Photo by Tanja Cotoaga on Unsplash.

How our language affects our outcome

The world understands us by how we communicate of/to it

11 min readJan 26, 2022

--

I recently attended a professional coaching programme and lest I forget, here is a piece on language based on what I learnt + my experiences thus far. We’ll cover a derivative of the speech act theory as well as some common pitfalls and what you can do to be more intentional when it comes to everyday language.

Two Ideas

We begin with two ideas to keep in mind that hopefully makes the rest of this piece more relevant.

Language is how we see the world

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — William Shakespeare

Our narratives are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They shape our reality and by consequence, our possibilities. Arguably the most critical conversation we can have is the one we have in our minds.

As an example, “I don’t know much about cryptocurrencies”. This could develop in two ways; one, “cryptocurrencies are confusing and hence are something to be avoided”, and the other, “cryptocurrencies are confusing so hey, who can I ask to learn more?” The former closes off the possibility of profitting (and also…

--

--

Joseph Matthias Goh

I write about my learnings in technology, software engineering, DevOoops [sic], growing people, and more recently Web3/DeFi