Whether written, spoken, or heard, words are life changing.
Think about that for a minute.
How many big events in your life could be described in a single solitary word?
Words like disappointment, sickness, divorce, fear, and anger might describe times of despair. We hear these words and our past experiences careen into us with a swell of emotion.
Or, to use a positive example, what might you feel when you hear the good words? Words like promotion, inspiration, love, marriage, joy, and fulfillment. In just the same way bad words shape our mood, these good words often carry us over, through, and out of life’s challenges.
However, with over 200,000 words in the English language, only a handful are powerful enough to change one’s mindset.
So what if, instead of waiting for the words that will change us to arrive, we simply made a list of words we wanted to pursue?
I listened to a Ted Talk recently in which a man did this very thing. Every day he picked one word to embody.
On day one he was driving to work when the word STRONG just kept popping in his head.
At the time, he’d just lost someone close to him and had been struggling to get out of a deep depression. Not feeling remotely strong in that moment, he decided to fake it for a day to see how his mindset might shift.
The change was so profound it caused him to search for another word the next day.
He did this every day for a year! Each day, he picked one word-- not always new, sometimes repeated-- but just one single word to focus on.
That year changed his life.
So, I decided to try it myself this week. I did this mainly because it was so simple, but also because later that night a word did in fact randomly keep popping in my head.
That word was: FUN.
Maybe needing some fun in my life, I figured, “What the hell, let’s try it!”
Well, to my surprise, it worked! I found myself beginning to recognize the fun to be had in the little moments of my rather ordinary day.
As the week wore on and I continued this practice, I consistently had a word pop in my head that I wanted to seek the following day. It’s worked so well that I wanted to share this with all of you.
So, with further ado, and after the longest intro of all time, my suggestion for this post is short. In fact, it’s just one WORD!
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