Thursday, May 31, 2012
Often, people speak in dis-jointed thoughts and sentences. What that means is they start an idea, they stop it in the middle, they get anxious then they start another idea stop that in the middle and keep going. Very often it goes something like this, “people talk about, well, actually, they talk about a lot of things, well, it really doesn’t matter. Well, you know. Okay, this is what I am talking about…” When people do that, it is very, very hard to follow them. You might do that. So, what do you do instead? Well, you realize that sometimes your mind is ready for the information sooner than your mouth can get to it. So what do you do? You slow down. You simply complete the thought before you start another one. If you slow down and concentrate on what you are saying, you are much more likely to get complete thoughts and people will have an easier time following you.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Do you ever notice the way people very often forecast failure. They will say things like, “this may be a stupid question” or “you probably won’t like this” or “this may sound kind of dumb.” Do you ever notice that people do that? You might do that. You might actually advertise or forecast failure. You may actually encourage people to think that your question is about to be stupid. Do you ever notice when you do that, you say, “this may be a stupid question” and people think, yep, right on schedule, a stupid question. So what do you do instead? What you do is you actually forecast success. You say, “This may be interesting” or “this may be worth considering” or “I encourage you to consider this.” If you forecast success instead of failure you will get by far better results.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Do you ever notice that when you try to get somebody’s attention to tell them how their behavior bothers you, you tell them how they are? You say, “You’re thoughtless,” “You’re inconsiderate”, “You’re a jerk.” Well even if you are right, you are going to get defensiveness from that person. Suppose you really want to get their attention and want them to change their behavior. Instead of saying, “You’re thoughtless, which is called a “you message,” suppose you say, “I have trouble with your behavior.” It’s called an “I” message. So replace those “you” messages with “I” messages. So instead of saying, “You’re a jerk,” “You’re thoughtless,” “You’re inconsiderate.” You would say, “I have trouble with your behavior, which by the way appears to be very jerk-like.” When you do it that way, you are going to get much more receptiveness with a lot less defensiveness.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Continuing on the subject of counter productive patterns of
speech, I want to talk about speaking in the second person when you are talking
about yourself. Most people do it out of
habit. Instead of using the pronoun “I”
when you are talking about your own experience, you actually use the pronoun
“you.” Examine what this would be like
if I were to say to you, “well, you know when you get into the studio to do a
recording, well you have to do a lot of takes and you feel kind of frustrated,”
or I could say, “when I go into the studio, I record a lot of takes and
sometimes it's frustrating and then I hit it and it really works well.” So what is the message? The message is, when you are talking about
yourself, speak in the first person, it is more genuine and received
better.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
One of the most common habits that people have is they do a self-discount. The self-discount is where you actually water-down your perspective before you even announce it. It’s like saying “well, I’m not very educated about this,” or “I don’t know much about it, but here we go.” It’s like saying, “I’m lucky to be breathing.” So instead of watering it down, how about you actually promote it. Instead of saying, “I’m not very educated about this,” simply say, “Well, from my perspective, here are my thoughts.” You are going to get more attention from people when you actually promote your idea rather than apologize for it. So stop watering it down, it’ll make a difference.
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