Every influential person has a verbal brand. Here is Steve Jobs'verbal brand. Here is Muhammad Ali's. And here is yours.
What is a verbal brand? The boundaries set around the words and phrases someone will and will not use. Building your verbal brand is the first of three stages to help articulate yourself like 1% communicators. I'll also give you some of my personal resources that have aided me.
So, let's begin building your verbal brand. 1% communicators have taken ordinary phrases and found a preferred personal way of saying them with creativity. Instead of saying, getting super popular, they might say, On the ascendancy right now.
Instead of saying, a certain way of thinking, they might say, Schools of thought. Big challenge might be described as a, Thorny problem. Unfortunately, few people today pay any attention to their verbal brand.
We say anything and everything, which is usually the same thing as everyone else. Usually some combination of these words. We do have some unique words and phrases that we've picked up from friends and family, but the constant use of stale expressions, lots of fillers, and using vulgarity like a comma makes us all sound like a colony of seagulls.
We need to make an agreement with ourselves about the type of words we want and don't want to use. Our choice of words should depend on the goals we are striving towards. What goals? Well, if we have ourselves a cup of honest tea, most people want to speak well in order to impact wealth, status, or understanding.
Once you know what you're after, you can begin building a verbal brand around the set of events ahead of you. Ask yourself, in what situations do I not have verbal confidence where I may be lacking the right words or phrases? Here's a list of the common scenarios.
Start researching one of those environments. Find movie clips, Reddit posts, or articles. What are the words and phrases most effective in those environments? You're not going to remember them, so write them down. Your goal is to make a list of the words and phrases that resonate with you and you're comfortable using.
And avoid words that are stiff and showy. No one knows what you mean by procuring a burger. Words like procure, extrapolate, or indefatigable may look articulate on paper, but saying them will make you sound like a child trying to cuss for the first time.
You don't need fancy words to have a good verbal brand. In fact, the reason that 1% speak with such surgical precision is not because they've swallowed the dictionary. It's because they've removed verbal discords.
Like a bad chord in a beautiful melody, verbal discords are words and phrases that just sound out of place. Joe Rogan would never use flowery words like ebullient or splendent. Martin Luther King would never use juvenile language like doozy or flapdoodle.
And Gandalf would certainly never say, these robes be bustin'. For me, I used to hate using the word bucket. Let's bucket everything into one group.
It's like a bucket of different ideas. To me, it always sounded, well, cheap and juvenile. And that's the frustration with verbal discords, is they don't align with how we want to sound, but it's the only way we know how to say something. Bucket was the clumsy way I described many things grouped together.
Using a method we'll reveal later in this video, I found the alternative word assemble. That word is now part of my verbal brand. And every time my mouth is tempted to say bucket, my mind remembers to use the replacement.
Now that we've refined our verbal brand, we can start solving lexical gaps. Your lexicon are the words you know. A lexical gap is when it takes you five minutes to say something that can be said in 10 seconds.
So it's like, you know, when you're talking to someone, right? And you're both there physically, but you're also kind of not there, you know? Like your mind is totally somewhere else, but you're also talking without not.
really talking and it makes everything kind of feel sort of empty, you mean not being present? These lexical gaps make our speech muddled. The path from the beginning of our thought to the end is long and winding.
Now this gap exists for two reasons. One, the idea you're trying to communicate is unclear in your mind, in which case you need to learn more. I'm going to find lexical gaps in my speech pretty quickly if I start talking about something I know nothing about. like neural plasticity in gorilla brains. Number two, your choice of words is vague.
Vague words lead to speech that feels inarticulate. Most of society speaks this way. Can you communicate this way? Absolutely.
In fact, it's ideal for casual conversation. But let's be honest, no one is remembering what you say, and no amount of Hans Zimmer soundtracks blaring behind your words will make them articulate. See, what we perceive as articulate is usually hearing something we expect to be said in drawn out and vague words said in simple and precise words.
