Writing and Speaking in a Distinctive Voice
Speaking in a distinctive voice has little to do with using big or complex words (though I must admit I’m often amazed by how otherwise educated people have developed such a limited a vocabulary).
A distinctive voice is more simplicity than flamboyance. The simpler the words and sentence construction the more transfixed recipients are likely to be.
Simplicity is always more powerful than complexity. Profound truths come in simple phrasings that cut to the bare bones of the thought or situation. Complexity is over-packaged language that leaves us feeling off balance and wondering if our interpretation is pure and accurate.
But let’s get back to basics. I said last week that our voices lack distinction because we all walk around parroting one another, all using the same old clichés, making our voices indistinguishable from the vast choir of people saying the exact same things. So we blend in rather than stand out.
That can change by ridding our language of all those echoes. Here are some examples of common clichés, followed by the same information expressed in a distinctive way.
Cliché: Think outside the box. (Irony: Using clichés isn’t thinking outside the box.)
Revision: Come up with original ideas.
It’s a no brainer.
It couldn’t be any more obvious if you handed it to me on the end of a skewer.
This isn’t rocket science. (Irony: Rocket science isn’t actually all that complicated.)
This isn’t particle physics.
This is a win-win situation.
Both sides benefit from this deal.
We need to focus on core competencies.
We need to stick with what we do best.
The proposal is cost prohibitive.
The proposal is too expensive.
We need to hit the ground running.
We need to move fast.
I don’t have the bandwidth.
I don’t have time.
The 800-pound gorilla.
The big problem.
Improve ROI (return on investment).
Improve our financial performance.
Our mission is to assist the economically disadvantaged.
Our mission is to help the poor.
Which of these two managers do you think the CEO will consider direct and clear thinking?
Manager one: “The current spending plan is unsustainable.”
Manager two: “We’re going to run out of money.”
The first manager sugar coats and minimizes the situation. The second gives the chief executive the bleak and direct truth about the company’s situation. Who do you think the CEO is more likely to respect, remember and promote?
Let’s take a real-life historic situation. In 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during takeoff killing all astronauts aboard. At the White House two senior staffers – Chief of Staff Donald Regan and Communications Director Patrick Buchanan – walked into the Oval Office to notify President Reagan.
Regan spoke first saying, “Mr. President, there’s been a tragedy.”
Buchanan, a no-nonsense straight talker, immediately added, “Sir, the Space Shuttle blew up.”
Reagan leapt to his feet after hearing Buchanan speak.
What Donald Regan said wasn’t a cliché or common phrase but it was too general to make an impact commensurate with the situation.
It was Buchanan who evoked the appropriate emotional response from the President by telling him what happened in simple, specific, brief language.
Donald Regan blew smoke. Patrick Buchanan lit a fire. No surprise that Buchanan, not Regan, was the White House communications director.
Simply rewording clichés and speaking more directly is just a first-level effort in the campaign to develop a voice distinctive enough to turn you into an oak among willows. We haven’t even touched on tone, color, metaphors, similes, storytelling, and so on.
Still, this first-level effort alone can make you a remarkably refreshing speaker and writer, one who sounds more like the office soloist than a choir boy or girl.
Writing and Speaking in a Distinctive Voice
Mike Consol is president of www.mikeconsol.com. He provides corporate training seminars for communication skills, business writing, PowerPoint presentation skills and media training (both traditional media and social media). Consol spent 17 years with American City Business Journals, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business journals with 40 weekly newspapers across the United States.
Contents About : Writing and Speaking in a Distinctive Voice
Affirmations are simply statements that we make to ourselves; it’s our self-talk. You use affirmations all the time, whether you’re doing so intentionally or unintentionally. If you make a mistake and you think to yourself, “I’m always making mistakes, I never do anything right”, you’ve just made a negative affirmation. If instead you make a mistake and you think to yourself, “That’s OK, I have the ability to correct this”, you’ve just made a positive affirmation.
Your self-talk has an enormous impact on your conscious and subconscious minds. By repeating positive affirmations you can reprogram your thought patterns. Creating new thought patterns will allow you to begin to change your underlying beliefs and the way that you think and feel about yourself, others, and your place in the world. In this way, you can improve your life dramatically through the use of daily positive affirmations.
