Henry sat down and said, in his first sentence, that he had a stress problem.
He had been under enormous stress for two years. He had anxiety about his career. He had deep depression about the trajectory of his marriage. He felt that the burden of expectations his family placed on him was crushing.
He was looking, he said, for practical advice on what to do about all of it.
He did not get any that day. Instead he was asked to do something small, and slightly irritating.
Take each of those four phrases — stress, anxiety, depression, the burden of expectations — and turn each one back into a verb.
What came out
He looked as though he had been asked to perform a card trick instead of address his suffering. He was asked to indulge it anyway.
He sat for a moment. Then:
I am stressing about… not being able to keep up the pace at work.
I am anxious that… I am no longer the rising star I was at thirty-five.
I am depressed when… my wife and I sit at the dinner table and have nothing left to say.
I am being burdened by… my parents' assumption that I will pay for my brother's children's education the same way I pay for my own.
Nothing was solved in that conversation. Henry nonetheless left visibly different from the man who had arrived.
He had walked in carrying four monolithic blocks pressing down on him. He walked out with four specific situations, each with a verb attached, each therefore something a person could actually do something about.
The mechanism
There is a name for what Henry was suffering from, and it is a grammatical one.
A nominalisation takes a verb — something happening, in time, that somebody is doing — and freezes it into a noun. A thing you have, or lack, or suffer from.
Stress is a nominalisation. The verb is to stress. "I am under stress" describes a fixed condition, a weather system you happen to be standing in. "I am stressing about X" describes an act, in time, with a specific object — which can be examined, and changed.
The grammar is harmless. The consequences are not.
When a problem becomes a big abstract noun it becomes a wall: solid, featureless, and nothing you can get a grip on. Turn the noun back into a verb and a door usually appears somewhere in it.
Where money does this constantly
Financial life is unusually rich in these, which is why the technique is worth more here than almost anywhere else.
Debt. Not a substance you are submerged in. You owe specific amounts, to specific people, on specific terms, on specific dates. "I have a debt problem" has nowhere to go. "I owe $34,000 on a card at 19.99% and $310,000 on a mortgage at 6.1%" has an obvious next move, and the obvious next move is different for each.
My financial situation. A phrase that has never once helped anybody. What is happening? Money is arriving from here at this rate; it is leaving to there at that rate; the gap is this.
Security. A word people spend decades pursuing without defining. You are not seeking a substance called security. You are seeking to be able to — cover twelve months without income, or say no at work, or stop worrying at three in the morning. Each of those is testable. "Security" is not, which is precisely why it recedes as you approach it.
Retirement. Perhaps the most expensive nominalisation in the language. It is not a place you arrive at. It is a set of things you will be doing, funded in a particular way, starting on a particular date. People who plan the noun arrive at it and find nothing there. People who plan the verbs arrive somewhere.
Freedom. Freedom from what, exactly, and freedom to do what? The two are different projects and only one of them requires a plan.
Where the tool has limits
Two honest caveats, because the technique is easy to over-apply.
Some nominalisations are simply efficient. Inflation, diversification, the transfer balance cap — these are technical terms with precise referents, and converting them into verbs is pedantry, not insight.
The test is not whether a noun is present. It is whether the noun is hiding something you would need in order to act. "The transfer balance cap" hides nothing; you can look it up. "My financial situation" hides everything — the amounts, the parties, the dates, the choices.
And the second caveat: sometimes the wall is real. A person genuinely in clinical depression does not need their grammar corrected, and reaching for a linguistic tool when the honest answer is a doctor is its own kind of avoidance.
The technique is not a substitute for the situation being difficult. It only ensures that what you are struggling with is the actual situation, rather than a noun you built on top of it.
Try it on one sentence
Take the money sentence you have said most often this year — the one that arrives automatically, that you have never examined because it does not sound like an opinion.
Find the noun doing the heavy lifting in it.
Turn it back into a verb, and say the sentence again, with the specific object attached.
Most of the time nothing dramatic happens. You simply find that the wall you had been standing in front of has an edge, and that you can see around it.
Which is usually all that was ever required.
Client examples in this article are anonymised or composite. Names and identifying details have been changed.
Adapted from The Money Script by Paul Yang. See the books.