Is Your Language Lighting Up Your World?

We've all got a list of things a mile long of all the shoulds, musts, have-to's, got to's in life. How do you feel when you tell yourself you should exercise, you have to take better care of yourself, you've got to clean the house today? These words lack in energy, passion, enthusiasm. You say them and it creates a resistance to the task at hand. They are otherwise known as  "Modal Operators of Necessity". As a result, you then tend to shy away from the things you know that will benefit you if you did in fact do them.

These words are heavy.Filled with rules. Full of implications and necessity. There are consequences ..... big ones, if you don't do what it is you say you are going to do do! These words are draining. You dread the action that needs to be taken, mainly because of the word/s that have preceded the doing word! The words we choose have more power than we realise!

The words we use are what helps us to create our reality, how we express our selves, how we communicate with ourselves and the outer world. What would happen if you were to get rid of the "shoulds",  "musts",  "have to's"in your life? What are some new words you could begin using instead? As speakers of the English language, there are thousands upon thousands of words at our fingertips, and yet we only use a small percentage. Tony Robbins talks about this his book "Awaken the Giant Within".

There are words we tend to favour and others we don't use at all. We get comfortable with our words. And after awhile, comfortable can get boring! I will always remember my grade 3 teacher telling me the only time he wanted to see the word "nice" was on a biscuit. I still cringe when I hear the word. After all, what is "nice"any way? It lacks depth, description and power. There are plenty of wonderful, descriptive and powerful adjectives out there, look them up in the thesaurus! Challenge yourself to bring a new descriptive word a day into your language. Expansion is growth! Let it be fun.

To bring this together for you, here is a list of words you can replace your "shoulds", "have to's",  "musts", "need to's" and  "got to's":

• I choose to ........
• I want to ......
• I'd like to ......
• I desire .......
• I might ......
• I may ......
• If I wanted to I could ........

Take the earlier phrase of "I have to take better care of myself"and insert one of the suggested replacements, "I'd like to take better care of myself". Doesn't that feel a whole lot better and sound a lot less harsher? You now have options. Maybe you will do it and maybe you won't. Either way, the world will keep turning and life will go on. Tomorrow morning you will wake up again and you get another chance. Take the pressure off yourself, there's so much on you already! Give yourself a break! Be kind to you. The relationship you have with yourself is the benchmark the rest of the world has to know how to treat you. And we all want to be treated with love and respect right?