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Change Your Vocabulary

Overview, Story, Change Your Vocabulary | | Tom Suddes

“WORDS ARE IMPORTANT”
– Tom Peters

 

“… We need a NEW LANGUAGE. The critical distinction is not between business and social, but between GREAT and GOOD. (We need to) jointly embrace a LANGUAGE OF GREATNESS”
– Jim Collins

Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point fame, Marcus Buckingham, One Thing You Need To Know, Tommy Hopkins, sales trainer of all sales trainers, Tom Peters and Jim Collins, modern day leadership/management gurus … ALL reinforce what past giants of the motivation and personal development industry like Nightingale, Stone, Mandino, Peale, et al. have said forever:

CHANGE the way you TALK…
and you can CHANGE the way you ACT!

There’s a compelling science around the psychology of CHANGE that includes tremendous work on this whole idea of NEUROLINGUISTICS and how we FRAME things.

*Pioneering researchers on cognitive science and linguistics have pointed to the paramount importance of something called ‘FRAMING’.

George Lakoff, Professor at University of California Berkeley, defines ‘FRAMES’ as the mental structures that shape the way we see the world. He says that ‘FRAMES’ are part of our “cognitive unconscious;” but the way that we know our current frames or new frames springs from LANGUAGE.

I want to strongly encourage you to
CHANGE YOUR VOCABULARY.

I guarantee that by CHANGING the way we TALK … we will dramatically CHANGE the way we ACT. In effect, your ‘self talk’ impacts the way you ACT! (It’s much like an actor using ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialect’ to get into a ‘character.’)

My hope is that the following OLD WORDS/NEW WORDS will help you ‘TALK THE WALK’… to make it easier to ‘WALK THE TALK!

A simple suggestion: Like any new ‘language’, the fastest way to make progress is ‘total immersion!’ Try as hard as you can to STOP talking about non profits, charity, survival, competing, donors, donations, etc. Use your new VOCABULARY with your Board and your team and it will become the lingua franca, which is a “hybrid language serving as a COMMON LANGUAGE between different people”. I strongly believe you can create a COMMON LANGUAGE for your entire ‘team’ including staff, volunteers and investors.

Special, Special Note: This is NOT some kind of ‘SEMANTIC GYMNASTICS’. It means to literally immerse yourself in a new LANGUAGE, a new LEXICON, a new LINGO

P.S. Part of this is trying to get you to stop using all the typical ‘industry jargon’ and start using SALES TERMS. BUSINESS TERMS. COMMON SENSE TERMS. IMPACT TERMS.

Enjoy the following ‘word games’!