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The Introvert's Public Speaking Playbook — Salvatore Manzi on Presence, Imposter Syndrome, and Speaking Up With Quiet Authority

Salvatore Manzi · Episode 77 · August 2, 2026

Communicate Like a Leader Salvatore Manzi

Salvatore Manzi is a communications coach who lost his voice on stage early in his career and spent the next 20 years reverse-engineering what actually works for introverted leaders who have to speak up. Back for his second appearance and with his book *Clear and Compelling* about to launch, Salvatore walks Greg through the frameworks he uses with his top-tier clients — how to share your thinking instead of just handing over the answer, how to handle imposter syndrome in three moves, how to speak extemporaneously without freezing, and how to build the kind of presence that lets you show up fully in the room.

You don't have to be perfect, but you do need to be present.
Anytime we are moving outside our known identity, imposter syndrome is going to come up as a safety mechanism. So if I feel that imposter syndrome, it's a good thing. It means that I'm growing.
Sometimes I have to shine if for nothing else to get other people permission to shine as well.
The problem and solution do not exist in the same moment.
Name it to tame it, bring it back into the body, and take one small action.
You can only take people as high as you take them low.

Key Stories

Techniques & Frameworks

Full transcript

Have you ever prepared for a talk or a big meeting and the second the room turns towards you, your throat tightens up and the small voice pops up? Who am I to be here? You know the material, you’ve done the work, but still some part of you says it’s not safe or you’re not ready. This is a loop many introverted leaders experience and it doesn’t get better by forcing your way through. My guest today is Salvatore Manzi. He’s a communications coach who literally lost his voice on stage early in his career and he spent the next 20 years figuring out what truly works for introverted leaders who need to speak out. Welcome to the introverted leader. It’s a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your underrated quiet strengths so you can get promoted and start earning what you deserve. I’m Greg Weinger. I have over 25 years of leadership experience and yes, I am an introvert. Salvatore is back for the second time on my show and his book, Clear and Compelling, comes out very soon. Today he’s walking us through a couple of frameworks that he’s used himself and with his top tier clients, helping them with public speaking, handling imposter syndrome and developing your personal presence. Let’s get into it. [“Savator”] All right, Salvatore, welcome back to the show. Thank you, it’s great to be here again. Yeah, this is your second time on the show and it’s really interesting because you’re a public speaker. You go up on stages and you would think intuitively, well, are the guys completely comfortable with being visible? Yeah, and I think your point is when I first got up on the stage, my voice failed me and I left the stage in terror and humiliation that set me off on a course to understand like how does the body work and what’s the psychology of this and how does the neuroscience play into how we communicate and that enabled me to get really good in the arena of public speaking. And yet there are still contextual situations that trigger my imposter syndrome or trigger my like, no, don’t talk now, it’s not safe yet. I always say that communication is always contextual depending on who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about and the environment in which you are speaking. And as a communication coach, my goal is to watch people and determine which of those three buckets is causing deflation of their ability to express themselves authentically. And because I think, I don’t speak for all of introverts, but I think as an introvert, when I feel comfortable in the space, I can be free flowing with thoughts. It might be a little bit more thoughtful, I’m considering more variables perhaps, but I’m gonna be more fluid in a space where I feel more comfortable. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And it strikes me a number of the techniques that you share that I’ve learned or practiced and my communications are about, how do you give yourself that sense of comfort through preparation, through going into the room, getting more familiar with the setting, through visualization, all these things. 100%, everybody has a natural fear of public speaking. We get up in front of people and we see a bunch of hungry eyes. It triggers the amygdala fight flight freeze where it’s a human condition to be afraid of getting up and speaking. And self-regulation, what you’re talking about, going in and familiarizing yourself with the space, visualizing yourself in the space, helps so much in preparing us or preparing our bodies. And I heard one of your recent videos, you were talking about the power of the breath and getting grounded again before proceeding. I think we all need a whole toolbox full of self-regulation tools so that we can pull on the one that’s gonna be most useful in that situation. All right, well, that’s a great segue to toolbox of tools. And I did wanna cover this first because I know this is really exciting. You have your book, Clear and Compelling. I have a copy here, thank you, Salvatore. And I just think this is such an amazing resource. This is like a compendium of your 20 years of experience. There’s huge sections about what to say, how to say it, and how to be present in the moment and deliver your message. So it comes across the way it is perfectly in your head. It’s always the challenge. I mean, it’s probably for everybody, but