Today, I'm talking about the concept of SELF Wealthy words and how your language shapes your reality. Plus, I'm sharing my process for creating a Word Playbook to ensure the words you think and speak every single day are those of the confident, successful you. Get ready to say YES! to a more empowered way of speaking and thinking. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello there, my remarkable friend. I hope you're feeling fabulous today and saying YES! to you and all the things that make you feel rich from the inside out. If this is your first time checking out this podcast, this is a space I share my insights, tips and strategies for creating a life you love, one YES! at a time through Self-Creation.

I am so excited about our topic today because it's something I personally experienced and seen immense growth from. What I'm talking about is the power of your words, the ones you both think and speak every single day, and how they shape your reality.

Words are incredibly powerful. They can build your SELF Wealth and uplift you, inspire you with things like self-confidence, self-belief and self-trust, and they can drive you powerfully towards your dreams as a result. On the flip side, they can also deplete your SELF Wealth and limit you, create doubt, and keep you stuck in a mediocre life that is less than you deserve and less than you truly are capable of.

In planning out what I wanted to share with you in today's episode, I spent some time thinking about all the ways words have changed my life experience over the years, from the extraordinary highlights I've lived out, to how they've kept me stuck in my very darkest moments. I've definitely seen both sides of how the words I think and speak every day have affected the level of my SELF Wealth and how this has played a very significant role in what I have experienced at various times in my life.

As you may already know, or you'll learn about me, one word in particular has had a very big impact in my life over recent years, and that one word is YES!. Saying YES! to myself and my dreams has been an absolute game-changer. Saying YES! is the one thing that helped me come out of what were some of my darkest moments in my life and recreate my life in a way that I actually love waking up to it every single day.

Saying YES! to me, all of me, saying YES! to all of my wants, needs and desires, no matter how wild and wonderful they may be, and saying YES! to the bigger possibilities of who I can be in my lifetime and the kind of life I can experience, has allowed me to change my story in ways I wasn't previously able to do.

And I talk a lot about stories, in particular how the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what's possible in our world create our reality. One of my first lessons in this was all those many years ago when I completely redefined who I was and as a result completely reinvented my world, going from being a woman who cleaned the homes of millionaires, struggling to make ends meet, to being a woman who is a millionaire.

People often ask how that was possible. What did I do? They want to know the magic secret to how I made that happen. And it's actually quite simple. I changed the story of who I be. I changed the story of what was possible for me. I changed the rules I decided to live by. I used the power of words to help me step into the identity of a woman who is a millionaire.

When I did that, I started doing all the things that a woman who is a millionaire would do. And in the doing, I created that reality for myself. It was that transformation of my identity and in turn my reality through the power of words, the power of my story, that I first understood the true impact words can have on your life.

And when I look back to the stories I was telling myself leading up to that time in my life, stories that go right back to my childhood, I can clearly see how my choice of words had been shaping my identity and my life long before I learned how to intentionally choose them to change the outcome of my life.

Stories I told myself like not being good enough, to make sense of why my peers teased me day in day out about my name, my red hair, freckles and pale white skin, about the way I spoke with a lisp.

Looking back, I can see how I lived out that story of not being good enough by default for many years, how I proved my story to be true. Until that moment in my life when I began to understand the power of our words and how we can change our reality by changing our story, by changing the words we think and speak about ourselves and our world.

I will bet a bottle of my best champagne that you have stories like I'm not good enough too that are depleting your SELF Wealth and limiting what you are able to experience in your life. If you don't, I want to know who you are because I want to see if you are human. I suspect you just might not be.

But listen, the other thing you might already know about me, or you'll learn about me soon enough, is that I am not someone who will tell you I've got this all figured out, that I'm perfect, that I don't fall into old habits and ways of being or telling myself that story of not being good enough, that I don't need to work on building my SELF Wealth. It's quite the opposite.

I have to do this work constantly to remind myself that this old deeply ingrained story of not being good enough is no longer my story. Just like maintaining your cardio fitness takes a regular commitment. Your mindset is the same. It takes a regular commitment. And I know for sure that I am human because sometimes that commitment gets a little shaky. Things are going well, and your mind feels really fit and so start to slacken off a little. Until all of a sudden you find yourself off track.

