Do Words Change Reality?

September 18th, 2009

Many years ago I had in my home office a magazine cover I ripped out and pinned over my desk. The article featured on the cover wasn’t as interesting to me as the title, which was a question. The question was something I intuitively knew was important. It said, “Do words change reality?”

There are examples in history where words, or the consciousness of how we use them, have altered our realities permanently. In recent history, the feminists in the 1970’s insisted that we stop using titles that imply that a man is the only person who can fill a role, and started directing us toward gender neutral terms. Those of us who lived through this period remember that it was quite a hot debate. I remember when I first used the phrase “in all humankind” in an essay, I got blasted by a male professor that the correct grammar was “in all mankind,” he was later put in his place by academia, but it took time. People reluctantly started trying out new words, and everyone stumbled over terms like “chairperson” or “salesperson.” But they evolved into talking about people as being “in sales” or addressing “the chair.” We think nothing now about talking about a “letter carrier” rather than a “postman,” we talk about “the police” rather than about “policemen,” or “fire fighters” rather than “firemen.” We adapted to the new consciousness. But did it pave the way for the little girls born after the seventies? I think it with other consciousness made a tremendous impact. I see the young women born after the 70’s as not thinking twice about traveling the globe on their own, taking on a variety of careers without a thought of boundaries, jumping into technology, or playing sports, even hockey at a young age. I remember I was forced to wear uncomfortable white figure skates, whose picks I was constantly tripping on, and the idea of girls playing hockey was just not discussed. I was well into my thirties before I discovered I could wear “hockey skates”, that had previously always been called men’s or boy’s skates. Forty years after the feminist wave of the 70’s, we even have the first household name, female hockey hero, Hayley Wickenheiser. All in all, this was in a rather short period of evolution. Of course, in North America there were many other concurrent changes in language to represent diversity in cultures, in tandem with the civil rights movement.

So, if changing words is seen as an important step in transforming whole future generation’s reality, what can it do for you…right now? I am a life coach and the purpose of Life Coaching is to transform people’s lives positively. In order to do that we have learned that language is incredibly important. I was reading through one of the recommended coaching texts and found this story. It is the story of a native aboriginal boy growing up with his grandfather. The boy, now a man, recalled how rich his life was growing up. He lived in a small house by the river that the wind whistled right through. Every day his grandfather and he did things together like fishing and swimming in the river, and many other escapades in the woods. To him, life with his grandfather was an adventure. Then one day, a social worker came and looked at their ramshackle house and said that they were well below the poverty line for what was normal. He said with certainty that they were poor. He remembered that his reality had changed in that one day. Up until then, he did not know that he was “poor”, and these new words shaped his future reality.

I had my own personal awareness of how words had been keeping me stuck, the story of which is in my book. Here is an excerpt from, From Survival to Thrival:

I first started to confront the words that I had been using against myself in therapy. It was my counselor who pointed out to me how much I used the word “need.” She questioned whether I really needed something, or wanted it. This led to a lengthy debate on what were truly survival needs and what were wants, or the things we know will make us thrive. For example, like many others, I insisted that one of my needs was love. She insisted it was not a need. This was such a radical idea for me that it upset me immensely. I was ready to walk out of her office and never come back. It seemed obvious to me that everyone needed love. Keep in mind that what I was thinking of as love, was love from others. But she stuck to her guns and said for survival, we did not need love. There are, unfortunately, lots of examples of people who have survived without love. She was not suggesting it was a great way to live your life, or to raise children, just that it was not a need. Needs, she pointed out, suggest desperation. Despair. Who wants to live their life in despair? Yet perhaps I had been living my life in despair.

At first, I resisted this idea, insisting that I certainly did have all sorts of needs. In truth, I would come to admit that I liked the drama of needing, which was also connected to my procrastination. I would let things become what I thought of as a "need," before I felt motivated to act. However, my therapist soon made me see that all I was doing was robbing myself of my own ability to choose. Later I found out that the word need is of pre-historic Germanic origin, and means more than necessity, it means distress or misery. My therapist was right: it was a word of despair.

After much work, I now say things like, “I want a vacation," replacing, “I need a vacation,” or “I want to get some work done” over “I need to get some work done.” I experience the power of making a choice. I no longer burden myself with a desperate, empty wish, but back up my choices with realistic actions. I make a plan to save for that vacation (process), instead of investing in lottery tickets, fantasies or blindly running up charges on a credit card (products). Those fantasy-credit-card choices deliver the promise of a product with no process. That is the thrust of what lottery tickets and credit cards advertise: fulfilling products without process. They also make products seem like routes to happiness. That is why advertising and marketing people are always talking about “creating a need.”

In answer to the question, do words change reality? The answer might be: You bet! But a better question might be: do your words change your reality? To which the answer is still: You bet! But only when one is prepared to take some consciousness to the task, and pay attention to what words are coming out of one’s mouth now, and deciding if the picture they are painting is the reality you really want? How do you want your future to be painted?