Why is that? Because that person speaking has spent time I'm thinking it through. Intelligence is compression of information. Your favorite podcaster is your favorite podcaster because they have solved most lexical gaps related to the ideas in their domain of knowledge. Their explanations, therefore, are lean and concise.
Listen to how clearly the American investor Naval Ravikant speaks. The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And that triggers a lot of people.
But how else do you know? How else do you know if you're smart? If you're not getting what you want out of life, how smart are you really?
Okay, you might have had bad luck once upon a time, but consistently, every time, I doubt it. And there's two parts to that. One is actually testing yourself against the world to see if you get what you want.
The other is wanting the right things in the first place. This man breathes clarity with every sentence. If you want to speak clearly, you need to first think clearly. And thinking clearly begins by logging the lexical gaps in your speaking. There are apps that allow you to easily do this or you can do this with any note-taking application.
Here's what this looks like in my Apple Notes. Write down just one phrase today that is long-winded. Most people will never do this because it's not fun digging up your verbal corpses.
But you're not going to find a better combination of words next time if you don't make the effort to bridge the lexical gap now. Before I introduce the solution for solving lexical gaps, if you're like me and you are... In a season of articulacy, I recently launched a two-week masterclass detailing my articulation journey along with every resource, exercise, and framework that has helped me develop a natural articulacy. Better Speak is designed to implement everything I discuss here on YouTube and give you the steps needed to acquire that lost art and superpower of good speaking. Check out the trailer below.
So to solve your lexical gaps, the three solutions are, one, Download this book and locate articulate alternatives for any immature or overused phrases in your speech, such as my word, bucket. You can also use these chat GPT prompts I wrote that will take your lexical gaps and provide a more concise and clearer way of phrasing them. Three, one incredibly easy way to solve for lexical gaps is to interact with speech where the lexical gaps are already solved.
Where do we find these sentences? In speeches. This site here will allow you to find the transcript for any speech from a movie or historical event.
Read the transcripts aloud along with watching the video. Speeches are the green smoothies, the wheatgrass shots of language. They are packed with such nutritious word combinations.
Here's a list of the best speeches to begin with. Listen to these speeches for a few days and you will immediately notice your mind will be better calibrated to start solving lexical gaps in advance. This is the secret to speaking like the 1% in conversation, learning to do some kind of word processing in advance.
This is also why many great speakers usually first were writers. Writing provides many opportunities to solve for lexical gaps. Hey, Neil deGrasse Tyson, how do you speak with precision every time you open your mouth?
I've thought out those words before. Hardly any sentence in public comes out of my mouth unless I've written it down once before. So we've tamed our verbal brand and we know how to find and fix lexical gaps. However, none of this matters if we can't retrieve these changes in the moment.
Great speakers know how to plant this information in their subconscious so that it influences their speech without much thought required. Because if we're excessively choosing every single word that comes out of our mouth, we filter out our genuine self. We need to speak freely and feel opportunities where clear and creative language can be used.
Kind of like when you're listening to a playlist on Spotify and approaching the ending of a song and you can sense the beginning of the next song before it even starts. Why is that? Because the transition between those two songs has been reinforced many times. Language is much the same.
We need to reinforce hearing articulate language so that we develop a sense for when it can best be used. This is done with lexical simulations, where you practice using a word or phrase in a simulated scenario. Say you have a friend who believes that rocks are soft until touched. And let's also say that you've recently added the phrase schools of thought to your verbal brand.
You'd like to use the phrase more often, so you simulate talking to your friend about his questionable beliefs. I think there are two schools of thought on this topic. Well, I think rocks are soft.
I think you might want to reconsider that school of thought. Remember that it takes using a phrase or a word roughly 38 unique times in order to commit it to subconscious memory, where you don't have to think about it to use it. A word is five times more likely to be used when you say it aloud than if you read it or hear it. You can glue yourself to TikTok and watch compilations of powerful quotes all day but that isn't going to do anything to influence your speech if you don't activate your speaking apparatus. Say great words aloud enough times and who knows?
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