Accent Reduction – Get the Habit- Secrets from Research

Habits—we all have them.   Some good. Some bad.  You know what they are.  You know which are good.  You know which you should stop.  But… it’s hard.  In fact, sometimes you feel positively powerless.  And, fact is, you are not crazy.

Get this: 40% of what you do every day isn’t a decision – it’s a habit.

That’s what one paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found.

That’s right.  This researcher found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t on the spot decisions, but habits.

So you ask, what does this have to do with Accent Reduction? Keep reading.  I’ll get to that.

But first are actually bigger life-changing questions.

So what if you spend almost half your day on autopilot?  Changing bad habits isn’t just “sorta nice.”  If you want success, studies show habits really do matter.

People whose careers are moving are 53% more likely to have good habits.

I got this from The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

Comparing middle management employees, researchers have found that those whose careers continue to have momentum are 53 percent more likely to engage in healthy life habits than those whose careers are stalled – Roberts and Friend 1998

Accent Reduction?  Do you want to speak so it is much easier for everyone, native-born USA American speakers and non-native English speakers** to understand your speech and your information?

Did you know that the researchers have found that the fastest spoken languages in the world are Spanish and Japanese?

Did you know that in many languages – not just Spanish and Japanese– you are supposed to speak many many speech sounds very quickly.  In many languages, you are supposed to make the consonants at the ends of words very softly and gently?

Did you know that in USA American English,  clear speech happens when you clearly say all the consonants and vowels?

Research spanning a hundred years show that for clear, easy to understand English you need to

Speak the consonants and vowels clearly.  To do this:

• Make the slow muscle consonants and vowels slowly.

• Make the fast muscle consonants and vowels quickly.

• Pronounce each consonant and vowel loudly enough so the listener can hear and understand every USA American English sound.

• Do not slur the words or syllables together.

Want to reduce your accent?  Do you want everyone (native born USA and non-native born speakers from everywhere – Mexico, Columbia, China, Haiti, India, etc) to understand you, to get your information accurately?  Do you want to make your listeners happy?  Change this one habit.

Back to the big picture.

If you are on autopilot for half the day, you want those routines and habits to be good ones.  So what really works for tossing bad habits?  (The speaking of speech sounds too fast and/or too softly….  And all other bad habits?)

What really works for ditching bad habits?  And is not dreadfully difficult?  There are indeed half a dozen secrets in research.  We will get to each of them.

**Spanish accented, Chinese accented, India accented, Haitian accented—you get the melody

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Check out our new advanced weekly speech tip program, our new subscription called ClearTalk Weekly, www.subscription.cleartalkmastery.com

Rerun from May 11, 2016