If Nobody Takes Your Ideas Seriously, It’s Probably Because You Explain Them Poorly.

I have been examining my communication skills for the past couple of months. I noticed that I have some issues I need to work on.

I mumble and stutter with certain words, I kinda forget what I wanted to say sometimes. Furthermore, I find it difficult to clearly explain my ideas in meetings, which causes others to not take them seriously.

When approaching someone in public, lets say to ask about something, I talk too fast. Most of my conversations are me repeating what I said so the other person understands.

I found out that most of the issues happen when I am not prepared for athe situation, like a stranger approaching me, or even a colleague coming to my desk and asking a technical question. My brain thinks too fast but my mouth can't keep up. Moreover, I have poor articulation habits.

After doing a lot of research I found out that this can be fixed, the issue is not that I am shy or anxious (although I might be actually anxious), it's that I don't talk much and I rarely practice spontaneous speaking.

Because of that I developed bad articulation habits and I tend to speak too fast and without proper breathing. My brain thinks fast but my mouth is not trained to deliver the ideas clearly. I need to talk more and improve my breathing, pacing and articulation habits.

I feel these issues have held me back significantly in my life, I am officially blaming my conversation skills for most of my misfortunes. If you think this is relatable, here is what I am doing to fix these issues.

Mumbling

Mumbling is basically issues with pronunciation, its a single word that ruins your flow, usually happens to me when I am talking fast. To fix it, I started doing two exercises, the first one is to put a pen in your mouth and try to read aloud some sentences slowly, maybe from an article or a book.

The second one is to do tongue twisters, where I try to spell some hard-to-spell words like Unique New York or Red leather, yellow leather. They are silly but trust me they work!

Filler words

Filler words are not bad, I am not doing public speaking training so I don't really need to totally remove the use of filler words, I just need to tone it down. The best way to replace filler words is to speak slowly and pause. Pausing feels awkward, so thats why I mix both pausing and filler words. Also not using filler words screams inauthenticity in day to day conversations.

Sentence structure

To have clear and understandable sentences, I started doing impromptu speech training. It is basically talking about a random topic every day for 60 seconds. I actually started with 20 seconds and easy topics, like talking about my morning routine and what I ate for dinner/breakfast, my favourite colour. After that, I started moving a bit to the medium topics but I noticed that those topics require a certain level of knowledge and vocabulary. Which leads me to my final point.

Vocabulary is king

Sometimes you are taken lightly because of the vocabulary you use, you might be using informal words in formal settings, or vice-versa. Using a specific type of slang like gen z words, you need to know which vocabulary to use in which setting.

Furthermore, I started reading more "complicated" books and learning new words, like "Ephemeral" (look it up).

Finally, since I am a Senior Software Engineer, I couldn't resist the itch to transform this journey into something digital, so I created a companion app called Minute Hatch. It will help you practice impromptu speaking by giving you random topics to talk about and then only allows you to hear your recording 24 hours later to review and remove the emotional reaction of the review

Give it a try, its free on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/minute-hatch/id6757143128