the first of three secrets that will Aid you in speaking better than 99% of people is to upgrade your Workhorse words Workhorse words are common and vague words that we overwork to the point of exhaustion in our speech here's a visualizer to understand this the horizontal axis plots how common to uncommon a word is and the vertical axis how vague to precise a word is Workhorse words are words that fall within this radius for example we might describe a meal as good good is a Workhorse word a movie was good vacation might also be good
our relationship pretty good great or awesome we collapse the rich Dynamic nature of life and the world around us into a vague cheap adjective articulate speakers select words that are sourced from within this radius these are moderately precise words that are beyond the common vocabulary of most people certainly we recognize these words but we don't employ them in our speech if I were to ask you to describe a coworker's attitude you might tell me that they were cool or nice a more precise description might be to say they were considerate approachable or cordal I've been
able to replace my Workhorse words with words of greater power and precision by following four steps step number one is to select a Workhorse word that you know you employ excessively in your speaking to help you with this I've aggregated the most common Workhorse words into a PDF that is accessible below this video let's say we want to enrich the word good after selecting a high volume Workhorse word identify the context in which the word is commonly used for example are you using good to describe an attribute food a person project an experience let's imagine
we're referencing to food step three find an articulate alternative using one of two methods method one is to use the wells spoken thesaurus which I'll link to for free below this video the wells spoken thesaurus is an exhaustive list of more precise and articulate substitutes for ordinary words the second method is to use one of the following chat GPT prompts also provided below one of these provides you with articulate alternatives to your Workhorse word based on the context in which you would use your Workhorse word such as in describing food the other prop provides you
with a list of examp examples from novels where characters use Rich Dynamic varied descriptions of your Workhorse word the goal is to find a word or expression that you're comfortable with using and consider featuring that on your phone lock screen as a reminder step four use your voice to punch up the Workhorse word to increase your awareness of it good good good you want yourself to become sensitized to the word to the point where you become aware of your tendency to default fall to it just before it happens this four-step process invites the question how
will I keep track of everything this leads me to the second secret that will put you in the top 1% of articulators if you watch the interviews of some of History's Greatest wordsmiths you begin to notice patterns in their language specifically you'll notice the repetition of particular creative phrases and expressions for example Reverend Martin Luther King would frequently use phrases such as Cosmic significance rabble rousers and agitators depths and dimensions of the problem Thomas Jefferson often employed the phrases human life of happiness and incomprehensible machine of man Muhammad Ali would frequently say style stamina and
system what you realize is that most intelligent phrases and expressions aren't generated on the Fly rather they are preassembled in advance and activated in speech creating almost an artificial AR articulacy from rean to Rosevelt to Churchill to Cicero many of History's Greatest articulators used a similar technique that technique is called the commonplace book The commonplace book is an aggregate of every clever phrase or concise word combination that you encounter that you wish to absorb into your own speaking I've kept a physical commonplace book for some years now I've recently migrated it to Google Docs here's
my current commonplace book I can't reveal all the contents but we can preview the structure I have divided this into 13 sections that represent different facets of my life from technology to politics to social media religion language each section features creative word combinations jokes analogies metaphors quotes this table here for example tracks my Workhorse words and the articulate Alternatives I'm attempting to work into my speech I read through this entire document once a week and that frequency is based on Benjamin Franklin who also kept a commonplace book and would review his every Sunday this template
I've created for myself can be found below this video what a commonplace book allows you to do is develop a bank of Rich word combinations that you can use to assemble articulate thoughts when we speak for most of us the average sentence looks something like this it's rather dull and flat peppered with ums and AZ clich expressions and all kinds of vapid vague Kirkland brand language we occasionally add color to our sentences by using unordinary and creative word combinations but that's rare there's of course nothing wrong with speaking in this way for 99% of people
this is our communication default but there's no denying that those who use fresh words to engineer well constructed colorful thoughts give their sentences and are articulate heartbeat that is engaging and pleasurable to listen to Imagine an idea that might take you two sentences to communicate that you've collapsed into a three-word phrase and now added to your commonplace book when you enter the realm of conversation pertaining to that idea you can begin to employ the contents of your commonplace book instead of vaguely saying someone did a bad thing your tongue selects grave Injustice that opinion becomes
school of thought someone who is extremely sad can be dealing with soul destroying anguish it depends on the context of course these phrases allow you to compose sentences that are more seamless and teing with color I want to share one final technique that will Aid you in creating lean crisp sentences remember that Jagged broken sentence visualizer that we referenced earlier that Barbed line isn't just the result result of using ordinary words and fillers it's also the result of redundant and Bloated language if you think about the average spoken sentence as a thin line such as
what is Illustrated here bloated language is the fat around your words that makes your sentences feel heavy and greasy there are three speaking habits that contribute to fatty sentences first are fillers the big five fillers are um a a like in so these create tiny bumps in our sentences and break the flow of our delivery second we have redundancy spirals this is where we double or triple up our words in an attempt to explain an idea it was a really really really hard time there are an endless countless unlimited number of things we can do
I want to read a book and just understand internalize and read the information in these examples instead of moving forward with the delivery of my thought and covering new ground I'm retracing previous verbal territory with replications and variations of the same word you might think I'm being scrupulous here but pruning redundancy spirals from your speaking is one of the chief contributors to creating clean speech there's a crisp quality to sentences without it in fact what makes the words of great articulator so penetrating is the amount of effort they've put into un learning poor speech Habits
Like redundancy spirals in like the third type of fatty language intensifiers intensifiers are empty words that we use to cushion our adjectives in sentences kind of sort of actually really basically virtually totally literally super pretty much our trip was really fantastic I literally just saw them at the store I kind of want to go to that Mediterranean restaurant the trouble with intensifiers is that they pad our sentences with uncertainty and cheapen the meaning of our words it's not enough to say an event was fantastic it has to be pretty fantastic to be fantastic none of
these fatty language habits are word crimes against humanity 99% of us communicate using bloated language including myself but if you want to achieve greater exactness with your speaking I suggest three actions number one is to keep your mouth closed until you've defined your starting words the most vulnerable moment particularly fulfill our words is at the start of our sentences keeping your mouth closed prevents your brain from defaulting to that initial um that your mind so desperately wants you to lead with as it relates to redundancy Spirals and intensifiers the best solution I found is simply
awareness the challenge is how do we keep our mind focused on stripping our sentences of bloated language without taking away cognitive horsepower from communicating our thoughts I noticed this when I was modifying my own speaking behaviors and I invented two solutions one is to process the endings of your words when you hear the endings of your words you can't help but focus on what it is you're saying this results in more calculated speech the second solution create a finger tab this practice consists of pinching your index finger and thumb together as a way of keeping
your mind focused on reducing redundancy Spirals and intensifiers in your speaking when you create that pinch and you hold it as you speak that mild discomfort creates an open tab in your mind that causes you to audit your speech more carefully if I'm gesticulating a lot with my hands what I will often do as an alternative to the finger tab is scrunch my toes in my shoes you only have to do this until you retrain your mind to speak cons precisely every method discussed in this video I've assembled into a free pdf linked below for
easy review let's make this generation one of the most well spoken in the history of humanity thanks for watching and consider subscribing
