• Some people may be naturally more extroverted or articulate, but these traits don’t define your communication potential. How you approach spontaneous speaking matters more than what comes naturally.

  • Pick a routine communication (like a weekly update) and experiment with delivery. Try varying emotion, tone, phrasing, posture, humor, or inviting others in before you speak.

  • Answering your own unasked questions can ease pressure. For example, one Nobel laureate structured his talks using research questions as slide titles, which served as cues for content delivery.

  • Practice pausing in low-stakes conversations. Pausing isn’t just about slowing down—it creates space to listen actively and show attention to others.

  • Don’t hold important conversations when distracted. Reschedule for when you can truly focus and be present.

  • Paraphrasing isn’t parroting back what someone said—it’s distilling their core message. It helps confirm understanding and builds connection.

  • Practice externalizing emotions. Say things like, “What you’re saying brings up something for me…” to strengthen self-awareness and expression.

  • Look for chances to share emotions during conversations. In your next few discussions, consciously express how you feel at least once or twice.

  • Spontaneous communication improves when we manage anxiety, drop perfectionism, and listen deeply to both others and ourselves.

  • Structure matters—even in impromptu moments. Have a clear beginning, middle, and end to keep your message coherent and memorable.

  • Notice how commercials use Problem–Solution–Benefit. It’s a simple and powerful framework you can borrow for your own communication.

  • Analyze your favorite books, songs, or TED Talks for flow and structure—doing this builds your narrative instinct.

  • Without clear transitions, your audience can get lost. Connect your ideas like a good tour guide connects stops on a journey.

  • Use transitions like, “Now that we understand the problem…” to guide listeners from one point to the next with purpose.

  • You don’t need to state your structure explicitly. Use subtle cues to give your remarks clarity and shape.

  • Try structuring your message as a story with a problem, tension, and resolution. It works at work and at home.

  • Stories stick because they engage emotion and attention. Use them to make your messages more memorable and impactful.

  • Start any talk with a road map—clear direction helps listeners stay engaged and retain information.

  • Before answering spontaneously, take 15 seconds to pick a structure like Problem–Solution–Benefit, Past–Present–Future, or What–So What–Now What.

  • Improvisation doesn’t mean randomness. Feel free to swap in anecdotes or jokes mid-response—structure helps you do this without losing flow.

  • What–So What–Now What is a versatile structure for spontaneous communication—great for interviews, meetings, or feedback.

  • Reflect daily on your communication. What worked? What felt unclear? Which structures helped? This builds self-awareness and intentionality.

  • Review your reflections weekly to identify patterns. You’ll start to notice what situations or times lead to clearer, more effective communication.

  • Great spontaneous communicators practice calming techniques and build a small library of go-to structures for common scenarios.

  • Word choice matters. Use inclusive language like “we” and frame suggestions as shared efforts, especially in feedback conversations.

  • End strong. Thank the audience, then restate your key message to leave a lasting impression.

  • If no one asks a question, wait a full five seconds. Then ask a “back-pocket” question to keep engagement alive.

  • Answer questions clearly and directly—avoid unnecessary preamble. Clarity boosts credibility.

Raw notes

Some people are naturally more extroverted, uninhibited, quick-witted, or facile with words than others. But any deficits we might have in these areas need not define us nor determine our destiny. What most shapes how we communicate on the fly isn’t something innate or deeply established in us but rather how we approach this challenging task.

Think of a common communication you regularly deliver, such as a weekly status update or a virtual check-in. Challenge yourself to try different takes. You might vary your emotion, changing your vocal intensity, reframing a statement as a question, inviting others to speak first, injecting humor, adjusting your body posture, and so on.

Answering your own unasked questions can help ease pressure in formal speaking situations as well. One distinguished academic I know, a Nobel laureate, wanted to improve his public speaking, which he regarded as good but a bit stiff. He began structuring them around important research questions, using these questions as the titles of his slides. These in turn served as cues to relay his intended content; he simply provided the answers to his questions for his audience

Practice pausing during your communication with others. To become more comfortable with this tactic, experiment with it first in conversations that are low stakes or conversational.

Slowing down isn’t only about making more time. It’s also about what we do with that time. We must listen actively, quieting our minds and reducing judgment so that we can better understand the gist of what others are saying, and so that others can perceive that we’re paying attention.

We can also avoid holding conversations when we’re distracted, rescheduling them for times when we know we can really focus.

Paraphrasing isn’t parroting back what the other person said (for example, “What I hear you saying is . . .”). Rather, it’s distilling the essence of what we heard them communicate. Doing so can serve a number of purposes depending on the context: It can ensure that we understood someone’s meaning correctly. It can allow us to confirm understanding and build connection.

