As we examined in Take Back Your Power – Watch Your Language, confident language is an important element of our personal power. When you catch yourself speaking with the out-of-power words we looked at in the first post, don’t beat yourself up. Saying a less powerful “I’ll try” instead of a more confident and powerful, “I will,” is just a habit–and habits can be changed with focus (see below). However, there are two legitimate reasons that we often choose out-of-power vocabulary. The InPower trick is to learn to use InPower language to deal with these situations. Most of the time, our language turns out to be an indicator of deeper things.
Self-Doubt
Sometimes we’re truly not sure of ourselves and experience doubt and even fear in certain situations. In these situations, out-of-power vocabulary is actually our attempt to be honest with ourselves, which is a good thing. When we make an effort to shift our language, if we’re paying attention, more powerful words can actually provoke these feelings of uncertainty and make us uncomfortable. This discomfort is good! It is helping us to see a place where we are habitually out of power and giving us a chance to claim it back. (For more resources on dealing with this kind of discomfort, read about the Mastery Statement methodology for exploring how to turn it into an asset.)
Here’s an example. I used to feel most natural saying:
“I should be more disciplined with my time in the office so I don’t end up staying late so often.”
Not surprisingly, I said this a lot without much changing in my life. When I learned more about inpower language, I turned this statement around to:
“I make maximum use of my time in the office, do the most important things today and leave the rest for tomorrow so I can leave at a reasonable hour to be with my family.”
At first , this made me uncomfortable because I wasn’t sure I could do it and was afraid if I never got to the bottom of my to-do list, people would think I was lazy and an ineffective leader. But when I began to explore this fear, I noticed that I was falling victim to the double-voice discourse mentioned in Part I. In other words, I was prejudging others’ reactions and then tempering my own thoughts, language and behaviors to be consistent with the negative reaction I was trying to avoid. This has the reverse effect of keeping me in the office later!
As I began to experiment with getting the most important things done and leaving the rest for the next day, I noticed that others were happy when I did the important stuff and few even noticed what I didn’t do. When they did notice, I told them when I would do it, and when I kept my word, they were content. My fears turned out to be unfounded, but I’m not sure I would have become fully conscious of them without shifting my thinking and language to a positive statement of what I would do instead of a negative statement of what I should do.
Self-doubt has other downsides when it comes to communications. In a survey I ran recently on Speaking Truth to Power, self-doubt was one of the primary reasons that people withheld speaking their truth, leading to a majority of respondents feeling regret because they missed an opportunity to be true to themselves, contribute to their organizations and protect others. Don’t let fear and self-doubt rule you. Learn to use your language powerfully and speak your truth.
Being Flexible
We often unconsciously or consciously choose out-of-power language because we want to be flexible and open to others’ ideas. Flexibility is an asset, so it’s not our willingness to be flexible that’s the problem, it’s the fact that the behavior we choose to express it makes us sound uncertain instead of flexible. This is a laudable goal, but when executed by passive out-of-power language, our flexibility can be turned on us by others seeking power over us, or, we may simply lose an opportunity to be more powerful. We can be assertive, flexible and InPower by staying positive, inclusive and using explicit time frames to bound our efforts. Being open-ended, just like being passive, can be an out-of-power stance when the situation calls for certainty. Here’s a confident language turnaround that allows you to be flexible and powerful at the same time.
Out-of-power attempt at flexibility:
We should try to get a variety of opinions before we decide on the next set of product features so we don’t miss something important.
InPower flexibility
Let’s put a survey out to all customers and interview our top prospects by June, which will give us time to research the level-of-effort for each of the primary features. We’ll make the final feature decision by July 1.
Do you see the difference? Not only is the InPower language stronger, it’s more precise.
Being Polite
It’s normal to want to be polite when interrupting people or stating opinions out of sync with those around you. So it’s equally normal to want to soften our words and our ideas. But it doesn’t serve us. It detracts from the value of what we’re saying.
Be polite by being polite. Don’t be polite by holding yourself back.
Use confident language to:
- acknowledge others’ ideas and share your own
- say thank you when you mean it
- listen to others when they’re talking
Use The Silence Trick for an Authentic Path to Confident Language
For the reasons above, and many more, it’s hard to change our powerless language. The problem is that this habit has become so natural that it feels authentic. Our normal, natural, authentic way of speaking is holding us back. So here’s a trick I give my clients to make more powerful language feel equally authentic. Try it for a week and see if it doesn’t open your eyes to the unleveraged power living in your own voice.
- Spend a couple of days noticing powerless words.
Pay attention to others first (sometimes it’s easier to hear it when they talk. That will help you notice your own powerless vocal patterns. Make notes, hash marks or mental “gotchas” when you or someone else says something powerless.
- Spend a few more days thinking powerless words to yourself instead of verbalizing them.
Really, when you want to say, “So I know it’s not my turn to speak, but I think we should look at….”, simply think them instead and open your mouth when you have something more powerful to say. Instead you’d think this whole sentence but only verbalize the words without the strike through: “So I now it’s not my turn to speak, but I think we should look at the numbers on page 6 and discuss them before we decide.” I call this the Silence Trick. It allows
- Watch how other people respond.
Most of us think others will “see through” our little silence trick. We believe they’ll call us on how much we don’t know and why we’re putting our ideas out without apology. But almost no one does. My clients almost always come back to me amazed at how people just take their ideas at face value. It builds their confidence in themselves, and that’s worth the experiment right there.
Your language creates your world. Master confident language to create a world where your power shines for all to see.
If the idea of speaking with confidence and power is uncomfortable, chances are you’re suffering from triggering thoughts and emotions. These are tough nuts to crack, but with some emotional detriggering guidance you’ll learn to let go of the triggers you allow to hold you back in no time. If this feels overwhelming, let’s talk.