In fact, this is one of the reasons I chose this topic today because if you have been following along, I've had a few challenges lately. Things that have been a little off track for me and I had to do a lot of really deep work again to find my way through those challenges and get myself back on course.

And what I've come to realize through this deeper work on myself, is how my choice of words this year has been playing out in my life, and in particular, how subtly some of these words that are depleting my SELF Wealth, have crept right on in.

If you've been hanging out with me for any length of time, you will probably have heard how I packed up my entire life back in 2022 and moved from my home country, Australia, to the other side of the world to live in Europe. Both my husband and I love to travel so much so that we wanted to plant ourselves in Europe permanently to explore the great vastness of it. And over the past two years since we've been here, we have definitely done just that.

I think just last year alone, my husband's Google timeline showed that we had traveled to eight countries, something like a hundred cities, and visited more than 400 places. We apparently traveled a distance equal to traveling some 63 percent around the world. And it really has been a fantastic experience, everything we came here to do. And I'll be honest, it has also been very challenging to travel as much as we have been and bring my vision for The Self-Creation School to life at the same time.

So during a month long trip at Christmas time, when I was really feeling that challenge, we decided that 2024 would be the year I focused more on my business and less on travel. This would be the year I worked hard on making The Self-Creation School everything I imagine it can be. I share this with you because this one decision has been playing out of my life in ways I didn't stop to think about when I declared 2024 to be a work hard year.

Now working hard seems like a pretty honorable thing to do on the surface, right? Working hard seems like a practical thing to do to be able to make massive progress towards something you want. If I'm honest, there's a part of me that loves working hard on something.

But here's the problem with it.

For me, working hard has become, over the first almost half of this year, a regular part of my conversation with myself and with others. So much so that it very subtly began to morph into thoughts of, “this is hard”, which has created feelings of overwhelm and anxiety.

In that state of overwhelm and anxiety, I started telling myself stories like, “If other people can do this without working so hard, why can't I? Obviously, I'm just not good enough”.

So, what do I do when I don't feel like I'm good enough? Well, I work a little harder to make up for my not enoughness. And as I work harder, it all begins to feel so much harder. My feelings of overwhelm and anxiety increase because if now I'm working this much harder and I'm still not good enough, boy, how hard can I work at this? Well, I'll just take it up another notch and work just a little bit harder and surely that will make up for my not enoughness.

You see what's happening here, right?

And here's how this idea of things being hard weaved its way very subtly into the language I have been thinking and speaking this year.

About a month after we stopped traveling, people in my life began to notice I wasn't posting photos from our trips. Funny enough, people actually checked in with us to make sure all was well in our world. And every time that happened, both my husband and I would explain that we had decided it was time for Leanne to work hard on her business goals this year and that I was pretty much head down, tail up, doing just that, working hard.

During the year, whenever we have met up with our friends for coffee or dinner, and the conversation passed around the table to ask after what I had been doing, my answer started being just working hard. As the days passed by, week after week, month after month, this idea that I am working hard has taken me on a downward spiral. Hard has become my story. And I probably don't need to tell you that this isn't serving me all that well.

And I've realized that working hard has become hard in ways that I'm not actually prepared to pay the price of. Working hard and harder and harder still on my business has shifted my focus away from working on the other areas in my life that actually really matter to me, like my health and fitness, like my marriage, for example. And things in general have started to be off kilter, a little out of balance. The word hard has started showing up in many aspects of my life.

And here's the thing, words like hard, overwhelmed, anxious, are words I actually banned many years ago from my regular conversation list. Now, I say this with a disclaimer. Of course, if I'm feeling like something is hard or I'm feeling overwhelmed or anxious, I'm going to allow myself to identify my feelings and use those words.

But the idea of having these words on my banned list of words, is that I don't allow them to become a part of the regular way I think and speak. Because the energy from which I take action with these kind of words as part of my story, versus other words like calm, effortless and ease, is going to be very different.

So while very well intentioned and seemingly innocently enough, I decided to work hard on my business goals this year, you can see how this one word has actually had quite negative consequences for me. And this really has been a wakeup call for me to revisit my Word Playbook and reaffirm my commitment to being more intentional about the words I allow into my world.

It's also a great reminder of how you can have all the tools and resources for managing your mind at your fingertips, just like you can have the gym membership, but if you don't use them regularly, they're not going to be all that much help. These days, it's not often I find myself too far off track, but when I do, I can guarantee it's because I've stopped doing this mindset work in some way or at the deep level that I need to.

So, on that note, before I dive in and share my process for choosing SELF Wealthy words that will support you in creating the life you want, I encourage you to think about where your mind health is at right now, where it might need some work, and how can we commit yourself to doing that work?

All right, so moving on. Words are a big part of how we communicate, I think you would agree with me on this. And as I've explained, they communicate to ourselves and our world who we believe ourselves to be and what we believe is possible. In that sense, and as I've already been discussing, they are a powerful tool that you can use to help you shape your identity and shape your outcomes.

And I really cannot say this enough. The words you use in your self-talk and conversations with others influence everything. Your emotions, your actions, and ultimately, what you experience in your everyday life. They influence who you be and you show up in your world.

So the idea behind having a Word Playbook is that you intentionally choose words that you do and don't use that reflect your desired identity, the identity of the woman who is living out the life you want. And to do this, I like to identify the words in particular that either increase or decrease your SELF Wealth. So here I'm talking about things like your self-love, self-confidence, self-trust, self-belief, self-worth, self-acceptance, and so on.

If you know my story, I became a millionaire and still didn't love the life I live because I wasn't wealthy in all those SELF things and all the money and success in the world won't buy them.

When I added SELF Wealth to the equation, starting with saying that YES! to all of me as I talked about earlier, that's when I created a life I need to pinch myself to believe is mine. So the focus for me is always on what story can I tell myself that builds my SELF Wealth because I know how that flows into everything else in my life.

So to help figure this out, and this is something I am in the process of revisiting myself, I like to start with a word audit. Here's how that process looks.

Over the course of a week, keep a notepad handy and jot down words and stories in you find yourself often thinking or saying that feel disempowering, draining, or make you feel negatively about yourself. When you jot down these words or stories, make a note of how they make you feel.

For me, obviously, hard was a big focus word and that makes me feel overwhelmed and anxious. Things I've caught myself out thinking and saying because I've been allowing the story of hard and the emotions of overwhelm and anxiety into my every day are words like I can't, I won't, it's not possible, I don't know, I'm tired, frustrated, disappointed. I'm not good enough.

Once you have a list of words and phrases and how they make you feel, spend some time to think about how using these words and feeling in these ways is depleting your SELF Wealth and stopping you from doing the things you want to do.

For me, the word hard has been absolutely depleting my self-confidence and making me second guess everything I've been doing to the point it really has slowed me down in the work I've been able to produce, even with all those extra hours of hard work, which are simply just leading me to burnout and being quite out of balance in a lot of areas in my life.

So step one is to identify the words you are using that are limiting you and how they make you feel. Step two is to think about how this is depleting your SELF Wealth and affecting how you show up in your world.

Step three is to think about your Future SELF and list down all the ways she would think about herself and her world and how that would make her feel. What words is she using?

So you can ask yourself things like, what does she believe about herself? How would she describe herself? How would she describe what's possible in her world? How would she talk about her everyday experience to others in conversation? What does she think about doing what it is you want to do and living the life you want to live? What does she tell other people about that?

My Future SELF does not for a moment believe that doing the things I want to do is hard, overwhelming, or that they make her feel anxious. She believes that what she does is effortless, that she's capable, that her life is in balance. She feels energetic, clear and focused. She's calm and the way she speaks is calm, considered and collected. She says things like, “My life is abundant”. “My life is full of possibilities”. “I am good enough”. “I am successful”. “I have value to offer”. “Everything is happening perfectly for me”.

Then once you have that list, consider how these words and feelings that they create increases your SELF Wealth and what action you would take as a result that you are not taking right now.

Then finally it's time to make sense of your audit and create a Word Playbook to guide you moving forward and I break this up into five parts.

