Speaking of power words, have you heard of affirmations? According the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an affirmation is a "statement or sign that something is true." When it comes to goal-setting, affirmations are about using words that trigger an emotional response in yourself that feels true, even if it's a desire or future state.
Remember how we were talking about the importance of (core) feelings and emotions? Setting up affirmations is about building on top of that. "Power statements" that trigger those responses.
In The Pack, I often use the phrase, "through patience and persistence, it will come" because it is something that has a strong back story and elicits an emotional response. Through repitition, it also takes on even more meaning and power.
<insert example from history>
The self-affirmation theory (Steele CM 1988) begins with the premise that people are fundamentally motivated to maintain their self-integrity or global perception of adequacy. Based on these findings, researchers hypothesized that awareness of self-affirmation benefits would undermine its impact when participants were instructed to self-affirm. Being told to self-affirm to attain specific benefits (e.g. to feel better about oneself) may challenge recipients' sense of autonomy, undermining the affirmations’ intrinsic appeal. However, researchers hypothesized that when individuals operated under the presumption that they had freely chosen to complete a self-affirmation task, its benefits for performance under threat could be restored. [source]
Further reading: