How to Be More Eloquent
How eloquent you are strongly influences your relationships. It also indirectly affects your self-esteem and your ability to deal with conflict. Speaking skills are about more than the image you’re trying to project to the world. Expressing yourself properly is important.
Language and expression are directly related to thoughts and emotions. If you’re confused about what you think, or you experience very intense and volatile emotions, it’ll be harder for you to be articulate.
Being eloquent doesn’t necessarily mean that you talk a lot or that you’re always carrying the conversation. In fact, people who have a hard time letting others talk are often rejected by a group.
The best thing is to develop your speaking skills so that you can say what you think in a precise way at the most opportune time. Here are some recommendations that could help you be more eloquent.
“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
-Benjamin Franklin-
Meditate and Listen to Be More Eloquent
Meditation is one of the best ways to clarify and organize your thoughts. Consequently, it’s also a good way to improve your speaking abilities. But don’t worry, you don’t have to become a Tibetan monk to reap the benefits of meditation. Breathing deeply and trying to clear your mind a few minutes a day can have a surprisingly profound effect on your well-being.
Over time, this practice will help you think in a calmer and more accurate way. It can also help you slowly clear out irrelevant thoughts that are just taking up space. A more clear and focused mind is the foundation for being an articulate speaker.
Listening is another crucial element if you want to get better at expressing yourself. It improves your communication capacity and helps establish a bond with others. If other people feel listened to, they’ll probably listen to you as well.
Read, Write, and Say What You Think
Reading is important for enriching your vocabulary and distills the intuitive knowledge of linguistic structures. It’s something that happens without you realizing it. Good novels, essays, or poems put you in touch with pure kinds of language, which increases your chances of speaking in an eloquent and articulate way.
Writing helps organize and record ideas. To write, you need some kind of order. Often, that order comes along with the need to put your thoughts on paper. In that sense, when it comes the time to express yourself, you’ll be more confident because you’ll have already written out your ideas.
On the other hand, you also have to learn to trust your own voice. So, try not to nitpick through every little sentence or change what you wrote until it feels artificial and cold. If your thoughts are clear and you’re ready to express them, don’t stay quiet. Don’t censor yourself unless there’s a really good reason to. Silencing yourself can be really damaging in the long run.
Simplicity, Respect, and Emotion
Becoming an eloquent speaker has nothing to do with using big and complicated words. Nor does it mean that you have to be formal and fake in your interactions. The best strategy is to speak simply and directly. That gives you the best chance of being understood.
You also have to respect your listener. Learn the person’s name and use it when you speak to them. Respect also means accepting other people’s ideas, especially when they think differently from you. It’s possible to express your disagreement without being intolerant and rude.
These days, many people have the idea that effective communication has to do with staying on neutral ground. They think that being “neutral” will give them more security and autonomy. Subjective opinions have a certain negative connotation. It doesn’t have to be this way. Subjectivity is certainly valuable and you have the right to express subjective ideas to whoever you’d like.
Two Final Recommendations
A communicative and open attitude is the key to avoiding misunderstandings (or solving them). Consequently, hiding your opinions because you don’t agree with everyone else isn’t really the best idea. It’ll just make the situation tenser. If you aren’t straightforward with your opinions, eventually everything will just blow up in your face.
If you’re afraid of speaking your mind, we recommend that you make the effort to get on top of that fear. That way, not only will you be feeding other people’s self-love, but you’ll also nourish your own in some ways. Being kind and open with other people will usually make them treat you the same way.
Speaking eloquently and articulately can even make your relationships with other people more fluid and easy. It can also give you a greater sense of autonomy and freedom. Commit to better communication with yourself and others. This will have lasting, positive effects on your relationships.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
Zoppi, K., & Epstein, R. M. (2001). ¿Es la comunicación una habilidad? Las habilidades comunicativas para mantener una buena relación. In Anales del Sistema Sanitario de Navarra (Vol. 24, pp. 23-31).