Name: How To Speak Like The 1% Elite
Uploaded: 2025-06-30T15:55:25.000Z
Duration: 15 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The zero and first conditional

If you wanna be seen as powerful, respected, and confident, your words have to match your ambition.

The superlative

I've spent years working under executives, becoming one myself, and learning from the most respected people in the room.

These are the five communication skills that separate those who get listened to from those who get overlooked.

You have to stop speaking to be liked and instead speak to lead.

In our company today, we have over 250 team members.

And so I get to see day in and day out people who exude confidence and act like leaders versus people who accidentally erode their own credibility.

And they do this in the simplest of ways.

The mindset shift that the people who are successful have is I am a leader, even if they aren't yet.

The mindset that people have versus the mindset of I am in somebody else's environment and therefore I have to be less than or smaller or less certain.

When you are less certain in your communication, it shows.

So in order to be more certain, you can do a handful of things to switch up the way that you speak.

One of the most important things that you can do is actually mean what you say and only say things that you are certain of.

CEOs, leaders, top executives, they have a point of view.

They see themselves, they see their life experiences, and they use where they're at in order to frame what their point of view truly is.

If you wanna be able to be more certain in your communication, remember that your point of view is important and you are there for a reason.

Now, the simple language tweaks on this are as follows.

Qualifying your statements by saying I think or I feel reduces your credibility.

Just say what you think or say how you feel.

It's obvious through the communication that you were thinking or you were feeling something, but those qualifiers make it seem like you are uncertain.

So consciously practice making these language swaps.

So instead of saying, I think we should try this, instead say, the best path forward is another example.

Instead of saying, I feel like this might work, say, here's a strategy that will get us this result.

It is this simple switch, but removing you from the conversation and just stating what you see, how you see it, instantly increases your credibility.

Next is number two, which is that your emotions are making you sound reactive and unsure.

We have a saying around here, high emotion, low intelligence.

Have you ever noticed that people who are wildly emotional, always talking about what's wrong and being outrageously creative in their storytelling, very rarely have a lot of success around them.

They don't have people who are winning around them.

They don't have successful business relationships.

They don't have successful businesses because the more you use emotion, the less you're using logic.

Emotion just clouds your decision-making ability and effective leaders are spectacular.

They are gangsters at being able to take a situation, remove emotion and be able to logically make decisions very quickly.

And they trust their decision-making process.

The only way you know you can trust your decision-making process is if you have your own internal confidence that you're not being swayed by something based off of the emotion that you have.

You're actually being swayed based off of logic, based off of data.

Just this week, I had somebody pop off on me and had this whole emotional outburst.

It was embarrassing and it instantly reduced my confidence in this person.

Their inability to feel something, to experience something, to have there be a form of rejection in front of them and be able to handle that with grace, understanding, questions, allowed me to see this person through a very new lens.

And that new lens is they make decisions based off of their emotion.

And as I looked a little bit further into this, I actually started to see how there was a lack of success in a variety of different areas, which is a key indicator that emotion is used in all sorts of conversations.

And instead of creating confidence, it actually erodes people's confidence, which means you cannot be successful because without other people, as a leader, you're not successful.

You actually cannot, by definition, be a leader if other people don't trust and actually follow you.

So never let your emotions override your message.

One of the visuals I use to help me during emotional situations is I imagine myself being a blade of grass.

If you have a blade of grass that is horizontal and there is a rock that falls through the blade of grass, the blade of grass isn't gonna stay hardened.

It's actually going to move with the pressure.

It's gonna move with the rock and then it's going to bounce back up to its original shape, versus if you had a toothpick there.

A toothpick, when a rock goes right through it, is going to rake.

It's very rigid, it's hard, and it's frail.

So in situations, instead of thinking of yourself as somebody who's going to make their point and who's gonna prove somebody wrong and get hardened like a toothpick, imagine that you are a blade of grass and that situation is just going to fall through you, not because you don't care, but because you're not gonna get emotionally involved.

You're gonna let the data that they're giving you go through you.

You're gonna let the emotion that they're giving you pass by.

And then you're going to respond in the way that you should respond, without the tense rigidity of the toothpicks in your life.

Next is number three and focuses on authority.

This is the secret to getting people to stop interrupting you and start actually listening.

What about what you're saying actually matters.

When you think of every conversation you're in as an opportunity for you to make an impact, you will show up to those conversations differently.

Any meeting that you're attending, any conversation you're a part of, it has to matter because as a leader, you have a million things pulling at your attention.

There are no shortage of things on your to-do list, emails that you could be answering, presentations that you could be making, but instead you're in that room for a reason.

If you recognize that you have nothing to say and there's no reason for you to be there, leave that conversation.

A leader knows where their time is best spent and they prioritize accordingly.

So whenever I walk into a room, I know the reason I'm going into that room.

When I know I have a target, I have authority going into the room because I'm clear on why I'm there.

They show up, they're not even sure why they're there.

They just listen, think about other things, maybe distract themselves, answer emails.

Great leaders know that there are a plethora of problems for them to solve and their time is going to be spent solving the most important problem.

Therefore, their attention and their communication of where they are truly does matter.

So if you're struggling with authority, reevaluate where you're spending your time.

Go into the meetings where you do choose to participate and actually participate.

Use your authority because you've thought through the situation and you know that there's a problem and there's something that you can help with or you need to better understand as a way for you to build up your own authority in your mind.

So never enter a room where you don't know why you're there and you will all of a sudden have more authority in your communication simply because you took a handful of minutes in order to really understand why your time was best spent there.

When participating and leading meetings, you steer the conversation with clear, confident delivery.

Next up is number four, which is to become a question master.

You just need to know how to ask the right questions.

The best leaders put themselves in a position to solve the most complicated problems in a business.

And in order to solve a complicated problem, there has to be some sort of constraint, some level of confusion and no clear path forward.

So if you are an effective communicator, you are able to address and properly identify what questions you need to ask, what information is missing to be able to make the best decision to move that problem forward.

I like to think about this as untangling a necklace.

When you're looking at untangling a necklace, it's taking one piece after another after another to really start to understand strategically what is the core knot inside this tangled necklace.

Your job as a leader is to unknot many necklaces.

The best leaders think of themselves as professional problem solvers.

But the reason they're able to solve these problems better than more junior people is simply because they ask more questions.

It is not the expectation that you know everything and you're coming at it from this high vantage point to be able to tell everybody what to do.

Oftentimes, you don't know what to do when you're entering that meeting or that problem.

You see great leaders guide conversations by asking powerful and strategic questions.

So challenge yourself to ask these questions.

Instead of what do you think, ask what data supports this decision.

And instead of how's it going, ask what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now.