Getting Results Magazine Getting Results Magazine Fall 2017 | Page 12

TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE One Simple Habit To Transform Your Life Jim Jubelirer On Tony Robbins’ Philosophy T hroughout human history, great leaders have used the power of words to transform our emotions, to enlist us in their causes, and to shape the course of destiny. Beliefs are formed by words—and they can be changed by words. Words provide us with a vehicle for expressing and sharing our experience with others. Do you realize that the words you habitually choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and what you experience? Over the past 40 years, Tony Robbins has worked with more than 50 million people. He has observed the power of changing just one key word in your communication and the way it instantly changes the way people feel–and how they behave. Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary—the words you consistently use to describe your emotions—you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live. This 12 | FALL 2017 is the power of consciously using your words to improve the quality of your life today and for the rest of your life. The English language contains some 500,000 words. Yet the average person’s working vocabulary consists of 2,000 words. That’s only 0.4 percent of the entire English language. And the number of words we use most frequently— the words that make up our habitual vocabulary? For most people, it averages 200–300 words. Isn’t that unbelievable? Of the 3,000 words which describe emotions, two-thirds describe negative emotions. With such amazing resources with which to express our feelings and ideas, you don’t have to accept such an impoverished vocabulary. Words have a biochemical effect on the body. The minute you use a word like “devastated,” you’re going to produce a very different biochemical effect than if you say, “I’m a bit disappointed.” The challenge is that the words we attach to our experience become our experience. If someone said to you, “I think you’re mistaken,” versus, “I think you’re wrong,” versus, “You’re lying,” your response would vary drastically, right? The same exact process happens with the words that we use within ourselves, but unfortunately, we do not consciously choose our words to describe our emotions. For emotions that we experience that are distressing, we have habitual words that we attach to them, and we’re less conscious of their impact. Making simple changes to the way you speak can have profound benefits. The following is a story that Tony Robbins tells directly in his own words: “I first became aware of the power of the words we use to label the experience of our emotions during an intense negotiation, more than a decade and a half ago. The other side unjustly closed a