Look consciously for opportunities to convey emotions that you might be feeling in the course of interacting with others. Challenge yourself during your next three substantive conversations to interject at least once or twice, expressing emotions you’re feeling.

say something like, “You know, what you’re saying brings an interesting feeling up for me . . .” and then elaborate as best you can. Externalizing your emotions can get you in the habit of registering your internal voice more strongly and listening to it. In so doing, you’re training yourself to feel and share more.

We can communicate fairly well in impromptu situations if we take the lessons of previous chapters to heart, learning to control our anxiety, restraining our drive toward perfectionism, and seeing spontaneous moments as opportunities rather than threats. But we can’t truly connect with others unless we pay attention to them as well as to ourselves, creating an ongoing dialogue in our minds between what we’re picking up from others and what our own, internal voices are saying we should do in response. We can’t create, experience, and project that kind of pitch-perfect communication Williams spawned that day unless we’re listening, in the fullest sense of the word. That means adding more pace, space, and grace to our spontaneous communication.

Sue Stanley, senior instructional designer at Toastmasters International, agrees:

“Structure is an important tenet of any successful speech,” she says, “whether it’s impromptu or not. You have to be able to get a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have to know where you’re going to start and where you’re going to end.”

The next time you watch television commercials, pay attention to the flow of ideas. Chances are, you’ll see Problem–Solution–Benefit in action.

Take a few minutes to think about your favorite book or popular song and how it flows. Can you identify the underlying structure? Bonus points: listen to a TED Talk or two and see if you can identify the road map the speaker is using.

Try it: Just as a tour guide must connect where we’ve been to where we’re going next—otherwise tour members would get lost. They would wander off, either because they felt curious about something they saw and wanted to linger with it, they couldn’t grasp the relevance of what they were seeing and their attention drifted, or they worried about what was coming next and thus couldn’t focus as well. Something similar holds with impromptu speaking. Without clear bridges between ideas, we’ll lose our audiences and they’ll go to their phone, their friends, or to sleep.

The Problem–Solution–Benefit structure, for instance, invites a transition like, “Now that we have a firm understanding of the problem at hand, allow me to share how we can solve it through a simple investment”; or “Once we invest in and build out this solution, we will be able to reduce costs and save time.”

Note that we don’t always have to be perfectly explicit about our overarching structure when beginning impromptu remarks. We can take a subtler approach and still reap the benefits of structure.

In general, it’s a good idea to give your audience some kind of road map at the outset of a speech of any length, spontaneous or not. Thinking about what you want to communicate in the context of a story structure can be a useful way to organize your thoughts, even when speaking on the spot.

By structuring our communication as a logical sequence with a beginning, middle, and end, we prime our messages to be noticed and remembered, both by ourselves and our audiences.

Stories enable us to connect with audiences not only on the level of abstract reason or logic but also emotion, which in turn might well help us remember information better.

Emotion can rev up the circuits in the brain devoted to paying attention. So if I’m an effective storyteller, I’m figuring out how to arouse your attention circuits, your memory circuits, and part of that could be through the emotional component.”10 Unlike a mere list, storytelling can even potentially transform our audiences through the emotional connections it forges—changing their minds, soothing or invigorating their souls, inspiring them to take action.11

The next time you need to convince someone to do or think something, try taking Nasr’s advice and structuring what you intend to say as a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. You might try this at work when trying to convince your boss and coworkers to take a certain course of action or at home to get your unruly teenager to change their behavior. Telling a story that begins with a clear problem, raises the stakes with tension in the middle, and then resolves with a memorable ending will help illustrate the point you want to make in a way that is hard to ignore or forget.

I spend that fifteen seconds choosing a structure and then very cursorily applying it to the topic. Considering the topic and audience, I ponder whether I might use a persuasive structure like Problem–Solution–Benefit, a chronological structure like Past–Present–Future, or a comparative structure like Comparison–Contrast–Conclusion. To my students’ amazement, my speeches actually turn out to be extremely clear and engaging, with minimal effort

As longtime improvisation instructor James Whittington notes, we can also make impromptu decisions to swap in new ideas, anecdotes, jokes, and so forth as they occur to us at various parts of our structured response, again without worrying that we’ll somehow scuttle our larger response.

What–So What–Now What works wonders when giving a spontaneous presentation, answering a question in a job interview, giving a piece of feedback—you name it. If you go back and review this chapter, you’ll find that I used What–So What–Now What as my organizing schema.

Make reflection a regular part of your day—first thing in the morning, perhaps, during your commute home, or before you go to bed at night. Identify one or two communication situations you experienced that day or the previous day, and analyze how you handled them. With whom did you converse most easily? What made it so effortless and fluid? Which structure did you use and why was that so appropriate? Did you encounter situations in which you wish you had structured your thoughts more clearly? Which structure did you use—and which other structures might have worked better? Were you unsure at times of the other person’s message or goal? How might they have used structure more effectively?

