Overcoming Bad Habits

Have you ever done a presentation, be interviewed or just listening in on a presentation, and start noticing these ‘bad words’. Not as in profanity, but those that come out of habit since you use them so much in your everyday vocabulary that it appears normal. You have the ‘ummm’ or ‘uhhh’, ‘I think’, ‘I guess’, ‘so’, ‘like’, and so on. They’re not good to use when you’re being interviewed for a job right after you graduated, especially in this economy.

Having passed the application round of the JET Program, or Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program, I have my interview towards the end of February. However I get nervous during interviews and most of the time I speak before I think, which can get very messy and confusing. My supervisor in my current internship puts me up to a challenge to prepare myself before the interview. In my ‘Bad Word Tracker’ sheet, if I say one of those bad habit phrases or words, I get tallied for every one of them each week. I already knew it was going to be difficult and got marked three times within 15 minutes since the challenge initiated.

Everyone takes for granted of how casual we speak including me. There’s no one to point out your mistake and therefore take corrective action to try and prevent it from occurring more often. This challenge or what I consider a ‘game’, forces you to rethink how you usually phrase your thoughts and each time you say it, you increasingly become self-conscious of it. In a way, I find it beneficial and interesting even though it is bit demanding mentally but on my second day, I was tally free! I still have the rest of the semester to survive and hopefully not see the whole sheet covered with strikes. Let’s see you try not saying bad phrases for one whole semester.