NLP A Thinking Model #13

 
BEWARE:

WHEN YOU THINK WITH WORDS

 

How much of your thinking is done in and with words?  Can you think without
words, that is, apart from words?  While linguists have not given us a
precise percentages about this, we know that most thinking is done with, in,
and through words.  I would guess it is somewhere between 90 and 95 percent.

 

When you think, you think almost exclusively in words.  While you can
entertain thoughts in any of the sensory-systems (e.g., visual, auditory,
kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory), such thoughts are usually simple and
direct.  Perhaps someones asks, "Do you remember the dog that you played
with as a child?" and you, for a moment, see that dog in the theater of your
mind.  You may even be able to hold on to that image, perhaps see it as a
movie rather than a snapshot.  Now if you wanted to, you could play around
with the image.  "Can you make his hair orange?"  But that's about it when
it comes to thinking without words.

 

Yet with words and language you can do so much more.  Once you have a
reference that you represent, then you can create all sorts of categories,
concepts, and understandings.  You can classify the dog by breed, as animate
and living, as intelligent, etc.  As a meta-representation system, language
allows you to think deeply, expansively, and thoroughly.  With words you
create the uniquely human world of conceptual abstractions-and tht's where
all of us mostly live.

 

You think in words and with words.  You use words as vehicles to transfer
thinking and as a code to encase a thought.  Language, as a set of symbols,
both enables thinking as well as constrains thinking.  Some words constrain
your ability to think certain things.  And without language, there are all
kinds of things that you can't even think as in "entertaining an idea."
That's why when a given language lacks certain words, people will have all
sorts of problems thinking certain things.  Postman (1976) wrote, "A
distinction that cannot be made in language, cannot be made conceptually."
(p. 242).

 

Now one of the most amazing things about words is that they are not real.
For many people, that is an absolutely shocking statement.  They still think
that words are real.  And when you make that mistake, you will then probably
also think that "words can hurt you."  They will then talk about "verbal
abuse."  They will talk about some words as in "bad words," and "evil
words."  But that's a fundamental mistake.  Words are not real.  "Dog" is a
word, but it doesn't bark or bite you.  "Cat" is a word, but it cannot
scratch you.  Words are symbols that stand for some reference other than
themselves.  And because words are vehicles for thinking, they do not
contain meaning.  You and I use words as symbols to communicate to each
other our ideas.  Yet meaning is in persons-in you and me. We are the
meaning-makers.  We use words to construct meanings.

 

That's also why there are words and phrases that do us a great disservice.
That's because they promote and enable dysfunctional thinking.  And with
words, to wrongly use a word is to encode an idea that -in that context- is
not only worng, but can be hurtful and problematic.  How does this work?  It
works as you take a word or phrase and use it to send a message to your
mind-and-body.  What your body does with the word then depends on whether
you just think it or whether you believe it.

 

If you just think, then you will do no semantic damage to yourself.  It
remains just a thought and nothing more.  It is something that you entertain
and play with in your mind.  But if you believe it, then you send a command
to your nervous systems to actualize it.  You are communicating to your
body, "Try to make it real."  "Try to activate whatever you can from within
to translate that word to the outside world."

 

This is the structure of the placebo and the nocebo processes.  Believe a
voodoo curse on yourself and your body will make it real.  Believe a
doctor's prediction about your situation, and for wow and woe, your body
will orient itself in that direction.  Believing makes it so in your body.
Believing does not make it so in the outside world, only within your nervous
systems-which it sets up as a self-fulfilling and self-organizing prophecy.

 

Words can be transformative, life-giving, and/or pathological in your
mind-body system.  So be careful as you think with words-as you read words.
Reading often operates as a self-programming process.  So as you avoid the
bad stuff, focus on reading only the good stuff.

 

 

 

In Meta-Coaching we notice words and then ask

              What do you mean by X-term?  How are yo using that word?

                                                    What else could you call
it?  What else do others call it?     

              What context or contexts are you referring to?

