Zamir’s Self-Mastery @The Academy Life Tips & Hacks To support and inspire fellow knowledge seekers,
I would like to introduce you to new
ideas in personal development.
This is intended to give you more information about
how to maximise your brain's potential.
DO THE WORDS YOU USE HAVE THE POWER TO ALTER REALITY
The words that we use help us make sense of the world around us by giving shape and contect to our thoughts.
They allow us to convey our thoughts to others and to ourselves, but do the words that we use have more of an impact on how we experience reality? In the 1930s a Polish – American scholar Alfred Korzybski proposed the idea that our words can modify our perception of reality.
He called this new idea general semantics and the idea behind it is that our knowledge of the world is limited by our nervous system and the language we've developed and so our access to reality is based on what is filtered through the brain in response to the reality we experience.
Words play a big part in this because they help us make sense of what's happening around us but can we trust our words? Korzybski devised a very simple experiment.
He offered people biscuits from a package that was wrapped in white paper.
As he handed out the biscuits he said "nice biscuit, don't you think?" The words he used created a suggestion of the reality that people should experience when eating the biscuit.
As his subjects happily ate the biscuits, he unwrapped the package and removed the white paper to reveal that the biscuits were actually dog biscuits.
At this point the reaction of his subjects changed from enjoyment to disgust at realising that they were eating dog biscuits.
So what has changed? Certainly not the biscuits. While the subjects thought they were eating a normal biscuit,
their experience of the biscuit was enjoyable but the moment that the idea changed in their mind, their reality changed.
This simple experiment shows how perception can be skewed according to the information that is presented to us.
A majority of the information is presented to us day today come via words, our own and other people's words.
While we have very little control of other peoples words, we have complete control over the words that we use, especially the words that we use to describe our internal experience and to describe who we are in relation to other people.
If we are constantly reminding ourselves that we are not good enough, not smart enough, not attractive enough, our mind will experience those words as our reality.
In essence we are creating who we are by the descriptions we use to explain ourselves.
Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
” Lao Tzu
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