How To Speak Like You Think 5 Steps

Today I want to talk about how you can better formulate your thoughts into words. If you're like me, you've had moments where you feel like what you say does not sufficiently represent what is in your mind. It's almost as if your mind is a prison for your intellect. And no amount of thought in the moment can seem to access this buried wealth of knowledge, of wisdom, of information that you know is trapped in your mind. I want to share with you a few practices that I've focused on following that has made a discernible difference in my ability to achieve what is often called the flow state, where you feel as if there are no barriers between what you're thinking and what you're saying. It's as if there has been a funnel that has been widened in some way, a valve that has been loosened, and the floodgates of your imagination and creativity are able to be unconstrained in their delivery. I want to be clear, I'm not a master at this. I still crusade on a daily basis to have my words accurately represent what is in my mind, but I have made monumental progress in specifically the last year. And I've stumbled upon a few actions in particular that are responsible for this transformation. And I want to share these with you. There are five of them. I might go in a few tangents as I address points that I feel are relevant to understand and prerequisites for understanding the broader idea of each of these points. I want to start with number one, and this is a mindset. This was an epiphany moment, a light bulb that went on in my mind when I was fully able to understand this concept. And I do want to briefly mention there is a difference. This applies not just to this first point, but to every point that we're going to bring to the surface in this video. There's a difference between understanding something intellectually and nodding your head and saying, yes, that makes sense. I know that to be true. And then internalizing it, which is embracing it and letting that characterize some new performance or behavior in your speech. There is a difference between these two. The delta, that gap is made up by volume of practice, by implementing these, by realizing that I fully don't understand this, how this makes a difference in my speech, but I'm going to stick with it. Even though there's sort of this dullness and dryness and you feeling like it doesn't have value or it's not the factor that is going to make a night or day difference in your speaking behaviors. I promise you that it will. This is true with anything that we pursue. There's this period that we have to go through where it becomes mundane. And you realize that I might know this to be the right answer, but it just doesn't feel like the right answer. And that feeling will eventually arrive. So that first thing I wanted to bring up is what is often called the three Ms of communication. And this is what separates the beginner, the palm sweating, heart pounding, knee shaking, amateur communicator from someone who's able to command a conversation with power, poise, and presence. The three Ms are me, message, and messenger. Let me briefly describe these and then we'll break them down in a bit more detail. Me is where you're focused on yourself. Most of your thoughts, they don't even have to be your conscious thoughts. It's just the subconscious focus. What's often called the subtext of the communication is focused on yourself. And when I say communication, this can be in conversation, this can be in presentation, but you are focused on yourself is I think the best way I could describe it. And you feel as if there is this undercurrent of anxiety in what you are, the situation that you're involved in. And there's almost this performance to be perfect. Your expectation is on yourself to perform to your best capacity because you feel as if you're being judged by what you say, how your body language is commanded. We have to get away and break away from this focus on yourself. You have to disband this idea that it's about you. It's about me. That's the first M. The second M is message. And this is kind of halfway between the beginner and the expert. This is sort of the intermediate stage where you realize that what you say can have a huge impact in how you're received and your ability to pursue opportunities and be seen as someone who is smart and capable. When I say message, I mean the word choice. Me is kind of turned introspectively where you're focused on yourself. You're not so much focused on your words. It's all about surviving the social situation. Whereas message is focused on your words. You realize that there's a particular arrangement of words that can communicate this idea better, but you're still kind of focused on yourself. You're focused more on your words, but that's not where your focus should be. It's not just on the message. This is where the third stage comes into play. Messenger. Messenger is where you realize that you are a vessel, a receptacle and a mouthpiece for your beliefs. It's not so much about focusing on the perfect word choice as often is the disposition of the speaker when they're focused on message. They're thinking about what's the perfect way that I can communicate this idea. And there's a lot of editing going on in their mind. Versus messenger, you are comfortable with saying things imperfectly, but there is enough care and passion and belief behind what you say that that is going to allow you often more clarity of thought and a more seamless and frictionless delivery of your ideas than if you spent all of that energy focused on trying to arrange your words in the perfect way possible. This is where most people are able to achieve the flow state. The flow state is often a term you perhaps have heard described before, and it is this uninterrupted stream of inspiration and consciousness where you are in tune with your thoughts and you're speaking masterfully. That is what a messenger is. And I also feel like it's worth mentioning, especially when you're focused on the me stage and the messenger stage, your anxiety, it mutes your intellect. The anxiety that you have, you can't help. If you're focused on yourself, you have some anxiety. It doesn't have to be crippling or paralyzing, or you might not even describe yourself as someone who is socially anxious, but your subconscious is focused on yourself. And when you are inside your own head and you're not focused on just delivering what you feel, that is what mutes your mind. One other thing I want to mention, and I wrote this down as your mind is often in a dull freeze that only allows you to access autopilot sentences. That is what happens when you're in this me stage. You feel like you don't have access to your mind because you don't. Anxiety and nervousness is a barrier between your mouth and your mind. And this usually happens when your subconscious is focused on yourself. And you're often thinking about the worst case scenario, which could range from what happens when I run out of things to say and silence is now the challenge I have to face to perhaps something far more extreme. What if I say the wrong things and I end up getting fired because I wasn't too careful with my word choice. There's a gradient there, a spectrum, a shade of worst case scenarios that if those are at the forefront of your mind or even in the back of your mind, and there's too much focus on those worst case scenarios, it does limit the flow of thought to words. So to summarize this first point, I feel like this video is going to be an hour long at this pace. This first point, the three Ms of communication, me, message and messenger. Your goal is to have a mindset shift. And we'll talk a little bit about this later in this video, but you have to get over this me stage. Message is better, but it's not ideal. Ideally, you want to be at this messenger stage where you are this mouthpiece in this loud speaker, this amplification for what you believe. And this is why it's important to speak the truth because you care about the truth. You care about what you believe. It doesn't necessarily have to be right or correct, but if it is the foundation upon which you're building your opinions and building yourself, that is the platform that you should be speaking from. That is the launch pad to be able to access the intellect that you have. The second point I want to bring up is what I wrote down as being present in the moment. If you're like me and you've struggled with either social anxiety or nervousness in conversation, conversation a lot of the time becomes about survival. It's about having enough things to say in order to get through the interaction. And this is where you often say things that already have neural pathways established for them. Meaning you are simply saying often the most basic banal reply to something that someone says. For example, you might know a lot of words that are better than good, but if people say, how are you? You simply sort of reply on autopilot. Your default response is I'm good. And you think I just simply wanted to respond with something. And even though there were far better replies, you fall back on this default response that is locked in your mind or not locked in your mind, but is what you often revert to. Being present in the moment. What this has meant to me is checking all worries, anxieties, frustrations at the door that are outside of my control and do not matter in this environment. There's no easy way to do this. I don't have a framework or a checklist or a process that I step through. I'm still working through this, but being present in the moment is really genuinely trying to listen to what the person is saying. When you focus on their words, and oftentimes it helps to picture the actual physical text representation of the word that they're saying in your mind. Helps you to be more involved in the moment. When you're focused on what they're saying, you don't have time to think about your worries or your anxieties or what they think about you. That's what being present is. That's how you achieve not just survival in conversation, but going beyond that thrival. You want to be able to thrive in these social interactions and conversation and presentation. And being present in the moment is one of the characteristics that has been associated with people like Steve Jobs. If you watch his interviews, he treats the questions as silly and often as simple as they are. He treats the questions as if it is the most important question in the world. And you can see that he does give thought and intention to the answers that he presents. Muhammad Ali, the boxer, was also talked about largely as always being present in the moment. He treated this moment as if it were the most important moment in the world. And that is something that I tell you has made a big difference, is when all of my focus is not on trying to survive the conversation, but just being there and listening to what another person is saying, really intently bending my ear to every word. And if there's something that I feel like I have a thought on or I can comment on, speaking my mind. And of course, easier said than done. And I'll give you a few techniques for speaking your mind a little bit later. But that's the second thing that is equally as important as the three Ms. Once you understand that you're a mouthpiece for your beliefs, it's equally as important to be present in the moment and be there for whoever you're speaking to. The third thing that is important is expanding your vocabulary. I want to read something here that I wrote that I feel like I could read it far better than, excuse me, I might be able to communicate. Words are symbols that represent ideas. Our language is a funnel and a filter for gigantic amounts of information that is scrambled in our mind. Our thoughts are not just words, words in the traditional sense of language, as in the, or a preposition. Our thoughts are a mixture of images, models, feelings, patterns, memories, prejudice, and concepts. We're talking about petabytes of information here. And when we speak, we try to put all of this information in its dynamic complexity into an understandable, rational string of words. And the way that we do this is through vocabulary. It's like organizing a garage. We are trying to condense this entire mess into really what are kilobytes of information. And what is important to take away from that, the reason why I read that out is because I want it to be absolutely crystal clear that you are not going to be able to achieve complete accuracy and satisfaction by putting your thoughts to words. Because you're dealing with a different language, a different world. We oftentimes visualize what we have to say with words, but there is so much emotion, prejudice, ideas, feelings that underwrite that thought or that word that the word itself is not going to do that thought justice. Now you can get pretty close. And there are epiphany moments that we often have where we realize that someone was finally able to put into words, a deep seated feeling that we always have sort of subconsciously known, but have never been able to materialize with language. And one of the best analogies that I came up with several months ago was, this is why kind of going back to this point here, this is why expanding your vocabulary is so important is your thoughts are almost, you'll think of it like a painting that is painted with all of these different shades of color, say a hundred different colors, red, blue, green, purple, turquoise, teal. And if your vocabulary is only 10 colors, maybe it's a small 10 pack of Crayola crayons. You can understand how there's a disparity, there's a Delta between what can only be satisfactorily described with a hundred colors, you only have 10. And so you're trying to almost filter this complexity through the strainer that doesn't allow you to fully understand what you're saying. And that box of crayons, so to speak, those are words, that is knowledge. Those are ideas