If you look closely nearly every area in life or line of work has its own vocabulary. To be even modestly successful it's one we all must learn at least something about.
Another important area many believe is called behavioral finance, a kind of catch all term about how we humans interpret all those pieces of data. In short, it's a summary about how we humans behave when dealing with greed and fear, success and failure, disappointment and triumph.
We don't claim it will make you another Warren Buffett. But even pure number cruncher types, despite their claims to the contrary, have emotions and those emotions lead to words and those words precede thoughts and actions.
WATCH YOUR WORDS
Our
thoughts are often worse than we are.
George Eliot
Most of us are familiar with
self-talk. If you’re not, you should be. It’s something all of us do every day,
carrying on a private conversation with ourselves in our head. A few of us even
do it out loud.
Every time you make a mistake
and cry out something like, “You dummy!’ or even worse, that’s one form of
self-talk. Most self-talk goes on more
privately, between just you and yourself kicking it around in your mind.
Psychologists say we have nearly 20,000 thoughts a day but are only aware of
about 2,000. It’s also been called self-coaching. Check out the literature and
you’ll even find books about it.
Lots of you won’t believe
what we’re saying here. That’s okay. Folks didn’t believe Columbus when he
suggested the world may not be flat or Galileo either. The path of history is
littered with examples of people and things once thought not to be credible
only to find out later they were.
Keep in mind that lots of people try things
just to prove they won’t work for them. That’s their problem, not yours. As an
old chemistry professor used to say, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” If
it doesn’t work for you, fine. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work for others.
Nor does it mean because it worked for others and not you it doesn’t work or
isn’t real.
In journalism there is an old
saying: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Since we all today live in the
electronic age we might have to substitute computer for pen. But you get the
idea, the power of words. Confucius, when asked what would be the first thing
he would change if he became Emperor of China, replied that he would reinstate
the precise meaning of words. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t sound as if a lot
of today’s lawyers or politicians would’ve ever voted for Confucius.
Think if you will for a
second about these words. Words become thoughts and thoughts become the basis
for all personal transformations. Words have power. A kind word can build, a
harsh one destroy. Words become thoughts and thoughts become ideas and ideas,
good or bad, often get carried out.
It’s an established medical
fact that the body is roughly 80 percent water. It’s an established fact that the
body’s seemingly hard, solid bones are really porous with canals for blood
vessels and nerves. Marrow, a relatively soft material in bone is actually
responsible for creating blood cells. Even given the millions of blood cells
floating around in the human body, blood is still mostly water. The vital
organs that make up and help regulate the body are mostly comprised of, you
guessed it, water.
So once again appearance
proves deceiving. We admire rock hard six packs, rippled muscles, strong, firm
bodies. Firm for most of us is in and flab is out. But if you extract all the
solid material in a human body it wouldn’t amount to more than a small heap not
several feet but less than a few inches high. The rest is water.
Someone once observed that
the strongest thing in your body is your thinking. It can also be your weakest.
Shakespeare noted that there is little either bad or good but thinking makes it
so. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius put it a little differently: “The soul
becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Most of us are aware of the
biblical admonition about reaping and sowing. You can’t plant corn and expect
to get water melons, genetically modified grains notwithstanding.
Several years ago when I was
doing internal medicine I saw lots of patients every day with a variety of
aches and pains from sore backs to arthritic joints to heart and stomach
problems, to name a few. Many of them in complaining about their conditions
would without the slightest hesitation unleash a fury of expletives on the
particular area bothering them. Some of these names you would not level at
your mother-in-law let alone worst enemy. But here they were calling their
painful elbow a dirty so-and-so or their agonizing headache a lousy, rotten
this or that.
Over time I began casually
asking some of them how they would respond if anyone spoke to them that way.
Despite the blank looks and an occasional leer, the most frequent answer, the
one that always surprised me the most was: “I never really thought about it
that way before.”
My response was always the
same: “Maybe you should start.” Storms rile up the seas just as a lack of wind
creates calmness. If the human body is 80 percent water, it’s subject to the
same forces.
So watch your words. Choose
them carefully, especially when you’re talking to yourself. Words affect your
attitude and attitude influences your performance, in an out of the gym.
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