Stop Saying These Two Words

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

I'm about to share something with you that will transform your experience of life. It will deeply impact your outcomes and results on field, off field, in the office, at home, with your health. These two words, if you can remove them from your vernacular totally, then it's going to be a game changer. And when you start to remove them, you're going to see and become aware of just how many other people around you constantly use these two words. These two words hold back so many people around us. They are limiting. They really impact the way we see the world, how we engage with the world. And if you can just eliminate them, it puts you in a very privileged position in terms of how you can approach life. And I want to talk a little bit about the power to influence our mind. And our mind is literally listening. Our subconscious mind is just listening and waiting for input, input, input, input. And we can input positive or we can input negative, one or the other. And when it comes to negative impacts, there are a few ways that you can really affect the subconscious mind. And these two words like you're going to be blown away and you're probably going to say I've said that today, or I've said that multiple times this week. I've said it hundreds of times this year. So I want you to just think about it for a second. And when you think about the subconscious mind, we have anywhere between 50 to 70,000 thoughts that run through our mind every day and about 70 odd percent, 70 plus percent of those thoughts are negative. That's right. So you've got tens of thousands of negative thoughts. Why? We have different biases. One of our biases is the negativity bias. And that bias was there for a great reason. To help us stay alive, to stay alert, to look for danger. But because of the amount of input we have, we've got like truckloads more input now than our parents or grandparents or great grandparents did. And I mean significant amounts more information on a daily basis because of the amount coming in. We're constantly scanning for negative, negative, negative. And so what happens is we start to really reshape and condition our mindset. Now look, conditioning in of itself, conditioning is the repetition of negative words or phrases that will condition your subconscious mind to accept those phrases, to accept those ideas and then internalize them as beliefs. A belief is simply something that we say over and over and over and we actually start to believe it. So when you expose yourself to discouraging or negative language, it really ships how you see yourself. We can call it self perception. But how you look at yourself, how you feel about yourself can really be strongly moved and shaped, even manipulated by the words and phrases that we accept. And when people have low self esteem or massive levels of self doubt, even low levels of self doubt, you start to go underneath the surface and say, hey, what are you saying to yourself? What are the constant words that you're using? And you start to realize, wow, there's a lot of negativity there. So these two words, you're going to laugh and I'll tell you right now what these two words are, Please eliminate them. I'm busy. You heard me right, I'm busy. Hey, how was today? Really busy. Hey, what about this week? Can we do the thing? No, I'm busy. Hey, what's today looking like? I'm busy today I've been busy. It's so busy. I'm really busy, but I'm busy. To me, when I hear someone say that, and I hear it a lot, my first thing is they're not busy at all. I say that you're not busy and people look back at me, what do you mean? I just told you I'm busy. I said you're not. You simply lack priorities. If you had your priorities really prioritized, then you would not be busy. You'd be productive, you'd be focused, you'd be diligent, you'd be fulfilled, you'd be on a mission, but you wouldn't be busy. Busy to me is I'm busy being busy. I'm Just shuffling things from here to there. I'm taking things off my to do list. I'm running from A to B. Busy is not sustainable. And when you say I'm busy, you're literally saying to your subconscious mind, I have no time for joy. I have no time for flow. I have no time to breathe. I have no time for connection. I have no time for people's problems, particularly people that are really close to me. I'm busy. I have time to deal with that. I have caught myself being busy a lot. There was a period in my life when all I was focused on was trying to win the world championship title. And, you know, people will often ask me if I'm on a podcast, being interviewed or on a stage. Hey, tell me about, you know, you won seven world titles. Tell me all about that. And I go, look, I'm happy to tell you about that. But that doesn't define me. That doesn't define me at all. That's something I did, something I was very clear on what I wanted to do and achieve. But during that period, I said, I'm busy a hell of a lot. So I was busy building a retail business. At the same time, I was busy trying to be a world solo champion. I was busy trying to help the team I was working with New Zealand become world champions. I was busy trying to retain national title after national title. I was busy working on books and side hustles. I was busy. And so I started to lose focus on the things that mattered. My health, my primary relationship. Those things started to suffer majorly. So what you say and what you do have an absolute correlation. So when you say, I'm busy, you're going to find yourself a little more stressed, a little more overwhelmed. And I just want you to think about that. When was the last time you said it? And I want you to think about how many times you hear other people say, oh, I'm really busy right now. And when they do, I want you to think they don't know what their priorities are. I have this incredible model that I share with my clients and shape of a pyramid. But essentially it all starts with why? What's your purpose? And once we get that purpose right, okay, our priorities should be a reflection of what's most important to us from our purpose, and then from there, our productivity flows. And if we get that right, we get this perfect pyramid of performance. And when I say perfect, I'm going to reform that and say, it's high performance. We get this pyramid of high performance. But when you say I'm busy. You don't get anywhere close to that. You will just be saying yes to lots of things. Your calendar will be always full. When people come to me saying, james, I'm spinning, I am overwhelmed, say, cool, great, let's get your calendar out. Let me see the white space. What do you mean, the white space? I heard somewhere that, you know, the busier your calendar and the less white space you have, the more successful you're going to be. I was like, yeah, if you're going to go, like, all alpha, and you're going to go all get the hustle and grind. But hustle, grind, and alpha. I don't know too many of those people that experience flow deep, joyful, intimate connection. They're busy, they're going, but they often don't slow down to smell the roses. So I'm going to challenge you to think about what you're saying to yourself, what your subconscious mind is actually hearing. Because when you're saying stuff like, I can't. I'm not good enough. I'll never succeed. I'm too busy. Man, oh, man, you are stopping yourself. You're limiting.