 MAKING THE THINKING CHOICE

 

Given that "mind" is not only a noun (actually, a nominalization), it is
also a verb (#42), mind is not a thing (as an object, entity, or substance),
it is a function.  Mind is what you do-and what you do is think.  When you
"mind the gap" you are thinking about the fact that there is a gap.  When
you "mind" your mother, you pay attention to, listen to, and comply with
what she says.

 

With a mind, you have thinking power.  While you can think passively by just
perceiving things, and let in all kinds of thinking, true thinking is a
choice.  It is a choice wherein you expend effort.  This means your ultimate
consciousness is a volitional consciousness.  And because you can choose to
avoid thinking, to not focus your attention, you can choose to not do the
work of thinking.  Lots of people do precisely that.  You can also let your
thinking powers deteriorate, weaken, and become nearly useless.  Yet when
you default on thinking, and drift in a will-less passivity, the result is
that you end up evading the adventure of life and the true joy of activating
your potentials.

 

This is the problem with all of the social media platforms-they encourage
you to adopt a policy of defaulting on thinking.  Instead they encourage you
to think what is Politically Correct, and to disparage any thoughts that
disagree with their conventional wisdom.  The end result-if you reject the
work of thinking, all that's left is to become a zombie.  Once you abandon
your thinking powers, all that you have left are your emotions-how you feel.
So you now substitute your feelings for your mind and with it, your ability
to detect reality.  This is the pathway to neurosis as Nathan Branden (1969)
noted:

"One of the chief characteristics of mental illness is the policy of letting
one's feelings -one's wishes and fears- determine one's thinking, guide
one's actions and serve as one's standard of judgment.  This is more than a
symptom of neurosis, it is a prescription for neurosis.  It is a policy that
involves the wrecking of one's rational faculty." (p. 71)

 

To surrender your mind to others, to an ideology, to what's politically
correct (PC) is to choose to not think.  It is to seek to be unaware, to
give up your humanity, to sell your cognitive potentials and
self-actualization short.  And all of that is a loser's route.

 

If your childhood home was convolutedly complicated or dysfunctional so that
understanding what was going on, and what it meant, would require a a degree
in psychology, sociology, an philosophy- it was probably easier to give up
even trying to understand.  It is easier to turn off your mind and retreat
into dreams and fantasies.  And because emotions are so strong-fear, anger,
guilt, confusion-it's easy to get lost in an emotion.  Yet in doing that you
develop the habit of not thinking.

 

When you surrender your mind to emotions or to the social environment, you
cannot develop an adequate contact with the world outside, or for that
matter, the world inside.  When you give up real thinking, you are left with
no tools by which you can make contact.  In the long-term this will deepen
your sense of helplessness and hopelessness.  We see this in
poverty-stricken communities, in lots of the college protests currently
going on, and even in corporate America.  Regardless of the context, people
have give up the ultimate human choice-the choice to use one's mind to do
actual thinking.  Instead, they default to the non-thinking uses of the
mind-

           automatic thinking

           reactionary thinking

           shallow thinking

           borrowed thinking

           agenda thinking

           certainty

           and expectations.

 

The solution is to develop your mind's capacities for thinking.  It is to
identify and cultivate all of your mental powers.  The good news is that we
now have modeled "thinking" and "mind" so that we have specified three major
thinking categories (essential, eureka, and executive thinking skills) and
14 thinking powers.  This, in turn, enables you to deliberately practice
these thinking skills until you develop them as key resources in your mental
capacity for thinking.

 

The Essence of Thinking

              1. Considering

              2. Questioning, Exploring

              3. Doubting

              4. Detailing, Indexing

              5. Distinguishing

The Eureka of Thinking

6. Inferring

              7. Organizing

              8. Creating

              9. Synergizing

The Executive Development of Thinking

              10. Learning

              11. Deciding

              12. Discerning

              13. Reflecting

              14. Sacralizing

 




 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 THE ART OF DETECTING

A CLOSED-MIND

 

If your mind is your central mechanism, your ultimate power, for dealing
with reality (which it is), then you will naturally want to have an open
mind.  And if you don't want that, then recognize that it is essential if
you are to "deal with reality."  Think about the very first thinking
skill-consideration-you cannot perform that skill if you don't have an open
mind.  Consider requires an open mind and, simultaneously, as you practice
it, it develops an open mind.  You can't consider something if you do not
open your mind and give an idea a chance.  You give it a chance by
representing it visually, reproducing it auditorily, and kinesthetically
trying on the words and the conceptual frames of the idea.

