Don't Think About The Pink Elephant
CAUTION: Do not think about the Pink Elephant.
Do Not Think About The Pink Elephant.
Let me introduce you to a conundrum. Two entities that control one another and many of us conflate:
Thinking
Speaking
Which of these two do you think plays a bigger role? Which one is more important? Which controls the other? Which comes first in our communication? Which one should we train to use more of?
When I was still in primary school, I was told to think before I speak. So I followed that advice to the T.
The equation that we learn from schools is simple: Think → Speak
This implies that thinking is more important than speaking.
I am proposing the opposite: Speak → Think
Don’t think about the Pink Elephant. And definitely don’t look at this image I generated with ChatGPT of a Pink Elephant. Seriously. Stop thinking about how ridiculous a Pink Elephant would be.
Imagine going to the zoo and seeing this massive Pink Elephant. Ridiculous right? No, really. Stop thinking about it!
I want you to memorise this for life:
More speech encourages better speech, and more thinking encourages more thinking. Would you rather be a yapper or an overthinker? Because you sure as hell can’t be both at the same time.
You are trapped in a cycle of thinking, and it’s the main reason your pronunciation and accent end up lagging behind.
When I work with coaching client's we focus on breaking down those nasty filler words and non-words mentioned in prior chapters of this book.
What my clients all have in common is that they keep overthinking their word selection despite not having a big vocabulary to pick from.
What you end up doing is jumping in and out of your mental library of words, and trying to figure out if anything new has popped up.
It’s like coming home to an empty fridge, closing it, then opening it again to see if something new spawned. The more time you spend in your head, the less your muscles will be working. The more time you waste on overthinking, the worse you will become at speaking. And I don’t think you’re reading this book because you don’t know how to think. Remember:
