Are your words creating the life you want .. or rehearsing the one you already have?

By Danielle Serpico

There is something that happens to you when you have worked with language for as long as I have. You start hearing things other people probably don’t even notice.

I can be sitting having a completely normal conversation with someone and they’ll say something like, “I’m trying to grow my business,” or “I just want to stop worrying about money,” or “I hope this works because I really can’t afford to get it wrong,” and immediately I’m listening to the words underneath what they’re actually telling me.

I’ve been working professionally with NLP, subconscious communication, human behaviour and transformation for more than fifteen years now, so I suppose it’s inevitable that I hear language differently. And sometimes I wish I could switch it off!

Because once you start noticing it, you hear it everywhere.

And, of course, you hear it in yourself too.

That’s probably the most interesting part.

We tend to think our words are simply describing what is happening in our lives, but very often they’re telling us something about the internal world we’re living from. They’re showing us what we believe, what we’re expecting, what we’re looking for and sometimes what we’re protecting ourselves from without even realising we’re doing it.

In my last article for Confidence Magazine, I wrote about something that has become a huge part of both my own life and the work I do with others, which is becoming open to receive.

For a very long time I associated creating more with doing more. 

Work harder, push further, find another strategy, solve another problem, take another action, and eventually you will get where you want to go.

And listen, I still believe in action. I’m Italian and Irish; sitting waiting for the universe to sort everything out was probably never going to be my natural state!

But over the years I became much more interested in something else.

Who are we actually being while we’re taking all of that action?

Because you can be doing all the “right” things and still be doing them from fear, pressure, scarcity or a feeling that if you stop pushing for even a second everything might fall apart.

Language gives us an incredible window into that.

Someone might tell me, for example, “I really want more clients, but nobody is buying at the moment.”

Now consciously they’re telling me that they want more clients. That’s the outcome they want.

But I’m also hearing, “Nobody is buying.”

And if that becomes the conversation they’re having every day — nobody’s buying, people don’t have money at the moment, it’s really hard out there, social media isn’t working like it used to, people aren’t investing — their mind very quickly becomes brilliant at finding evidence that they’re right.

Someone doesn’t respond to a message. There you go.

A post gets fewer likes than usual. More evidence.

A prospective client says they’ll think about it. See? Nobody’s buying.

Meanwhile there may have been an enquiry that morning, someone recommending them to somebody else, a lovely message from a client, an opportunity they hadn’t expected or even an idea that could lead somewhere, but those things can become almost invisible because they’re not what the mind has been instructed to look for.

This is one of the reasons I became so fascinated by language in the first place.

We think we’re reporting reality when very often we’re reporting our interpretation of reality, and the more often we repeat that interpretation, the more familiar and believable it becomes.

The conversation you’re having with yourself..

Most people think of communication as something that happens between people. I say something, you hear it, you respond.

But you’re communicating with yourself all day long too, and that conversation matters.

Think about the difference between saying, “I don’t want to be broke anymore,” and “I want to create greater financial security.”

Or, “I don’t want to keep attracting unavailable people,” compared with, “I want a deeply connected relationship.”

Or even something as ordinary as, “I need to stop being so overwhelmed,” compared with, “I want to create more space, support and ease.”

I’m not suggesting that changing a sentence is some sort of magic spell. I’ve never believed that we can simply stand in front of a mirror saying things we don’t remotely believe and expect our entire lives to transform.

There’s usually much more going on underneath our language, and that’s the work I love doing.

But what I do want people to become aware of is the direction their language is taking them in.

Language creates pictures and representations in our minds.

If I say to you now, “Whatever you do, don’t imagine a bright yellow lemon. Don’t imagine cutting that lemon open and definitely don’t imagine squeezing the juice onto your tongue,” you have probably already created some representation of a lemon in your mind.

You had to.

Your mind had to know what I was asking you not to think about before it could attempt not to think about it.

Yet listen to how often we communicate with ourselves in exactly this way.

“I don’t want to fail.”

“I don’t want to lose the money.”

“I don’t want another argument.”

“I don’t want to feel exhausted.”

“I don’t want this relationship to end like the last one.”

