The language you use shapes who you become. Saying "I am anxious" locks you in place, but "I sometimes feel anxious" leaves room to change. Small words like "yet" and "sometimes" can shift how you see yourself.
If I label myself as something, I'm gonna live up to that label, chances are. So if I say I'm the kind of person who sometimes does X, Y, or Z, rather than I have—
I have a habit or I have a, yeah.
Then to just recognize, all right, this is my tendency, but it's not who I am. And so how might I change that next time?
The bit that I wanna underscore in there, which is to not use the being verb, which is I am dot, dot, dot, but rather I have a tendency to, or I have a habit, or I have a pattern. It's not who you are, it's something you do. Those are very different things. That's a phenomenal piece of advice.
We'll see this even with emotion. Somebody will say, I am an anxious person. Let's just try, I have anxiety sometimes. Or when it comes to relationships, somebody might be like, well, I'm an avoidant. Well, maybe I avoid people in some of my relationships, or I push people away sometimes, but that's not who you are. You can choose to be different in the next relationship if you want.
And the word sometimes is great. Like, I'll never meet somebody.
Yet.
Like, you know, like, I haven't found the person I want yet, you know. And because I think what sometimes and yet do at the end of a sentence, and this speaks directly to narrative, which is it allows for hope, it allows for a bright future simply by the sentence we construct. So clever.
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