 

What stand in contrast to this openness?  Answer: All of the non-thinking
skills and states: reactivity, automatic thinking, borrowed thinking,
superficial thinking, agenda thinking, "knowing," and expecting (see
Executive Thinking, Brain Camp I).  All of these unhealthy thinking styles
close down consideration so that you do not even given an idea a chance.
And when consideration is shut down, then so also are all of the critical
and creative skills.  After all, if a person will not consider, then there
can be no questioning, doubting, detailing, and distinguishing.  That shuts
down all critical thinking.

 

Now certainly you have experienced people with closed minds, haven't you?
When was the last time you encountered a closed mind?  You try to sell to a
friend your idea about a certain movie, but he will not even consider going
to it.  You ask a banker for a loan, you know that your credit score and
assets are sufficient, but no.  The banker turns you down flat.  You say,
"You haven't even actually considered it."  But no, her mind is closed.

 

Theoretically, why would a person not even consider an idea?  What would
explain that refusal?  The answer is intolerance, dogmatism, and
know-it-all-ism.  The person refuses to open her mind to an idea; he refuses
to even tolerate an idea.  And why?  Because they have already decided on
some meaning, a meaning which simply precludes your idea.  Their previous
learning and knowledge functions as, what's described in the field of
learning, "proactive inhibition."  It stops any new considerations cold in
its tracks.

 

If an open mind is a mind open for business, then a closed mind is a mind
closed for business.  Where there is an open mind, there's a sign on that
person's heart, "Open!  Come on in."  When you enter, you are warmly
greeted, welcomed, and they ask you, "How can we help you?"  Conversely,
where there is a closed mind, you see a different sign, "Closed."  It could
be, "Closed for the night."  "Closed for he Season."  Or even, "Closed: Out
of Business."

 

A closed mind says, "Go away, we don't have any room or place for you."  It
says, "No solicitators" and it may add, "Violators will be prosecuted to the
further extent of the law."  A closed mind is also not a friendly mind; it
is not a mind that's interested or curious.  With a closed mind, you can
protect your beliefs from the danger of additional or new facts.  With a
closed mind, you don't have to learn anything new or different.  And without
new learning, you can remain the same, you maintain or are stuck in, the
status quo.  Now you will be untroubled by new ideas or challenges.  That's
the upside of a closed mind.

 

The downside of a closed mind, however, is one that's much more devastating.
With a closed mind, you don't grow or develop.  Instead, you arrest your
personal development and become stuck at a previous stage, and you probably
trap yourself in numerous cognitive distortions that of which you are
unconscious.

 

I was asked recently, "Why have you been putting so much emphasis on
critical thinking skills?"  Part of the answer lies in the prevalence of
closed-minds.  That's because critical thinking is partly defined as an open
mind to facts, truth, insights as well as the ability to think clearly,
accurately, and without bias.  In a world as divided as ours, we need more
and more open minds who can have civil conversations, realizing all along
that no thought is a fact, it is just a thought -a mental construct about
something.  And as fallible human beings, we are often wrong, something that
does not frighten an open mind.

 DO YOUR OWN THINKING!

 

There is thinking, which everyone does and which is inevitable, and then
there is real thinking, which is everyone does not do, and which is not
inevitable.  Thinking is an art, it is an education, it is a discipline that
requires skills and competencies.  All that's required for inevitable
thinking is a functional brain on the top of your shoulders, one that is not
brain-dead.  Nearly everyone has that and so nearly everyone "thinks."  Yet
because there are numerous non-thinking states, you can have a brain and not
use it.  There are 7 kinds of non-thinking: automatic thinking, reactive,
borrowed, superficial, agenda, "knowing," and expectant (Executive Thinking,
Brain Camp I).

