Speak Easy: How to be Articulate, Assertive, and Audacious Around People

By Armani Talks

Speak Easy is a framework to help anyone who is struggling with communication to learn the 3 A's. They will learn how to be Articulate, Assertive, and Audacious when presenting their message and interacting with others. Eliminate hesitancy & build a voice full of power. In Speak Easy, you will learn:

• Language: English
• Publisher: Armani Talks
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869046871

Book preview

Authors Preface

There was a certain period in my engineering career when I was being invited to meetings that I wasn’t supposed to be invited to.

I would be sitting with a few of the managers from Operations and they would say, ‘well, go on. What do you think we should do?’

Beats me!

Why was I being invited to these meetings with upper management? My coworkers, who were much more qualified and seasoned in their positions were just as confused.

There came a day when I emailed one of the people who had sent me these invites to ask them what the deal was. I was a junior engineer at the time, why didn’t they ask a senior engineer to attend the meetings?

That’s when the woman, whose name was Debra, said, ‘because you speak in a way where we can understand.’

Now everything made sense.

Operations and the Engineers despised each other. Operations felt like the engineers had too much of a technical jargon. Engineers felt that the Operations team didn’t take their roles seriously.

Since I was a new employee at the time, I was still moldable. There was enough technical knowledge on my end to be competent. But not too much technical knowledge to sound like a machine. Clarity.

It wasn’t always like that though…

I learned communication skills in a very informal manner. It was a journey of evolving my personality from being talkative to being shy to being composed.

I was talkative when I lived in Bangladesh as a child. By the time I moved to the United States, I suddenly became shy due to the culture shock and a heavy accent in my English.

I was shy for the next decade plus.

By the time I was wrapping up college, I decided to invest in public speaking and see if there was a shot to change my personality. Luckily, there was.

The answer seemed so simple. If you can talk to 50 people with ease, then 5 people should feel like light work!

I went from being a newbie in my public speaking club of Toastmasters to soon being the recruitment chair, to a mentor, to the External Vice President. Throughout my journey, I was part of 3 different clubs for a while soaking up as much knowledge as I could.

The people who were ahead of me taught me deeper insights into public speaking.

The people who were behind me taught me deeper insights into speech anxiety.

I decided that I wanted to jot down the insights of my public speaking journey on a public forum so others could learn alongside me. That’s when on June 2018, I started the ArmaniTalks Twitter page.

This page started off as a hobby.

There was a day when I got a DM from a man in Australia who said he had a best man speech coming up. He wanted my help crafting the speech and managing his speech anxiety. He said he’d pay me. I thought he was bluffing!

Until I see the PayPal notification hit.

On that day, I learned that ArmaniTalks was not only a hobby, but it also had the chance to become a business.

As years have passed by, the insights created from the company has touched millions of people from all walks of life. The short story styled content has helped men, women, teens, with their speech anxiety, social anxiety, shyness, mumbling issues, cracking voice and other communication quirks.

I nowadays give back to the engineering community by teaching awkward engineers the art of writing clearly and delivering a PowerPoint presentation without reading word for word off the slides.

Also, I help introverted entrepreneurs turn on the camera/microphone and hit record so they can finally launch their YouTube channels and podcasts. It is never as bad as the limiting beliefs make you think.

Plus, I work with people who are moving from overseas and help them fine tune their accent so they can rock their voice and deliver their message with the utmost confidence.

Throughout these past few years, I can confidently say that my path towards honing communication skills has been far from normal. I never got a bachelor’s or master’s degree in this field. My knowledge was from the school of Hard Knock’s.

The ArmaniTalks company is geared towards serving a small niche, never the masses. This was not by design, it just ended up happening that way. I often see messages like, ‘I trust you because you are different.’

A foreign kid, from a hard skills field, teaching soft skills? Yes, sounds different to me.

Speak Easy is a framework to help anyone who is struggling with communication to learn the 3 A’s. They will learn how to be Articulate, Assertive and Audacious.

There will be plenty of frameworks in this book you probably never heard of. You will Google it and be like, ‘I can’t find more information on this framework!’

That’s because I am an engineer, remember? We invent things. In this book, you will be given new tools and new frameworks which allow you to view communication skills in a brand-new light.

A light will now blaze in a place that was once dark.