And then we’re surprised that our attention keeps returning to the very thing we’re trying to move away from.

One of the simplest questions I have taught for years is also one of the most powerful:

What do you want instead?

It sounds almost too simple, doesn’t it?

But listen to how different you feel when you answer it.

The identity inside our language..

There’s another part of language that fascinates me, and that’s identity.

Someone says, “I’m trying to build a successful business.”

I hear the word trying.

What would happen if they simply said, “I’m building my business”?

It isn’t about correcting people’s grammar or telling them they’re using the “wrong” words. I’m interested in what happens internally when they say it.

One sounds like an attempt. The other sounds like something already in motion.

The same happens when somebody continually says, “I want to become more confident.”

Where is the confidence?

Somewhere over there in the future.

What happens if that becomes, “I’m becoming more confident every time I do this”?

Now the mind has something to notice. It can start finding evidence.

This is where language and my Open to Receive work have become so connected.

Because receiving isn’t simply saying that you want more. It’s also about who you’re being in relation to the thing you say you want.

You can consciously want success while continually describing yourself as someone struggling to become successful. You can want more money while having conversations every day about how there’s never enough. You can want a beautiful relationship while describing yourself through everything that went wrong in the last one, and you can want more visibility in your business while simultaneously telling yourself how terrifying it is to be seen.

And this is where I think we have to become curious about ourselves.

What do I say I want, and who am I continually telling myself I am?

Those two things don’t always match.

And yes, I catch myself doing it too..

I teach this work and I still catch my own language.

Of course I do.

Sometimes I’ll hear myself say something and think, “Danielle, did you actually just say that?”

And I laugh because there it is. Something has slipped out that tells me far more than the sentence itself.

Maybe I’m speaking from pressure. Maybe I’ve moved into scarcity around something. Maybe an old fear has popped up or I’m speaking from an identity that made perfect sense ten years ago but doesn’t really belong to the life I’m living now.

I don’t think mastery means reaching some magical stage where you never have an unhelpful thought or say an unhelpful thing again.

For me, it’s about noticing more quickly.

Instead of giving myself a hard time about it, I get curious.

What am I presupposing here? What am I focusing on? What would have to be true for me to keep saying this? Is this actually true now, or is it familiar?

And then I come back to that question again.

What do I want instead?

It changes the direction of the conversation.

Protection has its own language..

This has become particularly interesting to me through the Open to Receive work because I’ve noticed just how much our language changes when we’re in protection.

When we don’t feel completely safe emotionally, financially, professionally or in a relationship, our language starts telling us.

We say things like, “What if it doesn’t work?”, “I can’t risk it”, “I have to know how first”, “There’s not enough”, “What will people think?”, “It’s too late for me”, or “I should have done this years ago.”

And when we’re feeling more open, our questions tend to change naturally.

“What if this works?”

“What else could be possible here?”

“What do I actually want?”

“What am I available for now?”

“Where’s the opportunity in this?”

I don’t want anyone reading this to start policing every word that comes out of their mouth because that completely misses the point.

I want you to notice it.

Because sometimes the part of you that’s speaking isn’t really the adult version of you sitting here today.

It might be a much younger version of you who learned that money disappears, that people leave, that being visible brings criticism, that asking for something is risky or that receiving something means you owe somebody something afterwards.

When you understand that, the language makes sense.

I don’t even particularly like calling that self-sabotage, because very often I think it’s the opposite. Something inside us has been trying to protect us using information it learned a very long time ago.

The language is simply giving us an opportunity to hear it.

And then there’s actually receiving..

Here’s another thing I find fascinating.

Someone tells us we were brilliant and we say, “Oh God, no, I was terrible.”

Someone offers to help us and before they’ve even finished the sentence we’re saying, “No, no, I’m fine.”

Someone congratulates us on something we’ve achieved and we immediately explain why it wasn’t really that impressive.

Someone wants to pay us well and our first instinct is to wonder if we’re charging too much.

Then we say we want more recognition, more support, more money, more love and more opportunity.

Can you see the contradiction?

Sometimes receiving looks incredibly ordinary.

