5 Common Mistakes You Make in a Conversation

Here's how to fix your bad speaking habits that can make or break your career success 

Do you show up to work every day, work to the best of your ability and always strive to be better? Great! But that might not be enough. Because your speaking habits can compromise your potential for career success, even if your performance is impeccable.

Let’s say you have an extremely impressive résumé and you’re interviewing at a new firm for a potential promotion. On paper you’re the ideal candidate and you’re objectively more skilled and more experienced than your competitors. But, during the interview, your conversation gives the interviewer a bad impression and he is forced to go with a more impressive candidate.

Whether you’re interviewing for a new job, trying to land a new client, motivating your employees or making a pitch to land funding for your business, how you speak and hold conversations can make or break you, regardless of how skilled or talented you are in other areas.

Eliminate these five speaking habits before they destroy you:

1. Using Filler Words

Filler words have become so common in our colloquial speech patterns that we scarcely notice we’re even saying them. We start our sentences with the word “so,” never consciously realizing it. We inject our sentences with the word “like,” never thinking about the literal ramifications of its use, and fill every pause with an “um” or an “uh” as an almost involuntary reflex. These filler words seem innocent enough, but if they take over the bulk of your speech, they become distracting and reflect poorly on you as the speaker.

Fortunately you can train yourself to avoid them by making yourself conscious of their use and correcting yourself every time one slips out until your natural speech pattern is free of them.

2. Using Repetitive Vocal Inflections

The inflections in our voice say just as much as the words that are shaped by them. Imagine the sentence “I didn’t steal that car” with an emphasis on each different word within the sentence. “I didn’t steal that car” means something very different than “I didn’t steal that car.”

Too often our inflection becomes repetitive, distorting the meaning and power of our sentences and leaving our listeners uninterested. For example, some people draw into a near-constant monotone, never inflecting any syllable more than any other. Others fall into uptalking, the extraordinarily bad habit of ending every sentence with an upward inflection, like a question.

Add variance and significance to your intonation and inflections.

3. Talking Too Fast

When you get excited, or when you’re nervous, it’s ridiculously easy to speak too quickly. You have a lot to say and you’re trying to get it all out, so the words naturally come to you in a constant stream. Some people subconsciously fear silence and use rapid speaking to cover up any brief pauses that may otherwise result.

It’s far better to speak slowly. You’ll have more time to think about your choice of words; you can use pauses to add impact to your sentences; and most importantly, you’ll come across as a much more confident, in-control person.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll speak too slowly for your audience, so no matter how fast you think you’re talking, try talking just a little bit slower.

4. Neglecting Your Mannerisms

Everybody has small ticks and mannerisms that go unnoticed and remain insignificant in daily conversations, but these small mannerisms can add up to real annoyance in the context of a professional or public speaking event. For example, if you tend to gesticulate wildly in repetitive motions or if you unconsciously smack your lips at the end of each sentence, your listeners could view you as unpracticed, or worse—unprofessional.

Work with a friend or record yourself speaking to uncover some of the mannerisms you might be neglecting. Breaking these unconscious habits can and will be tough, but once they’re gone, they’ll stay gone.

5. Rambling

Rambling is an indication of nervousness, and it’s especially dangerous in a one-on-one context.

Generally, if you’ve prepared a speech, you won’t have to worry about rambling because you’ll have a specific, dedicated talk track. In a more improvised setting, which demands a back-and-forth between two parties, rambling is a much more dangerous threat. For example, in a job interview, if an interviewer asks a simple question expecting a simple answer and you respond with an extended monologue, your credibility could suffer some damage.

If you aren’t concise, your message will lose impact.

Don’t let any of these bad habits get the better of you. The best way to avoid them is through ongoing practice. So speak in front of a mirror or with a friend you trust, and actively work to suppress these all-too-common tendencies. In time you’ll be naturally free from any of them, and you won’t have to worry about your next conversation compromising your otherwise great chances at professional success.

http://www.success.com/article/5-common-mistakes-you-make-in-a-conversation

7 Lessons for Success, Including a Few You Haven't Heard

 Being afraid to make mistakes will always hold you back.

