Anthony Robbins AWAKEN THE GIANT... - Lemma Coaching

espondents were terrorized even by the question, but not many could actually define it—all they knew
was that it was horrifying! One woman even went so far as to say, "Well, I don't really know what that
means, but there hadn't better be any in Washington." One man said that he knew everything he
needed to know about Communists and that what you needed to do was kill them! But he couldn't
even explain what they were. There is no denying the power of labels to create sensations and
emotions.
"Words form the thread on which we string our experiences."
ALDOUS HUXLEY
As I began to explore the power of vocabulary, I still found myself fighting the idea that something as
simplistic as changing the words that we use could ever make such a radical difference in our life
experience.
But when my study of language intensified, I came across some surprising facts that began to
convince me that words absolutely do filter and transform experience. For instance, I found that,
according to Compton's Encyclopedia, English contains at least 500,000 words, and I've since read
from other sources that the total may be closer to 750,000 words! English definitely has the largest
number of words of any language on earth today, with German running a distant second, tallying
roughly half the number.
What I found so fascinating was that, with the immense number of words we could possibly use, our
habitual vocabulary is extremely limited. Various linguists have shared with me that the average
person's working vocabulary consists of only between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Conservatively
estimating English to contain half a million words, that means we regularly use only ½ of 1 percent to
2 percent of the language!
What's an even greater tragedy? Of these words, how many do you think describe emotions? I was
able to find over 3,000 words related to human emotion by going through a group of thesauruses.
What struck me was the proportion of words that describe negative versus positive emotions. By my
count, 1,051 words describe positive emotions, while 2,086 (al- most twice as many!) describe
negative emotions. Just as one example, I found 264 words to describe the emotion of sadness—words
like "despondent," "sullen," "heavy-hearted," "moody," "woeful," "grievous," "tearful," "melancholy"—
yet only 105 to describe cheerfulness, as in "blithe," "jaunty," "perky," "zestful," and "buoyant." No
wonder people feel bad more than they feel good!
As I described to you in Chapter 7, when participants at my Date With Destiny seminar make out their
list of emotions that they feel in a week, the majority of them come up with only about a dozen. Why?
It's because we all tend to experience the same emotions again and again: certain people tend to be
frustrated all of the time, or angry, or insecure, or frightened, or depressed. One of the reasons is that
they constantly use these same words to describe their experience. If we were to analyze more
critically the sensations we have in our bodies, and be more creative in our way of evaluating things,
we might attach a new label to our experience and thereby change our emotional reality.