The Magic of Words

It's impossible to over-emphasize the power of language. "I can't do that" is often followed by the inability to do something. "I never win anything" almost never results in a grand prize drawing with your name on it. "why does this always happen to me?" usually brings more of the same.

As Florence Scoval Shinn once wrote, "Your word is your wand."

And yet, how many of us think we want something, only to hear the exact opposite fall out of our mouth? How many of us keep puking our past into our future? Far too many, I say.

If you want to make changes in your life, you've got to get that it all starts in language. You've got to be ultra-conscious about every single word that comes out of your mouth if you want to create new results, different from whatever you've been getting that you're not happy with.

For one thing, don't talk about anything you're not going to do.

This encompasses a lot more than you may think. For example, don't say, "I'm starving" when what you really mean is "I'm hungry." I am amazed at the number of overweight people who keep saying over and over "I'm starving."

You must remember that your subconscious mind does not understand sarcasm, cannot take a joke, and only understands literal words.

So what happens when your subconscious hears "I'm starving" come out of your mouth? It clings to every fat cell, because it thinks you must be starving and it shuts down into starvation mode. You'll never ever lose weight if you keep saying "I'm starving" no matter how much you exercise, because you're telling your body to hold on to everything it's got.

"It's killing me" is another one. Interestingly enough, whoever started that saying is probably already dead. So if you don't want to follow them, stop saying it. I admit, this was a hard one for me to stop, being a child of the late 70s and 80s, when it was quite popular. Were you really "dying" to go to that concert? That's when you attract things like lethal car wrecks or freak accidents, when you're constantly saying you're "dying" to do this or that. I once read a story of a man who always (repeatedly) said he'd give his right arm to make his sick daughter well. He was in a freak accident where he lost her arm. He got a big insurance settlement, which paid the cost of her required treatments.

What you speak about, you bring about. Period.

So what are you talking about? Really?

The interesting thing is that we don't really HEAR at least 50% of what comes out of our own mouths. Adn when someone else repeats it back to us, we are likely to say "I never said that."

But more about that in a future post. I've alreayd rambled on too long today. (Or have I?)

HEre is your QoD:

What are you consciously creating through your every day language? What word or phrase do you deserve to banish from your life forever?