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Confidence Wins - So Stop Being Tentative in Email

Guest post by: Keith Ferrazzi

Article Overview: It’s time to inventory your email and see whether you’re communicating confidence or uncertainty with your outreach.

Confidence Wins - So Stop Being Tentative in Email

It's time to inventory your email and see whether you're communicating confidence or uncertainty with your outreach. I'm happy to be able to share this tip from my friend Tim Sanders' moving and instructive new book, Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence, just out today. (You can order it and get a free e-book here.) It's full of ideas about how to adopt and project a confident mindset, one that keeps reminding you that today is the day and tomorrow will be even better. The book is also extremely personal: Tim's remarkable grandmother is the source of many of the book's lessons, including the mantra that became the book's title.

Here's a passage from Today We Are Rich on how to audit your email to make sure your projecting confidence - a key attitude to win others to you're POV:

"Stop using tentative words; they hedge conversation to the point of being meaningless. The unconfident person talks with qualifiers and commits to very little. Tentative words include maybe, perhaps, might, somehow, allegedly, no offense, just saying, should, unlikely, probably, possibly, likely, may, could be, appears, suggests, leads one to think, and so on.

"If you want to project confidence, say what you believe, and say it directly. You'll find that once the namby-pamby words are gone, confident statements remain. One way you can examine your vocabulary is to audit the e-mails you've sent on a challenging or stressful day. Were you using power words? It's a good idea to audit your e-mails periodically to measure your improvement. Sam Knoll, a Novell employee who took one of my e-mail training courses, did this, and in less than ninety days, he saw a dramatic change in his vocabulary - and an added benefit: ‘When I reviewed three days of my own e-mails, I was floored by how wimpy I wrote. I printed several of them out and circled the weak words and lack-luck language. In just a few reading sessions, I realized that I needed to proof my notes differently in the future - for strength as well as grammar.'"

Great advice, Tim! Readers, go check out your email and report back - will they win hearts and minds? Tell me on the blog.

Warmly,

Keith

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Article Tags: confidence, email, outreach, uncertainty



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