This Speaking Advice Is Irresponsible. Here's Why.

I read a newsletter this morning, and three sentences in, I was angry. Not annoyed — angry, the kind where you reread a sentence to make sure you read it right.

The line that triggered my anger: “Speak before you overthink.”

Here’s why that’s irresponsible. Building better speaking habits is a habit change, not a personality transplant. You don’t fix a habit by asking someone to become a different person — you fix it by building something new out of the person already standing there. That sentence skips that part entirely.

This wasn’t a random opinion from a random inbox. This is a method taught inside teams at Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, reaching over 20,000 inboxes a day. Which makes it worse, not better. When advice this trusted tells you the fix is “just start talking,” you don’t question it — you try it. And for a lot of people, it’s going to fail. Not because they didn’t try hard enough. Because it was never built for how they operate.

The pitch: don’t wait for the perfect thought. Open your mouth, let the words find their shape on the way out, and if you freeze, use a prompt — “the interesting thing about this is...” — and trust your brain to fill in the rest.

I teach improv, I can think on my feet. So for someone like me, that advice basically works. But here’s a fact about me that surprises people: I skew introvert. Yes I thrive on stage but I don’t like concerts or loud environments. And I have many many introvert friends.

Introverts process before they speak. That’s their superpower. And for them, this advice to “Speak before you overthink” is a trap.

Introverts taking this advice will play catchup to the extroverts who thrive in a fast room and iterates out-loud. They will end up looking hesitant, unable to keep-up, and less intelligent.

I run many meetings where the sharpest answer comes from the person who paused first. Ask that person to skip the pause, and you haven’t fixed anything — you’ve deleted the part of their thinking that was actually working.

When someone in my STORYHabit workshops says, “I freeze up before I can answer” — I don’t tell them to talk faster.

I ask: