How Language Can Be Used to Improve Your Productivity
Hi team,
Welcome to our weekly newsletter!
Our company is Productive Assets and our goal is to provide the tools and insights into how we can all achieve our goals and make productivity improvements. Also, we want to have some fun along the way and try to add some levity, combined with reality, to the self-help market.
This week we wanted to start our series by raising the importance of language and how it can be used to make productivity improvements in our daily lives.
When it comes to the language we use, it is all too common to go down a path of internal criticism and damaging terminology. The problem with this is that it harms our ability to perform and will typically lead us into a spiral of negativity, which is not conducive to productivity. On a deeper level, it can also play a part in elevated stress levels, burn out and depression.
With this in mind, we utilise four techniques around language to improve our own productivity:
Remove the word “never” from your vocabulary
Have you ever said, “you have never succeeded at anything”, or similar? When we reflect on this statement, it is very rarely ever true. Our language is framed to exaggerate an event or process we see as a failure. However, there are always likely to be positives to take from these types of events. The best thing we can do is to reframe our language to acknowledge that you haven’t achieved something yet and focus on what you have achieved.
When you consider the target that is yet to be achieved, consider the steps you need to take personally to achieve this in the future, or to avoid a similar outcome if the situation arises again. By removing this negativity from our language, it sets us on a path to feel positive about what has been achieved and set clear goals to make progress in the future.
Reframe negative language into positive language
Reframing negative language is just as important for how we think, as it is when speaking to others. Too often we see a potentially negative event in the future and use language to tell people, or ourselves, to avoid making a mistake. In an office scenario, you might hear of a manager telling someone not to let them down, or not to fail. But the problem is, this negative language can affect our ability to succeed. It’s the classic example of saying don’t think of an elephant and the majority of people cannot help but think of an elephant. So, look to reframe the language used, which might mean that same manager stating, “I know you will be great” . As an add on to this, it always helps to add in a positive action you would like to see so that you can begin to visualise success in the task.
Create powerful language cues
Language cues can serve as a timely reminder to keep us on track. A useful cue that we use for when procrastination strikes is “close, pause, refresh”.
We all know that feeling when procrastination hits us and we get lost in a mindless scroll. When you are in that procrastination hole, it can be so difficult to break. So, when we can acknowledge we have been hit by the procrastination bug, we recall our cue; tell ourselves to “close” everything we are doing, “pause” by taking 30 seconds to breath and then the “refresh” enables us to return to the tasks we know we should be doing. As a language tool, this has served as one that has helped us reduce our levels of procrastination in recent months.
Create personal affirmations
This one is really specific to you and what you feel provides you with confidence and that desire to succeed. It may take time to develop what does and doesn’t work for you. Our preference is to go specific, such as “when I do my presentation I will project clearly, make reasonable eye contact with my audience and vary my tone and volume for effect”. For you it might be something more general like an affirmation at the start of the day saying you will “seize the day”. You can write your affirmations, say them out loud or simply think them, just work out what you feel provides the most impact.
We hope this has been a timely reminder of the power of language and how simple tweaks can provide a boost to your productivity.
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