In “The Tipping Point”, we learned of the story of Bill Gates, the genius of Microsoft. He gained success because he was willing to put in the time and effort to improve his skills. He was very good at programming and he understood that communication of ideas would build his company.

Successful global professionals understand this as well.

Here are the first six strategies to improve your business English and communication skills. In order to benefit from them, read the last two posts that explain each in detail.

1. Speak English EVERY day for 16 hours
2. Audiotape and Listen to yourself every day.
3. S-L-O-W Down!
4. Maintain eye contact.
5. Smile
6. Use open and accepting body language.

Over the holiday we visited family. One is a clarinet player and a private instructor for middle and high school students. She has a student who plays other instruments very well, yet, has too much tension when he is playing the clarinet. The sound is often either too tense on one note or inappropriate tension on other notes. This can happen in speaking our vowels as well.

7. Make Tense Vowels Tense!

First, one must realize that the vowels carry most of the meaning of the word because of their longer duration. Errors in vowel usage can cause significant confusion.

Muscle tension is a muscle motor response as we are learning new movements. This also manifests itself in the muscles of speech. Vowels are dependent upon using very slight front, central or back contour movements and also changing the tension in the tongue.

Many folks from all over have difficulty differentiating these in SAE (Standard American English). The pronunciation “rules” differ from one language to another.

These are the primary high-tension vowels.

· “ay” or {IPA /e/} pronounced as [eh-ee] . It is a relaxed /eh/ followed by a tense /ee/: Example: “Bait”

· “I” or {IPA /ai/} pronounced as [ah-ee]. It is a relaxed /ah/ followed by a tense /ee/: Example: “Bite”

· “ee” {IPA /i/} pronounced with high tension: Example: “Beat”

· “O” {IPA /o/} pronounced with an emerging tension of the back tongue and rounded open mouth at the end of the /O/ vowel. Example: “Boat”

· “U” {IPA /u/} Pronounced with a solid tense back tongue tone with the lips protruding, cheeks sucked in and tense. Example: “Boot”

The most difficulty is when a tense vowel is followed by a “nasal” sound /m/, /n/, or /ng/. This usually because of a co-articulating movement difference.

E.g. A Mandarin /n/ is made slightly differently than a SAE /n/ which changes the preceding movement’s contour. (Yet, this can be trained -changed).

For example: “Pain” can be changed to “pen”; “Fine” can be changed to “fawn” or “fun”;   “Phone” can be changed to “fun”; “Tune” can be changed to “ton”; “Comb” can be changed to “cawm/come/cum”:

Practice these quotations:

1. “We Only see what we know” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

2. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on” Franklin Delano Roosevelt

3. “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” –Lao Tzu

In November, my husband and I spent the holiday with my sister-in-law and family at their home in Michigan.  Dawn is an engineer with a master’s degree from MIT.  One of her specialties is getting professional and manufacturing groups to effectively work together.  Dawn is excellent at “knowing the target audience” and using the appropriate vocal style, speaking speed, terminology and interests of those within her audience.

Even if you speak English as a “second” language with an accent, it is possible to get others to effectively listen with a few strategies while you are continuing to work on your overall communication skills.  These strategies do take preparation and practice.

Know Your Audience

Who are you going to be speaking to?  Your peer professionals?  A mixed meeting of sales, legal, admin, peers and others?
•    Know Their Interests and Questions that They May Ask:
What are the most important topics and messages to communicate, i.e. what will each person in the room be interested in?  How can you determine that you effectively and clearly address the topics?

Example: Contact a few (three or four) people that will be in the meeting. Ask for their help; Help to understand the questions that others may  ask; Help in formulating your speaking contribution.
•    Know Their Speaking Style:
Do they speak quickly or slowly?  Do they use hard rough voices or softer, easy vocal style?
Example:  A client often had to speak in meetings with groups of attorneys and engineers. The common speaking speed was fast.  She had a Ph. D. in her field, yet had a slower speaking speed, a soft voice and a moderate accent. People often cut her off at mid-sentence.

In order to be heard, we worked on three strategies:
1.    Make shorter, more succinct and higher impact statements.
2.    Use rhetorical questions to keep the audience engaged with her.
3.    20-30 times/day correctly practice 3-5 syllable words in phrases so the words are very clearly understood.
•    Know Their Attention Span:
Observe how well these folks attend to others speaking in a meeting before they start asking questions or doodling.  If it appears their attention span is short, keep your talk short.

