Chapter 10

The Language of the Future

What language is constant and what is merely trend? This is the “action planning” stage where we help you through the steps to make the approaches highly personal, immediately gratifying, and a part of the nature of your work and fabric of your spoken and written business and life.

What Is Really “Future Tense”?

Experts make predictions. They aren’t always right, but true experts are right more often than they’re wrong.

If we include in the boat of expertise authority, moral suasion, influence, respect, and admiration as shipmates, then we can conclude that in your personal life and your business pursuits your expertise is vital. You want colleagues to respect you. You’d no doubt prefer that your family loved and admired you. You’d even want adversaries to hold you in respect and esteem, not see you as a pushover, but rather as a worthy opponent.

We’ve tried to show, if nothing else, that language is the underpinning of all your transactions. Therefore, your vocabulary and phrasing, your metaphors and examples, your tone and inflection will determine your success and expertise.

Language is fungible. There are considerable debates about whether we should hold a purist position and defend the proper usage down to the last participle and gerund or whether language evolved with society and we should consider modern colloquialism as the norm without being dissed. (Note that our spell checker did not question dissed.)

Here are some guidelines to maintaining the proper future tense in your approach to language:

1. Be aware of environment. Colloquial speech probably doesn’t belong at a Unilever board meeting, but is quite common at Apple management sessions. What is culturally appropriate?
2. Be aware of context. The nature of the issue and its severity or lack of severity will probably influence your choices. For example, you might say to someone giving a motivational speech to a team, “You crushed that!” But I wouldn’t compliment the person giving a eulogy at a funeral with that same phrase.
3. Consider your position. You’re of a certain age, in a certain business or professional station in life, you’re married or unmarried, leader or follower. At my age I find it important to understand what teenagers are talking about, but not to try to talk like them even when talking to them. It’s sort of like the fact that I can understand Spanish better than speak it. I can tell that you’ve asked me to step into the next room, but if I ask you for directions, I might find myself directed into the alley.
4. Understand that meanings change. The word gay for example has changed in its primary denotation considerably. Some words are purely scientific in their clear intent—a tree is a tree (apologies to Joyce Kilmer). But joint, grass, and weed can have a more magical connotation.
5. Be sensitive to regional differences. A hoagie, sub, and grinder are all similar sandwiches, but some are unknown in certain parts of the country. Some regions say soda, others pop. In some parts of Asia, all of what we’d call soda is requested by asking for Coke (which itself has a magical meaning, as well).
6. Test out trends. Not all new locutions are permanent. Some are no more than advertising failed attempts to gain notice. Others are highly regionalized. Be careful that you don’t become less understood by using strange constructions. (I’ve never understood went extinct or went missing.) The sartorial equivalent is found in men who wear their baseball hats backward with the visor in the rear and then have to shield their eyes from the sun.

While there will be struggles to turn between you and I into acceptable speech, the immutable fact is that the future tense is about clarity. The litmus test for successful language will be quite simple:

• Do they understand me accurately?
• Are they doing what I ask?
• Am I being as succinct as possible?

There’s not much more to desire! Bear in mind that the Gettysburg Address was written on the back of an envelope and required barely more than two minutes to deliver in its entirety. It remains one of the most moving and profound pieces ever written about sacrifice and freedom. Verbosity does not connote expertise. Terseness does.

People are adults. They are fully able to ask questions if they don’t understand you (and provided you believe in a culture of intelligent inquiry). Thus, tell people what they need to know, not everything that you know. My tree expert insists on telling me the history of elms or the nature of the development of caterpillars chomping on the leaves. I just want the trees protected. My air conditioning guy keeps explaining about BTUs and thermal inversions and temperature deltas.

I just want the rooms cooled.

The ability to engage in future tense will depend upon two factors: Your grounding and confidence in your language, and your adaptations to the conditions mentioned earlier.

But there is another rather major element.

Electronic Language

Walt Mossberg is the former technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He and I were talking one day on the way to an event when he said,

I don’t know why people say, “I’ll go on the internet for that,” because they don’t seem to realize that they are always on the internet. It’s as silly as saying, when you want to toast some bread, ‘I think I’ll go on the electric grid.’ We need to stop making that distinction.

Our language of the future will increasingly be by electronic means. That includes social media, YouTube, business media, Skype, GoToMeeting, and any number of developing technologies that accommodate print, audio, and video. Many meetings are now streaming, we tend to post on Facebook more than we would ever write conventional letters, and we tend to text a shorthand of the language even more often than that.

What does this mean for language use?