that allow you to be able to more accurately represent what is in your mind. And every one of us has a mental lexicon. A lexicon is just a fancy word for saying the vocabulary that you have in your mind. We all have a recognition vocabulary of tens of thousands of words. You have what's called your surface lexicon, which is usually about 1,500 to 2,000 words that you draw upon on a daily basis. Words like good, though, these are the words that are basically on autopilot. You don't have to think about the words as you're saying them. And then you have what's called your deep lexicon. Your deep lexicon is about 99% of all the words that you know. And these are words that you have in your mind, but you're not able to draw upon. And the goal is to be able to move these deep lexicon words to your surface lexicon so that you're able to speak articulately and sophisticatedly and scholarly without thinking too much. Now, the more that you think, and this is why pausing is often important, and we'll talk about this in the next point, but the more time that you often spend on a thought, the more you're able to index that deep lexicon of words. And that's why we're often able to assemble more descriptive and expressive thoughts the longer we're able to think about a particular topic. But when it comes to word retrieval and expressing our ideas, you want to get to the point where you're not thinking too much about the word. But in order to get to that point, you have to use more words more. And this is why expanding your vocabulary is incredibly important. Learning new words gives you new colors, new tools that you can now fashion your thoughts with and give you a better chance of being able to describe them more effectively. The fourth thing I want to share is kind of what I hinted at before, and that is that good articulation of ideas requires forethought, which is just a fancy way of saying you need to pause more. If you watch people like Steve Jobs or Obama or any expert communicators, you will notice that there is a significant stretch of time between thought and the expression of that thought. I watched an interview of Steve Jobs a few months ago, and I timed one of his longest pauses. It was two minutes and 15 seconds. The interviewer asked him a question, and he stood there thinking for two minutes and 15 seconds, and then he gave a 30-second answer. The answer was unbelievably precise, profound, and powerful. That thought was necessary. More thought, more thinking time, and speaking time was necessary to produce an answer of that eloquence. My recommendation to you is to ponder a question. Ponder a thought before answering. Take time to formulate your answer. Don't worry about holding your place in conversation or feeling like you have to give a quick answer. The key to articulation and being able to speak like you think is to first order your thoughts rather than feeling like you have to say what pops into your mind immediately. You can do that, and some of that is necessary. This is part of what being a messenger is, is not feeling like you have to answer perfectly, but if you don't have anything to say, give yourself some time to think. What most of us do and what I did in conversation is I would commit to a word, commit to a sentence before I had fully thought it through. I would say something like, this black binder here is a... And I hadn't really fully thought about what I wanted to say about the black binder. I just saw something. I said something, and I had not thought through the idea I wanted to communicate, and I'm talking about this black folder, this black binder here. Think of the thought. You don't have to think about the exact phraseology or the parlance of your words, the combination of words in the sentence. You don't have to think about everything, but what is the idea? Perhaps in reference to the binder, I might want to say something like... And I don't have a thought right now. This is me thinking through this in real time. I might want to say something about the utility that it has in my life, how it's where I store my bills that I have to sort through, and then I might craft a few sentences out of that. But I have the idea. I have the abstract concept in my mind. I don't have the exact formula of words, but giving myself forethought allows me to achieve better articulation and better bridge of the mind and mouth. The fifth and final idea is a very simple one, and that is to read books out loud. It may come as no surprise to you that we are much more efficient and articulate in our minds than when we speak and hear our vocal identity, our voice, our voice box, and our larynx activating and using our speaking apparatus, our mouth to express sound waves that others can understand. When you read a book out loud, you are familiarizing yourself with the structure of sentences, the way that words sound, and it will make them more easily absorbed into your own speaking and speech behaviors just by hearing them out loud. It is often a bit more strenuous and mentally taxing to try to digest the information while also saying it at the same time. But getting used to that, bridging the best of both of those worlds, reading and hearing yourself, but also understanding information, is what you are doing with your speech. Reading books out loud gets you familiar with sentence structure. You start to build those neural pathways in your mind, and then you easily default to those when you're speaking. That's why reading books out loud is advantageous. It's not just about digesting the information. It's about getting your mind muscles, but also your speaking muscles, comfortable with saying those words so that you're not only stumbling and stuttering and piecing together what you think is the rough approximation of a word that you try to use to sound smart, but you're also getting yourself familiar with how those words are used in context to the ideas that they're being used to describe. Reading books out loud, good articulation requires forethought. Expanding your vocabulary, being present in the moment, and keeping in mind the three M's of communication, me, message, and messenger, will help you achieve better clarity with your thought. I am not perfect. I want to be very clear about that. This video is testament to the fact that I'm not able to speak with perfect clarity. Perfect still is a word that I get hung up on. I'm not trying to achieve perfection. I've just been trying to actually shift away from using that word because, as I mentioned, messengers are willing to embrace imperfection. But I hope these ideas have been able to piece together any unsolved puzzles in your mind and color in some gray areas that perhaps needed some clarity and a light shed on. Thanks for watching this video. Let me know if I can clarify anything down below. And if there's anything that you feel like has massively helped you in improving your speaking and communication, put it down below so that others can learn from it. Thanks for watching.