Using these will help one to gain the “Articulate Advantage” when speaking.

What other strategies have you used?  What works for you?

I.    Speak English EVERY DAY for 16 hours.  In the car, on your way to work, rehearse…out loud… the names of each person in your office. Are you saying each correctly? Rehearse what you are going to say in your morning meetings.  Do you have your ideas organized? The appropriate vocabulary?  When you get to the office, write down what you wan to say and say it out loud. (If you do not have a private office, say it in a whisper….).  We must make our mouth move to the sounds in order to reprogram the speech sound movements.

II.    Audiotape and Listen to yourself. Preferably while you are on the phone. This way, you get the best idea of how you sound to others.  (Note: Do not record the other person’s side of the conversation as it illegal in many areas of the USA). Record your “outgoing” telephone message every day.  Change the day and date on it.

III.    SLOW Down! An average of 110 words per minute is best.  Sound interesting by speeding up an introduction phrase (to 140 WPM) …then pause for 1 second.. And, then list your points at 130 WPM, with a ½ second pause between each of them.  It will get others attention.

Now on to the next set of three effective communication strategies.
Western communication style has some pragmatic communication features that are very different from Eastern speaking styles.  Western communicators want an open, accessible communication style. This style is connoted by several types of body language.

IV.    Eye Contact:  The easiest way to accomplish this is to look at the other person’s Right eye.  One can maintain relaxed eye contact this way.  Especially when listening.  Your listener’s deeply appreciate this attention.  That said, it is not appropriate to maintain constant eye contact.  If you are speaking, you will periodically need to look away as you formulate an idea yet come back to the eye contact when you want to make a point.  It keeps your head up and relaxed.
Brian Tracy, a world renowned success coach, devotes four chapters to eye contact in his book “The Power of Charm: How to win anyone over in any situation.”   For those of you in China, Chaterhouse bookstore carries this book.  (When I was living in China, I bought my copy there).

V.    Smile while speaking.  A genuine smile draws people to you and your ideas.  Smile even if you don’t feel like smiling.  Physiologically, a smile accomplishes several critical voice and speaking needs.  A smile opens the airway allowing for effective replenishment of air while speaking.  We have often heard people speaking on residual air and sounding strained and too soft.  This loses the listeners attention. A smile also relaxes and opens the articulators for more effective targeting and pronunciation clarity.  When we speak with a more closed mouth, tension sets in and minimizes movements, making words sound mumbled.  Smile and be clear.

VI.    Use open and accepting body language.
Sit up or stand up straight.  It signals alertness and interest.  It also allows for adequate breathing. When we are short of breath we look tense and un-accepting.
Keep you hands and arms uncrossed. Again, crossing your arms restricts breathing. When one does this they seem to automatically put their chin down.  A physiological movement that also reduces airflow.  It is no wonder that folks who cross their arms and chin tuck look unhappy!
The best place to put our hands is in the modified preacher pose with the tips of the index fingers touching and the smallest three fingers crossed.  Another option is the hands gently cupped in a “hand-hold”.
Keeping the large muscles of index and thumb finger relaxed, relaxes the forearm and above to the shoulders and neck (where your airway is located).

We have discussed three effective communication pragmatics strategies used in North American Business English.  I chose these three as they are critical in maintaining optimum speaking muscle interactions. When our airflow is restricted, the twenty
plus speaking muscles become compromised.  This in turn diminishes one’s ability to use new articulation patterns while speaking.  These pragmatics also keep folks happy with us as we are developing a new speaking style….
Remember:
Maintain eye contact.
Smile
Use open and accepting body language.

Focused individuals and groups like the Beatles, Tiger Woods and Tony Robbins have made the efforts to make the correct muscle movements to become very good at using their fingers to play an instrument or playing a sport and even speaking effectively.   Yet, some folks do the same thing repeatedly without changing.

What is the difference?  Having someone scoring you via a scorecard or placement in sports; having an audience that gives feedback or an audio-recording that indicates when unwanted notes were played.  Scoring yourself……

Yet, in speaking another language, especially English, we often do not get the quick feedback of how well we are using our motor speech system to hit the target pronunciations.