as introverts, just like, how come you don’t see the beautiful clarity in my head? That is true for us. Introverts, we are doing so much thinking and cognitive work before what comes out. It’s hard for us to ensure that they’re getting the full message because I don’t wanna give you all the data that I just went through, but I wanna give you the insight. And one of the first things I always offer, I work with a lot of technical, analytical, scientific, data-driven leaders in elevating their communication. And one of the tools I offer is to share your thinking. I will say this, I would rather you wait until I have a perfect argument. I have completed the task and I can present you on a platter. This is the perfect thing. But people in the room, in those conference rooms that are watching your leadership, they wanna watch the thought process. They wanna understand how we got from this to this. So one of the things I’ve learned as an introvert is that I have to share my process. I have to share my thinking, take them along the journey so that everybody feels like we got through it. Rather than just giving them the answer, I had a client who, she’s brilliant, obviously, and she was a chief data officer for the company. And when she would be in a meeting, she would listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, and then give the answer. And everybody’d be like, but I just, and it would take them, there’s a lag time for them to catch up with, how did you get there? Like, okay, you’re right, but now I, people wanna feel included. They wanna feel validated for their own thinking. So she began to learn of like echoing stuff that she heard other people say that was valuable and then sharing a sort of thought process before just giving people the answer and change the way she worked with people from then on. I think they don’t get it because they haven’t connected the dots, but also I think it creates resistance because like, well, why do you get to say what the answer is? Like, it’s kind of treated more like opinion rather than your well thought out argument or your well established conclusion. Exactly, because people want to feel validated for their contribution as well. And if I’m listening to you and I don’t acknowledge what I heard, but I simply give you the answer that you’re looking for, it’s gonna feel right and wrong at the same time. Right answer, wrong part of the heart or something, not feeling connected. So a little bit of validation helps. And yeah, those are just some of the techniques that are in the book. And I just want to say I appreciate so much that you read the book and that you’re speaking so highly of it. It was a lot of fun to pull it together. Yeah, well, there’s clearly care. I mean, I wanted to use the word textbook, but that’s wrong. It doesn’t really like a textbook. It is super engaging and very practical, but it’s also very thorough. And so I’m, you know, from things to, how do you set up your room? How do you look good on Zoom? I will be referring back to it for years. Yeah, and for anyone listening, it is broken into three categories, which you laid out perfectly. Like how do you structure your message? What are the techniques to deliver your message? And what are the strategies you’re using to project the type of presence that you want in the room? And the real work in communication and coaching is in the presence. Like what are the set of beliefs and experiences that are driving the way you decide to show up in a room? And as introverts, how much beliefs are we carrying from societal pressures, all this stuff that is limiting or empowering us to be ourselves in those rooms when we’re speaking? A lot of limiting beliefs, unexamined beliefs to take a look at. And when you do, it really changes the way you show up in rooms. Like we’ve got that. Those are the beliefs that are making you feel small. They’re making you feel like you’re shrinking back from the situation instead of rising up to it. So maybe let’s start with the clients. And where do you see imposter syndrome showing up for them? Well, I agree. Everybody has it. And my approach to imposter syndrome is that anytime we are moving outside our known identity, like what we’re familiar with, imposter syndrome is going to come up as a safety mechanism. Like, hey, whoa, you’re moving into a behavior or into a situation that is unfamiliar. It’s not safe. And that is imposter syndrome. So I’ve begun to reframe it as if I feel that imposter syndrome, it’s a good thing. It means that I’m growing. I’m stretching. I’m moving outside of my comfort zone to become more and become more expressive of who I am. On that note, I would say everybody, everybody, every client I’ve worked with has some variation. Not everybody calls it imposter, but some variation of do I belong here? Is my, do I know my material well enough? Am I able to hold the energy of a room of this size or with VIPs of that caliber? What happens in all of those situations? It comes up for everybody. And what my job is is to watch where, in those three contexts, a person begins to fall into a limiting belief or allows a belief to lower their full expression of who they are. That’s the case that you support them with that and your coaching? Yeah, we coach, we identify what is it about the situation that makes you feel less than and where does that come from? Usually there’s some sort of hardwired belief from an experience, you know, third grade, I got up and talked in front of the class and I got shot down and I’m never doing that again. And so anytime there’s a room of this size, I feel that same sort of rush and memory. Okay, let’s reframe it. And we do sort of a little neuro linguistic programming to reframe the memory, create a new visualization and then begin