At the end of the week, review your journal entries to look for patterns. You might notice, for instance, that you’re better spontaneously structuring your communication at certain times of day, when you’re with certain colleagues, or in certain settings. Think about why that might be, and what adjustments you might make to create more of the optimal circumstances for your next important conversation.

Great spontaneous communicators practice techniques for overcoming anxiety and develop a toolbox of tactics for calming down in the moment. They practice skills such as listening and introspection. And as I’ve suggested in this chapter, they develop a small but potent catalog of structures that they can call upon in specific situations to respond in ways that are clear, directed, engaging, and “sticky.”

Spontaneous communication in daily life might be unscripted, but like political debates, they aren’t random. We can often anticipate how we’ll feel, what various contexts and speaking situations will demand of us, what kind of content our audiences might want to hear, and how we might most compellingly present it to them. By familiarizing ourselves with structures and practicing their application, we put ourselves in a position to shine when it really counts, just as we do by taking the other preemptive steps described in this book. We might even find ourselves doing something wonderful we never quite expected: having fun while speaking in the moment.

My work with clients and students has led me to identify four dimensions or qualities of focused messages: precision, relevance, accessibility, and concision. Practice enhancing these qualities and you’ll find yourself connecting better with audiences, engaging them longer, and delivering messages that stick better in people’s minds.

When most people reflect on their communication goals, they consider information they wish to impart or ideas they hope to convey—in other words, their content. But what we want our audience to know is only one dimension of our goals as communicators. We must also consider what we want audiences to feel, the emotions we want them to experience. And we must consider what we want our audiences to do, the actions we want our audiences to take. A goal isn’t simply our intended meaning but also the broader impact we intend that meaning to have.

To improve your ability to speak spontaneously, you would do well to first clarify your goals in your own mind. If you’re about to enter a situation where you think you might speak spontaneously, spend a few minutes jotting down answers to three questions:

What do you want people to know? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?

Think back to the last time you spoke spontaneously. What did you want people to know, feel, and do? Were the messages you delivered aligned with these goals?

Try it: A famous improvisation game called “sell a blank to a blank” asks participants to sell a random product and service to a randomly selected type of person. The product might be a plunger or a piano, and the job type or person might be a police officer, circus clown, or kindergarten teacher. The person playing this game would spend a minute or two trying to sell a plunger to a police officer, for instance, or a piano to a circus clown. This game helps us to practice imagining other people and tailoring our communication to their needs. Try picking three products or services of your own. For each one, pick a type of person to sell to. How might you best frame your pitch?

When we’re trying to argue for an idea, we rattle off arguments that are important and impactful to us. Particularly when discussing a topic that we feel emotionally about, we may skip the step of asking what will make the same topic important, impactful, and emotionally resonant for our audience. Ditto when we’re trying to sell a product or service: we list the features and functions rather than explaining how what we’re selling solves an important problem or challenge as customers define it.

To make your spontaneous communication more relevant, make a habit of thinking about your audiences and their needs. You can do this in the moment. If someone puts you on the spot with a question, pause for just a second and ask yourself, “Who is this person? What do they need to hear? How can I frame what I’m about to say so that it’s most relevant/interesting/urgent for them?”

Try it: In your next spontaneous encounter, try creating a moment of curiosity for your audience that might make the topic seem more relevant and urgent. If someone poses a question for you to answer on the spot, create just a bit of uncertainty by first defining a potential impact or challenge that the answer you’ll give will address, and only then delivering the answer itself. If someone hasn’t asked a question but you find yourself in the position of communicating an idea, evoke curiosity by first posing and answering a question of your own. For example, when you spontaneously need to share information about a new product, you could ask, “Do we really want to support two products in the market?”

Consider the following questions:

How might I best convey to this particular audience what I find most important or compelling about my topic? How much does the audience know about my topic? What impressions of me and my topic does my audience likely have? Are there any likely areas of resistance, concern, or hesitation? What motivates my audience?

To project more openness and inclusivity, we can ask questions and try to find common ground. We might say something like, “In thinking about how to achieve this goal, I am curious about your thoughts on X.”

