A friend of mine has just written a book called “Words Of Brain” and what he has found based on years of intensive work on neuroscience is that certain words have a tremendous impact on the way you feel positive or negative so the part of this segment is to change your language for a positive outlook for example in flying the word attitude refers to the flight of your approach relative to the horizon with your lower or raise the nose of the plane you change the attitude of the plane. The way you deal with a problem determines your attitude or approach as well here are three words that you can use to change your approach to any difficulty you face.

1. Change “problem” to “situation”

Problem is a negative word that triggers feelings of fear and anxiety, “situation” is a neutral word so instead of saying “we have a problem” you can say “we have a situation”.

2. Change “problem” to “challenge”

My personal preference is to change the word problem to the word challenge. Whenever something goes wrong immediately say “well we have an interesting challenge facing us today”, you see “challenge” is a positive word when you think of a challenge you think of something you rise to, something that brings out the best in you and others. Challenges are what makes life exciting and worth living. By rising to the challenges of day-to-day life you fulfil more and more of your potential.

3. Change “problem” to “opportunity”

Perhaps the best word of all is “opportunity”, instead of saying “we have a problem” you can say “we have an unexpected opportunity.” Napoleon Hill was famous for saying “every problem or difficulty you face contains the seeds of an equal or greater advantage or benefit, your job is to find the benefit.” Look for the good in every situation and this way of approaching a problem is determined by your attitude.

The attitude of looking for the good in every situation or looking for the advantage or benefit in difficulty is the way that most successful people think most of the time, superior people and leaders face the inevitable ups and downs of their daily life on the way to their destinations by taking complete control of their thinking and their emotions, and they do this by choosing the words they use to describe a situation, their tone of voice and their behaviour in dealing with a problem.

A mark of maturity, a vital quality on the road to success and happiness and balance in life is expecting problems and difficulties as natural, normal and unavoidable parts of life. You can never avoid them, they come as they say like the waves of the ocean, problems never stop. Becoming a superior person requires accepting so that when you set off towards a big goal or destination, you will experience unexpected turbulence.

One of the marks of leaders is that they don’t like to fail but they know they’re going to fail over and over again on the road to success. Thomas.J.Watson Sr. the founder of IBM was once asked by a young journalist how he could be successful faster? He replied, “if you want to be successful faster, you must double the rate of failure.” Success lies on the far side of failure and the way that you succeed and fail and fail and succeed is to learn from every experience. Look for the good, call it a situation, a challenge, or an opportunity to keep your mind positive and creative as you work on your way through it.