Wordplay

The average person is said to know fifteen to twenty thousand words. The uneducated person is said to know ten thousand words. And a highly educated person is believed to have forty to fifty thousands words in their working vocabulary. With approximately two hundred and fifty thousand words in the English language, there is substantial room to improve and learn a great deal more words. Why is this important? One of the most significant tools we have at our disposal in modifying our behaviors in our lives is something referred to as framing. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has shown that how something is worded greatly impacts how we think about something which then influences what we feel and what we do. In this world of randomness we have limited control over what happens but we can exercise much more control over what our responses are to situations and a key tool in doing this successfully is framing. Words create images in our minds. The only way to accumulate more words is by reading books. Emotions are empirical among us but our feelings are subjective. Feelings are determined by the words we apply to emotions we experience dependent upon context which we also construct with our words. A repertoire of expressive words enriches our emotional lives because we will have a much broader range of feelings we can both experience and express. This helps us to modulate our responses to a great many experiences and situations. If we are limited in our words then we are limited in the emotional responses we create thus we are limited in what we believe we can do. If we are limited in the words we use then we are limited in how we can frame things. Many of us are afraid of failing. Failure holds many of us back from not only accomplishing many things but from even trying them. Failure triggers other powerful defensive positions that cause us to retreat even more powerfully. A simple word substitution practice of replacing failing with learning or improving will overtime recondition our mindset towards this and actually eventually eliminate failing from our vocabulary. If the fear of failing at something is replaced with improving at something, there is a another reality we create for ourselves without changing anything other than our mindset, how we think. We will have successfully reframed something that results in a completely new process and outcome and also changes our intention and motivation. Words prime our thinking. It may seem impossible to some to change our mindset, to change how we think. Thoughts travel at 300 miles per hour so they move incredibly fast. When something feels this natural it seems innate and so people don't bother attempting to change it because they lack the belief they can. But I ask those of you reading this, have you ever changed your mind about anything? What were the circumstances that led to this change. More than likely it was implicitly done and caused by a situation. We experience paradigm shifts all the time. It is not only possible to change our mindsets but it is possible to consciously and selectively do so and the best way to improve upon your ability to do so is to incorporate as many words as you can into your vocabulary to improve your wordplay.