Speak Well 2: Simple and Effective Communication Techniques with High EQ

Chapter 2 Preface: Speak, you can probably solve all your troubles

Ma Dong
Counting from the launch of the audio program of the first season of "Speak Well" in the Himalayas, in the past two years or so, our team has actually only done one thing: research on speaking.The book you are reading now is a set of "mental methods" expressed in practical language summed up after two years of polishing.

A friend once asked me: "The first season of "Speak Well" was so good, why do you want to do the second season? Are you not afraid that the second season will not be as successful as the first season?" To be honest, I have had such worries. The "Speak Well" series of products have achieved excellent results - the audio program has been played 8000 million times, subscribed to 82 people, sold more than 40 copies, and so on.But the more glory, the greater the pressure.I'm also afraid that we won't be able to go beyond the past, and I have hesitated to do a second season.However, one thing changed our minds.

Since the first season of "Speak Well", Huang Zhizhong, Ma Weiwei, Qiu Chen and other "old weirdos" have received many private messages from netizens on Weibo.They not only ask the "old weirdos" for speaking skills, but more and more friends share with us the confusion and pain they encountered in life.When we were discussing these questions, we discovered one thing: Although some of the questions asked by netizens are reliable and some are not, even if the questions are fake, the pain behind the questions is real.They are willing to tell us their pain. This trust is our confidence to do the second season.

And this book is a set of "Speaking First Aid Handbook" based on more than 4800 questions from netizens we collected.Every problem in the book is not a theoretical analysis on paper, but a real confusion encountered by many real people in their lives.And I believe that you must have encountered the problems mentioned in the book.

With your confusion, you can turn to the corresponding chapter to see how to solve your problem; you can also read it from beginning to end in order, and gain six abilities at once (changing others, resolving conflicts, improving yourself, maintaining interest, close relationship, and practice emotional intelligence).Of course, our ideas don't stop there.This book also lists common misunderstandings, that is, by comparing "common sayings" with "better sayings", so that you not only know what to say, but also have a deeper understanding of why you say it.

Of course, when the book was published, I also had doubts: "Speak Well" audio program, there is a sense of liveness to solve problems face to face, this unique agility of the dialogue form, how to preserve it when it evolves into text? ?
Later, many readers who bought "Speak Well 1" answered our doubts: Listening and reading are two different things.Students who have listened to our audio will still gain something new from reading this book.After reading this book and then listening to the audio, you will have a completely different understanding.The key to the problem is not to let the text repeat the content of the audio, but to provide you with a "practical manual" about speaking according to the law of learning itself.

Here are two ways to go back to learning. The first is to start from the knowledge itself, first tell you "what" and "why", and then teach you "how to do it". This is the teaching logic.The second is to start from the needs, provide corresponding solutions to the problems you may encounter, accumulate experience and experience in the process of doing the same, and finally become a master by analogy. This is practical logic.

School education uses teaching logic: you have to learn the theory first, then the rules, and then solve the questions systematically from easy to difficult.Whether it is studying physics or learning a foreign language, it is such a set of procedures.Even if you go to a chef training school, you have to learn one subject after another, from the selection of ingredients and preparation of dishes to the cooking of knives.

The characteristic of practical logic is that you can learn how to solve your most painful problems in the shortest time.As mentioned earlier, we've had thousands of requests for help with speaking difficulties, with all kinds of common and odd problems.But in summary, the goals that people hope to achieve through speaking generally fall into the following five categories: changing other people’s thinking, resolving conflicts and embarrassments, improving their own expressiveness, safeguarding due rights and interests, and shortening the psychological distance with others.

Therefore, this book is the solution to these five needs, teaching you the skills of changing, resolving, improving, maintaining and drawing in respectively.In addition, since the crux of many speaking problems is the misunderstanding of emotions, we single out Chapter 6 to focus on the emotional intelligence behind speaking.In this chapter, we do not teach specific words, but the principles of coping.That is, how to understand others, understand yourself, and be an empathetic person without losing your own position.

In short, this is a book with only six keywords (change, resolve, enhance, maintain, pull in, understand), but there are countless ways to open it.Whether it is a practical manual or a dictionary, our aim is to help you solve the problems you are facing in real life by "speaking well".

(End of this chapter)