I want to invite you to think about the question of how things occur for you and what could be your access to creating a new level of performance (your ability to take action).

In my study of the book "The 3 Laws of Performance" by Steve Saffron and Dave Logan, it became clear to me that the way things are for us is tied to an expectation for the future.

We behave (take actions) based on our predictions for what will happen, a.k.a. what we think will happen, and the world we see shows up in that expectation. Our predictions are usually based on what happened before, and we use our memory to predict what will happen next.  That happens automatically and without you doing it. Your brain runs these predictions every waking hour.

So, in the statement, "Our performance is directly correlated to how things occur for us," you could say that how things occur for us is something with a future, past, and present. That includes ourselves, the world and other people.

Most people would say that the world shows up here, right in front of them. It is immediate and unavoidable. But where are the past and future?  Can you find them in the world? Are they tangible?

As a possibility, past, present, and future are not really here; instead, they live in language. When I say language, I mean the things you say and write, the conversations you have in your mind about the world, yourself, and others which you share and which creates how the world shows up for you.

When we say that our performance is directly correlated to how things occur for us and how things occur for us is as something that has a past, present, and future, and we now say that past, present, and future are in language, if that is so, what are the implications of it?

And what does that mean about our use of language and the question of how can we access a new level of performance?

When I listen to others and myself I partly listen for what is said or not said in talking about the future.

If for example, I want to fill an event (which I am currently doing), and my goal is to have a certain number of people signed up by the end of the month (notice that the goal and the event both exist in a language only, before they happen), what needs to happen for that to happen is that I am taking the appropriate action for that outcome to be possible.

Now, in my talking about the event, my goal of signing a certain number of people, and how I show up for myself in relation to the goal, I will have conversations that are either enabling action or go against the action that needs to happen for the outcome to happen.

How we see the world, is usually given away through the language we use to describe it.  Not only do we give it away, but we also create it (mostly by default, so you could say it isn't consciously created but automatically shows up. Creating with your word requires a whole different conversation as it is distinct from describing), as how the world shows up for us is strongly influenced by the language we use to describe it.

If our language shapes the way things show up for us, or partly things only are in language, and how they occur for us is correlated with the actions we take, we could come to the conclusion that our access to performance is through language, as it is the thing we actually can influence. Let that sink in.  Think about how we tend to be with our words.

What kind of conversations are you having?

What do you see in your life with the language you use to describe it?

How do you show up for yourself?

If I sit with that, and I really let that sink in, I start to wonder about my often careless use of language and my constant carrying over of the past into my future, my putting the future into a box of language that then seems to be impossible to escape from, not noticing that all along it was me who created the box and put my future in it.