I Have Mastered the Art of Talking to Myself Without Moving My Lips
Hey, don’t laugh, it’s a key skill. The only creepy thing about it is I can look at someone right in the eye and be muttering to myself at the same time. And even though I have at least another 40 years before I’m at that station in life where muttering is just something you do, I’m getting an early start because I’ve discovered that it has high value. I’m not the first to discover this, as it turns out. Experiments have been done to prove that regularly talking to yourself is a positive thing: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/25/talking-to-yourself-may-actually-be-a-good-idea/. All the scientific research aside, the value I get from my outward-inner-dialogue is the art of practicing my next line. That’s because I so often find myself in boardroom meetings with very passionate people. Which is probably not that uncommon. What’s also not uncommon, is that the people in the room don’t all share the same views. They can be passionately expressing opposing views with each other while earnestly trying their best to do what’s best for their company. I, on the other hand, am an outsider invited in – and I’m equally passionate about trying to mediate them towards achieving the ideal solution to some often delicate challenges. The muttering comes in handy because I can try-out ideas out loud, so to speak, before I actually say them. It’s funny how things can sound so different in your head, compared to how they sound when they’re actually spoken. Or mumbled. About a week ago I was a participant in a very heated debate on a company’s policy towards the layout of their standard work breakdown structure for their projects going forward. They were growing