Speak with emotion! ~ that's the secret ingredient
... continued from Speaking and eating

Now, here’s an extra secret ingredient for both of these processes, the need of which is ignored most of the time: the EMOTION you may want to include in the makeup of your offering (food or a spoken message). That is the hidden passion, love, a positive feeling towards the person receiving your offering, as well as a strong wish to present the best result of your work. For example, how do you say 'I love you!' in a heartfelt way?

What makes the difference between a common cook and a professional chef is the passion or lack of that they put in producing that meal.

The same goes with a speaker: the emotion one puts in her act of speech come through at the other end like a current. This makes the difference between a person speaking and an artist persuading or seducing her audience, think of the great leaders that history produced along the centuries.

It wasn’t their coercive power that made people follow them – it was the feeling and the conviction they put in their speech that produced masses of followers. It was the belief they managed to share effectively with their listeners. And how did they manage to do that? They did it by using the right words and phrases, with the right intonation and the appropriate strength, at the right time.

So, now… the question is how can you do that? How can you learn to speak English like that? I shall use an example from my own circumstances in answering this question. The truth is that I don’t cook very well, in fact… I cook very badly! But I do want to cook well, I badly want to be able to produce a good meal and share it with my friends. I have 3 shelves full of cookery books at home and I keep copying recipes of savoury looking dishes from magazines and I keep asking my mum and my friends for tips on how to cook certain dishes.

And then, when it comes to it, when I actually pick up one recipe, the first thing I do is consider its ingredients list, the time for cooking and the level of skill required (some recipes will indicate ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’) and then … I abandon it. I don’t even start to do my shopping list for the ingredients – what do you think of that? If I find a recipe using ingredients I actually have in my kitchen I will abandon that one at stage 3 or 4, at the moment of combining and cooking them at the right time and for the right length of time. Well, I mean I abandon the idea of having a good result – I will usually settle with a bad result, as I don’t believe in throwing food away when so many people die of hunger in the world.

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