• We need to separate out the informal uses appropriate for technology from the more formal uses appropriate for relationships. For example, I saw a speaker at a business meeting who wanted to convey emphasis on growth use this construction: “We want to achieve hashtag growth.” This was meant to limn the Twitter device for creating common themes and threads, but it failed orally and the accompanying hand signals for hashtag just made it worse.
• We have to focus on being succinct more than ever. It’s far easier to become bored over remote communication than in person. I fell asleep once during a mentoring call by phone where the other person was droning on with background about some incident where help was needed. And we have all seen people doze off even in meetings in real time. Electronic speech relies far more on quick hits, and frequent to and fro. Think of the fast reflexes of ping pong, not the boring baseline volleys in tennis.
• Language is far less reinforced by nonverbal behavior. Even when we’re using video, not only do we see a more limited view of the other person’s body language, but we tend to be far less effusive with our body language. You can’t stand up, or roam away from the camera, or really do much outside of the frame. There is far less nonverbal power, meaning your speech has to have still more power.
• Group interaction is more severely limited. Despite constant advances in technology, those who are boldest, or loudest, or hold the most senior positions will tend to dominate in conversations and interactions of more than two people. That will require either a formal agenda allocating air time to everyone or, more likely, a far more assertive type of behavior to convey your point and respond to those of others.
• Differing time frames will impact energy and alertness. I run global groups that often prefer to meet in real time and not listen to recordings. Even choosing a time that’s least disruptive, there are people on the phone at 4 in the morning or midnight. Our biorhythms aren’t meant for that kind of disruption and we have to pay even more attention to our language in view of fatigue.
• Finally, the technology that allows for instantaneous and global communication at any time also creates a subtle language issue. Although the world language is de facto English (formally, in air traffic control, for example, and informally in that some companies in Germany demand that English be used internally), it is not always the same English. Increasingly, we are interacting with people who don’t understand our sports metaphor (what we call soccer, they call football), or political reference, or jargon, or cultural connotation. We have to be careful to use clear language and not merely English. A classic failure here was the outsourced call centers to India, filled with American kitsch, and with everyone wearing American baseball caps, but which failed dismally to relate to American callers. Most have been returned to the United States despite higher labor costs because of the costs of customer complaints.

While there is no electronic language, there are constraints placed on language by electronics. It’s important to consider these and take proper preventive actions.

Remember, even after all this time, no one has ever figured out how to stop an e-mail once you hit send, and we’ve all hit send and regretted it a nanosecond later.

The Value of Silence

Our book has been about language, which requires, well, sound. But often, language becomes more powerful in the presence of silence.

What you don’t say can be far more powerful than what you do say in many instances. Emerson said, “What you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.” A colleague of ours, Steven Gaffney, is an expert in honest communications. One of his most salient points is that what’s unsaid can be more important than what is said.

All of us have been in the position where, threatened by a three-second silence that seemed like 20 minutes, we said something utterly banal and insipid, thereby undermining our cause and diminishing our presence. We often do this with a superior or someone we are trying to impress—a job interview, a meeting at work, a legal proceeding. Lawyers abjure a verbose or overly volunteering witness on their behalf. They tell us to solely answer what we’re asked, nothing more. Never volunteer anything that you haven’t been asked. (And, commensurately, they are taught never to ask a question for which they do not already know the answer.)

A silence is often a bargaining chip, and countering it is often a concession. Listen to poor speakers. They fill every void with er, or ah, or you know, or okay, or they laugh for no reason. They fear the silence and consequently make nothing more than distracting noises. As a speech coach with many clients, I play back tapes of their talks and they are astounded at the inarticulate sounds they never realized they were uttering.

The best poker players don’t talk, except to indicate their bets. Silence is by far the preferred ambiance for prayer or meditation or contemplation. Most of us can perhaps recall the great Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Sounds of Silence.”*

Why should we mix in a healthy dose of silence to aid and abet the effectiveness of our language?

1. It’s an excellent negotiating tactic. It’s one thing to scream at a realtor, “We love this house,” and pay full asking price, but it’s another to simply stay quiet as the realtor explains the positives, conveniently overlooks the negatives, and wonders what on earth you’re thinking and whether a 15-percent price drop might sway you.
2. You can elicit responses from others more easily on many occasions—more easily than trying to convince them with logic. Others will tend to step into the silence, and if you’re patient, you might just learn something of immense value. Police have been known just to let suspects sit with them after asking a question, as the interviewee begins to offer more and more detail as the silence threatens them. (“Maybe I was on 14th St. at that time, and maybe I did happen to pass her in the dark …”)
3. You force the succinctness on yourself that we discussed earlier. If you can create, sustain, and tolerate silence, then by definition you have probably told people what they need to know, not everything you know, and you can simply await their next questions or comments. The more silence, the less you’re talking; the less you’re talking, the more you have to make your points in tight language and time frames.
4. You give yourself time to think. It’s tough to think while you’re rattling on and tough to think while you’re trying to track someone else rattling on. But with even 10 seconds of silence, you can reorder your thoughts, create an example, suggest a course of action, and so forth.
5. You seem far more deliberate and wise. I’ve always been somewhat disenchanted by the people (especially, for some reason, my college professors) who immediately ran on with an answer to a question just asked. While it could be that they hear the question often, it could also be that we’re hearing a stock answer not really pertinent to our condition. Lawyers and doctors worry me greatly when they respond hastily because I don’t think they’re listening, but rather labeling me and providing response 6.3. That can have dire implications for one’s legal and physical health. But I always admired the professor who took a puff on a pipe (when that was allowed) or the speaker who pauses and considers the inquiry—allowing everyone to wait in eager, anticipatory silence—while formulating an answer.

