28 How to Sell Yourself
They ought to know better, but!
The athlete, the jock, has given us two words that never ex-
isted before 16-zillion-dollar salaries for mediocre shortstops: “ya
know.” There isn’t a sportscast that doesn’t have: “Ya know,
George, ya know, we went out on strike, ya know, because the
owners, ya know, they were, ya know, unreasonable, ya know.”
I know.
Soon after she was elected to the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton
held a news conference. Asked about her husband’s presidential
pardons, she said “you know” 19 times, three times in one sen-
tence. There were also plenty of “uhs.”
On CNN, reporting the “breaking news,”anchor Lou Waters
said, “She...uh...demonstrated complete...uh...control and...uh...cool
throughout the...uh...presentation.”
Beware of useless catch words and phrases
Teenagers have given us “like,” “and so,” “know what I mean?”
and “okay?”
Most of us overuse “I think,” “I believe,” “as a matter of fact,”
“to be perfectly honest,” “frankly,” “if I may say so,” and “as it
were.”
This is pure garbage.
Many wise men of the past have said the same thing in differ-
ent ways. Euripides wrote, “Second thoughts are ever wiser.”
Dionysius the Elder said, “Let thy speech be better than silence,
or be silent.” Pericles is quoted: “The man who can think and
does not know how to express what he thinks is at the level of him
who cannot think.”
Make the pause work for you
Use the silent pause and really think on your feet.
We’ve developed a disease that I call intellectual dysentery.
Sounds keep pouring out of our mouths uncontrollably. When
the people who do it hold a position of responsibility, we have no
choice but to question their competence. And the worst scenario
is when the audience knows the next word before the speaker is
able to...uh...get it...uh...uh...out.