Swear Like You Care: Passionate Profanity at Wor

Disclaimer: If you are the sensitive or easy-to-offend type, read no further, especially if mild profanity is offensive or hurts your eyes.

If you haven't uttered a single "shit" or "f**k" in the last 30 days at work (even in private), it might mean you just don't care.

There are an infinite number of situations where swearing is inappropriate in the workplace. But the scenarios in which swearing is not only acceptable, but appropriate and inspiring, are exactly why you should become proficient in passionate profanity in 2015.

It might even get you promoted.

The use of profanity in the workplace is an incredibly polarizing issue, with unique perspectives as you shift country to country, company to company, and person to person. In fact, more than half of American's and more than three quarters of Britishswear regularly in the workplace. A Google search on "profanity in the workplace" has over 500,000 results ranging from "WTF? Is your workplace a hotbed of profanity?" to "Watch your mouth, cursing in the workplace could get you fired". We can all agree to disagree on when it's appropriate to swear at work.

However, if you are passionate about what you do, there is a specific reason to incorporate deliberate and intelligently architected profanity into your game at work.

It's massively memorable, proves your passion, and will help you bond with your audience. (if you don't f**k up the delivery)

There are many scenario's where passionate profanity has a true business application: Team meetings, large group events, 1:1 discussions, hallway conversations, commiserating with colleagues. If you dare cross that line at work, I suggest starting in a simple place. Ensuring your presentations are MASSIVELY MEMORABLE.

Leverage profanity to deliver massively memorable presentations. Contrary to what you might think, words are better than pictures.....And profane words are better than regular words to drive your most important point home.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is a commonly accepted premise in the business world. Most people nod their head approvingly when you say it. The business world has shifted to highly visual presentation materials. As a result, Powerpoint is the most overused (and arguably ineffective) presentation tool on planet Earth. But as we shift to easy visuals and metaphoric presentations, we are dismissing almost 100 years of research on how the brain processes information.

You may not have heard of the "Stroop Effect", but it's an 85 year old theory on the brains ability to process and prioritize information quickly. The classic Stroop test consists of a series of words in different colors. The goal is to simply say the color when the word appears. Try it below:

Not incredibly easy, is it? But doable. It gets quite a bit harder when those images flash quickly on the screen one by one. When you get home, there is a NSFW example of the Stroop test using profanity here (same disclaimer applies from above). It gets exponentially harder to name the color when profane words appear.

But why? The Stroop theory asserts that the brain processes words at a faster pace than colors or imagery. If there were a word/image race, the word wins. As a result of this race, your brain struggles to take in images when words are competing for the same attention. Words that trigger an emotional reaction, essentially beat out all other images and words in the race to your cerebral cortex. This means that you can massively emphasize the most important parts of a presentation by deliberately incorporating strong emotional words.

Profanity simply ups the ante, creates intense emotion and cements focus.

Harvard Science Review summed it up nicely, "Swear words, in the appropriate context, can be beneficial when used for group unity, coherence, and general expressiveness."

Dan McGinn, in a Harvard Business Review article titled "Should Leaders Ever Swear?" called out Barack Obama for leveraging deliberate (though mild) profanity after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama told Matt Lauer on live television that "one of his goals was to determine "Whose ass to Kick". This statement gave viewers immediate insight into his state of mind, intent, and focus on solving the problem. Imagine if he had said his focus was on "conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the spill".

Not as much impact, eh?

I am definitely not taking a stab at that! Hey, I don't work at your company. Shit. I don't want to get you in trouble. Get creative, test some boundaries, have some fun. Even in the most conservative companies, you can find the right forum to express your thoughts in a...well "colorful" way.