TO GET AHEAD, CLEAN UP BAD SPEECH HABITS
Several types of speech problems make people appear to be uneducated and can hold them back in their careers. Including:

* Speaking like an adolescent. Using phrases like "that's like so cool" makes you sound young and inexperienced. Add frequent use of "y' know," or using the word "go" instead of said, "He goes, 'It sure would!' adds to the perception.
* Cussing. Using the f-word, cuss words, or calling people profane names.
* Ignoring rules of grammar: Saying "he don't" or "they was" instead of he doesn't and they were. Or saying "me and Joe" instead of Joe and I. These mistakes make others think you don't know the rules of grammar.
* Using abrasive regional accents. Avoid saying "deez and doze" instead of these and those. Avoid dropping an r or adding an r to a word. Avoid saying "yah" instead of yes. In some areas of the north, saying 'y'all' would be considered improper.
Lack of education is often not the cause of a poor speech habit. Educated people may speak, or lapse into speaking, the colloquial English that was used in neighborhoods where they grew up.
* Speaking with lack of confidence.
It's difficult to gain respect from others when your statements sound tentative. If you have a statement to make, make it. Don't start with "I think," which indicates that you lack self-confidence.

Avoid ending sentences using a rising inflection as if a statement were a question.

In her Wall Street Journal column "Managing Your Career," Joann Lublin gives many examples of bosses who wanted to promote a person but couldn't do it because of their poor speech habits. But a growing number of businesses are hiring speech coaches for rising stars.

The coach analyzes an individual's conversation, pinpoints shortcomings, and videotapes the session. Clients take the tape home and do drills in front of a mirror.

But feedback from your boss and fellow workers is free, and it could be all the help you need to clean up a bad habit or two.

GREAT INNOVATORS HAVE THICK SKIN
An innovation is different from an invention. It's inventiveness put to good use.

Thomas Edison had the right idea when he told his people, "We've got to come up with something. We can't be like those German professors who spend their whole lives studying the fuzz on a bee." In his book, They Made America (Little, Brown & Co.), Harold Evans contends that invention without innovation is a pastime.

He says the defining characteristic of the innovator is a determination to "bring a brainwave into the bustle of the marketplace." But the innovator without a thick skin will fail, because anyone advocating change has to put up with all the nay-sayers with their "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" statements.

Consider Raymond Damadian who was described as a "screaming lunatic" for thinking nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could be used for medical diagnosis. Theodore Judah was called "crazy Judah" for advocating a railway over the high Sierras. And Amadeo Giannini was called a "hothead dago" for setting up branch banking for the masses: Bank of America.

Most innovations come from borrowing and combining rather than from invention. Henry Ford said "I have invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work."

Evans says innovators may be prompted by vanity or the desire to be acknowledged by their peers. There's nothing wrong with that. In the end, they bring good to their organizations and the country.

What does this mean to you and me? It means that if we have an idea and skin thick enough to withstand the statements of nay sayers, our brainwave could result in something important.