Jordan Peterson Rarely Speaks About Becoming Articulate, but When He Does, It’s Life-Changing
Understanding his mental model of “walking on stones” will rewire your anxious brain and make you dangerously well-spoken.
A clinical psychologist and social justice warrior, Peterson calmly dismantles and eats feminists for breakfast.
He says his interest is “people” but gets embroiled in debates with political agendas.
He’s achieved the rare feat of becoming a global superstar academic by expressing complex ideas with clarity and precision.
The Canadain caught my attention for the first time when I flicked on Channel 4 news here in the U.K., and sat opposite him was British T.V. darling Cathy Newman, who knew as much about Peterson as I did.
The Channel 4 research team screwed up royally because it was clear Newman thought her interaction with Peterson would be like clubbing seals with her confrontationally tone-deaf interview.
She got blindsided and taken to the cleaners by Peterson’s intellect and perfectly constructed argument surrounding the controversial topic of refusing to call trans men and women by their preferred personal pronouns.
It’s a subject that’s landed Jordan Peterson in some scorching controversy, and the networks interrogate him like the Gestapo, but he always answers with sharp clarity.
He’s clarified that he’s okay calling people whatever they’d like to be called but doesn’t accept “compelled speech dictates of the federal and provincial government”.
Peterson’s articulate response struck a chord with surgical precision and stopped me and 46 million other viewers dead in our tracks.
Newman also froze on national T.V. in a clip now garnering more views than Both Biden and Trump’s inauguration speeches.
Here’s the famous scene;
Cathy Newman: “Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?”
Jordan Peterson: “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You know you’re willing to risk offending me in pursuing the truth; why should you have the right to do that?
It’s been rather uncomfortable.
You’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell’s going on, and that is what you should do, but you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. I think more power to you as far as I’m concerned”.
Cathy Newman Reply: “So you haven’t sat there from, and uh, I’m just,
right, (giant pause). I’m working that out. You have got me; you have caught me. I’m trying to work that through in my head; it took a while”.
Jordan Peterson: ha, gotcha
Peterson says he doesn’t care what your background is; if you pursue becoming articulate and communicating well, it opens up a barn door of opportunities.
You can negotiate with clients, engage with your co-workers, advocate for your employees, market your services, solve problems effectively, and think critically.
You’ll be firing on all cylinders because it’s better to be “competent and dangerous than vague and useless”.
The clinical psychologist has rarely spoken about his process for becoming well-spoken until now.
It’s life-changing.
Remove the trash
It would help to tidy up your language because irrelevant words weaken your message.
First, start by removing filler words.
Your err’s and umm’s and like, you know, basically, stuff like that, I mean, probably, etc.
Corporate presentation expert Jerry Weissman, who is the Author of the book In The Line of Fire: How To Handle Tough Questions, says,
“The fillers diminish the essential words, making it difficult for the audience to absorb them, or worse, weakening the important words by surrounding them with all those qualifiers”.
The words “probably,” along with phrases like “I guess” and “sort of,” reflect a lack of confidence.
I’m guilty, like any other person who isn’t a scholar, of jargon and qualifiers like using the phrase “etc.” as I did earlier; it implies that I’m making you, the reader or anyone hearing my message, do all the work instead of spelling the damn thing out and telling you what I mean.
Peterson says if you want to compel, convince and entice people, you must remove these filler words with your concise message because it’s beyond foolish to pick “awkwardness over grace”.
Rewire your anxious brain.
Fear and apprehension are preventing people from communicating effectively.
My anxiety-induced feelings from global lockdowns resulted in far fewer social interactions, making speaking to people difficult.
I was out of practice, stuck in my head, hypersensitive and awkward in social situations. My internalised thinking made being in a flow state of articulation impossible.
I could barely string a sentence together, let alone weave the perfect sentence and deliver a confident message.
One research study shows higher public speaking anxiety levels correlate with poor self-perceived speech performance.
In other words, being articulate has little to do with outside factors but more with your personal view of yourself.
If you lack confidence, it’s likely to lead to poor speaking.
I wish I had come across Peterson’s golden rule for overcoming this sooner because it actually works.
He says if you’re socially anxious, your heart starts beating when you see the audience; why? Because the audience is the “metaphorical monster”.
Your knee-jerk reaction is thinking people judge you when you speak, or you feel like you look foolish, or, oh no, I’m sweating, or I don’t want to be here.
People being scared sh*tless is more common than you think.
Another research study surveyed 1,135 undergraduates student between the ages of 17–58, and 63.9% reported a fear of public speaking.
Almost the entire group, 89.3% surveyed, said they wanted classes to improve, and only 9% said they were completely comfortable speaking in public.
Peterson says the fear comes from being self-focused and having an internalised thought process. i.e. You’re focused too much on yourself.
While you can’t stop the focus on yourself, here’s what you should do.
Jordan Peterson — Source
“How do you tell people to stop thinking about themselves? You can’t.
It’d be like saying, don’t think of a white elephant.
You can’t tell someone to stop thinking about that because they get caught in a loop of thinking about the white elephant.
So what you do with socially anxious people is you say, look at other people, look at them; why? If you look at them, you can tell what they’re thinking, and when you focus on the person, your attention moves outward, so you should use your eyes to push your attention out.
All your automatic mechanisms kick in, and you stop becoming awkward”.
Imagine stepping on stones.
Jordan Peterson once said, “The most dangerous men are the ones that are articulate”.
In the same way that your fingers are differentiated and can move in different directions gracefully, speech is an act of articulation in the same manner.
So, how do you become articulate with language? Peterson says you must “start by paying attention to what you say”.
Pay attention to your words as if navigating in the dark along a path you can’t see so you feel the way forward with your feet. You stick to words and ideas you’re sure of.
Jordan Peterson — Source
“You can think of this as an analogy, so imagine that you’re trying to walk across a swamp, and the swamp is Murky.
You know there’s a path of stones under the Water, but it twists and moves.
If you stay on the path, you won’t drown, the crocodiles in the swamp won’t devour you, and as you walk forward, you can feel your next step where the stone might be.
Then you feel it solid, then you take that step, and then you do the same thing with your foot again; you search, and you find out where the next is, and you step on it, and you move forward in that manner that’s what you do with your words.
It’s the same thing when you feel and articulate yourself.
You think, is this the right word?
Is the fact that I’m uttering it putting me together, intact and stronger, or is it tearing me apart and making me dissolute and weak?
You can teach yourself to be articulate in that manner”.
Final Thoughts.
It’s a profound yet simple message.
Remove the trash filler words.
Rewire your anxious brain by focusing outwardly.
Stick to the stones on your path of words you are familiar with.
I’m as guilty as the next person when I use language to sound clever if I honestly self-analyse; sometimes, I don’t believe in what I’m saying.
40 years ago, Peterson began his journey of understanding himself better and realised that sometimes speaking weakened him.
Only about 5% of the time did he have a sure footing of the words he was using.
He said it was because often there was an alternative motive to his language.
He wanted to sound smart or win an argument, but they weren’t the words or ideas he had carefully chosen.
It’s a deep and nuanced message: you can learn to speak more thoughtfully, honestly, confidently and articulately by paying attention to how you talk.
Saying what you honestly believe to be true can make you dangerously articulate.