Why you should leave the Scrabble words for game night
One of the key components to being authentic when you are talking and presenting and communicating, particularly on video, is for you to use your voice. Not anyone else's voice. Not your ideal avatar's voice, YOUR voice.
That can be really challenging because we have a lot of preconceived notions about what is acceptable
and what success looks and sounds like. We also have a lot of internalized judgment about what we look like, what we sound like, what we're saying and how we're saying it.
We give ourselves a really hard time about most things, and seeing yourself immortalized on video forever and ever is just a perfect place for all of those insecurities to manifest to their fullest potential.
There's a workaround I will teach you for making sure you don't sound like someone pretending to be someone else as you're communicating. Lay the foundation for natural conversation by using words that you would normally use.
Don't pull out the thesaurus. This is not the time for that. This is not the time for you to whip out all of your Jeopardy knowledge. This is the time for you to be relaxed and comfortable and at peace in your skin. As you are talking with people, you're asking them to give you some of their time--time they won't let you waste with fakeness.
So as you sketch out a brief outline of what you want to say or what you want to communicate, go back through and look for those ridiculous 90-point Scrabble words, or the SAT words from ‘back in the day'. Once you see them, eliminate those and replace them with words that are natural for you.
I want you to understand that natural or common don't automatically equate to ineffective. As a matter of fact, the more familiar they are, the more effective they have the potential to be because people aren't sitting there racking their brains trying to figure out what the heck you're trying to say.
Those word choices also give you a great foundation. You're less likely to stumble when you're utilizing words that are more natural for you and your personality. You're less likely to be distracted as you try to remember how to sound impressive. And, it has the added benefit of being easier for other people to understand.
Remember, if people have a hard time following you then you are missing out on the opportunity to interact with them in an effective manner, in a way that gets you what you want. If people have to stop and say, 'Wait, what? What was that? What did she say?' Then you've lost them. You've lost them and the opportunity to persuade them because you have continued talking and while you're talking, they're back on what you said two sentences ago.
In this information, saturated world we live in, we generally have one opportunity to get our message across. Because if people aren't feeling what you're saying, if they're not connecting with it, that skip next button is really easy to push.