Language creates.

By going to Vietnam I was going to a part of the world that was totally unfamiliar to me and I have to admit that I was anxious.
Not being able to read anything and as a result not being able to figure things out scared me.
I had thoughts about getting stuck and felt vulnerable.

So before I went I researched Travel Forums about Vietnam to create some sense of security.
But that actually didn’t help at all.
Most stories on the Forums and in the Lonely Planet were not reassuring.
On the contrary they were feeding my anxiety with their talk about getting ripped off, scams and difficulties when booking your own train and bus tickets.

What the tone and use of language of that information did was paint a negative picture of a country that in the end only had a different way of operating than my own.
The main difference was that their way of selling was not done by a set price but by finding the price the customer was prepared to pay.
The problem was that their way of operating didn’t particularly suit my set of skills and Western temperament and therefore challenged me big time and made me uncomfortable.
But that was all and it had to do with me not the Vietnamese.

The fact that my daughter helped me to see that the problem was a result of doing things differently and then helped me to come to terms with the incompatibility of their and my way of operating was the gift she gave me on this holiday.
And thanks goodness the whole business of selling was compatible with her skills and temperament.

On reflection, I get to see the importance of being careful about the language we use to depict the world we live in and also how we interpret other people’s information.

So I am going to be a bit more careful now how I describe my Vietnam experience.
I can now say that their and my sales methods don’t match up and that neither of us is wrong, just mismatched initially.

Having a companion who did have the right match with skills and emotional intelligence was of course a blessing but isn’t that so in our everyday life as well?

Is that not why team play is so important?
In Vietnam it became clear that I definitely didn’t have the skills and the emotional temperament that fitted with their way of doing business.
So I could have easily made them wrong, which of course I furiously did in the beginning.
But once I calmed down and my daughter related back to me how she saw what was going on, things changed for the better.

In our daily life it probably goes the same way.
I get upset and in trouble if things don’t fit and then I use language to depict how wrong the world is.
I then enroll others and that way I keep my negative view of how wrong the world is, alive.

So, for the ones who are game, here is some mind gym for you.
Check how you language your world and how that affects you emotional state and effectiveness.