Marissa, we get this question a lot! You’re in good company.

We have a content bias. Like Marissa, we feel like we have to get it all in, even though our time is limited. Couple things to remember: even if you could fit it all in, your audience couldn’t remember it all. Your job is to curate your message so that the board (in this case) gets the main message you want to convey, and you are supporting that message in several ways: examples, stories, data.

One of the problems we tend to run into is that we’re so in the weeds with our work that it’s hard to see the broader sweep. Get that perspective—part of the job of periodic updates is to highlight the momentum and arc of our work, not the minutiae. This presentation is an opportunity to give the news anchor version of what’s going on, not the long-form embedded journalist answer.

It’s a funny thing. Most of us know that when we’re engaged, time passes more quickly. We’re in flow, so we’re not watching the clock, so we’re surprised when we look up and see that an hour has passed.What we don’t quite always manage to implement is our own control over this phenomenon. We moan and complain about something we have to do, firmly setting the default intention that we just want to get through it. That really determines our experience; it is almost impossible to see past the elements we thought would be annoying or arduous or boring to experience what might be different or educational. When we hang onto the default intention, we are deciding that we will be bored and annoyed.

Not to be all Pollyanna or whatever, but if you know you have to do something, you may as well find a deliberate positive intention. If you have to write a report because the colleague who was supposed to do it went home sick, you can be irritated, take longer, and do a worse job, or you can look for something, no matter how small, to make it worth your while.

The great news is that we have opportunities to practice setting these intentions every day. What’s the thing you have to do that puts you in a bad mood? What can you do to find some measure of deliberate, positive intention in that task? For me, I really hate all the paperwork that comes along with my job. Contracts, invoices, expense reports…just knowing that I have those kinds of items on my to-do list weighs down my day. There’s something about the detail-oriented nature of those tasks that just makes me grumpy.

I have to practice setting a positive intention on paperwork day. I have to change my inner monologue from “uggggh, why do I have to do this it’s so stupid I hate this I’m irritated at myself for still being annoyed by this after all these years; I just want to get it over with so I can do something else” to something more conducive to actually getting the work done.

Here’s what I’m trying: “It’s time to send out contracts and invoices and expense reports. This is a chance for me to be as intentional in the logistical part of our work as I am in our coaching. Let me see if I can find some cool ways to integrate this part of our work into the rest of it.”  This is the kind of challenge I need—it takes the task out of the mundane and elevates it to be a crucial part of how we interact with clients.

I love mystery novels. There’s something about falling into the story and then being surprised at how it twists and turns that makes a mystery the ultimate relaxing read for me.

Recently though, reading a book by an author I usually enjoy, I found myself frustrated by just these same twists and turns. The plot involved a the murder of a millionaire, his dying sister, artwork stolen by the Nazis, several instances of infidelity, a will, intercontinental thievery, architecture, a old man and his even older father and their obsession with World War II, a museum…that’s not even everything this book asked me to contend with.  And then finally, there was no satisfactory resolution. The murderer did it to frame her brother (spoiler.)

A red herring is a plot device a writer uses to distract the reader from the real machinations. They’re the stock-in-trade of a mystery writer. In this case, though, the writer’s red herrings ran away with her. The most interesting parts of her book had nothing to do with the story she had decided to tell.

This happens to public speakers a lot. Our red herrings sneak into our material, intrigue our audiences, and are never heard from again. They’re wondering “when is she going to tie up the loose end of the story about the elephant?” or “how does that graph relate to the gist of all this?”

Red herrings don’t belong in your talk. If you bring it up, it’s gotta be relevant.

Put this in the “Everything is a metaphor for everything else” category:

We all have times in our lives when we don’t know what’s next. Something we counted on is gone, a person or a place or a job. Times of transition are often like this—“I knew what to expect in the last phase; I don’t know what’s next.”

The micro version of this is what happens when we forget what we want to say next in a presentation or a speech. We were on solid ground, and then it feels like we’ve walked off the edge of a cliff. Unmoored.

In both situations, we need to look for our intention. Why were we here in the first place? What can we hold onto that pulls us back to who we are and what we want to achieve?

As I’ve noted before, everybody is busy. A side effect of that busy-ness is that our interactions with other people can start to have a quality of efficient productiveness, as if “call Mom” was item #7 on today’s list of things to do.

Have you been on the receiving end of that kind of conversation? What did it feel like? What can we do instead to remember that the people we interact with aren’t obstacles to clearing our to-do list?