Number one, I like to choose three adjectives that describe the tone of my Future SELF's conversation. So for example, confident, sophisticated, open, determined, positive, and so on.

Number two, I list the words my Future SELF never uses. So here, you pay attention to the negative words on your audit list that don't appear in your Future SELF's conversations. For me, I have words like slang or swear words, anxious, overwhelmed, impossible, hard, distracted, confused, impatient, hesitant, tired, weary, worried, frustrated, not good enough.

It doesn't matter how long you're listed, so write down all the words you no longer say or think. The words that don't serve you and are no longer a part of your story.

Number three is to list down the words your Future SELF uses often. Here I have words like YES!, remarkable, effortless, expansive, powerful, determined, focused, confident, capable, calm, courageous, energetic, and worthy.

The final two things I include are my top three to five totally unacceptable words. Words that are an absolute hard no. For me I have four and it's probably no surprise that they are hard, overwhelmed, anxious, and perfect.

And finally, I create three to five 'instead of' statements. So instead of fill in the blank, I say fill in the blank. Here I draw on the top three to five things that keep coming up in my everyday conversations that are depleting my SELF Wealth and negatively impacting my outcomes.

Here's some of mine as an example for you. Instead of I am overwhelmed, I say, my life is abundant. Instead of it's too hard, I say I am focused, determined and capable. Instead of it's not perfect, I say this is good enough. So you get the idea.

Basically, I am looking at my current stories and replacing them with words that my Future SELF thinks or feels. This at the same time also helps me address some obstacles I am creating for myself. It's too hard, it's going to stand in my way. So by reframing this with words from my Future SELF's vocabulary, I've made a plan ahead of time for how I can overcome this one thought moving forward. I have an answer for it that better supports me.

And then the important part of all of this is using your Word Playbook every day to remind yourself of how to think and speak like the Future You. Some ways you can do that is by reading your playbook every morning, something that I had actually stopped doing. You can create I AM affirmations using the words of the Future You.

I highly recommend downloading my Daily Journal Pages, which I've made available to you for free. I use these pages every morning to look at how I'm feeling and the story behind that, and I clean it up before I start my day. So here, it's going to be especially powerful if you keep your Word Playbook handy as you do this. So if words do pop up from your banned words list, you can switch them out and set your mind straight before you head into your day.

There's also space on those pages for your I AM affirmation statements of the day, amongst other things that I've found helpful in helping me set my day up for success. Now I'll leave the link in the show notes for you if you'd like to grab yourself a copy.

I also had to have a conversation with my husband about supporting me in changing the way I'm speaking about my focus on business this year. Firstly, so he had permission to call me out on it. And secondly, because me working hard, working too hard, was also becoming part of his conversation. And so obviously we needed to get on the same page with this.

So I definitely recommend, if you can, to include the people you spend the most time with in on your plans here so that they can support you.

And listen, you will catch yourself out using words and phrases on your 'I Never Use' list. Even after you stop using those words, as you can see by everything I've shared here today, you might regress into using them again.

But you get to decide what you make that mean. You can beat yourself up for using these words and not getting this right and tell yourself this won't work for you. Or you can show yourself love, grace, patience, and understanding, and say, well, isn't that interesting? That word is sticking around or has come back to visit. Let's spend some time this week and focus on switching that out. You can see it as a perfectly normal opportunity to review and adjust your words on an ongoing basis as needed.

It's easy to fall into the trap of using words that don't actually serve us and, as you can see, for them to show up in subtle ways in your life. I hope sharing my recent experiences with this has sparked a conversation within yourself about how the words you use on a regular basis may be holding you back and making things a whole lot harder than they need to be. And definitely, no pun intended right there.

Choosing more empowering words doesn't cost you anything. But allowing those disempowering, negative and limiting words to run on default most certainly comes with a price tag. So if this work feels like it's all too much for you, I encourage you to consider what the cost of not doing this work is, and if you are willing to pay that price.

One thing I can promise you either way, your words have a powerful impact on the everyday life you experience. If you will be prepared to up level your words, you will up level your life.