We live in an age and are entering a future in which stimuli will continue to multiply. While I’m writing this, I’ve heard three beeps on my phone, which I forgot to turn off, indicating incoming messages. Our future will be clogged with noise from friends, family, advertisers, news, recreation, entertainment, mobile access, and so forth.

We need to create some silence.

Don’t become so enamored with language that you shun silence. You’re not getting paid by the word, nor are you respected by the amount of air time you use.

Many years ago, in the classic TV show “Get Smart,” I believe they had a cone of silence. They bought it at discount on the show, so it never worked correctly for the spies in the series. But you can create your own cone of silence if you take pains to allow yourself the option and the luxury.

Therapists bask in silence, waiting, often out of direct sight, for the patient to say something, allowing the patient to take the next step, establish the next direction.

I’ve often sat silent for 30 minutes or so listening to a group talk over each other trying to sort out an issue, then rise and go to the board to show them what I heard and figured out while I sat there in my own cone of silence.

It all depends on what you’re telling yourself.

Self-Language

The final message of our book is about the language you speak, but to yourself. The ancient philosophical debate is about whether thought or words came first, a sort of cognitive chicken or egg. Yet, how do you think if you have no means—no tools—to express your thoughts?

Over the past decade or more, positive psychology has become a major field of study and a vital source of self-development. Popularized by impressive academicians, such as Dr. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania,† the basic tenet is that the self-talk one uses influences behavior profoundly.

Dr. Dan Gilbert, at Harvard,‡ has investigated synthetic happiness, showing that what we once thought was pure rationalization (e.g., that accident taught me an important lesson; getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me) is actually a highly effective way of talking to ourselves to create happiness. People who do so on a regular basis he found to be far happier than those who solely relied on traditional events such as birthdays, anniversaries, births, and so forth.

In other words, scientists are more convinced than ever by empirical evidence and research that the language we use with ourselves has the most extensive and dramatic impact on our success in life—or lack of it.

What is the language you use about yourself? Have you bothered to examine it? Other people (short of therapeutic intervention) can’t do that for you, and you’re not really paying attention most of the time, any more than you’re conscious of your constant, small adjustments with the steering wheel as you drive the car.

You need to step back from that unconscious competency to conscious competency in order to examine what you do without thinking about it.

Unconscious competency

Conscious competency

Conscious incompetency

Unconscious incompetency

As you can see in the progression above, there are things we don’t do well without realizing it, which is why some people’s attire or singing immediately draws groans from most others. Then there are things that we’re intensely aware we don’t do well—playing a piano would be one of mine or dancing a tango another.

There are things we do well by focusing on them, such as writing this book or hitting a golf ball. And, then, there are things we do well without thinking, such as making the knot in a tie or giving an extemporaneous talk.

In order to study your self-language, you must step into conscious competency and ask what, precisely, you say to yourself. Some examples:

• When you succeed, do you say you’re talented and worked hard, or you were lucky?
• When you fail, do you say you learned something for next time or that you have no talent?
• When you trip over a piece of furniture, do you say that someone put it in an inappropriate place or do you remind yourself that you’re clumsy?
• Do you generalize specific positives into a generalization or specific negatives into a generalization (I convinced them, I’m excellent at persuasion, or I didn’t convince them, I have lousy interpersonal skills)?

I tell salespeople I coach all the time that a rejection by a prospect is not a reflection on one’s sales skills, but merely the fact that that person, at that time, did not purchase what you were selling. That could be different tomorrow, with another person or the same person. (Which is why sales persistence is such an asset, not sales surrender when you hear a no.)

Your self-language is an ongoing narrative, the novel of your life that you write every day. The question that only you can answer is: Will every day be the same or be an improvement? That will depend on how you talk to yourself.

Yogi Berra, the surprisingly insightful observer of human behavior, observed that “Baseball is 90 percent mental, and the other half physical.” You can watch golfers’ success by what they tell themselves they can do or can’t do on the course. Lesser talented athletes in all sports beat superior competition all the time because they are more mentally prepared. Sports “motivational coaches” proliferate.

It has become incredibly clear that the most important language you ever use is also the language you use most constantly—with yourself. As we come to the conclusion of this book, we want to urge you to apply the skills and ideas consistently to this area. Specifically:

• Pause before major decisions, events, and activities and ask yourself what kind of language you’re using to describe it and your participation and chances for success.
• Treat negative events (financial setback, lost promotion, relationship ending) as isolated incidents that have no bearing on tomorrow, and positive events (financial gain, promotion obtained, new relationship) as examples of generalized strengths (investment acumen, talents, attraction).
• Deliberately talk to yourself briefly first thing in the morning and just before going to bed. Take 30 seconds to remind yourself of what you’ve done well and why and what you intend to do well and why. Firmly secure these consciously so that they can become part of your unconscious competency.
• Review your day and determine what you were saying to yourself prior to major events and how that contributed to your success or setback. Remind yourself of what you need to abandon or repeat in the future.

The language of success is a combination of a common use of the powerful techniques we’ve presented combined with your own ability and inclination to use them with discipline and frequency. Every business today is in the communications business, and that will continue tomorrow.

And every person’s success in business—and in life—is a matter of the language they use.