Quick Mindset Upgrade – Language

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“It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.” -Dr. Jordan Peterson

I don’t believe that being optimistic means that you should be smiling all of the time and jumping up and down in excitement every moment (although more power to you if you do feel like that). It simply means seeing the upside more often than you see the negatives, and giving yourself a fair chance in life rather than writing things off.

How Do You Talk to Yourself?

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The core of a negative mindset is a simplistic pattern of thinking where people:

• magnify negative events
• treat ambiguous events negatively
• minimize the significance of positive events, or sometimes ignore them altogether

This would not be a problem if it consistently added to the quality of our lives. Negative, or more accurately, critical thinking does have value when it is correctly applied to a specific area of our lives for a period of time, with the aim of improving something. When this becomes our default way of thinking for most areas of our lives with no particular aim, we run into challenges. Simply put, chronic negativity impedes our progress and performance. It takes away the desire to make things better, because you can’t see how things can be better.

It’s one thing to be negative about events, circumstances and other people, but when it comes to ourselves and our potential, we can never be right because we can never be completely objective about ourselves.

Fortunately, one of the easiest ways of shifting this mindset is by looking at and changing the words that we use.

What is in a name?

Many of our life experiences and challenges are felt experiences – we feel something happening inside during various situations. Take public speaking for example. Many people will experience an accelerated heart rate, sweaty palms and butterflies in their stomach. An inexperienced speaker will automatically assume something is wrong and say that they are nervous. What has happened then is they have taken their felt experience and given it a label. When we give experiences a label, then we also start to experience everything that goes with it, good and bad.

Saying that you are nervous will activate the confirmation bias for nerves (finding information that reinforces ones existing beliefs and filtering out everything else). This results in you feeling everything that goes with feeling nervous – physically, emotionally and cognitively.

The experienced speaker will have the same inner feelings but will label them differently, by saying they are ready or excited (incidentally, nervous and excited has the same physiological pattern). This activates the confirmation bias for preparedness and excitement.

Speak that which you want to become

What you say about the experience is what the experience ultimately becomes. And this is not limited to our felt internal experiences, it can happen in the outside world too. A problem can either be a disaster that wrecks your life, a challenge that needs to be overcome, or an opportunity (for growth and learning) that you may not yet be aware of. Are you livid, angry or annoyed? Are you okay, good or fantastic? Language can act as an unconscious magnifier of our experiences, both good and bad. We can take bad situations and lower their emotional intensity, and increase the intensity of positive events, and vice versa. We just need to be more conscious of our everyday language. Start training yourself to take the ambiguous and negative things that happen and start training yourself to speak about them differently. And if you have nothing good to say… Then don’t say anything at all.