 

Imagine that-a working brain which is not engaged so it actually and truly
thinks!  The state of non-thinking is not only possible, it is far, far too
much the case with most people.  Why is that?  Because thinking is hard
work.  If you have ever struggled to understand a subject in school, with
reading a difficult passage in a book, or the mechanics of how something
works, and afterward felt exhausted, mentally drained, and if you rubbed
your heads to ease the tension you feel, then you know that sometimes,
thinking can require a lot of cognitive effort.

 

Famous people have often spoke about the effort of thinking.  For example
Peter F. Drucker once said: "Thinking is very hard work.  And management
fashions are a wonderful substitute for thinking."  John Dewey wrote a book
at the beginning of the 20th century, How We Think, and in it he defined
thinking in a way that still shocks most people: "The origin of thinking is
some perplexity, confusion, or doubt."  It is the surprises and disappoints
of life that we don't like or can't figure out, otherwise known as
"problems," that trigger us to think.  No wonder some people do not like to
think and do whatever they can to avoid thinking!

 

Not only do senior managers in organizations substitute "management
fashions" for thinking, there's another substitute you should know about.
Carl Jung wrote, "Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge."  Now
we are back to non-thinking-making a reactionary and prejudicial judgment
rather than thinking.  Then you don't have to put in the work of actually
thinking something through.

 

When Albert Einstein thought about thinking, he noted something which many
of us have said about schools.  Namely, schools should not only focus on
what to think, but how to think.  Most do not.  Einstein said, "Education is
not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think."  True
thinking is not inevitable, you have to learn how to do it.  You have to
learn how to use your mind to think, and thereby become mindful, that is,
consciously aware and alive.

 

A fascinating thing about thinking is that you have to do it, no one can do
it for you.  Now it is true that you can learn from someone and take on his
thoughts and think her thoughts after her. Because of this, we all can
benefit from the quality thinking of those who came before us and we do not
have to start from ground zero.  I can read from Aristotle.  Then, what he
learned and discovered thousands of years ago, I can think those same
thoughts, try them on, and make them mine.  We call that learning.  It is
the process by which I can come to understand what someone else has already
figured out or discovered.  But again, you have to do the thinking to
transfer those thoughts into your neurology, nervous systems and brain.  No
one can do that for you.  Nor will those thoughts get inside you by osmosis.

 

We can also learn to be excellent thinking partners to each other.  This was
the discovery of Vygotsky when he described how a more informed person can
scaffold the learning of a less informed person thereby accelerating the
development of the learner (Executive Learning).  But again, the learner has
to do his or her own thinking.

 

What happens when you do your own thinking?  Obviously they learn.  You come
to know more and when you integrate that learning, you can do more.  You can
become more skilled and effective in doing things, more self-confident, more
independent, more able to stand on your own two feet.  You become empowered.
As you use your mind to think and develop your thinking powers and skills,
you becomes more self-determining and able to discern truth from falsehood.
And all of that unleashes your potentials.

 

Now you know what we are striving to do in Neuro-Semantics.  As we teach the
Meta-Model, the Meta-Programs model, the Meta-States model, etc., our larger
objective is to enable people to access their ultimate power-their thinking
powers.  This makes people more intelligent, more rational, and more
informed.  And because we want everyone to do this, it facilitates everyone
in becoming more democratic, more respectful, and more tolerant and
accepting of others

 

In enabling people to become excellent critical thinkers and creative
thinkers-we want and encourage people to do their own thinking.  This
downplays the need to conform your thinking to anyone else's.  This makes
redundant any need to have a creed and force people to submit their minds to
only the "politically correct" thinking.  In this way, we work to develop
thinkers who can engaged in healthy conversations, debates, and dialogues.
They do not have to agree, in fact, if people are truly thinking, they
probably will not agree.  There will be lots of differences.  That is not
only okay, it is to be expected.  It is desirable.

