The past week as I was doing my life things and observing the world around me it struck me how powerful words are. My primary occupation is word based so I know this all to well. Yet this past week between world events, and my interactions with others, I was feeling word power. Our words, my words, have the ability to influence, to encourage, to defeat, to demoralize, to heal, and to show love.
Yehuda Berg said “Words are singularity the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinger, to hurt, to humiliate and to humble.”
Words can do all that.
These powerful words are sometimes said to others. There have been times in my life where the words said to me had a strong effect in a positive way. These words helped to me feel accomplished, happy, and unstoppable. There have been other times where the words said me to have a strong effect in a negative way where I felt defeated and demoralized. As I worked on having a healthier sense of self the negative words were not as damaging. I could see these harsh words were reflecting a hurting human. While these words would sting a little, I worked hard to reframe them with compassion. Was I able to do this all the time? Nope. Yet I really tried my best to do a compassion reframe most of the time.
Sometimes these are words we say to ourselves. This past week I was meeting with a client that I have worked with for awhile. We were talking through some issues connected to relationships and came to the understanding of what was influencing him was his insecurities. We can up with a plan that could help him change his internal word dialogue to a healthier, positive, stronger place. If you change your thinking you can change your feeling. We talked how just like his fitness he loves to do he would need to do this on a consistent basis otherwise the change will be minimal. This is where he hesitated. Many people pause at the idea in order to change our internal sense of self we need to work at it. We need to be repetitious. Yet who we are and the words we say to ourself should be a priority. Who we and how we see ourself matters.
“Be careful of how you talk to yourself because you are listening.” Lisa M. Hayes
As I absorbed and sifted through my pondering of the power of words some clarity flashed through. If we tried in our own ways to have more thoughtfulness and intention of how we say what we say to ourselves, and to others, we could help our world be more loving, caring, and compassionate. Our words can change things for the better. For us and the world. Rumi said it beautifully “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
