"Talk is the advantage that humans have over AI." — Professor Alison Wood Brooks
Professor Alison Wood Brooks, on the episode
Alison Wood Brooks is a Harvard behavioral scientist who has spent two decades transcribing and studying real conversations at scale, work she teaches in a course called Talk and lays out in a book of the same name. The pop framing of communication advice is that some people are naturally gifted talkers and the rest of us just have to wing it. The operating system she actually runs treats conversation as a skill built from specific, learnable moves: how you label your own nervous energy, how you respond to a view that seems crazy to you, how many questions you ask and what kind. Most of what makes someone likable or forgettable, she argues, isn't personality, it's a handful of small, repeatable choices made turn by turn. This protocol pulls the three sharpest, most load-bearing moves from that conversation.
Before any high-stakes conversation, say 'I'm excited' out loud to relabel the same physical arousal and perform measurably better.
Professor Alison Wood Brooks says
Anxiety and excitement are the same physiological state, so the label I say out loud is what actually changes my experience of it. In my karaoke study, people who said they were anxious sang worse than people who said they were excited, with no other difference in the task. Saying 'I'm excited' before a hard moment shifts my focus toward opportunity instead of threat.
Try this
Say 'I'm excited' out loud right before a nerve-inducing moment instead of naming it as anxiety.
