Build Your Vocabulary

English: Emily Chrisman and teacher Joseph Pascetta role play a situation during the Oct. 10, “Tying the Yellow Ribbon” event in Elgin, Ill. This is one of the many ways instructors with the Children’s Reintegration Program teach kids how to deal with difficult situations when their parent comes home from deployment. Pascetta is one of eight teachers from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology that help with the children’s program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You have a loss for words when sitting around at a party or some other function.  Your memory is fishing for something nice to say to a peer and there is nothing but a blank.  To fish anywhere in the world requires the body of water is stocked or naturally populated.  Otherwise you are dipping the hook with no results.  You might also have to learn how to fish.

In many of the psychotherapy sessions I facilitate, there is an all too common challenge for the client to communicate in a positive and productive way with others.  I see whole families who come off with a tendency to talk down to each other and act confused when directed to pay a compliment.  Along with this, we usually discover that the family members are sorely lacking of a personal vocabulary for positive-based phrases and words.

To help with building a new track in the memory banks for the positive verbage and productive use of it, I propose an active use of role-play and an immediate goal to meet.  The development of skill and a change in memory takes repetition of a particular task, which in this case means saying the words out loud.

In my next post, I will talk about the art of motivation for this task and the different and fun ways to help get it started.

I Choose Desire

I’m glad you have decided to get over your pansiness and click on this post to read.  Desire is a six-letter word that often connotes some sort of carnal lust for a substance or even better, a person.  Such a word is seen on the front cover of romance novels and articles, which lead the reader into an underworld filled with the kinds of unmentionable activity between people.  I would even put “desire” in the category of taboo conversation.  Only because this is the result of a social mechanism we human beings have built to label and shelve our corners of existence.

I use the word “desire” to help put some emotional charge behind my priorities and to establish a point of entitlement in this respect.  In order for me to take ownership for what I see as personal goals, there must be an investment on my part.  But let’s move on to the reason I titled this piece with “desire.”

My gives me a verbal list of grocery items right before I am about to grab the keys.  There are only four items to remember and she knows that I can keep them in mind, all the way to the store.  She asks me if I need to right them down anyway.  I quickly reply “Oh yes” and go ahead to make a written list.  Yeah, I’ve heard and read about all the different ways that we can exercise our minds.  There are many benefits to keeping our brains stimulated with memory games and what not.  The internet is full of literature on how much better a person can gain in the prospect of health by pushing our mental capacities.

The thing is, I already put my brain to use.  One bit of clear evidence is in the making of this article.  And this is where the word “desire” comes in.  Instead of holding in my memory the list of fruits, veggies, bread and other kitchen items, I desire to exercise my imagination.  Or I simply choose to listen to the car stereo and really get into the music.  These uses of the brain help me further my goals and enable quality time for projects.  My projects bring enjoyment and quality development for life and family.  There’s no doubt of my ability to bring up the list in memory once I get to the store, but why waste such effort when it could just be written?  A few minutes of writing on paper can buy me an infinite peace of mind.  The organizational tools industry makes a bundle for good reason.  It’s easier to move on with the important things and move on when we’re writing appointments on a calendar and not letting these items take our memories hostage.

Related articles

• What do cows drink? (The Associative Architecture of Human Memory) (psychologytoday.com)
• The desire to write grows with writing. (imustwritenow.wordpress.com)