Success Tips – Stop Using These Two Words to Bring More Success in Your Life

Can tweaking small parts of your speech habits make you more successful? Based on his life experiences, Bernard Roth, a professor of engineering at Stanford University and the director of its design Institute, thinks that it can.

In his new book, “The Achievement Habit,” Prof Roth recommends making two simple changes to your everyday language:

1.  Use ‘And’ instead of ‘But’

Take a scenario, rather than saying, “I want to go to the movie, but I have work to do”, the Professor Bernard suggests that instead of saying,“ I want to go to the movies, and I have work to do”. When you use the word but, you create a conflict for yourself that does not really exist,” he writes

If you use the word ‘and’, “your brain gets to consider how it can deal with both parts of the sentence”. You might decide to see a shorter movie, for example.

However, Roth doesn’t recommend that you swap out “but” for “and” in all of your conversations, and sometimes the former is needed to not sound weird in a conversation. He tried it himself for a whole weekend and it didn’t go very well, but (and?) still recommends that people make the change whenever it’s possible.

2.  Use ‘want to’ instead of ‘have to’

This is an old trick that Roth has often practised on his students to get them to open up their minds and take charge of their lives. He has one person say a series of statements that begin with “I have to,” then their partner repeats the same statements beginning with “I want to” instead.

This exercise is very effective in getting people to realise that what they do in their lives even the things they find unpleasant are in fact what they have chosen. Prof Roth gave the example of one of his students who felt he “had to” take a hated maths course required for his graduate program. Eventually he realised that he actually did want to take it, because the benefit outweighed the discomfort of sitting through classes he didn’t enjoy. The mind is trickier than we think and is always working with our egos to sabotage our best intentions.