My Love for Language and Words

I don’t talk about it much, but language has always been my first fascination.

I’ve always loved language — not just the words themselves, but the way they move, the way they breathe, the way they land in the body long before the mind names them. For me, language was never just vocabulary or grammar. It was sound, rhythm, cadence… and sometimes even comfort.

My first real doorway into this came through Spanish. I didn’t know it at the time — I was just a kid in junior high trying (unsuccessfully) to roll my R’s — but Spanish woke up something in me. It taught me to listen. To hear the music behind the meaning. To feel where a sentence wanted to go. To appreciate the culture where the language was from.

Later, Latin gave me the opposite gift: precision — the roots, the structure, the bones underneath language. Latin taught me that every word has weight and lineage; nothing is accidental. There’s something grounding about that — knowing there’s an architecture beneath our everyday speech.

Italian came next — and that one wasn’t learned from a textbook alone. I studied it, yes, but then I took myself to Italy and let the language happen to me. I listened to real conversations in cafés, on trains, in markets. I sat in the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, watching full productions just to feel the rhythm of the language in my body. I wasn’t studying… I was absorbing. And Italian gave me something I didn’t know I needed: the sense that language could be fluid, expressive, and alive.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t collecting languages. I was also the kid who loved sentence diagrams — those branching little maps that showed how every word connected and supported the others. Even then, I was drawn to structure, to clarity, to the architecture beneath the surface of a thought. I was learning how people speak when they’re being themselves. I was learning how meaning forms, how emotion hides inside phrasing, how clarity feels when it’s right.

And somewhere in all of that, I discovered something important: I don’t just do CleanEFT™ — I’ve always loved words, and I’ve always loved language. Clean Language simply gave me the missing piece, the quiet je ne sais quoi (French I never learned, mind you) that tied everything together. It gave shape to the way I already listened. It gave a name to what I was already doing. It gave structure to something that had lived in me for years.

All of that eventually became the foundation of my work — long before I ever heard the words “Clean Language” or “EFT.” I learned to listen for the shape of a thought. I learned to feel when a sentence is tight or tangled. I learned that one precise word can change the whole experience of a moment.

I think that’s why I love what I do now. Because it’s still about language — but it’s also about people. Their stories, their words, their metaphors, their meaning.

And when someone tells me their experience in their own way… and I reflect it back without changing it… something softens. Something shifts. Something becomes clear.

It turns out all those years of Spanish rhythm, Latin roots, Italian melody, and opera’s emotional architecture were preparing me for this: helping people find the words that feel true — and letting those words lead them somewhere new.

And the funny thing is, even now, I experience language the same way I did in those Italian cafés — as if I’m sitting at a small table, listening to the rise and fall of conversations around me. Letting the sound wash over me. Not forcing anything. Just noticing. Letting meaning reveal itself in its own time.

That’s how language feels to me: warm, human, unhurried.A lived thing.And that’s the quality I bring into my work today — a way of listening that makes room for clarity to arrive, naturally, like someone leaning in across a café table and finally finding the words they didn’t know they were ready to say.

Some people collect books or mugs; I collect the moments when language reveals something real. And I’m grateful I get to turn that into the heart of my work every day.