Choosing Words To Create Our Experience & Who We Want To Be

Our words shape our experience. The way we tell our story or our narrative creates the way we feel about the story. And that, therefore, creates the way we act upon the story.

If you are having a conversation with your date or your spouse and in that moment you are thinking ‘she doesn’t really care about me’ or ‘he doesn’t really love me’ or ‘he’s just talking to me like this because he’s just being nice’. ‘They would stop this conversation long ago if they could’. The feelings then come with those thoughts are typically feelings like anxiousness, loneliness, sadness, unworthiness, etc. This instantly can make you feel negative physical sensations in the body. The feeling-sensation is now actually an embodied experience and now all this is going to influence how I talk next, what I say. Now I’m going to talk too much and maybe over-share because I’m feeling unsure. And I’m going to talk more and now I’m rambling and I’m all over the place. Now I am thinking even more that I am not interesting and I am scattered and he or she does not want to be listening to all this.

Our narrative, our story, one phrase, one thought becomes our experience and our experience become the motor for our behavior and the motor for our behavior lands us in a place that is often the exact opposite of where we actually want to go.

Now, if we run a different narrative or story in the same situation and instead we think, ‘They are really happy to have me here and I can tell because they are smiling and asking me questions and this is really enjoyable for them’. This different narrative, these different thoughts completely change our entire experience of our world.

This is just one example. Think of all the times that the words we choose to think or speak or write influence how our world and experience unfolds. If we have a specific goal in life….maybe eating healthier, maybe connecting more to a child or partner, maybe finding more job satisfaction, maybe writing a book….whatever it is, the words we use to describe these things, how we think about these things, how we talk about these things to others will influence if we obtain and live out these goals in our real, every day lives.

This is not about “thinking positive”. This is about thinking in a more useful or helpful way, choosing more useful and helpful words, to get us where we want to be in life or who we want to be life.

Pay attention to your words, your sentences, your narrative, your stories. They make all the difference to our lives as well as to others in our lives.