That's all from me today. Be sure to join me next Wednesday for another conversation about creating a life you love one YES! at a time.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

Today, I'm talking about the concept of SELF Wealthy words and how your language shapes your reality. Plus, I'm sharing my process for creating a Word Playbook to ensure the words you think and speak every single day are those of the confident, successful you. Get ready to say YES! to a more empowered way of speaking and thinking. Let's dive in.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I'm your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you're ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

Hello there, my remarkable friend. I hope you're feeling fabulous today and saying YES! to you and all the things that make you feel rich from the inside out. If this is your first time checking out this podcast, this is a space I share my insights, tips and strategies for creating a life you love, one YES! at a time through Self-Creation.

I am so excited about our topic today because it's something I personally experienced and seen immense growth from. What I'm talking about is the power of your words, the ones you both think and speak every single day, and how they shape your reality.

Words are incredibly powerful. They can build your SELF Wealth and uplift you, inspire you with things like self-confidence, self-belief and self-trust, and they can drive you powerfully towards your dreams as a result. On the flip side, they can also deplete your SELF Wealth and limit you, create doubt, and keep you stuck in a mediocre life that is less than you deserve and less than you truly are capable of.

In planning out what I wanted to share with you in today's episode, I spent some time thinking about all the ways words have changed my life experience over the years, from the extraordinary highlights I've lived out, to how they've kept me stuck in my very darkest moments. I've definitely seen both sides of how the words I think and speak every day have affected the level of my SELF Wealth and how this has played a very significant role in what I have experienced at various times in my life.

As you may already know, or you'll learn about me, one word in particular has had a very big impact in my life over recent years, and that one word is YES!. Saying YES! to myself and my dreams has been an absolute game-changer. Saying YES! is the one thing that helped me come out of what were some of my darkest moments in my life and recreate my life in a way that I actually love waking up to it every single day.

Saying YES! to me, all of me, saying YES! to all of my wants, needs and desires, no matter how wild and wonderful they may be, and saying YES! to the bigger possibilities of who I can be in my lifetime and the kind of life I can experience, has allowed me to change my story in ways I wasn't previously able to do.

And I talk a lot about stories, in particular how the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what's possible in our world create our reality. One of my first lessons in this was all those many years ago when I completely redefined who I was and as a result completely reinvented my world, going from being a woman who cleaned the homes of millionaires, struggling to make ends meet, to being a woman who is a millionaire.

People often ask how that was possible. What did I do? They want to know the magic secret to how I made that happen. And it's actually quite simple. I changed the story of who I be. I changed the story of what was possible for me. I changed the rules I decided to live by. I used the power of words to help me step into the identity of a woman who is a millionaire.

When I did that, I started doing all the things that a woman who is a millionaire would do. And in the doing, I created that reality for myself. It was that transformation of my identity and in turn my reality through the power of words, the power of my story, that I first understood the true impact words can have on your life.

And when I look back to the stories I was telling myself leading up to that time in my life, stories that go right back to my childhood, I can clearly see how my choice of words had been shaping my identity and my life long before I learned how to intentionally choose them to change the outcome of my life.

Stories I told myself like not being good enough, to make sense of why my peers teased me day in day out about my name, my red hair, freckles and pale white skin, about the way I spoke with a lisp.

Looking back, I can see how I lived out that story of not being good enough by default for many years, how I proved my story to be true. Until that moment in my life when I began to understand the power of our words and how we can change our reality by changing our story, by changing the words we think and speak about ourselves and our world.

I will bet a bottle of my best champagne that you have stories like I'm not good enough too that are depleting your SELF Wealth and limiting what you are able to experience in your life. If you don't, I want to know who you are because I want to see if you are human. I suspect you just might not be.

But listen, the other thing you might already know about me, or you'll learn about me soon enough, is that I am not someone who will tell you I've got this all figured out, that I'm perfect, that I don't fall into old habits and ways of being or telling myself that story of not being good enough, that I don't need to work on building my SELF Wealth. It's quite the opposite.

I have to do this work constantly to remind myself that this old deeply ingrained story of not being good enough is no longer my story. Just like maintaining your cardio fitness takes a regular commitment. Your mindset is the same. It takes a regular commitment. And I know for sure that I am human because sometimes that commitment gets a little shaky. Things are going well, and your mind feels really fit and so start to slacken off a little. Until all of a sudden you find yourself off track.