The advice I dislike the most on the topic of communication all falls into a common category, which is basically, “Don’t feel nervous!”

The other versions of this are:

Here’s the problem. When we say “don’t feel that way,” it does not help. The fact of the matter is that they do feel that way, and to help, you have to start from there. When we say “don’t be nervous,” we’re compounding the problem. Now the nervous person knows that they’re wrong to feel that way, and that we certainly wouldn’t be nervous if we were in the same position. Now on top of being nervous, they feel bad about it, and they’re going to beat themselves up for this apparent character flaw.

Stop all this. We feel how we feel. We have to start from there.

A few years ago I was delivering the keynote at a conference, and that morning I had the worst attack of nerves I’ve ever experienced. I couldn’t eat, I didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t read or prepare. I was deep in the “I am sure I will screw this up” well.

It so happened that I was with my parents and several colleagues I’m very close to. I had terrific support and expertise—unconditional love from my parents and close-at-hand reminders from my team about everything we know to do to mitigate anxiety. Even so, I found my inner monologue going something like this:

In other words, I was falling into the trap of making myself feel bad about feeling bad, and slipping right into a default intention (“I want to get this over with”) into the bargain.

This story has a happy ending. I pulled out my whole toolkit—breathing, visualization, grounding into my positive intention, listening to “Africa” by Toto at top volume in the car on the way to the venue—and by the time we got there I was feeling a little better, almost normal. Once I was miked up and standing in the wings, I was starting to get really excited. And when I walked out and took the stage, it all came together.

I had everything I needed to overcome this crisis of confidence. Most people who feel the way I felt don’t. They try to muscle through it. Some well-meaning soul nearby tries to pep them up, “You’ll be great! You don’t need to be nervous.” This slips off of them; they can’t even hear it. All they can hear at this point is their own voice, speaking words of regret for every single life choice that led them to this moment in time.

If you’re the well-meaning person nearby, what can you do? You can tell the person that it’s normal to be nervous. To sit with that feeling and hold it loosely. To notice where they feel it in their body. To breathe, and clear their mind of the voice inside that is talking to them. To come up with a deliberate, positive intention to replace the default one that has taken hold.

What do you win?

This little word is making a bid to become the most-overused two-letter word in spoken English. We love to use it as a launch pad into our actual thought—“So, I was thinking we could go to Chipotle,” “So, now I’m going to talk you through the budget, “So, how are you?”

You can see from these examples that we don’t need these “so”s. In most conversation, an extra “so” here and there isn’t a problem. But it does lead to adopting that as a habit that’s hard to quit, and using “so” as a transition into our thoughts in a speech or presentation prevents us from being as polished as we can.

Start noticing your “so”s. Where do they creep in?

When we’re trying to learn a new skill, there’s a lot to think about. If you’re learning to play tennis, you can’t think about your feet and your swing and your serve all at the same time.

The same is true when you’re working to improve your communication skills—you can’t do it all at once. Choose one area you can concentrate on—for the length of a meeting or a presentation or a conversation—and work on that. It might be improved eye contact or trying to eliminate “so” or using more intentional gesturing.

But pick just one.

Since the advent of the cell phone, people don’t have to be in their offices to talk to you. In many ways, this is terrific. I have a nifty hands-free set-up in my car, and I get a lot done on road trips to and from the airport. But that freedom has a downside, and it’s the waning ability of people to stay engaged on a phone call of any duration.

And the biggest time suck is, say it with me, conference calls. I complain about them, you complain about them, but somehow they keep showing up on our schedules. I don’t know what the mathematical formula is, but I bet you there’s some kind of ratio that can demonstrate, with each person added to a call, the decreasing engagement of the group.

What happens on an average conference call? The first mistake is that we treat conference calls like they are in-person meetings. Essentially, even though the physical circumstances of everyone in the room are different, we behave as if we were meeting in the same room. We don’t establish any virtual gathering place, and we haven’t done a good job of acknowledging that we need to have different rules for virtual meetings than for in-person ones. Instead we just wait until everyone is breathing into the same weird void and launch our agendas.

Assuming that no one reading this has the unilateral power to stop this massive time wastage (although hey, if that’s you, could you make that happen?), let’s talk about some ways to pump up your own engagement in the conference calls of your life.

First, think about your intention. What do you need to make happen on this call? What’s at stake for you? What change do you need to effect? If the answer is “Seriously, nothing, I don’t know why I have to be on this call,” hit that mute button and get started reading your favorite blogs, cleaning out your inbox, paying bills, or whatever you need to do to reclaim your time.