Does Your Language Align with Your Values?
When thinking about how your language aligns with your values, consider a health care company choosing to use non-violent language rather than language that might be construed as violent. That company might focus on achieving goals instead of achieving targets, and it might use information points instead of bullet points.
Begin thinking about what kind of language and alignment you want to present this year. Joseph Campbell wrote that if you want to change your world, change your metaphor. To that I would add this: once you have your metaphor, select your language.
The metaphor “war on drugs” made it easy to think about jailing people as prisoners of war. It seemed acceptable to use increasingly harsh tactics because, after all, you were in a war. Now we’re looking at drugs as a health problem. In a way we were captured by our metaphor without even realizing the implication of it.
As you consider beginning to consciously change your metaphor, you may want to consciously change your focus. Focus is the attention you place on something. So linguistically, if you want to be more resourceful, create a focus that allows you to see a bigger picture. If you’re planning some sort of campaign, speak to the larger purpose. Say things about who will be positively impacted by what you want to do this year. This opens up the picture to lots of possible options.
If you want to adjust your focus later, after establishing the bigger picture, you will just need to “chunk down” to a narrower focus. Who will be affected? What’s most important to them? Focusing on these answers will move things down to a narrower focus.
If I decide that one of the things I want to do this year is to be more optimistic, I can preplan optimism by choosing ahead of time what I’m going to focus on. Eliminate the negative by refusing to dwell on problems or unhealthy comparisons with others. Often when you feel bad it’s because you’ve been making a comparison with someone else instead of a focusing on how you are doing now compared to how you were doing before.
This year you want to create the right state of mind for whatever task you’re going to engage in. In the same way that an athlete cultivates the right mindset to win, you can consciously cultivate the mindset you need to support your activities this year.
My challenge to you is to set a frame for the coming year—consciously set the frame for the year you want to have. Go beyond goals to mindset and purpose.
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I like to collect stories about belief change experiences. If you have any interesting ones, let me know or post them below so I can comment on them in subsequent articles or posts.
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About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