See the truth once and it is impossible to unsee it…

INTRODUCTION

You need to give up power in order to get it.

The first time I ever heard this quote, I thought I had just heard one of the most ridiculous things in my life.

Why would I possibly want to give up power? Confidence is all about having power, holding onto it and amplifying it, no?

No.

As years went on by, I one day stumbled onto a definition of confidence that blew me away. It was a definition with similar words attached to it.

One of the similar words were:

-Dependence.

Dependence?? Really? That sounds like giving up some power. But how does this fit into the larger puzzle pieces of communication skills?

As more years went on by, I started to understand this quote on a deeper level. This insight clicked when I was serving as a member in Toastmasters, the public speaking club.

During my time in the club, I had seen plenty of people come and go. People from all walks of life coming to improve their communication skills.

Where many came and saw success, plenty of others came and quit too soon.

There were 2 different individuals who stood out.

Cameron and Sam.

Let’s start off with Sam first.

He was a man in his 60s, moustache, white hair and had some short pants on. I was the first to greet him when he walked into the meeting. He greeted me back and had a seat. Sam didn’t speak much that meeting. He simply sat there and observed.

By the time the meeting was done, I asked him what he thought. That’s when he gave me a very shocking insight.

‘You know young man; it has taken me over 25 years to step foot inside this meeting. For 25 years, I have wanted to pick up public speaking, and for 25 years, I have talked myself out of it.’

I looked at him in shock. Over decades pondering whether you were going to conquer a fear or not? I allowed Sam to continue speaking.

‘I feel like a million bucks’ young man. I finally came to the meeting. Now I am honestly thinking about joining the club.’

I enthusiastically told him that joining this club was going to be a gamechanger for his confidence. Not only was I the recruitment chair, but I wanted to see this man succeed.

Something about Sam felt a little off though.

The way he was carrying himself made it seem like he already conquered his demons. Sure, it was great that he finally stepped foot inside the meeting. However, the way he was talking, he made it seem like his speech anxiety was a thing of the past.

7 days later

Next week, we are having another meeting. Sam comes up to me in the beginning and says he is about to sign up to be a member of the club. He filled out his application and everything.

As the meeting progresses, we come into the session known as Table Topics. This is the impromptu speech section of the meeting. A Table Topics Master has random topics picked, and then he or she chooses volunteers.

On this day, no one was volunteering. So now it was a game of being volun-told. The Table Topics Master looks around, see’s Sam’s enthusiastic face and tells him to come up to the stage.

Sam suddenly looks petrified.

He looks at me like he wasn’t ready. His face was signaling as though he wanted me to stop him from going up on stage. However, I whispered to him that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Sam goes centerstage.

Everyone is watching him.

Bright lights.

Will he rise to the occasion?

Unfortunately, no.

Sam didn’t say a single word. Stood there like a deer in the headlights with a face as red as a tomato. When he sat down, the enthusiasm he had earlier seemed like a thing of the distant past.

After the meeting, I asked Sam if he submitted his form.

He looked at me angrily and said, ‘No. This club is not right for me.’

I never saw him again.

Now off to Cameron.

Unlike Sam, Cameron was young. I would say he was roughly in his early 20s. He had just moved from California to Florida and his dream was to be a movie director.

His only problem?

He struggled to give a speech to more than 3 people at a time. During one-on-one conversations, he was great. However, when it came down to speaking to multiple people, his nerves would get the best of him.

Cameron’s desire to be a movie director overpowered his intense speech anxiety. Now was the time for him to conquer his fears. He came to each meeting and volunteered to give the impromptu speeches.

Everyone is watching him.

Bright lights.

Will he rise to the occasion?

Unfortunately, no.

Cameron was worse than Sam because at least Sam stood there quiet. Cameron on the other hand would talk fast, his knees were visibly trembling, and he would drop an occasional F bomb with kids present in the audience.

Despite his massive setbacks on stage, he was always the first to volunteer. How strange.

There came a period where my life had gotten too busy. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to be a part of this club anymore. I bid my fellow members a farewell and told them I’d try to stop by when my schedule was free again.

1 year passes by

On one summer day, I was free. It was 6:25 pm on a Tuesday. I wonder how my old public speaking club is doing? You know what,