Why You’re Not Good at Expressing Yourself in Words

And how to get good at it.

I had a friend when I was younger who was never very smooth with his words. Pete would lie badly, forget peoples’ names, and just couldn’t seem to express his sincerity to people when he actually was trying to be honest.

Part of Pete’s inability to express himself was due to the fact that avoiding vulnerability makes it impossible to express yourself well. The other part was because he was intellectually lazy.

Someone told him that acts of kindness really flatter a girl. So he came up with the idea of writing a list of five hundred reasons why he loved this girl he’d been dating for the last few months. It sounded like a pretty thoughtful act.

He showed me the list before he gave it to her and the first one was because you make me smile. “Well, that’s nice, I suppose,” I thought. One of the next ones was because you have nice hair.

The more I read, the more I noticed the same repeating pattern I should have expected from Chris. I didn’t bother reading all five hundred before I started making suggestions.

“Pete,” I said, “You know you could beef up some of these reasons if you really wanted. Nice isn’t a very impressive word. Lizzie’s hair is a lot more than just nice. What other word could you use to describe Lizzie’s hair that would make this sound better?”

Pete’s wheels began turning as he struggled to come up with a better word. He produced a few and we settled for one I can no longer remember. We kept doing that until class ended and then he rushed off to give her the revised list.

The little act of struggling to figure out a better way to say something to someone you love is more romantic than saying the first thing that comes to your mind. Saying the first thing that comes to mind is easy. You just open your mouth and let the words fall out.

Saying something a little more impactful, though, is hard. Sometimes how we feel about a person or a situation is as much a mystery to us as it is to other people. Only when faced with a situation where we have to describe how we’re feeling do we realize that we don’t know how to do that very well.

I was awful at expressing myself in words for the longest time. Besides being extremely passive and shy, I always held back what I really thought about people without truly realizing it. I just didn’t understand what it meant to communicate my opinions to others.

After living that way for years, I began to see the consequences of poor communication. And just like behaving a certain way for a long time can cause you to behave the exact opposite way later in life, I changed drastically. Today, I value the power of words and celebrate the vulnerability that comes with openly expressing them.

I made the statement earlier about Pete’s avoidance of vulnerability and how that makes it impossible to express yourself well. This is true. You can’t express yourself well in social situations if you can’t accept yourself for who you are.

Examples of men and women who were very good with their words include all sorts of writers, speakers, and leaders like Winston Churchill, Dorothea Dix, Elizabeth Roosevelt ,and Martin Luther King Jr. They didn’t have to pause for long periods to think about how they felt about something. They were so in tune with their thoughts and feelings that expressing them just came naturally.

Becoming a nuanced speaker will always help you in every situation. There is not one situation where being more effective in how you speak won’t get you farther.

Take a job interview for example. If you want your prospective employer to know that being a loving father makes you a hard worker, how do you say that?

You could say, “My kids are my motivation,” or, “I need this job so I can feed my family.” However, those two statements don’t make the interviewer feel the motivation your children give you. Your children may give you all the purpose you need to carry out every duty of the day, but someone you just met has no idea.

So you give them the idea by saying something that reaches deeper into the depths of your soul. “Ever since I had Rachel and Austin, I’ve found it utterly impossible to slack when there was work to be done. Whether at home or at the workplace, I find no shortage of reasons to put in extra mileage when I think about what those two angels mean to me.”

That would be a more effective way of not only letting an employer know what really drives you, but also distinguishing yourself from most of the other applicants. Everyone that has children is motivated by them. Everyone that has a family needs a job to feed them. The ubiquity of words deteriorates their value so that meaningful ones lose their meaning to us over time.

Let’s go back to romantic expression. You can tell you lover she looks pretty this evening. Or you could tell her she’s particularly difficult to keep your eyes off tonight. You could inquire as to what exactly she did to make her face glow like that. And of course, you could pay close attention to what she says and engage in deep conversations to show that you are interested in her thoughts and feelings.

Every author out there will tell you that you only get good at writing by writing frequently. Only then are you actually putting forth the effort to communicate ideas effectively through written words. This isn’t only how it is with writing, it’s how it is with thinking and speaking. Formulate intelligent thoughts in your head often enough and you will no longer be able to say things that sound dull.

In the world of art, the ability to find clever ways to express thoughts will make or break your career. Lyricists like Jay-Z and Eminem talk about spending hours upon hours every day when they were younger rearranging words to make their rhymes more powerful. Screenwriters say writing a 120-page script can sometimes take as long as writing a novel because you have to tweak every word to produce the strongest possible message on the screen.

There is only one way you get better at expressing yourself in words and that way is by trying. That’s it and that’s all. No one becomes fluent in heartfelt language without putting in the effort.

That requires soul searching to truly understand yourself. If you don’t know who you are, expressing yourself turns out to be a total mess. Discover yourself and discover the untapped parts of your soul that provide the most abundant reservoirs for impactful speech.

Practice saying things in different ways to see how flipping words around can change the entire meaning of sentences. Study the movement of other peoples’ mouths — how slight changes in tone and inflection reveal additional information about how a person is feeling. Actually sit down and think about what would happen if you said something better. Acknowledge that it’s worth it to do so.

An admiration for poetic speaking can’t hurt also. When you appreciate the beauty of intelligently manicured words, you’ll want to make similar ones come out of your mouth as well. If you don’t admire eloquent speaking, why would you want to speak that way yourself?

Everyone can learn how to express themselves more effectively. All it takes is the desire to sound better and the desire to practice. Besides improved quality of all your relationships, you will gain a sort of confidence in who you are. Really putting in the effort will make your everyday conversations sound like masterpieces.

Make your words come to life by bringing them to life.