How I Learnt To Express Myself Better

I am an introvert.

The earliest memory I have of getting into trouble about my introversion was may be 20-22 years ago as a young girl in rural Kenya. Visitors would come, and as a well trained child I’d welcome them, serve them tea/fruit, then leave them in the living room by themselves as they waited to see my mom or father. I knew I was supposed to talk to people, but I just didn’t know how to talk to strangers. I was also very poor at sharing my thoughts and emotions. Often when I got into trouble, I’d just cry, because I didn’t know how to really say stuff without it coming out all jumbled.

Fast forward to the business world, and the first few years of my career were fine. I was an Excel geek, and I didn’t really need to talk to anyone even in the office. I was not good with words, it would take me a whole day to put together a 1 page letter. Voluntary writing (what I do here) was unimaginable.

Then I became a manager. Management is not about being good at doing stuff, but it is about getting others who are good at doing stuff to do it to your standard. This means not just ordering them around, but learning to communicate effectively, but also inspiring them enough for them to want to do stuff, beyond what you pay them for. To do this, I needed to talk, almost all the time!

I wish I can say I moved from total introvert to Barack Obama in 2 weeks by following xyz steps. I cannot. I am not Barack Obama, will never be, but I express myself pretty well (both in writing and verbally). I have come to enjoy expressing myself. My current career curve is in training, and the prospect of spending 2 days at a time with total strangers does not fill me with dread. I’m not a career writer (and I have no dreams of that), but this blog and my Twitter account are testament to the fact that I’m a decent communicator in writing. So what helped?

Reflecting on the last 10 or so years, there are things I have done that have helped me:

a) Widening my reading list

For a long time, all I read were “serious books”. Management, finance, behavioral economics etc. I needed to read those books because I was learning on the job career-wise. However, these books were not teaching me how normal people communicate. They’re full of jargon, and stiff sentences, and it showed when I needed to write something. They did nothing to my speaking ability.

To learn how to express myself, I added two genres to my library;

1. memoirs;
2. what I call “normal stories”.

Memoirs because reading one’s life story is ordinarily boring, but great writers are able to make their life stories interesting. Memoirs taught me how to develop an interesting voice for a mundane topic, and how to talk about myself without coming off as narcissistic and self obsessed. “Normal stories” are fiction reads that are either based on historical happenings, or day-to-day living that I can relate to. Similarly, “Normal stories” taught me how people who are really good at expressing themselves talk. I didn’t learn by copying them though, more like reading that stuff so much, I over time found myself getting better at expressing my thoughts.

b) I showed up: I over time started offering to speak in public, something I actively avoided all my life. At work, this was by doing investor presentations, answering Q&As during meetings etc. This at first was like pulling teeth. I remember I worked for my first presentation for 2 weeks, then practiced before my mirror for a whole week before finally presenting to an audience of 20 for 30 minutes. Needless to say, it was a flawless presentation, and it gave me courage to do more. Today, I still need to prep. For this 5 minute TV slot, I probably spent an hour reading up and structuring my thoughts, but the point is, I showed up. A few years back I would have declined to appear on TV.

c) I started writing.

I started writing about things I enjoyed and knew a lot about. I didn’t attend a writing course (this is obvious, right?), I instead chose to write just like I speak. Normally.

Introverts are not usually totally blank when you see them sitting quietly by themselves. We are always having these little conversations with ourselves in our heads 😀 I decided to practice bringing these conversations out of my head, by writing and blogging. 

The strange byproduct of this is, writing has made me a good speaker, and being a good speaker has made me a better writer. If you’ve followed my blog since 2009, you can see how my voice has changed over time.

d) Learnt to ask questions: Instead of wondering what to say, I learnt to instead get people to talk about themselves and their interests. This works in two ways:

1. If the other person is talking about themselves, I do not have to say much, I just need to ask follow up questions and to listen to them which works perfectly as an introvert. So whenever I meet a new person, I will introduce myself, leave them to introduce themselves and based on that I ask a follow up question 🙂
2. I get to learn new stuff. See what I know, I already know, talking about it does not help me in anyway. However, when other people talk about what they know, I learn new things.

In conclusion, realizing that I needed to work on how I express myself was the most important thing, followed by knowledge that I wasn’t going to become great at this overnight.