Watch Your Words

                                          Our words 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 everyday, 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 you and yourself kicking it around in your mind. Psychologists say we have about 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 can 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 might 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's 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 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's it's worth, it doesn't sound as if a lot of today's lawyers and politicians would've ever voted for Confucius.

Think if you will for 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 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 appearances prove 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 extracted of the solid material in the 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 the names you wouldn't level at your mother-in-law let alone your 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 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 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 and out of the gym.
















































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