“Words are important,” he bellowed angrily Nanni Moretti in the film “Palombella Rossa”. Without shouting it, Bernard Roth, professor of engineering at Stanford University and academic director of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design also supports it. And he adds: changing some phrases in our vocabulary can lead us to success. In his book "The Achievement Habit," Roth suggests some language adjustments that can help you achieve career goals more easily. Here are the two easiest.
Replace "but" with "and". Let's say you want to communicate to someone that you can't go to the cinema because you have to work: "I want to go to the cinema, but I have work", you would say. Try following Roth's suggestion and reformulate the sentence as follows: "I want to go to the cinema and I have work to do". The effect will be better because “when you use the word 'but', you create a conflict (sometimes even rightly so) with yourself that sometimes doesn't really exist,” explains the academician. Because you can go to the cinema even if you have work to do: the important thing is to find a solution.
Instead, using the conjunction 'and', "our brain begins to consider how to deal with both," writes Roth. Perhaps you will choose a shorter film or find someone to delegate your work to.
Replace "I have to" with "I want". Start doing it already in your mind. Replacing “have to” with “want” is the best way to get people to do what they want in their lives, “even the things they find unpleasant, because that's what they've actually chosen,” Roth explains. For example, the professor gives an example in which he tells of his student who felt the need to take a math class, necessary for his curriculum, even though he hates the subject. At one point, after doing this exercise, the boy understood that he really wanted to attend the courses for the advantages it would bring him. In fact, these overcame the dislike of the material.
Both of these adjustments are based on a component of the strategy called problem solving “Design thinking”. When you use this strategy, you challenge your automatic thinking, generating something new. And when you try it out in a different language, you may find that the problem isn't as unsolvable as it seems, and that we always have control over our lives, contrary to what we've always believed.