In fact, this is one of the reasons I chose this topic today because if you have been following along, I've had a few challenges lately. Things that have been a little off track for me and I had to do a lot of really deep work again to find my way through those challenges and get myself back on course.

And what I've come to realize through this deeper work on myself, is how my choice of words this year has been playing out in my life, and in particular, how subtly some of these words that are depleting my SELF Wealth, have crept right on in.

If you've been hanging out with me for any length of time, you will probably have heard how I packed up my entire life back in 2022 and moved from my home country, Australia, to the other side of the world to live in Europe. Both my husband and I love to travel so much so that we wanted to plant ourselves in Europe permanently to explore the great vastness of it. And over the past two years since we've been here, we have definitely done just that.

I think just last year alone, my husband's Google timeline showed that we had traveled to eight countries, something like a hundred cities, and visited more than 400 places. We apparently traveled a distance equal to traveling some 63 percent around the world. And it really has been a fantastic experience, everything we came here to do. And I'll be honest, it has also been very challenging to travel as much as we have been and bring my vision for The Self-Creation School to life at the same time.

So during a month long trip at Christmas time, when I was really feeling that challenge, we decided that 2024 would be the year I focused more on my business and less on travel. This would be the year I worked hard on making The Self-Creation School everything I imagine it can be. I share this with you because this one decision has been playing out of my life in ways I didn't stop to think about when I declared 2024 to be a work hard year.

Now working hard seems like a pretty honorable thing to do on the surface, right? Working hard seems like a practical thing to do to be able to make massive progress towards something you want. If I'm honest, there's a part of me that loves working hard on something.

But here's the problem with it.

For me, working hard has become, over the first almost half of this year, a regular part of my conversation with myself and with others. So much so that it very subtly began to morph into thoughts of, “this is hard”, which has created feelings of overwhelm and anxiety.

In that state of overwhelm and anxiety, I started telling myself stories like, “If other people can do this without working so hard, why can't I? Obviously, I'm just not good enough”.

So, what do I do when I don't feel like I'm good enough? Well, I work a little harder to make up for my not enoughness. And as I work harder, it all begins to feel so much harder. My feelings of overwhelm and anxiety increase because if now I'm working this much harder and I'm still not good enough, boy, how hard can I work at this? Well, I'll just take it up another notch and work just a little bit harder and surely that will make up for my not enoughness.

You see what's happening here, right?

And here's how this idea of things being hard weaved its way very subtly into the language I have been thinking and speaking this year.

About a month after we stopped traveling, people in my life began to notice I wasn't posting photos from our trips. Funny enough, people actually checked in with us to make sure all was well in our world. And every time that happened, both my husband and I would explain that we had decided it was time for Leanne to work hard on her business goals this year and that I was pretty much head down, tail up, doing just that, working hard.

During the year, whenever we have met up with our friends for coffee or dinner, and the conversation passed around the table to ask after what I had been doing, my answer started being just working hard. As the days passed by, week after week, month after month, this idea that I am working hard has taken me on a downward spiral. Hard has become my story. And I probably don't need to tell you that this isn't serving me all that well.

And I've realized that working hard has become hard in ways that I'm not actually prepared to pay the price of. Working hard and harder and harder still on my business has shifted my focus away from working on the other areas in my life that actually really matter to me, like my health and fitness, like my marriage, for example. And things in general have started to be off kilter, a little out of balance. The word hard has started showing up in many aspects of my life.

And here's the thing, words like hard, overwhelmed, anxious, are words I actually banned many years ago from my regular conversation list. Now, I say this with a disclaimer. Of course, if I'm feeling like something is hard or I'm feeling overwhelmed or anxious, I'm going to allow myself to identify my feelings and use those words.

But the idea of having these words on my banned list of words, is that I don't allow them to become a part of the regular way I think and speak. Because the energy from which I take action with these kind of words as part of my story, versus other words like calm, effortless and ease, is going to be very different.

So while very well intentioned and seemingly innocently enough, I decided to work hard on my business goals this year, you can see how this one word has actually had quite negative consequences for me. And this really has been a wakeup call for me to revisit my Word Playbook and reaffirm my commitment to being more intentional about the words I allow into my world.

