A few weeks ago I made a post which was titled 'stiletto'. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you go and read that it before you continue. Its not pertinent to understand what I'm about to write about, but the extra background wouldn't hurt.
That being said, lets just jump right into it, shall we?
I spent the past weekend in Long Island with some friends of mine. I had a social event at 9:30 in Stony Brook, and I wasn't about to make a 4 hour drive all the way down from my home for that one event alone, so I decided to spend the weekend at my friend's house, who lives about 5 minutes away from Stony Brook.
So what I really wanted to talk about were two 'events' that occurred during my weekend endeavors. The first event took place at some grocery store while my friends and I were getting food for dinner. In the store I came across a free sample stand which was being run by a girl who was probably about 19 or 20 years old. Now I didn't really feel like talking, all I wanted was to elicit some kind of response. I just looked over at her, and when she noticed me, all I did was smile. She gave me a nice wide smile back, and I was on my way. Smiles really are contagious, aren't they?
So what was the point of that, Matty? Well, the only thing that I thought was notable about this scenario was that I actually planned out what I wanted to do, and I knew what kind of response I wanted. I mean think about this, when you are usually presented with a similar situation, you act almost purely out of instinct, am I right? This time, I wasn't on autopilot. I was in complete control of the situation, and it played out exactly according to plan.
Now I still don't think this is enough to get at my actual point, so let me talk about the other event that occurred over the weekend.
This next one took place at the social event in Stony Brook that I had to attend, and to be honest, there isn't anything really specific about what happened; I simply had conversations with a couple of people that were present. I keep getting your hopes up, don't I?
Well, the most notable things about these conversations was that I was on the money. What I mean is that I said everything that I wanted to say, I said it how I wanted to say it, and I never made any comments that were misinterpreted or confusing. I was once again in complete control of myself. This may sound pointless, but think about it, don't you usually slip up in conversations every once and a while and say something that you didn't mean to say, thus raising the awkward bar by one or more notches? Have you ever stumbled around for the right descriptive word, but couldn't find the one you wanted in time to complete your thought? Well it may be just me, but I usually tend to speak before thinking and I rapidly come up with the words to finish my sentences as I progress through the actual sentence. Speaking like this can either be a good or a bad thing for me. While I can come off as particularly witty at times, other times I just stumble over my words and manage to construct sentences that lack semantics.
This is what I wanted to get at, I usually tend to go through periods where I constantly fumble around in my conversations, to times where I am completely and uncannily on the ball. Why is that? This usually occurs in one week intervals, and there are usually some long stretches where I am somewhere inbetween the two extremes.
To help me get into this, I looked up the following definitions:
well·-spoken (wel′spō′kən)
adjective
- speaking easily or fluently
- speaking in a courteous or gracious manner
- properly or aptly spoken
unintelligible
adjective
1. not intelligible; not capable of being understood.
What I found both interesting and amusing, was "well-spoken" being used in a sentence:
He is very well-spoken, intense, funny, dipping into funk speech when he wants to, and very smart.
Dipping into funk speech. Haha. While that statement is mostly just humorous, I think it touches on something relevant. What it seems to mean to me, is being able to represent yourself in a way that is different than most would, or in other words, it portrays personality and individuality. I tend to do this a lot. I try to speak in ways that sets me apart from a lot of other people, or rather, I try to speak in a way that accurately depicts my personality.
So then what about the times where I am not "well-spoken"? Am I not acting in the way that parallels my actual personality? Am I unlike myself? I think I would agree with these statements, I mean, after all I'm not acting in the way that I would like, and I guess I find this mostly displeasing due to the fact that the other person probably isn't getting a good sense of who I am.
Well, while that opened a window, it still didn't answer the question as to why I go through these speaking 'cycles'
Err, I think I might be stuck. you can't tell from the post, but I've been sitting here for about a half hour now, and I can't come up with anything.
Eureka! I remember something my friend told me! A while ago my friend was talking to me about some research he was doing, and how when we perform tasks long enough, they become embedded in our minds, and we no longer have to think when we perform certain tasks. He also said that if we ever try to think during those tasks again, our thought process interferes with what we have started to deem as automatic. Something similar happened to me just the other day. I was driving back from LaGuardia Airport and a bug got smeared on my windshield. I looked down at the lever I needed to use to spray on the wiper fluid, and on it, it said "pull" and so I tried to pull it... but it wouldn't work. I thought to myself, how is it that I can't figure out how to do this when I've done it so many times in my life. Why is this trivial task causing me so much difficulty. The problem was that I was thinking about it to much. Whenever I performed this simple task in the past, I didn't think about it at all, I just did it. It was committed to muscle memory, something I didn't have to think about, and when I did try to think about it, I guess my manual thoughts interfered with my automatic ones, and I failed at accomplishing what I set out to do.
Oh and, for those of you that care, I was pulling the lever out to the side when I should have been pulling it towards me... D'oh.
So I guess when we take that information and apply it to my speaking habits, we can better understand why I speak well at times, and poorly at others. When I am well-spoken, I am not really thinking about what I am going to say or do before I do it, I just simply do it. It is automatic. However, when I am thinking about what I want to say, my thought process interferes with how I would speak/act on instinct, and I fumble.
Now some of you are going to recall that in the beginning of this post when I was describing the "smile" encounter, that I was in fact thinking about what I wanted, and that I actually planned it out. Well, while this is true, when I think back to that encounter, I wasn't actually thinking about what I was actually going to do, I was thinking more about what kind of response I wanted, and how I wanted it all to play out rather than what I was actually going to say or do.
So then I guess what we can infer from all this is that before I speak, instead of thinking about what I am actually going to say, I should rather think about how I want the conversation to go, which shouldn't interfere with my automatic speaking abilities. Very interesting.
Well, I'm going to end here since I'm a little tired from thinking so much. But before I go, I have a question for you all:
How do you represent your personality?
Try to be really specific. Don't just say "I act in a way that's different from other people"; Think about what it is in the way you act that sets you apart.
Well, that's all I've got.
Stay frosty
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