seeing it in a new way as we go forward. Sometimes it’s also reloving that part of ourselves that we think is like, I’ll just be honest about myself and not talk about my clients. There are parts of me that I sometimes think are too ugly to be seen by the world. Like I don’t want the world to see this and so when I’m up in front and the lights are on me, there’s a part of my energy that is being used to try to hold that back and let it not be seen and keep it quiet and please don’t anybody see this. And what I did to change that to script was to name it. I gave that part of me a name and I invited it in and I let it sit in the front row and be like, it’s here. It is a part of me. And yeah, there might be somebody out there that does think that is not their jam, but I’m not gonna please everybody. And I can’t dim my lights so that other people always feel better. Sometimes I have to shine if for nothing else to get other people permission to shine as well. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. These are these parts that we all have. There’s these kind of earlier, younger, vulnerable feelings, these parts of us and to continue to repress them, cast them aside, pretend they don’t exist or just actively feel that you’re bad, it’s intensifying the challenge and it really does shift when you can bring some understanding to this part and some care and like you’re saying, look at the situation with a different perspective. Yeah, my three-step rule for imposter syndrome, when it comes up, number one is name it. Name it to tame it. If I can identify, ah, this is that imposter syndrome coming up and I’ve named it now and I can then reframe it like, oh, again, this is a good thing. This means I’m moving outside of my comfort zone. Once I’ve named it, it’s not gonna get louder in the background because now it’s been heard. It moves from emotional processing to rational processing when we have a name. So the brain is able to start thinking about this experience in a different way, no matter emotional anxiety, but more rational, what can I do? That’s number one, name it to tame it. Number two is to regulate. Do something to get yourself back into the body because what happens when we go into imposter syndrome, we go up here and we start spinning out, super-rating about whatever the anxiety and trying to process, so get back into the body with the breath, with visualization of grounding, with some sort of tool to bring you back into your body. Sometimes I just tap myself or clench my fists, whatever I need to do to bring myself back into the body and out of the head. Name the to tame it, bring it back into the body, and third thing is to take one small action. I don’t wanna solve the problem. I don’t need to come up with a four-point plan. I don’t need to have everything figured out. I just need one step forward. What is the very next step that I can do in this situation to begin moving forward? That might be smile. It might be move to the other side of the stage. It might be put your pen down or doodle for a second. Like what’s one small move in action to get the energy rolling? And that whole rush of the imposter syndrome will begin flowing into something much more resourceful that you can use to expand into that new person that you’re becoming. Yeah, super helpful. And there’s so much in our biology working against us in that situation. There’s just the hardwired, primitive person, the savannah surrounded by a pack of hostile people, their reaction. And then there’s all of this that you just described happening too. So there’s really a lot. But fortunately, I mean, there’s techniques and even backed by neuroscience now and understanding how we can regulate that. And so it really is possible to shift all that. Let me ask you, what is your go-to? What’s your hack, one or two hacks that you use when imposter shows up for you? Yeah, I mean, you mentioned it is going into breathing and I’ve done some public speaking recently and I wanna get your feedback as a communications coach. One of those things that I have as a go-to is to try to lead off with a joke because if I can tell a joke and I can smile, I think it’s just the act of smiling, I think is doing chemical work for us to relax us. It’s true. Are you smiling because you’re happy or are you happy because you’re smiling? There is a brain body loop when you do smile. In fact, if you hold a pen in your mouth, so that your mouth is forced into a smile, within 30 seconds, your mood will lighten simply because of you being in that somewhat force but you’re being in a smiling perspective like that. Awesome, breath, smile. There’s also something about opening your presentation with warmth and a smile on your face generates warmth and connectivity with the audience. Of course, there are gonna be contexts where you don’t wanna generate warmth when you’re giving things or whatever but most presentations, talks can start with showing a little bit of warmth to the audience with the face and it’s wonderful. Starting out with a joke, man, you’re brave, you know? Like only tell a joke if you’re funny, pretty funny then. You are. I guess I have faith in that but I also have had this dry sense of humor where if it doesn’t land, I just roll with it as a parent. Well, that didn’t work. But I usually try to plan something and it’s one of the other guests on my podcast talks about at least I think in terms of TED Talks, the general math was 100 hours for every one hour as a proportion of preparation, which is like, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that but that’s pretty intense. I think it was probably about 10 to one and preparing for this last speech. It’s a good amount of preparation. So I had a joke planned. I was part of a keynote presentation and then I