Changing Conversational Habits   

 At a recent seminar presented by a national expert on human learning, Dr. Jack Wolf, I heard the statement: 94% of adult behavior is habit. A striking assertion, that! Although we may think of ourselves as wonderfully flexible and adaptable (and many of us can be so, under certain circumstances), much of the time we are operating on automatic pilot. With respect to language and interpersonal behavior, this habit-bound patterning also appears to hold true.     

You probably speak with a distinctive regional dialect. Your inflections may even sound like those of your parents or your siblings. Your everyday vocabulary changes little, and you probably share the jargon of workplace colleagues, acquired over years. A skilled linguistic geographerasking a few questions and listening to you for a few minutes, could probably identify your home city or region, your level of education, and perhaps your job or profession. Speech habits are largely unconscious, and they reveal a lot. Let's say that for some good purpose such as a job promotion, you decide to change your conversational habits.     

Perhaps you want to improve your grammar or change your dialect. You may find this quite hard to do. You are probably surrounded by the same people and the same environment of talk, both at home and at work. Therefore your usual speaking patterns will be reinforced, and your attempts to change will probably be noticed and commented on by others. For example, young people who come home from student life at a university may have fun poked at them by family members and friends for trying to sound so educated.     

Four decades ago when I was teaching a public speaking course on a U.S. military base abroad, I counseled an African-American airman from inner city Philadelphia that he'd sound more convincing if he put some effort into adopting a General American dialect. He told me that if he began speaking in the dialect I suggested, he'd be ostracized by his black enlisted buddies, a group whose manner of speech was an identifying bond. Maybe he would have sounded more credible in the classroom, but not with his own group.     

Recall Shaw's play Pygmalion, starring Professor Henry Higgins and his student, Liza? The professor was determined to work with his lovely subject so that she could sound like a proper lady. To help her make the changes, Higgins modeled the sounds, which Liza then practiced as he corrected her. Over and over. Eventually new neural pathways were formed and the street girl was linguistically transformed. Members of Toastmasters clubs are encouraged to eliminate the filled pauses from their speech, items ums and ahhs, and empty phrases such as you know. To help a novice speaker accomplish this, a club member keeps count of these phrases and shares this feedback. Often a dime or quarter is charged for each filled pause, this going to the club coffee fund.     

As the novice becomes more aware of these small unconscious habits, they begin to drop away. These changes are noticed and celebrated by club members. Such a learning regimen works really well in such self-help groups because members agree on the reasons for the changes, and they also learn to invite corrective feedback. In everyday life, however, few of us enjoy being corrected or improved. So we must find other ways to make changes.     

The best way to learn a second language? Go to a country that speaks that language. Study the basic patterns, then immerse yourself in it. Surround yourself with good speakers of their language. Listen, attempt to talk, listen more, talk more. The best natural way to change your conversational habits? Place yourself among models of the style of talk you want to acquire. Listen, speak a little, listen again, talk more. None of us can remember those first years of life when we were learning our native languages. The popular myth is that this learning was both easy and fun. Actually, as crawlers and toddlers, we really worked at it, listening constantly to our parent models, trying to make the sounds.     

This wonderful miracle of learning that we achieved took a long time and much effort. So it is that making significant changes in your conversational style will require more than reading a self-help book or attending a one-day seminar. It will take effort over time. As the old joke is told, a young man unfamiliar with New York City asks an older gentleman Sir, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall? The old man's answer: Practice, Sonny. Practice.