Changing a few words in your conversation could change the way you think, says Mel Schwartz in his article Change a Word, Change Your Life. The words we need to change are not big words in the vocabulary- not nouns or adjectives but verbs like are, am, is, was, be, been, being – small extremely powerful words as they affirm thought and freeze statements into fact. How?
So if you say to yourself over and over again, “I am shy”, there is something unchangeable about this statement. It shows that the speaker can not be anything but shy.
Alfred Korzybsky promoted the idea of writing and speaking without these ‘to-be’ words in his book called Science and Sanity. He quashed the Newtonian idea of objectivity and mined quantum physics ideas of subjectivity. The resulting language he created was called E-Prime. As a psychotherapist, Mel Schwartz believes that huge barriers can be overcome by simply de-verbing it.
Try it the next time you speak.
