Intro: How Your Environment Shapes Your Speech

The way you speak influences every area of your life. So, how do you sharpen this skill? It starts before you even utter a word. I realized early on in my eloquence journey that clear, confident speech is the product of a well-nourished mind. Being an excellent speaker comes down to daily habits. We can either carelessly consume, or we can intentionally curate the content that is going to influence how we speak. I did this in my own life. I carefully and intentionally evaluated what I was taking in, all my inputs: the books I was reading, the articles, the whole communication garden, if you will, and built it back from the ground up. The result is a system that has elevated how I speak. I call it the edifying environment. Today we are going to build yours.

Edifying. What does that word actually mean? The root is from a Latin word that means to build. So when we think of edifying, it is something that is building you up, typically your mind and your character. When we think edifying environment, we’re creating a space in which you are building your mind and building yourself.

If this is your first time seeing my face or hearing my voice, I’m Celeste, host of A Better Way to Say.

Recap: The Flower Metaphor

On the last episode of this podcast, we talked about reasons why you might not be articulate. One of the reasons was focusing too much on the output, which is your speech, and not enough on the inputs that will influence that. I had you picture a flower, and I want you to think about that again today. The flower is the blossom at the top, that is your speech. But the flower doesn’t appear magically. It requires an ideal environment, the right support, in order to flourish.

So today, we’re going to curate your edifying environment, because if what you read, if what you listen to, if what you think about daily can be improved, then your communication will improve as a result. This practice of building daily habits to support your larger speaking goals is not new. It’s been lost, I would say, but it’s a time tested principle that many great speakers of the past have used, including one I’ve been reading about recently: Francis Bacon, a philosopher and statesman who had a dedicated daily practice in which he imbibed sources from those who went before him and from sources of his own day and age. The beauty of our day and age is that we have such quick access to things that can edify us, if only we decide to reach for them.

Step 1: Define Your Spheres of Interest

Step number one is to define your spheres of interest. This is the thrilling part, because we get to lean into what naturally attracts our passion and interests and then build that into our daily routine. Think of yourself as the architect of your environment. You are going to pick one to two interests that fit two criteria: first, it needs to be of deep enough interest that you wouldn’t mind learning about it every day. Don’t pick something you only have passing, surface level care for. Second, it needs to be specific enough that you can study it without feeling overwhelmed. If you enjoy art, that’s beautiful, but art is a very broad umbrella, so you’d likely need to niche down, perhaps into Renaissance art, a certain artist, or Impressionism.

If you’re not sure what to pick, ask yourself: What topic have I spent hours looking into, gone down the rabbit hole on, just because I was interested? What authors, essayists, columnists, or creators do I routinely interact with and feel pulled to, and is there a common thread between them? And what subject could I speak about for hours? We all have interests like this that grip us, and it’s almost as if we don’t choose our interests, our interests choose us, and we simply need to be attuned enough to hear it.

One thing I admire about Francis Bacon is that he was a polymath: a politician and statesman, but also a philosopher, who melded those worlds. He also had interests that were private and personal to himself. As you’re picking your interest, don’t view it through the lens of would other people find this interesting. View it through the lens of would I?

Step 2: Choose Your Sources

Now we are going to choose our sources. Think of this as a privilege: we can access information from the ancients to the moderns, to podcasts, to professors, whoever, something most people throughout human history could never have dreamed of. We’ll build our environment in two parts, the physical world and the digital world.

Starting with the physical world: books. We’re often told if you want to speak well, you should read more, but that advice doesn’t go far enough. What should we read, and how often? Francis Bacon has a quote that helps me visualize how I choose books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

Books to be tasted are ones you don’t have to read cover to cover to get something out of, like a business book where only a portion is relevant, or a collection of essays you dip into depending on your mood. Books to be swallowed are quick reads that don’t demand deep study, fun fiction or light reads. Books to be chewed and digested are the intense ones, treatises, philosophical reflections, scientific papers, the kind you walk through with a highlighter. As you build your own environment, choose books from different levels so you don’t feel overburdened or under-stretched.

For me, a book to be tasted is Lend Me Your Ears, a compendium of great speeches from Thucydides’ Funeral Oration through the Gettysburg Address. A book to be chewed and digested is The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, which I’ve read multiple times and often quote from. When you choose your books, I advise picking one collection style book, essays or stories from a single author, so you hear their voice repeatedly until you learn the rhythms of their speech. I like rereading collections by Joan Didion and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The habit of rereading is drastically underrated; I think it solidifies something in the subconscious.

For the digital world, focus on the mediums you already consume, podcasts, YouTube, Substack, whatever it is, and pick creators and shows within your chosen topics. I’m biased toward podcasts. For philosophy, I listen to Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy Bites. For learning how to structure arguments clearly and speak with conviction, I like the Munk Debates. Consider who you already like to listen to and whose speech you’d like to emulate, because it’s important to have speech role models. While you’re on your phone, consider setting time limits on social media, because you need to clear out the weeds if you want to speak in a clear, confident, well structured way.

Step 3: Turn It Into Daily Habits

Step three is the most pivotal part, where we weave in our topics, our books, our edifying environment, and actually put it into practice. Your books mean nothing if they’re sitting idly on the shelf. To create an environment that supports your goal of becoming a better speaker, you need three elements: reading, expanding and reviewing vocabulary, and writing and reflection.

Reading: read in an engaged rather than passive way. Take notes, highlight what you like, write in the margins about connections to other ideas. Don’t underestimate the power of rereading, it solidifies the prose and words more concretely in your mind. Look for the idle moments in your day, lunchtime, the train, the treadmill, and always keep a book on you.

Expand and review: have a dedicated practice of taking in new vocabulary and phrases and reviewing them routinely. I keep a vocab list on my phone that I’ve translated into a flashcard app, and whenever I have a spare ten minutes, I go through the fifty or so terms I’m weaving into my vocabulary. The hardest part is actively engaging: when you hear a phrase you like, pull it in. If you want help with this practice, the Eloquence Unlocked guide is in the show notes, with details on exactly how to do it.

Writing and reflection: as I’ve studied the great philosophers of the past, one commonality is that they kept a journal where they wrote their ideas, separate from their published works. I highly suggest weaving in a writing or journaling practice, or at least a reflective practice, into your daily routine, where you have no inputs coming in and simply sit and let the thoughts flow.

A Day in My Life

In the morning, before I touch my phone, I read for twenty minutes. I’ve found that reading in the morning, instead of starting with emails, is a calming reset that propels my day in a great direction. At midday, I listen to a podcast during lunch. Later in the day, I take ten to fifteen minutes for my vocab review. In the evening, pre-bed, I journal, my time for reflection and writing. And before bed, I do my second reading session, typically a longer session with a deeper book. I start my day with reading, and I end it with reading.

What’s Coming Next

We’ve covered building and cultivating that garden. But what about the actual act of speaking? That’s what the next episode covers: how to practice speaking in a way that stretches you, but is also fun. Thanks for listening to A Better Way to Say. I’m Celeste, and I’ll see you on the next episode. Until then, speak well.