This book is a very powerful addition to my own personal development journey. I found Nathan's three step breakdown of 1-RECEIVING, 2-PROCESSING AND CONTEXT, and 3-RESPOND, to be a fascinating, valuable, and powerful approach to breaking down and understanding my own communications. The concepts of pyramids, building blocks, tiles, and capstones, and then using Post-it Notes in STEP 3 to rearrange the tiles into more empowering communications is extremely effective. And has, in fact, been extremely valuable in recreating my own contexts into more powerful contexts for me to live into in all areas of my life. Thank you, Nathan Osorio, for writing such an easy to read, easy to understand book, that provides such a powerful and easy to implement process for me to improve my communications in all areas of my life.

This book offers a unique context for which to view language. It's brief, and right to the point, I thought it was a good read all the way through. After reading, I now find myself visualizing pyramids (something the book talks about) and asking the question: What language do I have around [whatever I'm dealing with]? I consider myself fairly advanced on the personal development side, yet this book gave me some eye opening moments. Considering it's read time (relatively short in my opinion) I absolutely think this is a must-read at least once.

"Why use language that isn't inspiring?" is a question that I once would have answered with something like "well, because sometimes life just isn't inspiring, and why would I pretend that it is?" The idea that we can create reality with our words because *everything* that's ever been created has been created by language is not, in my opinion, an intuitive concept. This book makes the concept land. The author breaks down how and why we intelligent, and often suffering, humans make meaning from language that gets in the way of our happiness and fulfillment. He invites us to try on a few very simple examples to discover that we're creating meaning that isn't there, and he provides equally simple practices to free ourselves from this meaning-making. The barrier to entry is low--and I believe that these practices will make a real difference over time. I recommend that anyone give this book a read--it's fewer than 100 pages and is really clear and accessible. And then do the exercises and see what transforms.

You Begin with Language by Nathan Max Osorio is a thought-provoking exploration of how language shapes every aspect of our lives. What I really appreciated about this book was how Osorio made me realize that language isn’t just a tool for communication; it’s the very infrastructure that supports our thoughts, actions and perceptions. The writing style is approachable and easy to follow, which I think is important when diving into a topic as big as language’s role in our lives. There were moments in the book where I found myself looking at my own experiences with language in a totally new way. If you're someone who’s ever wondered how much language impacts the way we see the world - internally and externally, this book is a must-read.

You Begin with Language unpacks with subtlety and depth the age-old idea of “creating” our own selves, focusing on language and its relation to the internal and external realities we must deal with. Using a wonderfully diverse set of examples, Nathan Osorio charts the often tangled and daunting path to liberation from the many inherited pictures (pyramids, myths) which tend to block us from becoming the “architects of our lives”. Difficult and complicated things are set out with stunning clarity, and the exercises provided for each Step along the way are easily useable, and certainly helpful. It’s hard to imagine someone not benefiting from the many kinds of wisdom within this book. I did, very much.

Remarkable book combining both human personal family experience and carefully thought out philosophical framework on how language shapes and creates our experience in the world. Comparing and contrasting the experience of those "differently abled" cognitiviely and perceptually with the "normative" person allowed for powerful insights. The author's three part model of interpersonal communication echoes the Freudian psychoanalytic and modern psychodynamic ideas of personality and object relations. However this book transcends the formal and technical psychoanalytic stuff, to take the reader to a place of personal empowerment. This is a very wonderful for human freedom, agency, and societal advancement.