At the heart of my writing is a passion to elevate Leadership, so much of which comes from the understanding of self and others. Words that are rich in meaning can also facilitate awareness and understanding of other areas, fields, dimensions.
Yesterday I shared a post from Rob Poynton. After that, he then noodled around my posts and found one on the Japanese word “Ichi-Go Ichi-E”, emailing me to say: “Isn’t the Japanese language amazing? Like the Germans, they seem to have extraordinarily fine-grained language and words for things that we know we need words for, but simply don’t have.”
Rob then pointed me to another rich source of words we need but simply don’t have. One of the most common tags on my blog posts is “share learnings”, so thank you Rob for once again sharing!
This interchange has inspired me to add to an earlier post where I collated my writings around rich and beautiful words. The list of words and links to associated posts with musings on them has now grown to 15.
I hope you enjoy both learning some new a beautiful and rich words and also allow yourself to muse on my own musings on them and see if they are words you need for your own awareness and leadership.
Beautiful words bring dimensions of meaning
I frequently say “a Leader is someone others choose to follow” and we follow leaders partly through rationality, through thinking about what they say. However, we also process (often unconsciously) other ways in which they communicate. Are they calm? sage? energised? fierily passionate? purposeful? resolute?
We process in ways beyond language, and words of rich meaning can be a bridge for us between our thinking to our feeling and our intuition.
Over time though, I’ve reflected many times on this site around words of beauty from other languages, often with deep meanings of cultural richness over many generations and that do not directly translate into English.
What this has meant for me, then, is that each of them can catalyse our thoughts around the meanings and allow us to bridge to our awareness of self and others.
So, here are quite a number of words with links to each post. I hope these and my musings around them also catalyse your own unique reflections.
- Ichi-Go Ichi-E
- Ikigai
- Ipcha Mistabra
- InnSaei
- Shoshin
- Memento Mori
- Yūgen
- Nyepi
- Hamba Kahle
- Haal
- Zemblanity
- Amor Fati
- Petrichor
- Wabi Sabi
- Meraki
Please do contact me at any time with your own beautiful words, I love to learn new words and meanings particularly from native speakers who can translate them into English for me. I’d be happy for you to simply share with a brief sentence or two with your understanding and awareness from the word, or if you’d like to contribute a guest post I’d love that too!
In closing, I reference an earlier post: “Language shapes the way you think“. where I share a lesson from the master, Ed Percival. I encourage you to review this to bring focus to the power of the language we use, then I recommend you drop back in to consider individual words, pick one or two from the selection. I haven’t given any definitions here, they are all discussed in each linked post. Enjoy!