How are you framing your words?

When you go to a studio to take a photograph for your passport, you are made to pose, and then asked to ‘smile’... and then we ‘smile’.. an artificial smile to the face of a lifeless camera. What if the cameraman ask you to remember something that was so pleasant for you.. something that was a very enjoyable experience for you...and to bring that to your face...? Or what if he ask, instead of asking to ‘smile’... if he ask you to ‘cheer up’...?

When you talk to an architect, we tell him or her, I want a ‘door’ here. And it’s the ‘door’ that he will draw or build into that plan. What if we ask him to have a ‘passage’ here, so that it could be anything like an arch, or whatever a passage could mean through the filter of that architect’s mind?

How careful are we, and how conscious are we in using the right choice of words that empowers the other person, enable the other person to dip into his positively charged resource state of mind and create in him the visuals of what to do and than what not to do? How often we end up saying (we don’t even remember) “I don’t want you to think....”. Instead, how empowering it would be to say “I want you think....” and tell him exactly what you want him to think instead. (“I don’t want you to think that I am patronizing you, Shahir”...and what you just asked me to think is just that... that you are patronizing me, because you have to think of thing first in order for you not to think of it, think of it now; instead, if you were to tell me, “I want you to think that I am only suggesting a few things that I believe could be beneficial in such a situation...” and that’s exactly what I will tend to think)

What are the words that you can begin to use to create in the other person’s mind a positive image of what he can do and achieve? How can you say things differently that’s more empowering and enabling...? Why don’t you say something, and say that again differently... and see which one sounds better?