was pretty relaxed to get into my thing. There is something about breaking that initial tension of the conversation. I always say to my clients that you want to take your listeners on an emotional journey. There’s something that happens when we laugh and smile. It reduces our resistance to the content that’s being shared. So if I can as a speaker get my listener to smile or laugh, it reduces and they’re gonna hear more of what I have to offer. Now you can only take people as high as you take them low. So there’s gotta be gravitas. There’s gotta be gravity to it as well. We can’t just give all good stuff. There’s an interesting rule around repeating the joke. The joke is kind of funny the first time. It’s a little funnier the second time. It’s dead the third time. The fourth time is like, what is happening? And the fifth time it starts getting funny again. And then it’s like, so you have a refrain that you use throughout your presentation. You want a single point that you’re making at least at the front and at the end of your talk. And if you can say it one or two times more, it’s going to resonate more deeply. There’s the law of primacy, recency, and frequency. Premacy, the first thing you say is gonna have a lot of impact. Recency, the last thing you say is gonna have a greater deal of impact. You’re gonna precipitate it, but the rest of the day. And frequency, the thing that you say most often is going to be the thing that echoes in their mind. So simple rule of humor. And we wanna take people on an emotional journey. Laughter and smiles allow listeners to be more receptive. And you want to have some sort of repetition of your main points so that it sticks with your audience, whether that’s a joke or whatever you’re using to get through it. Yeah, there’s probably rhetorical rules going back to the Greeks about that kind of thing. Just refrain, I mean, you listen to political speech. They have these refrains and a call and response. But yeah, that’s a great way to cement an idea with an audience. Yeah. And I heard somewhere that people need to hear things three to five times before it actually lands. I’ve heard it’s almost seven. Oh, well, I’ve heard it’s eight and I’m kidding. Listen, don’t keep bullying. But it’s advice to me to remind myself to be sure I repeat myself several times so that they hear it. A lot of times people will say, oh, but so-and-so just said that. Yeah, well, they didn’t hear it the first time because no one’s actually listening the first time. You have to say it a second or third time. Before it comes clear. Yeah, it’s always shocks me how many times things have to be repeated before, this is just internally in an organization before it really sinks in. Maybe some people will get it, but for it really to land an organization, maybe the seven pluses for your organization. There is something there and I’m not gonna, again, throw extroverts under the bus or say that introverts are better, but I feel like introverts are more perceptive at the first time, it’s said. Or the second or maybe the third. So how did the rest of the presentation go, your talk? Yeah, I felt really good about it. It was pretty polished in terms of, I worked it up to the point where things were in my own words and I felt like I could speak pretty naturally about it. It was a presentation, so there was less dynamism, I think, in terms of diverting from script. I think one of the things that I would like to work on as a speaker is doing more, working on my skills, speaking extemporaneously. Yeah, so what I offer in my book, there’s a framework for the impromptu. It provides a structure for speaking in the moment, right? But one of the things I realized for myself as an introvert and an analytical-minded person is that if I have a framework to follow, I can follow it. When I don’t have any idea where I’m starting and ending, it tends to either get too complicated or too verbose or it gets lost somewhere in there. If I have a framework, I can always be like, okay, I start here and then I’m gonna end here, we’re good. And to learn that framework, I tried it every morning somewhere between brushing my teeth and my cup of coffee. I would do one round of an impromptu on whatever topic. Oh, remote mice, these are very helpful. And I would do the framework on that topic until it became muscle memory. And that helped me become more of an extemporaneous speaker because I knew where to push in and where to lean back out. Right, so the framework, what are the steps in that framework? So you have to start with a headline. It could be a statement, it could be an opinion, it could be a fact, but you start with a headline. Then you wanna give some sort of value add. You wanna hit the important rationale, the logic, your reasoning behind this. Then you wanna paint a picture. You gotta provide for me some sort of visual way of understanding the concept of what you’re presenting. And then you wanna end with a point. You might just repeat the headline like a sandwich. You might create a new point as you’ve talked yourself through. So headline, insights, picture, point, hip, HIPP. If you practice that, we could do a test run right now. Give me a topic. My double bergamot Earl Grey tea. Oh, you know, Earl Grey tea is a transformational substance. What I don’t think a lot of people realize is that it is caffeinated, but not so overly so that you end up in a caffeine deep afterwards. It is good on its own. And because of the bergamot, it’s not just a black tea that’s gonna be bitter in your mouth. And you could add a little bit of sweetener or a dairy substance of some sort to lessen it. Imagine that you’re in the morning and you’ve got like a really cold morning, but you’ve got a warm cup that is loosening like the texture of the vaporation