Good Life Project - Lose the Jargon: The Truth About $10 Words

Episode Date: October 20, 2015

We do the weirdest things to make people think we're worthy of their attention, or money.No matter what you do or where you come from, there's this little voice in most of us that just wants to be wanted. We want people to think we're worthy, we've got something really good to offer.For many of us, part of that equation is that we want others to see us as smart. If you're building a career around being what my friend calls a smarticle particle, it's pretty important. That's cool. But, here's where things often go off the rails. And, trust me, I'm speaking from experience.Not infrequently, that urge to be seen as smart enough, coupled with a wee bit of imposter syndrome (seriously, does anyone not have at least a touch of it?), leads us to want to say things in a way that make us sound smarter.Where a $1 word or phrase would do, we use (and often make up) a $10 word or phrase. Because, hey, preternatural sounds smarter than weird. Proprietary Multisensory Phased Metaphor Story-Architecture Persuasion Framework (PMPMSAPF) sounds better than "tell stories that make people buy." And exponential growth-hacking sounds fancier than "grow faster with less effort." That last one, by the way, I've found myself using recently. Ugh!Here's the deal...Using jargon—large or sometimes even made up terms of art that don't easily describe what we're talking about on the surface—don't make us sound smart, they make us sound arrogant and inaccessible. They don't draw people in and engender trust and rapport, they push people away.And they create an understanding gap. People don't learn anything, but they nod their heads because they don't want to admit they've got no idea what you're talking about. Then, instead of asking what you mean, they just walk away, still dumbfounded. Everyone loses.That's what I'm talking about on today's GLP Riff, along with what to do about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's Good Life Project Rift is entitled, Lose the Jargon. So we all want to feel respected, you know, kind of like we're doing important work. Like we're worthy of people's attention or maybe even investment and love. But at the same time, there's often this deeper voice that says, if we're just us, if we simply stand in our truth, simply, purely, gracefully, that that won't be enough. So we start to heap on all sorts of fanciness in the quest to feel more important. Like we've done things that make people take us seriously, you know, complicated things, big things, things that allow us to, oh, make up words that nobody understands, but that sound so important, nobody

is going to actually ask us what they mean for fear of being, you know, the quote, dumb one in the room. And trust me here, folks, I am as guilty of this as the next person. I have made up a metric ton of jargon in my day. And the funny thing is, we see in other people this use of jargon all the time. And we call them on it. you how many times I've said to somebody, excuse me, but that phrase or word sounds like it's totally made up or designed to make you sound really important. But it really is just confusing the heck out of me. But when it comes to us, we somehow feel like other people's jargon is offensive, but somehow our fancy pants terms of art, well, they're brilliant. Until somebody really smart walks up to you, you know, past all the others who've been nodding and pretending that they have some clue what you're actually talking about and says to you, um, what exactly does exponential growth hacking and story architecture and social dynamics mean? By the way, I chose those three terms because I just discovered myself using them in a recent webinar that I taught.

And I realized midway through, literally almost like as I'm using these terms, and I've seen myself now use them in copy, that I'm pretty sure nobody has any clue what I'm talking about when I use them. I literally did a palm slap to my head in the middle of actually doing this. It's a good thing that the webinar was just showing slides and not live video. So I'm constantly finding myself and stopping myself and trying to actually back my way out of jargon. So next time you want to be taken seriously, here's a thought. Kill the jargon. Destroy any word or phrase

that requires explanation beyond a simple sentence. Better yet, just explain it really simply to start with, like you would to a fifth grader, because the moment you make somebody work to understand why what you know is so important or awesome, you've already pretty much lost their attention along with the ability to help them, let alone impress them with your complex word-a-tunosity. Come on, I had to end it with a little bit of my own fun jargon there so think about that moving

forward lose the jargon keep it simple that's how you make the ripple that starts to make a difference i'm jonathan fields signing off for good life project