Choosing Your Affirmations
Shakti Gawain, author of Creative Visualization, offers the following advice for choosing your affirmations:
o Always phrase your affirmations in the present tense, as if it already exists. Say “I enjoy being at my ideal weight” instead of saying “I will reach my ideal weight.”
o Affirm what you want, not what you don’t want. Instead of saying “I am no longer a procrastinator”, say “I always get things done on time.”
o Don’t simply go through your affirmations by rote; add positive feelings and emotions to your affirmations.
o Choose affirmations that feel right for you. If you come across an affirmation that you like but you would feel more comfortable changing a couple of words, go right ahead.
Use Three Different Pronouns
A technique that you can apply to make your affirmations more effective is to write down the same affirmation using different pronouns. For example, if you want to affirm that you’re surrounded by positive people who want the best for you, you can write down the following three affirmations (in this example your name is Joan):
o I am surrounded by positive people who want the best for me.
o Joan, you are surrounded by positive people who want the best for you.
o Joan is surrounded by positive people who want the best for her.
When you say affirmations in the second and third person it’s as if someone else is talking to you or about you. Your internal critic is less apt to interject a negative comment if it thinks someone else is making these positive affirmations about you.
Affirmations Can Be General or Specific
Affirmations can be general or they can be very specific. Some examples of general affirmations are the following:
o Abundance is all around me.
o Abundance is my birthright.
o There is more than enough for all.
Use general affirmations to “set the stage”. Once you’ve established clear, well-defined goals for yourself you can create specific affirmations to help keep you focused on your goals and to strengthen your belief in your ability to reach your goals. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds in the next three months by exercising, your affirmations could be the following:
o I now jog for 40 minutes, 4 times a week.
o Jogging helps me to lose weight and makes me healthy and fit.
o I am now lifting weights 3 times a week.
o I enjoy going to the gym and lifting weights.
o I am getting excellent results from jogging and weight lifting, and it shows.
o Every day I am getting fitter and fitter.
o I now weigh X amount of pounds (your target weight).
o People comment on how much thinner I am and how good I look.
You Have to Be Able to Believe Your Affirmations
Whenever you choose to change anything in your life, you’re choosing to move out of your present comfort zone. We should always strive to grow and expand our definition of ourselves and of what we are capable of. However, you have to make sure that your affirmations are not so far off from where you are at the moment that there’s no way you can get yourself to believe what you’re affirming.
If you don’t believe the affirmations you’re saying to yourself, then you need to start with a less ambitious affirmation and gradually make your affirmations bigger and bigger. For example, if you currently make $3,000.00 a month, it may be difficult for you to believe “I am now making $50,000.00 a month”. However, you can probably believe the following affirmation: “I am now making $4,500.00, or more, a month”. As you move forward and begin to see results you can progressively increase this number until you do feel comfortable affirming that you make over half a million dollars a year.
Repeat Your Affirmations Often
There is much power in repetition. Positive affirmations are not something that you do once in a while, instead, you should expose your mind to the affirmations that you choose for yourself as often as possible. In the words of Robert Collier: “Constant repetition carries conviction.”
Write down your affirmations and place them where you can refer to them often (you can even carry them around in your wallet). You can say them out loud to yourself every morning when you wake up and at night before going to bed, or you can set aside a few minutes each day to scribble them on a sheet of paper several times to help reinforce the message in your mind.
Taping the affirmations in your own voice and listening to the tape while you’re relaxing-or, even better, meditating– has had extraordinary effects for countless people. Louise Hay, author of the International bestseller “You Can Heal Your Life”, recommends that you sing or chant your affirmations. Some people leave a CD with positive affirmations playing softly in the background while they sleep at night.
In addition, there are several programs that allow affirmations to flash on and off on your computer screen unobtrusively, helping to program these affirmations into your subconscious.
Affirmation Bath
Practitioners who offer healing workshops often use a technique called “affirmation bath”. Basically, several people stand around one person and they all begin saying positive affirmations directed toward that person. The person is “engulfed” by positive messages from others. You can try this technique if you can find several like-minded people to participate in this exercise with you.
Release Any Negative Feelings That Arise
Negative feelings can act as self-imposed stop signs to getting what you want in life. If you feel any discomfort, self-doubt, fear, anger, and so on when saying your affirmations, you need to let go or release these negative feelings. One way to do this is by using the Sedona Method. As stated before, you have to add positive feelings and emotions to your affirmations, and if negative feelings are getting in the way, you need to be able to let go of them.
Your self-talk can either prevent you from getting what you want in life, or it can be a powerful catalyst for creating the life you’ve always wanted. Create a daily practice of using positive affirmations to help motivate, support, and inspire you to go after your dreams.
Written by Marelisa Fábrega who blogs at http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com