What’s in a word….. Well! I say – everything! The word you use is the experience you’ll have! If you just ‘like’ your job , you’ll have a problem falling in love with it. On the other hand, if you are ‘passionate’ about your work, you’ll jump out of the bed every morning.
It’s true.. The words we use to describe anything can make us experience those emotions. If I replace my ‘negative’ emotion words with words of lesser intensity, I’ll experience less pain. Try substituting ‘ a tad low’ for ‘depressed’ in your vocabulary and see the difference! Or scrape out words like defeat, problem, hate, humiliated etc from your list of words you use, and you’ll find yourself experiencing these ‘negative’ states much less frequently.
On the contrary, if we’re habitually using the less intensity words to describe our day or state like.. ‘im good’ , ‘I feel fine’, life is ok’, then ‘good, fine and ok’ is how we are going to experience life. But if we substitute these with juicier words like ‘i feel awesome’, ‘life is rocking’ and ‘I’m on top of the world’ – can you just imagine the how our experience of life would change! One of my favorites coaching tools is substituting words that disempower with words that might not feel that heavy.
One of my coachees found the word ‘commitment’ very binding and restrictive. So, we went from ‘ I’m making a commitment’ to ‘I’m giving my word’ to finally ‘I’m promising’ – which she liked. Another coachee, though, increased the intensity and got to ‘I commit’ to make herself take action! Yet another coachee thought of an interview more like an ‘interrogation’, which made him nervous- so we got to substituting this ….he went from ‘judging’ to ‘asking questions’ to ‘having a conversation’ to finally ‘having a friendly chat’ which made him relax a lot more.
The aim here is to just lessen the experience of pain by lowering the intensity of the ‘negative’ words . At the same time, we heighten the experience of pleasure by increasing the intensity of the’positive words’
Simple put, transformational vocabulary is just transforming your vocabulary to transform your experience. It’s so simple that it’s baffling – but take a leap of faith and try it….. Believe you me, a life-changing insight awaits you!! 🙂
Click the link below to view video on Transformational Vocabulary