But, what makes anyone think that by changing the words one becomes another person. Do words create the person, or does the person the words? Mr. Robins and his colleges tend to forget that if you are in a hole, pulling on your bootstrap is the least productive thing you can do. I consider these so-called motivational speakers con artists. Stop deceiving people and get a real job!

Thanks!

The speech thing is very interesting, since clearly speech content is more a cause of audience response than an effect.

What sports analysts or other outsiders say is irrelevant to this concept. It’s what the players and coaches are saying over a long period of time: multiple interviews in a variety of media.

And keep in mind that Seligman makes it clear in his book that this predictive measure is nowhere near 100%, so it’s easy to find plenty of matches where it fails to predict the winner.

Saying “we will win” is not always posturing. In the case I’m talking about all “sports analysts” (I’m not sure how to call them in English) decided that one team was a lot stronger than the other. And taking into account past performance in that season, it really was so. The strong team also expected to win, and they were not “posturing”, they really believed what they were saying.

I watched the game expecting the strong team to win. And the strong team, which was very optimistic about the outcome, LOST!

So, in my opinion:

If a team has an optimistic attitude, and they say they will win, then they lose.

If a team has a pessimistic attitude, they believe that they have a low chances of winning the game, but at the same time they are very committed to do everything in their power in order to win, then they are most likely to win.

Then I ran this same test on Jim Key’s speech which won him the 2003 World Championship of Public Speaking — he has a PDF of the speech on his web site. His speech scored a 1.25 (positive). But I also noticed that his speech started out negative and became more positive as it went along, as if he was gradually taking the audience to a point of greater optimism. I wish I could get copies of the other 8 speeches at that contest to see if there was any correlation between the speech’s optimism score and the finishing position.

The same word can be optimistic in one context but pessimistic in another. I usually ask, “Does this word/phrase imply a feeling of certainty (optimism) or one of doubt (pessimism)?”

Also, the research in the book wasn’t done with just a single quote from each team. The authors considered every quote they could find from a variety of media sources. One line just isn’t enough data to go on — you need to look at the long-term pattern.

Let’s say team A plays with team B.

Case 1: Team A declares: “We shall win the match against team B. Our players are very well trained, and we shall win the match. It will be an easy victory for our team”. Team A will usually lose!

Case 2: If team A declares: “We shall die on the field playing, if necessary, in order to win the match.” Team A will usually win!

Case 2 happened recently in the game of Steaua (a Romanian soccer team) against Valencia (the last winner of the UEFA european championship). Steaua declared they will die in the field playing if necessary in order to win, and then dominated the game against the very strong Valencia team and won with a 2:0 score.

I’m not an avid soccer watcher, but from what I noticed, the above cases hold true most of the time.

I have also discovered that the cases above also apply to my work. If I say “hey it’s easy”, then I won’t get things done. If I say “No matter how hard this is I would rather die in front of my computer rather than not get things done”, then I usually get things done successfully.