Our listeners often consider reminding another of the mispronunciation or asking for clarification as being  “rude”.  Rather, our listeners go ask other folks what we just said or just ignore what we said entirely…..

The speaker only begins to realize that they have not spoken to be understood after they get ignored for a promotion, a prime project or have received a smaller than expected raise.
For some ESL speakers, this can take several years to become apparent.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s popular new book, “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Chapter 2, he cited research showing that even though one may have talent, it will take practice….around 10,000 hours of practice….to become Extremely good at anything. This is two to four years of daily practice.

How to Harness the “Power of the 10,000 Hours”: Three of Ten Strategies
1. Speak English only every waking moment for 2-4 years.  Using 16-8 hours/day at 365 days/year, this adds up to about 10,000 hours.  Considering that many folks have been in English working environments for over 2-4 years, this should not be too much of a problem.

2. Become one of your own coaches….. Audio-tape yourself DAILY when speaking on the phone. Rewind, put your earphones in and listen to yourself.  Put yourself in the other person’s place.
What did your colleague hear?  Dropped articles? Dropped syllables? Stress on the wrong syllable? Sound substitutions? Speaking at the speed of light?

3. S-L-O-W Down!  Listen to an audiotape you made of yourself (See #2). Time yourself for a minute from the middle of the tape.   Count EVERY –uh; -ah; as well as EVERY word. Do this in 2-3 second segments. It may take an hour to get it right. And . . . It is worth the effort.

This is VERY Important.  If you are over 110 words/ utterances in a minute, you are way too fast for your listeners to understand you and your accent

Recap:   Speak English EVERY DAY for 16 hours.  Audiotape and Listen to yourself.  SLOW Down!

Remember, do you want to be passable or Extremely good at speaking English?  Just one of the team or a top manager?

Sounding natural while speaking English is a struggle. When one has learned to read English before speaking it, the struggle seems heightened.  Only with “out loud” practice does one become proficient.

To recap from the last blog entry :
Linking is joining words together while speaking without stopping the voice between each word.
For example “whaduhyuwant?” Not “What..do..you..want?”. That would sound robotic and make understanding difficult.

Linking ties into rhythm.  As we join words, we emphasize meaning via speed, pitch and pause between important phrases.

Rhythm and stress act as modes to emphasize words and phrases while speaking.  The brain actually focuses on rhythm and stress first to give it insight into the meaning of the words.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outliers. Great book.  I liked this sentence in the first chapter:  “On the wall, was a hand-painted banner: ‘Embrace the struggle’.”

To say this quotation with good linking and rhythm:
“ONthuh-wall…..(1/2 sec pause) WAza HANpainudBAnner…(1 sec pause), emBRACEthuhSTRUgul”.

The [….] pause engages the listener to anticipate the next phrase. The BOLD capitals indicate a syllable with a higher pitch and longer duration. Also, if you noticed, I included “word reductions”. [hand-painted] becomes “ HAN painud”

The process of linking strives for efficiency of lingual movement. Therefore, as the /t/ and /n/ are made in the same place in the mouth, the voiceless /t/ sound gets eliminated in moving to an unstressed syllable.  This efficiency carries over into maintaining consonant voicing so that the larynx does not need to start and stop on voiceless consonants such as the /t/ .  The /t/ will morph into a /d/ mid word going to an unstressed syllable.  “WHAduhYUwant?”

Malcolm Gladwell emphasized in his book that an “Outlier” is one who is willing to do the consistent and persistent struggle of practice.  To be understood,… Embrace the struggle.  Speech is a muscle motor act and must be practiced out loud …and…. physically in order to get better.  As with the Outliers mentioned in the book, the rewards will come.

An Accent….What is it?  Who has an accent?
It is a specific way of speaking a language.  Pronunciation, stress, rhythm, and tonality.  We all speak with an accent, yet some of us have many.  In those who speak English as a first language, some speak with a certain accent when they are around friends from their youth and another when at work.
Often, when we live in different areas of the world, we will add other pronunciation patterns, other accents, to our English.
And… we use the appropriate “accent” when speaking to specific groups.
I have a “storytelling accent” that I use when telling Southern Tales. This accent would not be received well if I were to use it in a gathering of professionals.

