Words matter. Words give shape to your thoughts as much as they take shape from them… so choosing the right word—or wrong word—can have a big impact.
For instance, think back to when you were a kid. You were home, horsing around, and… CRASH!
Mom comes home, sees the mess, and asks what happened to the vase/lamp/wall/screen door/TV/washing machine/crystal egg. Let’s review your options:
- You go all George Washington and say, “Why, yes, mom, I cannot lie, you know this. ‘Twas I that broketh it!”
- You leave open the possibility that it wasn’t you by choosing some “less exact” language, like, “Ummm… I guess it broke?”
- You feign ignorance: “What? Wow. How’d that happen?”
- You lie: “Wasn’t me.”
My guess is that you chose one of the options between #1 and a swift smack to your ass.
The point is, words matter.
And now that you’re a grown up, words matter even more. Not in pseudo-science neuro-linguishit programming sort of way, but in a real, say-what-you-mean kind of way.
I spend an entire chapter in Super Staying Power devoted to the idea of “controlling the frame,” which is the art of taking full responsibility for your own career. You know where it starts? That’s right: semantics.
To tide you over until you buy the book and make it through Chapter 8, which is where I go through the whole framing thing, here’s a tip. Two tips, actually:
You don’t “kinda” anything. You “sorta” nothing. And you certainly don’t “kinda sorta” jack squat.
Like when a client asks on a conference call what you recommend, you don’t ever say, “I sorta think you oughta implement solution A.”
That kind of talk will kinda keep you at grunt status for as long as it takes you to break the habit. So if you’re sorta cool with that, then ignore this post.
But I don’t think you are cool with that. I think you look in the mirror and see the Master of the Universe. And while you won’t ever get that job, (which is a good thing, BTW), you’ll get a lot closer if you start speaking more definitively and kinda sorta drop the kinda sortas.
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Like Mark Twain first said (paraphrasing…), the difference between the wrong word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.
Using words like kinda sorta is definitely maybe one of my pet peeves. I think.