That trajectory. Your ceiling is being created. You're self sabotaging. It leads to, you know, lack of confidence and behaviors that are negative. And words can reinforce societal biases and stereotypes. They shape our perception of ourselves and others. So just think about the language that you use. Is the language that you use uplifting? I was sitting on a flight in the last few months, and behind me there were two ladies. And the amount of swearing. And, hey, I grew up in Northern Ireland. I've been known to swear a bit myself in the past. And every now and then, you know, if I. If I drop something on my toe or stub my toe or, you know, I touch a hot stove, sometimes a little word can slip. I'm human. But these two ladies were swearing profusely and with absolute conviction. And it was just so negative. And they were talking about other people and the B word and the F word and the S word. And I was just. I sat in front of them and I was trying not to shake my head, and there was no judgment, but I was just like, whoa, I can feel the energy. Like, I can feel that innately negative energy. I just couldn't imagine how it would feel to be one of those women because their outlook on life would have been much different. At one point, we were over the Alps, covered in snow. Sun was setting, sun was streaming through the windows, and I was looking out going, whoa, like this is ethereal, like, I'm lucky to see this. And one of these women was swearing at the sun, I kid you not. Like, what the F is that doing? Blinding me? And when will it go away? And I just thought, wow, it's amazing how one human can see something in a certain light and another can. Their perception is totally different. But the only thing that's different about that, again, no judgment at all, just observation. The only difference there is how we label things, what label we put on things. So when we see a problem, do we put a negative label or do we say, ooh, what can I learn here? Problems, present possibilities. When you take that approach, I think lots of different things can unfold. Rather than go, oh, my God, why me? Why this damn problem? You start to feel very different. And the biochemistry, the science backs this up. This is not woo woo. The science backs it up. When we use beautiful, exquisite words as opposed to damn awful words. See what I did there? We actually feel different at a chemical level. And when those chemicals are surging through our bloodstream, they impact us. Impact us short term, but also our longevity. So when we look at things like neurological disorders, heart failure, stroke, lots of that can be compounded through what we say to ourselves and how those things we say and think actually release specific chemicals. So my challenge to you today, I always like to set a little challenge, is to listen to what you're saying. When people ask you, how are you? How was your week? What are you up to? Just be aware. What words are you using? Please, if you can get rid of I'm busy, change it to maybe. I'm focused, I'm excited, I'm doubling down on what's most important. But try, if you can, to eliminate those two words, I'm busy. And hey, if this was a podcast episode that you really enjoyed today, please share it with someone who you know is a busy person, and I want you to send it through to them and challenge their thinking. But for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders. It's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.