 

The professions that we focus on and develop in Neuro-Semantics (and NLP)
are thinking professions: coaches, consultants, therapists, leaders,
managers, etc.  To be highly effective at any of these professions-you have
to be a clear, accurate, precise, practical, creative, and critical thinker.
You have to know how to challenge ill-formedness in linguistic structures
(the Meta-Model).  You have to know how to challenge the cognitive
distortions, biases, and fallacies (see Executive Thinking; Thinking for
Humans).  You have to be able to detect and work with thinking and
perceiving patterns (Meta-Programs, Figuring Out People).  Is it a lot?
Yes, you bet it is and in Neuro-Semantics we have lots of training programs
to make this a reality.  Here's to you doing your own best thinking!

 THINKING ABOUT THINKING

WITH NLP

 

Isn't that a gret title?  I wish I had invited it, but alas I did not.
Joseph Yeager invented it and then wrote a book by that title, Thinking
about Thinking with NLP (1985).  It's an excellent book -insightful, playful
(full of humor), and full of practical applications.  I got that book the
next year (1986) just as I was entering into this field. 

"NLP is the science of thinking about thinking." (p. viii)

"... Think of thinking as continuous and fluid ... choice is a convention of
thinking, not a given of human nature." (p. ix)

 

And while it is a wonderful book, it is also an incomplete book.  In fact,
given what we know today, it is very incomplete!  In spite of all of the
good things in the book, Joseph did not even come close to the idea of NLP
as a Thinking Model (Neurons #43, #44).  Well, in 1985 NLP was only
officially 10 years old (1975) and Meta-Programs and Sub-Modalities were
only then in the process of being developed.  Joseph also wrote it years
before the discovery of the Meta-States Model (1994) wherein I modeled the
most unique kind of thinking and consciousness that we humans have-
self-reflexive consciousness.

 

Now as a thinking model, NLP did not make the mistake of making "thinking"
dichotomous to "feeling" or "emoting."  NLP is much too holistic for that!
When we talk about thinking, we include within it feeling and emoting.  The
fundamental channels of thinking, the sensory representational systems of
the VAK include both.  Generally, visual and auditory representations drive
the thinking part and kinesthetics drive the feeling and emotional part.
This is the basic structure of facilitating experiences using NLP.

 

If that doesn't immediately make sense, or ring a bell for you, consider
what happens in any and every NLP training and/or coaching.  A person wants
to feel more relaxed, more joyful, more confident, more curious, etc.  What
does the NLP trainer do?  She first grounds the experience of work asking
VAK questions, "How do you picture this?   What tone of voice are you using?
And how are you feeling in your body-your breathing, posture, muscle tone,
etc.?"  Once this thinking is elicited, then the NLP-er will ask the person
to make the thinking features of the pictures brighter, the tone more
upbeat, etc.  Then, "What effects does this have on your emotions or
emotional states?"

 

The visual and auditory qualities also drive the kinesthetics.  Sometimes
the kinesthetics are used to amplify or turn up the bodily sensations.  Then
to enrich it further, words are elicited.  "What do you say to yourself?"
"What could you say to yourself that would make this experience more
joyful?"  "What tonality would you use?"

All of this highlights that in NLP we think with our whole mind and body.
Thinking is visual, auditory, kinesthetic (which includes smells and tastes)
sensory systems.  It also includes linguistics for our mental categories
(our meta-representational system).  NLP, as a holistic thinking model,
involves no dichotomizing or polarizing of thinking and feeling.

 

Neurologically, when we think not only are various cortexes activated in the
brain, but neuro-pathways are activated from brain to all of the body.  All
of the many different nervous systems are activated (autonomic nervous
system, immune system, sympathetic nervous system, digestive nervous system,
etc.).  That's why, taking cue from Korzybski, NLP is as holistic and
systemic as you can get, hence, Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  We "program"
or construct strategies and experiences into our very neurology.  Then, as
"neurons are fired together, they wire together" (Donald Hebb).  Now the
program, whether it is for reading, riding a bike, getting dressed, driving
a car, solving an algebra problem, etc., that program is readily available
to us as a developed resource.

