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Be
straight
In your notebook, list all your important relationships and speaking situations and
mark yourself out of 10 in each case for how straight you are. Do you say what you
mean and mean what you say, or do you soften, disguise or even withhold your real
message? Is mind-reading involved, in either direction?
Where you have a score less than 7, think carefully about the reasons. I am not
advising you to abandon practices that may be keeping you safe in difficult
relationships; if you have genuine cause to fear the consequences of straightness,
please seek professional help. However, where the habit is all yours or you judge that
the fear is disproportionate or inappropriate, take one relationship or situation at a
time and set yourself a goal of straight talking. In some cases, you may even be able
to share that this is what you’re doing and inspire the other person or people to help
you in your project.
A great starting point for increasing your clarity is to practice making clean requests.
Instead of hinting, intimating, suggesting or simple wishing the other person would
guess what you want, ask. The request might go something like this: “When you [do
or don’t do something], the effect on me is [I feel something or I have to do
something]. My request is that you [do something different] in future. What do you
say?”
AUTHENTICITY
It is possible to treat all speaking as a performance, either consciously or
unconsciously. The desire to fit in, to be liked, or to be respected is a
strong one in many people, and it can drive a chameleon-like approach to
speaking where different personas come to the fore depending on the
audience. I remember that my mother’s accent and pronunciation varied
significantly from the family version of her to the public version: we got
the genuine, natural delivery, while strangers got a more refined,
impressive version.
However, people can often feel the artifice of an assumed persona, and it
can take a lot of effort to switch, particularly if there are several to move
between. In my younger days I separated my contacts, presenting
different versions of me to work colleagues, band members, friends, my
family and so on. My new workmates secretly went through my address
book and organised a surprise 30th birthday, inviting everyone. When
the lights went up on what I thought was an empty office, the feeling of
overwhelm was so intense I fell to my knees as I looked around and saw
intermingled all these people I had conscientiously been keeping
separate. Of course, I was touched and astonished, but there was also a
sense of fear because my secret walls had all come down. Who was I to
be?
The party was wonderful, and I learned a big lesson that night, later
encapsulated by a phrase spoken to me by a wise friend:
stand in your
own
truth
.
To be authentic is to be yourself. That sounds simple, but it may not be.
You may, like the young me, have several selves to choose from. Which is
the real one? Even if that’s not the case for you, the task does raise an
important question, and one that not many people ponder: who am I?
The exercise below will help you to answer this question, making it easier
for you to speak with authenticity. In my experience, authenticity rings
true with listeners; fakery tends to be detectable unless a speaker is
highly skilled at pretence (like great actors), or the adoption of a persona
is deliberate and comes from a desire to serve others or to make a point,
and not from self-regard.
I am not suggesting that you wash your dirty linen in public. If you have
an argument with your spouse just before making a business
presentation, it will not serve the listeners to hear about or see the results
of your upset. With their best interests at heart, you will have to generate
a different, more positive you if you are to make your speech effective.
Your privacy is your decision: Steve Jobs gave many speeches in public
without mentioning his fatal disease. This was not inauthentic; he was a
very private person. Intimacy is being fully known, and few people decide
to open themselves up for all the world. You can decide your own
personal boundaries whilst retaining authenticity; there is a big
difference between levels of an authentic self and assumed personas.
One great benefit of clarifying who you are is being able to introduce
yourself clearly and succinctly. The exercise below also helps you to
develop a powerful personal introduction, so that next time someone
asks: “What do you do?” you can answer powerfully and confidently
without the common fumbling (“Oh goodness, where do I start?” Or
“Well, at the moment I’m…”).
Exercise 1: Who are
you?
We tend to take for granted that we are who we are, but without definition that
concept can be rather woolly, and it changes over time as our experiences shape our
personality. Here are some questions for you to ask yourself. When you settle on clear
answers, you will have a much firmer concept of who you really are.
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