Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself by Dr Aziz Gazipura PsyD

Author:Dr Aziz Gazipura PsyD [Gazipura PsyD, Dr Aziz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: B. C. Allen Publishing & Tonic Books
Published: 2017-10-25T06:00:00+00:00

Certainty Rant

If you want to be a person who is taken seriously and seen as a leader both in business and socially, you must learn how to communicate with a tone of certainty. The good news is it’s not that hard. You don’t have to become smarter, gain twenty years of experience, or achieve anything else first. You can just start doing it now.

Speaking with certainty is just a pattern of voice tone and body language. First, start paying attention to when you are certain about something. I had a client who was hesitant when speaking socially, especially with people he didn’t know very well. He was a successful business owner, who knew quite a bit about business building, but even talking about this was difficult. He was concerned about saying something with certainty because he feared someone could find a counterargument and disagree with him. Or he could see that there’s always another perspective and he wanted to acknowledge and honor that every time he spoke. The result was a halting, hesitant sounding manner of speech that was filled with the qualifier, “I don’t know.”

To begin, I asked him some questions about a topic he was completely certain about: football. I asked him a series of basic questions about which teams were favorites this season and why. I asked him what their weaknesses were and who the best quarterback in the league was. No matter what my question, he answered immediately, with a tone of absolute certainty.

Next, we had him study other people in his life who spoke with certainty. He noticed their body language and voice patterns. He began paying a little less attention to what they were saying, and started paying more attention to how they were speaking.

I encourage you to do the same thing. Discover in your own life what you are certain about and notice how you communicate when speaking about it. Where are you naturally most certain? Is it in your knowledge about sports, movies, or video games? Perhaps it’s your opinions in politics, finances, or another field.

Once you’ve identified it, do the following exercise. The next time you’re alone, perhaps driving somewhere in your car, go on a “certainty rant.” This is where you speak out loud, with complete and total conviction about anything you want. Start out with the topic you know well. It doesn’t matter what the content, or how eloquent or thought out it is. That’s not the point. The point is to begin practicing speaking with authority. Think of it as vocal training for an actor.

Once you’re going, start talking about anything and everything in your life. What you did yesterday, what you’re going to do that day, a particular situation at work, your opinion on an issue in your team, what you think of someone’s performance, what you liked about the dinner party last night (or didn’t like). Don’t censor yourself. This is not a time to be nice or polite. No one’s going to hear this, it’s just an exercise to flex your certainty muscle.

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