• Reference Answers to Comprehension-check Questions:
  • 1. Changing the way we use certain everyday words can actually shift the way we see the world and other people, helps change the emotion-laden attitudes being the words, and makes us less likely to make inappropriate demands on ourselves and others.
  • 2. We attempt to control people’s actions and even characteristics with can’t, should. Everybody and related words. We try thus to create “reliable” data, however unrelated it is to the facts.
  • 3. Our beliefs, and the words we use to support them and to protect ourselves from change, come from early in our lives. Willis Harman, Ph.D., a futurist at SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute), maintains that we are all in a way hypnotized form infancy. .
  • 4. When we switch from try, which anticipates failure, to “do the best I can,” we did exactly that. We could not have done better, or we would have. Check it out: Consciously delete try from your vocabulary for a month.