Ray Dalio is a very smart guy with a gift for making money.  He founded the investment firm Bridgewater Associates and in 2012 was named to the TIME 100. In a 123-page personal value statement titled Principles, he attempts to share what insights and strategies that he believes will help us get what we want out of life. As he writes in one of many footnotes (which are often more interesting and personally revealing than the main text):

“I wish I could read and compare the principles of all the people I’m interested in—Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, people running for political office, people I share my life with, etc. I’d love to know what they value most and what principles they use to get what they want. Imagine how great that would be—e.g. imagine how much valuable fundamental thinking could be harnessed.”

I agree with Dalio that understanding how really outstanding people think and operate is a great way to learn how to become better. So I decided to read his manifesto from cover to cover. Here are 7 lessons for life success that I distilled from it. Some are delightfully provocative and unconventional, while others are easy-to-digest common-sense advice:
1. Stress test your opinions by having smart people challenge them.
“I never cared much about others’ conclusions—only for the reasoning that led to these conclusions. That reasoning had to make sense to me. Through this process, I improved my chances of being right, and I learned a lot from a lot of great people.”
“I also believe that one of the best ways of getting at truth is reflecting with others who have opposing views and who share your interest in finding the truth—rather than being proven right.”
2. Don’t be one way on the inside and another way on the outside—it means you lack integrity.
“I believe that people who are one way on the inside and believe that they need to be another way outside to please others become conflicted and often lose touch with what they really think and feel.  It’s difficult for them to be happy, and almost impossible for them to be at their best....I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads—often theories that are critical of others—that they won’t test by speaking to the relevant people about them.  Instead, they talk behind people’s backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation…So I learned to love real integrity…Most people would be insulted if you told them that they don’t have integrity—but how many people do you know who tell people what they really think?”

3. Being afraid of making mistakes is why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.
“I believe that our society’s ‘mistakephobia’ is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested, and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. As a result, school typically doesn’t prepare people for real life—unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that’s why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.”
“Everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses....one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them.”

4. Be a “hyper-realist”: It's the best way to choose and achieve your dreams.
“I have become someone who believes that we need to deeply understand, accept, and work with reality in order to get what we want out of life…understanding reality gives us the power to get what we want out of life, or at least to dramatically improve our odds of success. In other words, I have become a “hyperrealist.” When I say I’m a hyperrealist, people sometimes think I don’t believe in making dreams happen. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I believe that without pursuing dreams, life is mundane. I am just saying that I believe hyperrealism is the best way to choose and achieve one’s dreams. The people who really change the world are the ones who see what’s possible and figure out how to make that happen. I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.”

5. Learn to objectively reflect on yourself and others—most importantly, on your weaknesses.
“The most important quality that differentiates successful people is [the] capacity to learn and adapt…people who can objectively reflect on themselves and others—most importantly, on what their weaknesses are—can figure out how to get around those weaknesses, can evolve fastest, and come closer to realizing their potentials than those who can’t…However, typically defensive, emotional reactions—i.e., ego barriers—stand in the way of this progress.”
“Having others help find one’s weaknesses is essential because it’s very difficult to identify one’s own. Most people don’t like helping others explore their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the biggest single problem of mankind, because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all other problems and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.”
“Remember that intelligent people who are open to recognizing and learning from their weaknesses substantially outperform people with the same abilities who aren’t similarly open.”

6. Life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t care what you like.
“Treat your life like a game or [a] martial art. Your mission is to figure out how to get around your challenges to get to your goals. In the process of playing the game or practicing this martial art, you will become more skilled. As you get better, you will progress to ever-higher levels of the game that will require—and teach you—greater skills.”
“This particular game—i.e., your life—will challenge you in ways that will be uncomfortable at times.  But if you work through this discomfort and reflect on it in order to learn, you will significantly improve your chances of getting what you want....By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you ‘like.’ So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things—which often are difficult but produce good results—so that you’ll then deserve to get what you want.”

7. In life, you have to decide what you want, what is true, and what to do about it.
“I want you to think for yourself—to decide: 1) what you want; 2) what is true; and 3) what to do about it. I want you to do that in a clear-headed, thoughtful way, so that you get what you want....I am going to ask only two things of you—One, that you be open-minded, and two, that you honestly answer some questions about what you want, what is true, and what you want to do about it....If you can’t do these things, you should reflect on why that is, because you probably have discovered one of your greatest impediments to getting what you want out of life.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201411/7-lessons-success-including-few-you-havent-heard?