Let’s say you’re on a Zoom call when your manager asks for your thoughts on how your team might update one of the company’s current products. In a situation like this, you may feel put on the spot—especially if you know that some customers have provided negative feedback. But rather than hide from that reality, a situation like this could give you an opportunity. In answering your boss’s query, you might spur curiosity in your boss and others on the Zoom by first identifying three or four unexpected comments you’ve received from customers about their experiences with your product. Hearing this feedback might trigger questions in the minds of your audience members. How did these comments originate? How might we best address them? Is there an opportunity to improve or expand? If the customer feedback you’re citing was negative, bringing it up might create tension among the group, but you can transform that tension into curiosity by establishing a new, shared priority—how might we resolve this problem? Posing this question might create a sense of urgency, priming audience members to find your response to your boss’s original query—“How might the team update the company’s current product?”—more relevant and interesting

The example above demonstrates how thinking about relevance requires that we also address potential areas of resistance that audience members might have. We can also do this by dampening the tension, moderating our words so as not to say something that we know will set off the audience.

Address the “Why should I care” question in the course of communicating and you’ll find that audiences really will care more about what you say—and they’ll pay attention to your focused message.

In auto racing, the grand marshal waves a white flag to designate the race’s final lap. We can do something similar when we engage in small talk by making a graceful exit which leaves our conversation partner feeling listened to and appreciated.

Further, people tend to find conversations most satisfying when they entail a relatively balanced, two-way exchange of information. Don’t treat small talk as a stand-in for your weekly therapy session, but don’t put all of the emphasis on the other person, either, and remain a closed book to them or make them feel like they’re being interrogated. People want to learn about you and know that you are listening empathetically to them.

In posing open-ended questions, we relinquish some measure of control—we don’t know where our partner is going to take the conversation. But that’s precisely why open-ended questions are so important. We’re giving our partner the opportunity to co-create the conversation with us. And as I think you’ll find, a co-created conversation is usually a better one for all involved.

One way to accomplish this task is by starting off a comment of ours by paraphrasing what we heard from our partner. For example, if you’re speaking to someone who is a newcomer to your city and who has spent a moment or two describing how much they love it, you might say something like “I’m glad to hear that you like it in this city after moving in from Baltimore. I’m wondering, what about this city most surprised you when you first arrived?” We can also end our comments with a question that likewise serves to help transition between topics or ideas. If we’ve been talking about our recent success landing a new client, we might say, “Well, I’ve told you my good news. What’s the best thing that’s happened to you in the last week, either professionally or personally?”

With a bit of work, we can not only handle ourselves well but also begin to spread happiness, connection, and collegiality wherever we go, inspiring others to open themselves up to people around them and to learn from them. The positive benefits of small talk can be significant indeed, but only if we break from our established habits and develop a more helpful—and structured—way of engaging. So don’t struggle through another social occasion. Get out there and start practicing!

Step #1: Answer the Question As clearly and concisely as possible, provide a direct answer to the question that is asked of you. No need to provide a preamble or detailed background. Get to your answer directly. Delay tactics or straying from the point might undercut your response’s transparency and authenticity, thus diminishing your credibility.

Step #3: Describe the Benefits and Relevance to the Asker We often assume that people can immediately understand why our answer is important and relevant. Unfortunately, that’s not always true. To help our audience understand the value of our response and increase perceptions of our competence, we must be explicit about the most important benefits they stand to realize:

Step #2: Detail a Concrete Example Think of a key example that supports your answer. Don’t go overboard on the specifics. Although some elaboration helps, too much risks boring audience members, distracting them, and turning them off. Keep this portion of your answer to a few sentences, offering a handful of details.

You do want to thank your audience for their attention, but add some extra oomph to your exit by reminding audience members once more of your key message or ideas. You might say, “Thank you for your questions. Clearly, we must invest in this project to achieve our goals,” or “I really appreciate your questions and input. Together we can launch this initiative successfully.” Think about the single idea you want listeners to glean from your presentation or meeting and end with that. If you reflect on potential closing lines in advance, you know you’ll be able to end on a high note no matter what.

If you invite the audience to ask questions and nobody raises their hand or steps up to the microphone right away, take a pause and wait. Jittery speakers won’t do that—they’ll rush to observe that nobody has any questions and close down the proceedings. That feels weak to me. Surely someone must have a question. In some cases, that someone might have to be you. If you’ve paused for several seconds (I advise waiting for a full five) and nobody has raised their hands, pose what I call a “back-pocket” question. Have a question ready in your figurative back pocket for precisely this situation. Make it a question you want to answer and one you can easily handle. You might preface it by saying, “A question people often ask me is . . .” or “When I first began learning about this topic, one thing that puzzled me was . . .”

Word choice matters in all communication, and especially when providing feedback. Using “we” and posing a question puts both of you on the same level, establishing the desired change as the result of a joint effort. It affords the recipient of feedback a bit of agency or autonomy in resolving the situation. You’re implying that their perspective matters, too—it’s a part of the solution to be welcomed, not a part of the problem to be shunted aside. Likewise, framing the invitation declaratively instead of posing a question can help clarify or accentuate your invitation. This directness might be especially appropriate if you have provided feedback on this issue before or are pressed for time.

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