of the tea and the smell. You get that full auditory and sensory immersion into that cup of coffee. And as you drink it, it’s going to heighten your senses. It’s gonna warm your body and within 15 minutes, you’re gonna start feeling the effects of the caffeine. So in my judgment, Earl Grey tea with bergamot is absolute the finest thing to start with unless you’re a coffee drinker, which I often do. Excellent, bravo. Yeah, it comes with practice. I could have, I would give myself maybe a B on that. I was sort of reaching for the visual and I finally got there, but the picture. Practicing this every day with just some object will empower you to feel more confident in speaking up in a meeting or giving your opinion to your boss when they call you on the moment or anything like that. Yeah, so headline the benefit and then the painting the picture, creating a multi-sensory kind of experience of what it is that you’re describing and then recap. Exactly. Point, headline, insight, picture, point, hit. Point, I love it. I’m wondering if we could just spend some time on the presence framework because presence is such a big part of leadership in general, but also effective public speaking. Yeah, presence really drives where you show up and how much impact you have in your messaging and in your position. I would offer that you don’t have to be perfect, but you do need to be present. So first step is become self-aware. Where are you withdrawing? Where are you escaping into the brain? Become aware of your own hex. The second thing I would offer is to notice the gap between the stimulus and the response. Something happens. How quickly do you feel you have to respond versus how much space do you give yourself to simply process, go through the analyzing that you want to, and then provide a response of some sort. So watch where you disconnect and watch what you do in the gap between the stimulus and response and you will augment your presence greatly. And you mentioned being out of your head, but I don’t know that everyone has a sense of what that is. I think for me, there’s a sense of being in your body. It’s paying attention to sensations in your body where I’m clearly much more aware of everything around me than just my thoughts. Yeah, two things I would say about that. One is I was on a workshop where they would say, well, how does that feel? And where is that in your body? And throughout the whole workshop, we had to keep touching the part of our body where we felt the energy of whatever was happening. And it started to create an awareness of, oh, when I have a feeling here, it usually has something to do with this feeling. The second thing I was gonna offer about the being in your head is you can hear it. You can hear when someone’s in their head and you can hear when someone’s in their body. So one of my quick tells of where I am is to listen to my voice. Listen to the voice, do I have a body voice or do I have a head voice or do I have more of a throat voice? That’s a quick tell of how far up. And when you watch people, oftentimes when they’re presenting with a PowerPoint, behind them slides are going, they go up into their head as soon as the next slide comes up, cause you can see them thinking about what’s the next. And the better go to is to the next slide comes up, take a breath, deliver the headline for that slide. Fun fact, the headline is not the headline on the slide. What is your headline for that slide? The audience is going to see the slide. They’re going to read the headline, but what is your introduction of that slide? And it might, you might give the headline and then bring the slide, but what is your headline? And if you let the slide appear, bring yourself back into your body, deliver the headline that you prepared, you’re going to come across as a more embodied speaker and create more connection with your audience. Yeah, watching you, you keep breathing in. I mean, I think it’s kind of the entry point to your body is through the breath and then you can really pulls you out of your head and then you have a chance to settle in. And I think that for a lot of people, it’s not just introverts, but people who are in their heads are intellectual that it can feel scary to stop thinking because you have this idea that the brain is going to solve your problem in the moment. Cause it does, you know, it’s a really effective tool, but in that moment when your body might be taking over, that’s not where you need to focus. Yeah, one of my coaches mentors once said to me, the problem and solution do not exist in the same moment. You have to turn the brain off for a second, reboot to allow it. You can’t just simply think about the problem and kill it until you find the answer. But if you think about the problem for a minute, distract yourself, get back into your body and then go back to it, you’re more likely to find the answer. If I stay on the problem the whole time, I’m just going to dig deeper into the problem. And that can be so scary on a stage with 150 people looking at you. At least, yeah. Yeah, while you’re sweating. Okay, wait, I’m going into Eminem there, but definitely. And there’s a lot of humanity and just admitting to the audience, oh, lost my place. Let me come back to that in a second. What I want to get to is this, people listening or people watching a speaker want them to succeed. They don’t want to feel uncomfortable because the speaker is uncomfortable. And so as a speaker, when I do hit a spot where I’ve messed up or I said the wrong thing or I’ve forgotten, just being human about it helps. There is a fine line. We don’t want to apologize every time we made a mistake. If I say the wrong word, just repeat myself, say the right word. That’s it. I don’t want to say, oh, sorry, what I meant to say