I did all my graduate school interviews last fall. To prepare for them, I practiced all the likely questions I was expecting to get. Why do you want to go to our school? Why do you want to pursue an MBA? What are you going to focus on at our school? All that jazz. However, the most important piece of preparation didn’t come from answering mock questions. For these formal, professional, video call interviews, I knew I had to be on top of my game and not mumble a single word. 

Twenty minutes before my interview, I would pull up a video like this one:

I would run through the exercises and make sure my tongue and mouth were ready to talk. I would think to myself: “Slow down. Big mouth. Smile. Give the listener the best chance possible to understand me.” I don’t know how much doing these exercises actually helped me but they at least put me in a focused mentality. My roommates got a kick out of it. I can’t blame them. From their point of view they saw me put on a suit at 10:00pm, ask them to be respectfully quiet for the next hour, and then walk into my room to make a bunch of strange noises.

I am sure everyone who knows me has probably been in a conversation with me at some point where they did not understand something I said. Believe it or not, I am aware of my mumbling habit. At times, I have to focus quite deliberately on annunciating. My own personal theory is that I am more prone to mumbling the more comfortable I am talking to a person. So, if you have heard me mumble you could take it as a compliment.

In all seriousness, my mumbling is something that I have been aware of since I was a kid. While not exactly the same thing, I actually had a speech impediment as a kid and can remember going to speech therapy. Hard consonants at the start of words gave me a lot of trouble. The worst sounds were “K” and “R”. For example, a word like “Koala” would be very difficult to say. For some reason, words starting with those sounds would feel like they got stuck in my mouth. Like I literally couldn’t push them out into the world. Normally, it would only last 3-5 seconds but that can be a long time to be agonizing over saying a simple word when you are talking to someone. Especially, when they can see me struggling to get it out. This rarely happens anymore but I distinctly remember it occurring when I was younger. 

I still mumble. I am not sure if I will ever fully shake the habit. It doesn’t bother me at all when people tell me that they can’t understand me. I know it is something I do and I don’t feel any shame about it. But I do wish I communicated with more accuracy. I want to limit the amount of times I try to communicate something and it gets misheard, misinterpreted, or dismissed all together.

Communicating is difficult and confusing. I take it for granted most of the time. It sounds simple and self-evident but I do want to be more aware of what and how I am talking. The next step for me is reflecting on how I honestly sound (not what I think I say based on my own thoughts) and trying to hear myself from the perspective of the person I am talking to.