Speak Easy Note #24 - Quenching Your Thirst No Matter What's In The Glass

Since so many of us continue to be making more out of less and learning how to do without, I have selected a section of “SPEAK EASY, The Communication Guide for Career and Life Success” available from Word Craft Press for this week’s blog posting that focuses on the importance of looking at everything from a new and positive perspective:


Often when we look in the mirror of our lives, our view is narrow and distorted rather than broad and encompassing. There’s a tendency for people to zero in on what’s wrong or missing rather than see what they have. They also tend to bring a habitual optimistic or pessimistic perspective to their communications. Just like certain people have a tendency to use negative rather than affirmative language formation, people have a propensity to see the world from a full or empty perspective.

There’s an often-told story of twin children with completely opposite views of the world - one was extremely optimistic and the other was quite far beyond pessimistic.

One Christmas Eve, their parents decided to take action to resolve their children’s extreme views. The parents filled the little pessimist’s room with every imaginable toy a child could want. They filled the little optimist’s room with manure.

On Christmas morning, the parents first went to their pessimistic child’s room to find the child crying in a heap in the middle of the room, lamenting, “With all these toys I got for Christmas, there are too many parts that can get broken. I’ll never have enough batteries to keep these toys running. I won’t be able to understand the instructions and learn how to use them. I’m probably too stupid to do them right anyway. I know I’m going to break something. Somebody will want to take these away from me. I’m going to have to share these with other kids. I don’t know what to do first.”

With sighs of exasperation, the parents left the pessimistic child’s room and entered into the little optimist’s room full of excrement. This second child was ecstatic and was running around screaming with joyful delight, “I am so excited. With what I woke up to in my room today, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

It’s definitely all about perspective.

How you see the world becomes your reality

and controls what you say about it.

We know that over 90% of how we receive communication is non-verbal. Changing the words we use, however, still has the power to change how we feel and how others react to what we say. We will begin to see situations differently when we begin to choose different words to describe them:

AVOID: “There’s only half a glass left.”
BETTER: “There’s still half a glass left.”

AVOID: “She never calls me.”
BETTER: “I’d like to talk to her more often.”

AVOID: “At my age, there are so few options left for me.”
BETTER: “At my age, I’m so clear about which options I want to select.”

It’s true that in many instances there’s a smaller amount rather than a larger one to express in our communication. Rather than being about how full or empty the glass is, it’s about explaining what there is in the glass to drink. If there are only three drops of water in the glass, the point is to figure out how to describe quenching your thirst with whatever amount you have. You can’t articulate how to drink the empty part so it’s unproductive to focus on it.

Until next time,
The Wordsmith