Somebody says, “You were brilliant.”

And you say, “Thank you.”

And then you stop talking!

No explaining it away. No telling them about the three things that went wrong. No immediately giving the compliment back because sitting there and actually receiving it feels uncomfortable.

Just letting it land.

It’s such a small thing, but it’s worth noticing.

The way we speak to other people changes things too..

Of course, all of this goes far beyond the conversation we’re having inside our own heads.

I’ve spent years teaching communication, NLP, sales, public speaking and influence, and I’m still fascinated by how a tiny change in language can completely alter the feeling of a conversation.

And I’m not talking about manipulation. In fact, good communication for me is the opposite of manipulation because it begins with intention.

If I’m going into a sales conversation thinking, “I really hope this person buys,” I’m having a completely different internal experience from, “Let’s find out if this is right for them.”

If I’m walking onto a stage thinking, “I hope they like me,” that’s very different from asking, “What can I give this room today?”

And if I’m going into a difficult conversation with someone thinking, “I have to make them understand that I’m right,” imagine the difference if my intention becomes, “I want us to understand each other better.”

We underestimate how much of ourselves travels through our words.

People feel pressure.

They feel uncertainty.

They feel when you’re trying to get something from them.

And they also feel congruence, certainty, curiosity and genuine connection.

That’s why communication has never just been about learning clever phrases for me. It’s about understanding the person who is using them.

Does your language belong to where you’re going?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Does the language you’re using today belong to the life you’re creating now, or does some of it still belong to the life you’ve already lived?

Because we can leave an old chapter physically and still speak its language for years afterwards.

We can have money and still speak from scarcity. We can be deeply loved and still expect rejection. We can become successful and continue talking as though we’re struggling to prove ourselves. We can finally be safe and still have a nervous system and a vocabulary built around protection.

And one I’ve become particularly aware of is that we can receive exactly what we once asked for and immediately start focusing on losing it.

That’s such an interesting one.

The thing arrives, and rather than experiencing it fully, the mind starts working out how it might disappear.

Sometimes our external world changes much faster than our internal identity catches up.

And perhaps part of learning to receive is allowing ourselves to recognise, I’m here now. This is actually happening. I can experience this.

Listen to yourself..

For the next 24 hours, listen to yourself with curiosity.

You don’t have to correct anything.

Just notice.

Listen particularly when you hear yourself saying things such as “I always…”, “I never…”, “I can’t…”, “I have to…”, “I’m trying…”, “I’m worried that…” or even “I am…”.

And every now and again ask yourself:

Is that actually a fact, or is it a very familiar story?

Then ask:

What do I want instead?

You don’t have to jump from “Everything is awful” to “My life is absolutely amazing” if you don’t believe it. Your subconscious isn’t stupid.

Find language that feels true but takes you in the direction you actually want to go.

“I’m trying to get more clients” might become “I’m creating more conversations with the right people.”

“I don’t want to be stressed all the time” might become “I want to create more space and support around me.”

“I’m terrible at receiving compliments” might simply become “I’m learning to let them land.”

Small changes, perhaps.

But a different direction.

The longer I do this work, the more fascinated I become by how much of our internal world is revealed in the most ordinary moments. A thought we barely notice, a sentence we’ve probably said a thousand times, a reaction that feels automatic, a word we use without ever questioning it.

Our language tells us so much about the world we’re living inside.

So listen to yourself.

Listen to what you’re expecting, what you’re assuming, what you’re protecting and what you’re repeatedly telling yourself is true.

And then ask yourself what you actually want.

Because becoming open to receive isn’t only about the opportunities, money, love, success, support or experiences that come towards us.

It’s also about becoming the version of ourselves who can recognise them, allow them in and actually experience them when they’re here.

And sometimes that change begins in a very ordinary place.

With the next sentence that comes out of your mouth.

Danielle Serpico is an international speaker, entrepreneur and trainer who has worked professionally with NLP, subconscious communication, human behaviour and transformation for more than fifteen years. She is the creator of SourceWork™ and Open to Receive™ and works with entrepreneurs, leaders and individuals to change the internal patterns that influence how they communicate, create and receive.