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Every word counts

My friend Matt is up here in Queensland for a week to watch the Super Bowl together. He expresses himself really well and understands how you say what you say matters a lot. And he has some words that he things do not help you live better. One of them is: ‘quickly’.

Let’s say someone says to him (for example), ‘I’ll just quickly go to the bathroom,’ and they rush to do it, he tries to tell them there’s no need to rush. There’s no need for the ‘quickly’. Just do what you want to do. There is time. Get rid of ‘quickly; and it’s: ‘I’ll just go to the bathroom.’ You don’t have to rush. Your time is as valuable as theirs.

I do this too. I don’t like to keep the other person waiting. But I’ve stopped saying it the last couple days and I feel the difference already. I don’t mind waiting for my friends and I’m pretty sure they don’t really mind either.

One word can make a huge difference to how you live your life. Here are a couple other poisonous ones:

‘Try’ & ‘Should’

TRY

When it comes to goals, instead of saying ‘I’m going to try and exercise every night’ or in my case, ‘I want to try and write a blogpost every day.’ I purposely say, ‘I’m going to write a blog post every day.’

Saying ‘Try’ gives you permission to fail. ‘Well I only said I was going to try’. And if you don’t actually do what you set out to do, when you said ‘I’m going to…’, you feel guilty about it. And guilt is a very motivating factor to get back on track and do it tomorrow, so you don’t feel as bad as you did about your goals today.

SHOULD

This is another one. This is especially important in a relationship. I’m trying to be a better partner for my fiancee (and in 3 weeks – my wife). I’m going to stop saying, ‘you should have…’ Or ‘you should…’ (as in ‘you should do it this way’ for example), which is laden with judgement and assuming the way I do that thing is the correct way. Often it is not. ‘I think a good way to do that is…’ or ‘maybe a different way to do that is…’ are a couple alternatives that I’m going to say instead. Every single word you say can make a huge difference, to the other person’s life and most importantly yours.

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