Since 2002, hearty and fun-loving men and women everywhere have been celebrating the obscure holiday of “Talk Like a Pirate” Day on September 19. Yes, for a full 24 hours, supporters swap their real speech for pirate terms, in all settings. Makes for very interesting staff meetings, I can tell you! For more details, click here.
This holiday got us thinking here at Point Taken. Since we teach people to ‘talk like successful senior executives (perhaps this should be it’s own holiday?), would it be that different to teach someone to talk like a pirate? That is, how much of speaking skills are taught? Turns out, a lot of what we think of as our ‘natural’ speech patterns are actually learned behaviors. We just learned them so long ago that they have the feel of having always been there.
In the next few days, the trainers at Point Taken will be having some fun with ITLAP Day – if you follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, you can see some of the best instruction we can give to get you talking like a pirate!
If you want to talk like a successful senior executive, our advice remains the same: make slightly more sustained eye contact (in all settings), and use a louder, more animated voice during presentations to grab the audience’s attention. Actually, this might be good advice for pirates as well. http://pirateglossary.com/
Arrrright, me hearties, let’s run a rig and have some fun on ITLAP Day!