© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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Attitude plays an important role here. Dale Carnegie writes in How to Win Friends and Influence People that you cannot truly win an argument. For one thing, you're doing most of the talking. You gain nothing and learn nothing that way. Even worse, because you have proven your point, the conversation ends. You've attained, finality, certainty, stasis. If you really must prove a point because you have a need to in business, or with your children or in a similar situation, you had better find an indirect way of accomplishing the task. Arguing is not the way. Anybody can do that. When a person with verbal skill and authority argues, the effect is like a bulldozer, flattening everything in its path. The more difficult task is to start a kinetic fire going under the other person, to generate probing thought, to use words as roving Shocks. You do this with gentle arrows, not with sledge hammers. Logic has nothing to do with it.

The Trans-Biological terms for the dichotomy between direct and roundabout speech are Ascending vs. Descending Language. Descending Language tends to lead to a cadence, a stop, a definite state of knowledge and certainty that leaves the human element wanting. Ascending Language does the opposite. Good teachers almost always use Ascending Language, involving questions, hypothetical situations, “what if” scenarios. Good salespeople are adept at the same skills. Sales are not accomplished by rattling off lists of benefits and mathematically calculating price-reward ratios. Sales today, whether in person or through advertising, are made by building human states like personal trust, or, in the case of a product, cachet and image. Even presidential campaigns are decided on questions of personal likeability, “issues” running a distant second.

When you communicate with others you always choose small bits to impart to them out of many possible choices. You always edit what you say. In the other direction, you only get small portions of the other person's individuality, from which you attempt to extrapolate the whole. So communication is a dynamic, give-and-take process where certainty and clarity are replaced by a form of linguistic intimacy. You are never obscure for the sake of being obscure, for this is a form of static manipulation, a perversion of your creative human powers of expression. What you do inject into the process is Creative Confusion, uplifting doubt, possibility and new Vectors and directions.

Exercise: Ascending and Descending Language

• Watch your next week's worth of conversational exchanges, paying attention to your possible tendency to use Descending Language.

• Practice using Ascending Language to add constructive doubt and ambiguity to your communications, either written or oral. For example, in a memo, instead of writing: “This plan will increase sales by 15%,” you could write: “This plan should work to increase sales by 15% in this region, with opportunities for fine tuning the plan as we gain experience.” The 15% is not engraved in stone (you used the word “should” instead of “will”) and you leave open the idea that further creative action by all concerned is both possible and expected.

• Telling the teenager “No, you cannot borrow the car,” is Descending Language. Rather say, “I don't think you deserve the car” (leaving open the question why), or “I don't think you're an experienced enough driver to go that far that late” (implying that the teenager will eventually gain the experience).