It's also a great reminder of how you can have all the tools and resources for managing your mind at your fingertips, just like you can have the gym membership, but if you don't use them regularly, they're not going to be all that much help. These days, it's not often I find myself too far off track, but when I do, I can guarantee it's because I've stopped doing this mindset work in some way or at the deep level that I need to.

So, on that note, before I dive in and share my process for choosing SELF Wealthy words that will support you in creating the life you want, I encourage you to think about where your mind health is at right now, where it might need some work, and how can we commit yourself to doing that work?

All right, so moving on. Words are a big part of how we communicate, I think you would agree with me on this. And as I've explained, they communicate to ourselves and our world who we believe ourselves to be and what we believe is possible. In that sense, and as I've already been discussing, they are a powerful tool that you can use to help you shape your identity and shape your outcomes.

And I really cannot say this enough. The words you use in your self-talk and conversations with others influence everything. Your emotions, your actions, and ultimately, what you experience in your everyday life. They influence who you be and you show up in your world.

So the idea behind having a Word Playbook is that you intentionally choose words that you do and don't use that reflect your desired identity, the identity of the woman who is living out the life you want. And to do this, I like to identify the words in particular that either increase or decrease your SELF Wealth. So here I'm talking about things like your self-love, self-confidence, self-trust, self-belief, self-worth, self-acceptance, and so on.

If you know my story, I became a millionaire and still didn't love the life I live because I wasn't wealthy in all those SELF things and all the money and success in the world won't buy them.

When I added SELF Wealth to the equation, starting with saying that YES! to all of me as I talked about earlier, that's when I created a life I need to pinch myself to believe is mine. So the focus for me is always on what story can I tell myself that builds my SELF Wealth because I know how that flows into everything else in my life.

So to help figure this out, and this is something I am in the process of revisiting myself, I like to start with a word audit. Here's how that process looks.

Over the course of a week, keep a notepad handy and jot down words and stories in you find yourself often thinking or saying that feel disempowering, draining, or make you feel negatively about yourself. When you jot down these words or stories, make a note of how they make you feel.

For me, obviously, hard was a big focus word and that makes me feel overwhelmed and anxious. Things I've caught myself out thinking and saying because I've been allowing the story of hard and the emotions of overwhelm and anxiety into my every day are words like I can't, I won't, it's not possible, I don't know, I'm tired, frustrated, disappointed. I'm not good enough.

Once you have a list of words and phrases and how they make you feel, spend some time to think about how using these words and feeling in these ways is depleting your SELF Wealth and stopping you from doing the things you want to do.

For me, the word hard has been absolutely depleting my self-confidence and making me second guess everything I've been doing to the point it really has slowed me down in the work I've been able to produce, even with all those extra hours of hard work, which are simply just leading me to burnout and being quite out of balance in a lot of areas in my life.

So step one is to identify the words you are using that are limiting you and how they make you feel. Step two is to think about how this is depleting your SELF Wealth and affecting how you show up in your world.

Step three is to think about your Future SELF and list down all the ways she would think about herself and her world and how that would make her feel. What words is she using?

So you can ask yourself things like, what does she believe about herself? How would she describe herself? How would she describe what's possible in her world? How would she talk about her everyday experience to others in conversation? What does she think about doing what it is you want to do and living the life you want to live? What does she tell other people about that?

My Future SELF does not for a moment believe that doing the things I want to do is hard, overwhelming, or that they make her feel anxious. She believes that what she does is effortless, that she's capable, that her life is in balance. She feels energetic, clear and focused. She's calm and the way she speaks is calm, considered and collected. She says things like, “My life is abundant”. “My life is full of possibilities”. “I am good enough”. “I am successful”. “I have value to offer”. “Everything is happening perfectly for me”.

Then once you have that list, consider how these words and feelings that they create increases your SELF Wealth and what action you would take as a result that you are not taking right now.

Then finally it's time to make sense of your audit and create a Word Playbook to guide you moving forward and I break this up into five parts.

