How the words we choose shape the changes we make
It’s not about weight loss. It’s about weight release.
Some of you will love this reframe. The rest of you – don’t dismiss it so fast. Think about it: “loss” implies something that needs to be found again, whereas “weight release” puts you firmly in control in a way that “weight loss” simply doesn’t. Release is deliberate. Intentional. It’s an act with no plan to recapture what you’ve let go. Weight loss, by contrast, can feel passive, even accidental. We don’t generally intend to lose things, and more often than not, we’re sorry when we do. We look for lost things. We want them back.
So ask yourself: do you expect your excess weight to accidentally fall off? And if it did, would you be upset and go looking for it, hoping to return it to its rightful place? Suddenly, “weight loss” makes no sense. “Release,” on the other hand, is exactly what we’re after.
Still not convinced? Think it’s just semantics – that since we know what we mean, fussing over word choice misses the point? Here’s why it actually matters.
Consider the Himba people of Namibia (Roberson et al., 2005). They have more words for shades of green than English does, but no distinct word for blue. When tested with color tiles, the Himba could perceive subtle variations in green that most Westerners struggle to differentiate – because they have more words for those distinctions. But when a blue tile was introduced, they had a much harder time identifying it as distinct, because in their language, blue and green share the same term. The words we use shape what we’re able to perceive and how we perceive it. It stands to reason, then, that we may genuinely respond to releasing weight differently than to losing it.
Semantics, it turns out, is the whole point.
Organizing and decluttering is having a cultural moment, with companies everywhere springing up to help people shed the burden of excess stuff (perhaps “stuff release” rather than “stuff loss”?). I plan to write more about the various methods and philosophies, but for now, here is the first of two reframes where a simple shift in language made all the difference.
When most people take on a clear-out, they approach it as just that: clearing out. The focus is on what to throw away, give away, or otherwise get rid of. Some people are naturals at this. We all know at least one person who heads to their closet every year, pulls out anything unworn in the past twelve months, and donates it without a second thought. And many of us quietly wonder – how? How can anyone make such a definitive decision based solely on a twelve-month window? What if it was an unusually warm winter, so the heavy fleece-lined Shetland sweater with matching knitted socks never got worn, but next winter they might take up ice fishing and need exactly that? Should it go based on an arbitrary timeframe?
The problem with hard-and-fast rules – “twelve months,” or “would you buy it again if you saw it in a store” – is that for many of us, the answer is: it depends. It depends on what shaped the past year. Did the twelve-month crowd throw out all their shoes during COVID? After all, who wore shoes? Or pants, for that matter?
Just as some people detach easily from their belongings and release anything without an immediate practical purpose, others are gifted at seeing potential value in things and, understandably, hate being wasteful. These are the people who keep shoeboxes because they make perfectly good storage containers, and who would find it absurd to toss them out only to buy storage bins. Reduce, reuse and recycle is a virtue, after all. But we can’t keep everything – and given the volume of shoes in my closet, there isn’t a storage unit large enough for all those boxes. So what are people like this supposed to do?
A management reframe: from cutting to keeping
A client came to me about team dynamics, but as often happens, other issues surfaced. In this case, organizing his workspace was a significant part of the problem. He kept circling back to what he needed to get rid of: files, furniture, offices, employees, meetings, schedules – then second-guessing himself, worried he was being too hasty. Clearly frustrated, he had an epiphanic outburst: he was sick of fixating on the negative, on what to eliminate, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t focusing instead on what was good and worth keeping. Aha. When he began examining each element through the lens of what he was actively choosing to keep, releasing the rest became far easier.
I’m not saying “Am I choosing to keep this?” is the answer for everyone. We know each person is different. But reframing can be an excellent starting point, even when the right frame looks different for each individual.
The second example is personal. I was struggling to let go of a piece of property that held many years of significant memories, and every attempt to say goodbye left me feeling ill. Saying goodbye implied leaving something behind. Even though the property was completely vacant, I was not willing to leave even the faintest trace of anything there. So before the sale closed, I walked through one last time with a new frame: I wasn’t there to say goodbye. I was there to gather the memories and take them with me. And because I find it helpful to pair a physical action with an intention, I walked in with a bag and swept the memories from each room as I went. I carried them all out when I left, and we closed the deal that afternoon.
Feeling stuck, knowing what you want to have happen, but not quite getting there? Perhaps a new frame would change everything.