is, that’s a lot of extra words for people to have to process and it’s unnecessary. Just tell me what you meant. Yeah, yeah. I think when you go back to imposter syndrome because I’ve been studying this a bit, there’s a strong tie-in with perfectionism. And it’s endearing to see somebody on stage, make a mistake and cut themselves some slack. Agreed. Because it just reminds us all that we all do it. Yeah. So refreshing. And it’s interesting, it is tied to perfection and the brain is a problem solver and our amygdala is wired for safety and is constantly going to be directing us towards safety. So we’re looking for mistakes and dangers and problems. We have to get out ahead of that brain wiring in order to get out of that perfectionist. I don’t know if you’ve read Carol Dweck’s mindset, the book. I haven’t read it, heard it referenced many times. Thank you, Carol. That book changed the course. I came across it, I think, 10 or 12 years ago and just from then on, whenever I made a mistake, I’m like, oh, I’m learning. I just had this knee-jerk response. Oh, I’m learning. Okay, well, of course, that was my first try. The first try is always messy. I started being kinder to myself and it was the first time in my life that my perfectionist, who I named Perry, by the way, Perry the perfectionist, my brain, it was the first time that I had a conversation with Perry and rather than letting Perry take me down, when Perry popped up and goes, oh, you messed up. I’m like, okay, but what did I learn? Okay, great, we learned something and then changed my life. That’s great, bringing in some of that kindness and compassion for yourself. Yeah. That’s a good deal. I want to ask about the humble brag. It’s my favorite, because who practices bragging? No one does this, no one practices bragging, but it is important because what you’re doing is not always seen by other people and when I share the humble brag, it gives other people an understanding of how to work with me, about what problems I can solve. So practice bragging and there is a formula for that. There was a couple of footnotes to know in advance. One is that you want to stick to data, not opinions, right? If I share judgments or opinions, it’s going to leave room for people to push back, but if you share facts and data, not a problem. Number two, focus on the impact more than the process. You’ll be able to describe the process of what you did, but for a humble brag, you just want to focus on the impact. That’s what’s going to click with the others. And the third thing I would offer is it’s ideal if the humble brag is measurable in some way, something concrete in there. The formula is quite simple. I took this action on this project and got this outcome. If you deliver it in a neutral voice, it helps to sound humble as well. Okay, facts, not opinions. I took this action on this project and got this outcome. For myself, I coached two financial advisors launching a capital fund who raised $200 million, which was $100 million more than they expected. Humble brag. Yeah, I don’t think you’re a jerk. Thank you for that. I would encourage anybody listening to take that formula and just come up with one humble brag today and try it. Try it out with somebody in a low state situation, share it with a colleague or a friend, and then prepare to drop that during a meeting when it feels relevant. Ideally, over a course of maybe three months, you’ll come up with like 10 humble brags that you can pull from at any time and drop in a meeting. Absolutely. So this is great. We are running up on time, so could you share where people can go to learn more about you and your work and your book? Yeah, clearingcompellingplaybook.com will take you to the website that offers a couple of free resources. You can download a chapter of the book as well, and you can pre-order the book. And please do look me up on LinkedIn, Salvatore Manzi. I’m always curious to hear, what’s your experience with public speaking? Where have you sort and where are you still working? I’d love to hear about it. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for being again on my show, Salvatore. Thanks again for having me, Craig. All right, before we close out, here’s three things I want you to sit with from this conversation. Number one, share your thinking. As introverts, we do so much processing up in our heads before we open our mouths, and then we just hand people the clean answer. But the people in the room really want to see how you got there. Walk them through your reasoning, and only then land the point. This is how you go from being the quiet one with all the answers, to the one that everyone wants to follow. Number two, Salvatore’s three-step move when imposter syndrome strikes. Number one, name it to tame it. This brings awareness to the feeling. Number two, regulate. Get out of your head and into your body through the breath. And number three, take one small action. It doesn’t have to be a full plan or a complete fix, just one next step. This gets your energy moving in the right direction. And number three, if extemporaneous speaking is where you freeze up, try this framework. Hip, H-I-P-P. Headline, insight, picture, point. Practice this on some random object each morning until it becomes muscle memory. This gives your brain some guardrails you can run on so you can speak up in the moment without losing track. If you enjoyed this content, here’s one more step. Hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. It’s the easiest way you don’t miss the next conversation and it also helps other introverted leaders find this content. We need more introverted leaders. I’m Greg Weingar. Keep leading with quiet confidence and I’ll see you next time. After you.

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