Can one Word change nations?
Words can literally be life-changing. They speak to the power of words to not just tell others about things, but actually enable lives, inform mentalities, and even change the world. ‘We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.
When we think negatively, we become negative,’ he writes in the especially descriptive The Power of Now (1999), one in a series of superstar ‘how-to’ books that broach a common theme. ‘Our thoughts can literally change our lives and our world,’ he continues. The mind needs to be stored empty as well: ‘the wise person is always as selfless in speech as in thoughts.
They talk only when it is necessary.’ Shelle Rose Charvet’s Words That Change Minds (1999) probes thought similarly and attends to the ‘strategic side’ of words’ power ‘to change minds and behavior’.
Joyce Meyer’s The Power of Words: Change Your Vocabulary, Change Your Life (2018) explores the possibilities for such psychical transformation on an individual scale. She argues that the language you use (‘words you choose … mojo sentences’) can have deep impacts on your connection to yourself — your life story, your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, your relationships with others. As she puts it, “Words create worlds!” This language market demonstrates a recurring rhetorical pattern.
Kerry Patterson et al’s Crucial Conversations (2012) — a pro-corporation, midrange product in the self-help lexicon — shows that it’s a popular argument too. Crucial Conversations is aimed at coaching people in dialogue for high-stakes situations, asserting that what you do with your words in your crucial conversations shapes the direction of your life and even the fate of the world.
The first of ‘The Four Agreements’, Don Miguel Ruiz’s enormously popular critiques of spiritual hypocrisy, puts the case succinctly: ‘Be Impeccable with Your Word.’ Ruiz claims that words are creative and destructive, and that ‘if you choose the right words, your speaking can be a powerful force and have great effect on your world’.
This isn’t just a hypothesis. As history tells it, there are few real basis words that can change a nation other than people’s words. Simple speeches and writings, such as the American Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ or Winston Churchill’s wartime addresses have rallied nations, created movements and changed history.
In short, words can be weapons, by which might be meant that they inspire, agitate, and transform human beings and societies. Used correctly, they change people for the better, locally and globally. Delivered from safe spaces or the battlefield, they mitigate conflict, diminish suffering and change the world. To harness the power of words then, as these influential texts show us, individuals and leaders can promote real and lasting transformations.
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