[0:00]Shashi Tharoor is one of the best speakers of our times. And no wonder that the sun never sets on the British Empire, because even God couldn't trust the English in the dark.
[0:12]In this video, you'll learn how to apply his habits of speaking in your life. The first and most obvious thing people associate with him is his extensive vocabulary. But that's also where people make a huge mistake. Being articulate doesn't mean using extraordinary words in ordinary ways. It means using ordinary words in extraordinary ways. Confident speaking is not about knowing a lot of words, it's about expressing yourself precisely and connecting with your listeners. Because I genuinely consider myself somebody who enjoys communicating, and you can't communicate if you're not understood. Having a baseline vocabulary is important, but it's not as important as you think. So we'll cover that later in the video. Your skill as a speaker isn't judged just by your abilities. It's also based on how well your listeners understand you. So as an example, you could say scaling content. Or you could just say get more views. Both of those mean the same thing. It's just that one is easier to understand than the other. This brings us to the next habit: enunciation. This means clear pronunciation of each word. Many people start mumbling and lower the loudness of their voice towards the end of their sentences. Is this ranch? It's somewhere in California. Okay. Somewhere in California, like 80 acres. Contrast that with how Shashi Tharoor pronounces each word, particularly the end of every word. The global narrative is shaped by various factors. It is shaped by the interests and the self-interest of governments, and by the interests and the proclivities of the media organizations. Uh, the people who rejected it were the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Golwalker in particular was scathing in the language, and so are many others in that ecosystem. Sticking with pronunciation, a huge mistake is uptalk. Uptalk means raising the pitch of your voice towards the end of your sentence. This makes you sound unsure and underconfident. how many data categories do you store? Does Facebook store on the categories that you collect? The fix to this is simple. Drop the pitch of your voice towards the end of your sentence. You can, it's a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they're democratic at the end of it. In that clip, you also saw the importance of how fast you should speak. Generally speaking, it's helpful to speak slowly when you want to emphasize something and speak a little bit faster when you want to express energy or excitement. To make this a habit, take a common question you get all the time, like what do you do or tell me about yourself and then record your answer to that question. Watch the recording and notice the amount of filler words you use, your tone, speed, and how clearly you're speaking, and then try to fix each of those one by one. But if you want to go from a good speaker to a great speaker, you must start using rhetoric devices. One such tool is alliteration. Alliteration means using words that begin with the same letter or sound. Here, notice how he uses the words forgive and forget as he's talking about British colonialism in India. Does it mean anything to Indians anymore? Not really, John. I think people have largely forgotten. And Indians are very good at forgiving and forgetting, so they're forgotten as well, which is what I object to. Let them forgive, but let them not forget. Using tools like alliteration is the difference between making your messages easy to remember and making it impossible to forget. That's the difference between good and great. Some of the best communicators understand this better than others. And I'm talking about advertisers here. See, nobody wants to see ads, but they make a lot of money. Why?
[3:39]Because they know that they have to make their messages impossible to forget to make sales. That's why you see product names like Kit Kat, Tic Tac and the best name of all, Coca-Cola, which has alliteration both at the beginning and at the end. But if you really want to supercharge your speaking abilities, combine alliteration with the rule of three. The rule of three is just structuring your arguments or explanations around three points. Because when you present information in threes, that's far more memorable for listeners. The easiest way to do this is to use three similar words for your key idea. But there are larger issues to the Constitution, the rights it grants. Are those rights being deepened, expanded, and extended? If you're staying somewhere, you say, I put up there. Now in in English and American, to put up with something is to bear it, to suffer it, to endure it. But one of his strongest habits is complete convincing. He doesn't just present data. He backs it up with a compelling emotional anecdote to persuade people both logically and perhaps more importantly, emotionally. So first, he uses a fact to establish credibility for his point. India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%. By the time the British left, it was down to below 4%. But now to hammer home that point, he tells a story of how the weavers in India were treated under British rule to back up his point. The handloom weavers, for example, famed across the world, whose products were exported around the world. Britain came right in. They were actually these weavers making fine muslin, light as woven air it was said. And Britain came right in, smashed their thumbs, broke their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their cloth and products. That kind of emotionally rich language is far more persuasive to the average person than dry facts. Now, whether you like it or not, people decide with emotion and justify that decision with logic. Here's another example of him using facts and emotion to make his point. 29 million Indians died of starvation in British induced famines. The most famous example, of course, was the Great Bengal Famine during the Second World War when 4 million people died because Winston Churchill deliberately, as a matter of written military policy, proceeded to divert essential supplies from civilians in Bengal to sturdy Tommies and Europeans as reserve stockpiles. And when conscious stricken British officials wrote to him, pointing out that people were dying because of this decision, he peevishly wrote in the margins of the file, why hasn't Gandhi died yet? The final habit in this video is perhaps the most important of all the points in this video. Being articulate is not the process of clear thinking, it's the outcome of clear thinking. Even if you focus all your energy on speaking, you won't make much progress if you don't know how to think. Step one of clear thinking is to admit to not having all of the answers all of the time. Sometimes just saying I don't know is the best thing to say. It makes people both believe you and trust you more. Step two is to understand opposing arguments. Watch how he presents a counter argument to his point as he's talking about delimitation of parliamentary constituencies in India. counter argument, yes, and maybe that's not so, but Parliament is only to discuss national issues. Why don't you get those people better representation by increasing the number of Vidhan Sabha seats in the state assembly? That's how he's able to defend his position when he's asked difficult questions because he's thought through his positions. If you want to develop this skill, the best way to do that is through a reading habit. And no, I'm not going to tell you to read boring classics that they forced us to read in school. The best way to start a reading habit is to read what you love until you love reading. If you love anime, read manga. If you love superhero movies, start with comic books. Over time you'll become naturally curious about other kinds of books and that in turn will help you develop your vocabulary.
