Strong Reviews beat Weekly Reviews
Little divots form in our field of consciousness. Among them are words that sound like the opposite of what we’re trying to do and can subliminally sabotage our efforts. Antonyms of their corresponding homophones, so I call them antonymic homophones. Some people call them auto‑antonyms or contronyms (which are slightly different but often overlap).
One of those is the word week (a seven-day period) which sounds just like weak (the opposite of strong)…and no one wants to be that.
Why is it that people can do a Daily Review just fine, but struggle with a Weekly Review? In part, it’s this effect. The word week creates a psychological bias that our brain uses to turn the Weekly Review into a Weakly Review, then for some reason we just can’t find the strength for it as often as we’d like.
Many years ago, for my coaching clients, I started calling it a Strong Review instead, and people started doing much better with it. I assumed it was just a silly trick, one that surely wouldn’t work on its inventor. But it did! It totally did the trick.
Now I’d like to propose this: If there’s anything you want to succeed in over a 7-day rhythm, find a word that leans toward success. Or at least that doesn’t lean toward failure.
And anything you want to fail? Keep right on calling it week/weak.
For example, if there’s something you have to do but don’t really want to and will drop if something better comes along, go ahead and call it a weekly routine. But if there’s something that you DO want to do because it helps you be the person you want to be, call it a strong routine instead.
Sure, it’s silly. But if it works, do you really care? Just try subbing in a different word for a month and see what happens.
The word strong in place of week may be a little too on the nose for you. I like it because it pushes even harder in the direction we want. Other words I’ve tried with clients include semana (Spanish for that familiar 7-day increment). And being me, occasionally I call it a samana (not to be confused with Samaná), for playful branding purposes.
Now that you know the effect of a homophonic antonym, you’ll start to here – oops, I mean, hear – others suddenly blur in.
And now that you have some options to creatively counter this effect by choosing words that suit you and your intentions better, please make the appropriate changes. Try asking your favorite LLM botfriends to help you, they’re really good at playing this game.
Has this been studied? Kinda. The phenomenon of phonological ambiguity is well-documented with words like here/hear increasing lag in our response time or ambiguity aversion.
As far as I know, there is only one 2019 paper about the pronounced effects of words that sound like their opposite, and their impact on perception or memory or motivation.
To date, no one has run a lab experiment that says “calling it a weekly review makes people weaker.” But the cognitive ingredients of automatic co‑activation, unconscious conflict signals, and durable negative priming are all documented. ChatGPT assures me “your coaching anecdote sits comfortably on that foundation”, so take that for what it’s worth.
Fortunately for you, it’s free and easy to try this experiment at home! Please dew. Ahem, I mean, do.
