A Personal Challenge
Amid my daily disaffirmations, I’m also trying to do something each day to further progress and develop myself; my disaffirmations, while intended for humor, can spread a bit of negative energy if not checked, so I thought I would include something for personal development of my readers as well.
Note- this may not be so applicable today, depending on your weather situation. For example, I have absolutely no plans on communicating with anyone today, sparing my housemate, as my only intended destination is the gym once the roads thaw out, so this challenge will have to wait for another day when I’m actually going to be talking with people in a face-to-face setting.
I watched a few press conferences after the football games this weekend, and I couldn’t help but wince to hear and see some of those players and how they acted in front of the camera. Most (George Kittle excepted because that man is wit and personality through the top) couldn’t make eye contact nor drop a single sentence without multiple uses of “like” “ya know” and lots of “uh”s and “um”s.
I’m not being judgmental- I use the same phrases in my regular dialect. Maybe not so much the ums and uhs, but casual conversation has incorporated like and you know into far too much of my dialect. So my challenge for the week (I’m making it for the week as I’m only to work two days this week and likely won’t be interacting with much of the public outside those two brief sessions) is to attempt to navigate conversation completely excluding what I refer to as the limiting words/phrases; so named because the use/overuse thereof limit both the legitimacy of what you’re saying and the intelligence with which you communicate it.
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The limiting phrases:
Like
Ya/you know
Uh
Umm
Er
Ah
This is not to say that some of these don’t have a place in conversation. For example, one could still legitimately say, “Do you know that charming Irishman who lives in the apartment with his beautiful ginger cat and his poor invalid housemate? I do so like him!”
What you could not say would be, “I also, uh, really, like, dig his car; it’s, umm, a really cool little, ya know, two-seater convertible.” Just typing that out hurt, mentally.
Why do we use words in conversation that we wouldn’t want to type out? Again, keep in mind that I’m not being judgmental; I do this as well. But, when messaging, texting, or writing an email, I certainly don’t use those; so why should I/we incorporate them in conversation?
The normal use of them is as a space-filler, to take up that part of a second to give our brains a chance to think of what to say next, but that’s just the point- they’re a crutch, and as long as we keep using crutches, we’ll never be able to walk on our own, conversationally speaking.
So, if you’re looking for a challenge this week, try eliminating those words from your spoken vocabulary. It’ll be rough, don’t be too hard on yourself; if you find yourself slipping one in, just remind yourself and start again. We’re not trying to change the world, here, just raise the intellectual bar a tiny bit.