I was raised in an area that had an accent of what I lovingly refer to as “Hoosier Hillbilly”.  When I went to college, I quickly realized that although most folks understood me, it was not deemed a professional accent.
In my linguistics classes and physiology classes, I learned of the muscle responses that make sounds, tones and rhythm.
This is when I began to do “Accent Addition”. Not “Accent Reduction”. When we learn another language, we do not “reduce” or “lose” our primary language.

To speak with a Standard North American accent (i.e., as the Radio & TV media do), one does not lose the “accent “ of their first language.  They “add” the Standard North American accent.
So, to add the Standard North American accent, let’s start with knowing basics; Pronunciation, stress, rhythm, and tonality of the that accent, the struggles some groups may have, and how to use those to bridge to the Standard.

I work privately with a mid level manager at a very large international company. We are doing accent, communication and voice/presentation training.
Here are some of the communication strategies that we covered in the last week.
1.     Audio tape yourself.  Read a paragraph… only a paragraph…from a familiar magazine.  Then listen to it.  What you hear is exactly what your Primary-English colleagues hear.  Have a colleague listen to it with you without having the visual of the paragraph.  And repeat back sentence by sentence… no paraphrasing. Usually they will struggle to understand it.
2.     Now read the paragraph very s-l-o-w-l-y and audio tape it.  Have a colleague listen to it again.  They will very likely understand you better.
Why?  Because this gives the listener the time to “edit” what you are saying and interpret better.    Even though you have heard that the brain analyzes a huge number of pieces of information a second, remember that this number really consists of data from your body functions, visual, tactile, muscle motor and varying other inputs.   Each word is not single unit.   Rather, they are combinations of multiples of units.  Each sound has a set of signals, stress patterns, semantics, grammar, and phrasal inflections affect interpretation every second for the listener.
The listener is really processing at about 90-100 words per minute (WPM). The average speaking speed for broadcasters is about 135 WPM.  The average speaking speed that I have noted in engineering, business/marketing, law firms, and financial workplaces has been between 135 WPM to 230WPM. Fast talkers usually get the least amount of information understood.
The brain starts by “chunking” inflection, stress patterns, grammar markers, etc.  And, then the brain begins to assign meaning.  If the listener must edit what the speaker is saying, the analysis slows down.  Unfortunately, the speaker keeps speaking at their usual (135-230 WPM) with accent, grammar and/or vocabulary issues.   The listener’s interpretation speed slows down for each “edit”.  Finally the listener has totally lost pace with the content of the speaker.  The listener stops listening, gets frustrated, tries again and stops again.
The speaker loses valuable time and credibility…….
As a professional in a shaky economy, you cannot afford to lose credibility.
Slow down.  Audiotape yourself and practice slowing down.    It must be practiced repeatedly every day for it to become a habit.
Your value in the workplace will increase.

Nov 16, 2008:

It is a fact.  We are in diverse workplaces.
There are many professionals who speak accented English.  Not only with “foreign” accents, there are also “regional” accents, ……
The ones who have English as their first language …
You know, the folks from New York City or New Orleans, the British or Aussies, and are usually understood by other professionals across the world.

Then we have the people who speak English as their “other” language among two or more.  This comprises a very large group of professionals working internationally.

Here, we will be addressing various components of “accent” in both sets of English speakers.

The accent components will also be combined with everyday situations for speaking within your business, professionals and business-social settings.

I will also offer you recommendations for books, community involvement and video reviews.  We will use business, technology, finance and presentation aspects to make it more meaningful.

Segments to be included:
•    Sports!:  Names of teams in specific leagues.  Positions, players, etc.  How to pronounce these.  Also, sports slang and references
•    Business networking:  What are the basic rules and what to say.
•    Business / job interview scripts and accent struggles in these.
•    Menu Madness:  How to pronounce items on various menus’
•    How to answer questions at business meetings.
•    Listening to win.  Strategies to understand what others are saying.
•    Body Language: Reading the moves of others correctly and making appropriate of your own.
•    Strategic English sound targets for:  English speakers of Chinese, Southeast Asia languages, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Russian, et al
You will have enough to make it a challenge, yet enough to be immediately incorporated into your daily life.

I would really appreciate hearing about any of your recommendations as well.   Phyllis