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I am not the originator of this concept but it is worth sharing and it also has nothing to do with smoking (in case you were wondering). For many years I have been doing something consciously and then a couple of years ago someone else told me about this way of looking at life and now someone else mentioned it the other day. There is a need to ‘but’ out of conversation. No, I am not referring to stepping out of conversation but rather taking the ‘but’ out of the conversation and replacing it with ‘and’. You will be amazed at how your tone and action of the sentence changes with this simple change.

Take almost any sentence and replace the ‘but’ with an ‘and’ and there is a small transformation in the context. “I want to get my point across ‘but’ people don’t seem to get it”. This phrase sounds frustrating outwards and looks like it is blaming people. If you took the following phrase and just changed ‘but’ to ‘and’ see how it changes: “I want to get my point across ‘and’ people don’t seem to get it”. What this phrase now says is that people are not getting the point and maybe I need to see if it is me or them or what is being lost in the communication. It is looking deeper and more inclusive. When you use ‘but’ you seem to end the concept and seem to blame others; however, ‘and’ seems to offer more depth and a broader scope to the situation.

In a past post I talked about ‘changing your words and you change your life’. I said that if you use the word ‘problem’ often, you talk about the situation and no solution and if you change the word problem into ‘opportunity’, you still have a problem but now you are coming to a solution as well. The same applies to ‘but’ and ‘and’. What you need to do is every time you are either saying or writing, try replacing the ‘but’ with ‘and’ and see how it changes your context. We don’t take time to really hear or understand what and how we say things. Your words are a reflection of you and while people won’t know the change in your words, they will certainly feel the difference. Lets ‘but’ out of conversations, ‘and’ replace it with a more appropriate replacement and that is the bottom line  Now go and kick ‘but’!