 actually incredibly fun. So, there's a compilation video below this below this video that you can access where you're going to watch and you're going to practice speaking to people who are frowning, who are giving you disapproving reactions while also not supporting you with their voices. And your job is super simple when you do this. You have to stay excited about your idea regardless of what you see or hear. And this is going to teach the skill of emotional regulation. So, cognitive security and emotional regulation, those are the two big communication micro skills that if you can develop these, you're going to solve the battle that goes on upstairs in your mind. And emotional regulation, it's not about being insensitive or not being empathetic. You're not becoming a robot.

14:35 You're just building armor. You're not letting every verbal sling or arrow or or face from a person penetrate you. Because the truth is, you just can't control other people's emotions. You can't control their faces or reactions. What you can control is something that removes a massive chunk of external overthinking. And that's what we're about to dive into here. That's what we're going to focus on next, which is another very high leverage exercise that we're going to walk you through. We talked about cognitive defense, cognitive security, emotional regulation. The third thing that I want to focus on is your breath. So, one of the destructive patterns in speaking that a person has that I think this is going to be a big epiphany moment for you, it always is for our clients is mid-sentence breathing.

15:21 Because what happens when someone breathes mid-sentence is that that one second pause gives the mind an opening. And what happens when people consistently inhale mid-sentence is you've now filled your lungs with oxygen. And this has the tendency to create run-on sentences because now you have all this charge that has to be dispelled throughout the sentence and redundancy happens. You're giving yourself this opportunity to recharge mid-sentence before you've committed to completing the thought or the idea. And so people will end up looping back into their thoughts because the sentence stretches because the breath was mid-sentence. So there's a very simple equation that I want to give you. We call it the oxygen equation. And what the oxygen

16:07 equation is is one breath equals two sentences. And this is going to help you stay on your forgetting how to spell sentence. One breath equals two sentences. One breath inhaling at the top and then continuing to deliver one sentence and then delivering the next sentence. And what this does is it creates a little bit of a heartbeat. One breath, two sentences, one breath, two sentences. It slows this the the your breathing down, prevents the brain from hijacking your thought and not having those breaks. Breathing at the end and then two sentences. So this is something that I offer up to you to practice and to start noticing in your speech. And

16:54 the purpose of the oxygen equation is not so that every single time you speak, you're using one breath for two sentences. It's just to develop an awareness for where your breathing is because most of the time your overthinking is given an opportunity to breed and to grow and to fester mid-sentence because you're giving yourself that moment for your mind to take over. I want to give you a secondary tool as well that's going to help you uh understand this further. And we're going to reference that graph in the beginning that we talked about. Remember that idea we talked about the the preparation of thought and the presentation of thought and that that gap that exists. So this gap is what's called response lag. And this is becoming more and more of an epidemic with Gen Z where everyone now

17:41 has the ability to give themselves as much time as they need to think about their response. And this happens because the medium of communication is now the phone or email or laptop or whatever it is. and and that lack of response time is creating a huge lack of confidence in the person's ability to commit to a reply in real time. And so people when they speak to someone in real time, the time that they now have to think about is far less than what they would normally operate on. And so they've convinced themselves that a good reply is only one where you take 30 seconds to send a text or before you go to chat GBT first. So there's no thinking in the moment. there's a lack of trust in the your ability to find the right words, a lack of confidence and it's extremely taxing on the on the mental engine to

18:28 having having to deal with that thought of I don't have enough time and and so what I want to help you is just build greater trust in yourself and find the right words. And you're going to do this by forcing the next five words. So, what this looks like is when you find yourself having a gap or a pause mid-sentence and you have that pause, you're going to lean forward physically just a little bit and you're going to emphasize, you're going to punch up the next five words. What this means is just getting 10% louder with your voice. Just the next five words. It doesn't have to be the next five. It just needs to be the next few. I'm just going to find the next words. I'm just going to continue to say something and I'm going to force myself to not allow myself to have that pause. And what you you find is that your whole body depends on the person, but your eyes might widen and you are,

19:15 you know, you're fairly able to actually continue the sentence without needing to have those gaps. And this builds an increased in trust in yourself to to find your path along the way. The analogy that I often use to describe what this feels like is it's like a train on the track and you're laying the track right before the wheels of the train as it goes down the rails. And this is such an incredible skill to develop because it starts to close that gap between the preparation of thought and the presentation of thought. The average response lag for most people is about 10 to 12 seconds. That's the effective amount of time that a person needs to feel like this thought is okay. You want to close that to 2 to 3 seconds, if not even 1 second or shorter, where you're just in this flow

20:00 state all the time and you're choosing the right words. You're not overthinking. are extremely satisfied because you have figured out how to make speaking and communication an incredibly simple habit. So, if you want to watch a further breakdown of everything discussed here, I have a full free course here on YouTube on how to speak well and how to speak articulately. Check that out. And I hope this video helps.