The Power of Your Thoughts and Words

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I recently listened to the Audible book, The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. This has been another life-changing book for me. I’ve read several other excellent, inspiring books over the years of how the power of our thoughts and words affects our behavior and actions. This book, however, takes these ideas to a new level of grasping the concepts and applying the principles. When you begin making and seeing these new changes in your own life, it will feel like a miracle!

I hope you will read this summary and then read or listen to The Three Laws of Performance to learn how dramatic growth can take place in your life all at once by utilizing the amazing power of your thoughts and words!

The Three Laws

1. Our Perceptions shape our Performance

The First Law states: “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them”. In other words, your actions will perfectly match the way you see a situation. The facts don’t matter as much as our subjective interpretation of those facts. So, the first step toward transformation is to acknowledge your reality illusion, i.e. realize that you’re not seeing things as they are, but simply as they appear to you.

2. Our Language shapes our Perception

The Second Law states: “How a situation occurs, arises in language.” Most people don’t realize the profound impact of our language on our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Language is much more than our spoken/written words. What’s “unsaid but communicated” tends to have a much bigger impact on our performance than our spoken words. Our unspoken assumptions, fears, doubts, hopes, expectations, regrets, etc. affect what we consider to be possible, important, relevant, or appropriate.

3. You can Shift Perceptions using Generative Language

The Third Law states: “Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.” There’s a difference between descriptive vs generative language. Descriptive language describes past events, issues, data etc. It’s useful for looking backward to spot trends or to analyze what happened. Future-based language (or generative language) can be used to craft a totally new vision that replaces the default future.