Number one, I like to choose three adjectives that describe the tone of my Future SELF's conversation. So for example, confident, sophisticated, open, determined, positive, and so on.

Number two, I list the words my Future SELF never uses. So here, you pay attention to the negative words on your audit list that don't appear in your Future SELF's conversations. For me, I have words like slang or swear words, anxious, overwhelmed, impossible, hard, distracted, confused, impatient, hesitant, tired, weary, worried, frustrated, not good enough.

It doesn't matter how long you're listed, so write down all the words you no longer say or think. The words that don't serve you and are no longer a part of your story.

Number three is to list down the words your Future SELF uses often. Here I have words like YES!, remarkable, effortless, expansive, powerful, determined, focused, confident, capable, calm, courageous, energetic, and worthy.

The final two things I include are my top three to five totally unacceptable words. Words that are an absolute hard no. For me I have four and it's probably no surprise that they are hard, overwhelmed, anxious, and perfect.

And finally, I create three to five 'instead of' statements. So instead of fill in the blank, I say fill in the blank. Here I draw on the top three to five things that keep coming up in my everyday conversations that are depleting my SELF Wealth and negatively impacting my outcomes.

Here's some of mine as an example for you. Instead of I am overwhelmed, I say, my life is abundant. Instead of it's too hard, I say I am focused, determined and capable. Instead of it's not perfect, I say this is good enough. So you get the idea.

Basically, I am looking at my current stories and replacing them with words that my Future SELF thinks or feels. This at the same time also helps me address some obstacles I am creating for myself. It's too hard, it's going to stand in my way. So by reframing this with words from my Future SELF's vocabulary, I've made a plan ahead of time for how I can overcome this one thought moving forward. I have an answer for it that better supports me.

And then the important part of all of this is using your Word Playbook every day to remind yourself of how to think and speak like the Future You. Some ways you can do that is by reading your playbook every morning, something that I had actually stopped doing. You can create I AM affirmations using the words of the Future You.

I highly recommend downloading my Daily Journal Pages, which I've made available to you for free. I use these pages every morning to look at how I'm feeling and the story behind that, and I clean it up before I start my day. So here, it's going to be especially powerful if you keep your Word Playbook handy as you do this. So if words do pop up from your banned words list, you can switch them out and set your mind straight before you head into your day.

There's also space on those pages for your I AM affirmation statements of the day, amongst other things that I've found helpful in helping me set my day up for success. Now I'll leave the link in the show notes for you if you'd like to grab yourself a copy.

I also had to have a conversation with my husband about supporting me in changing the way I'm speaking about my focus on business this year. Firstly, so he had permission to call me out on it. And secondly, because me working hard, working too hard, was also becoming part of his conversation. And so obviously we needed to get on the same page with this.

So I definitely recommend, if you can, to include the people you spend the most time with in on your plans here so that they can support you.

And listen, you will catch yourself out using words and phrases on your 'I Never Use' list. Even after you stop using those words, as you can see by everything I've shared here today, you might regress into using them again.

But you get to decide what you make that mean. You can beat yourself up for using these words and not getting this right and tell yourself this won't work for you. Or you can show yourself love, grace, patience, and understanding, and say, well, isn't that interesting? That word is sticking around or has come back to visit. Let's spend some time this week and focus on switching that out. You can see it as a perfectly normal opportunity to review and adjust your words on an ongoing basis as needed.

It's easy to fall into the trap of using words that don't actually serve us and, as you can see, for them to show up in subtle ways in your life. I hope sharing my recent experiences with this has sparked a conversation within yourself about how the words you use on a regular basis may be holding you back and making things a whole lot harder than they need to be. And definitely, no pun intended right there.

Choosing more empowering words doesn't cost you anything. But allowing those disempowering, negative and limiting words to run on default most certainly comes with a price tag. So if this work feels like it's all too much for you, I encourage you to consider what the cost of not doing this work is, and if you are willing to pay that price.

One thing I can promise you either way, your words have a powerful impact on the everyday life you experience. If you will be prepared to up level your words, you will up level your life.

That's all from me today. Be sure to join me next Wednesday for another conversation about creating a life you love one YES! at a time.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what's stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what's standing in your way today and I'll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it. That's https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.