 

As a Thinking Model, NLP specifies how such programming works in human
neurology and how it is coded linguistically.  We are a neuro-linguistic and
neuro-semantic class of life (Alfred Korzybski).  What this means is that
unlike the field of Critical Thinking or the field of Creative Thinking, NLP
is so much more.  Again, that's why it is a meta-discipline.

 

When you next add the meta-levels of thinking to all of this-then you have
an even fuller picture.  As you think about your thinking, you develop
higher levels of consciousness.  This meta-thinking shows up as beliefs,
decisions, learning, understandings, conceptual models, etc.  Within each of
these we develop all sorts of thinking hierarchies- belief systems,
hierarchy of values, increasingly more abstract understandings of patterns
and the "laws" that govern a discipline.

 

NLP began as a thinking model, even though the founders didn't realize it,
or think about their work in that way.  Today Neuro-Semantic NLP continues
the original discovery by modeling the many ways that thinking functions in
our mind-body system.

 

Why is all of that important?  Because everything human depends upon, and
arises from, thinking.  Thinking is the key to everything we deem important.
As the ultimate cause; it is your ultimate power.  Consequently, if you can
get to the thinking of someone, whether a client, an expert, or yourself-you
can identify the structure of pathology, excellence, challenge, etc. and
therefore that person's way of functioning.  You can learn it, bring healing
to it if need be, and/or replicate it.  That's because it is a model of
thinking itself.

 

 WHAT NLP REALLY IS

 

NLP, as a Communication model, is not a therapy model.  It is not a version
of psychotherapy. Nor is it a modeling model, a hypnosis model, or even a
model for personal development (self-actualization).  So what is NLP?
Amazing enough, that is one of the perennial questions that has plagued the
field of NLP.  This is the question to ask if you want to torture an NLP
trainer!

 

Yes, NLP speaks to, addresses, and provides lots of guidance in each of
these disciplines.  These are actually the most essential applications of
NLP.  There are many more-parenting, leadership, managements, coaching,
consulting, education, health, fitness, etc.  These are so much the
essential applications that they are commonly, even to this day, confused
with what NLP really is.  That's why some say NLP is Modeling, some say it
is Psychotherapy, some say it is Hypnosis, and others say it is
Self-Actualization.  NLP certain is each of these in terms of applications.
But what is it at its core?  Can we determine that?

 

NLP is actually much deeper than any of these.  Thinking about it as a
communication model, then at its heart, it is about how we communicate to
ourselves and others to create our experiences (states, skills, knowledge).
As NLP identified how these communications work and the basic communication
processes (mechanism), we found that it gave us the inner hidden structure
of experience itself.  And when you know the structure of an experience, you
can model and replicate that experience.

 

Yet unbeknown to most NLP trainers, writers, researchers, and teachers, NLP
is actually deeper than just a Communication Model.  Nor is this something
new that I'm adding to NLP, it has been deeper since the beginning, but
hardly anyone noticed.  I did not.  And I researched it for decades and
delved into the NLP models going back to the original sources.  Perhaps
that's because it is easier and makes more sense to simply say that it is a
Communication Model.  People understand that.  What else would you call it?

 

When Bob and I packaged NLP for the two volumes of User's Manual of the
Brain, we said that it is most essentially a Communication Model.  Evidence
of that goes to the fact that the first NLP model is "the Meta-Model of
Language in Therapy" and the second model was the Representational Model
that comprises our communications (including Sub-Modalities or the cinematic
features of our inner movies).  The third model, the Strategies Model about
how the communications generates and "programs" an experience.  Fourth, the
Milton Model of hypnotic communication patterns and how trance states work.
Fifth, the Meta-Programs model about how people think in their
communications.  That's a lot of evidence that NLP is a Communication Model.
Yet could it be something deeper?  If so, what would we call it?

 

Could we call it a thinking model?  What if, deeper than all of the uses and
applications of NLP is thinking?  Yet there's a problem with that.  Namely,
what is a thinking model?  How do you model thinking?  Thinking itself seems
so primary and irreducible, what would be its components?  Perhaps that's
why none of us saw that NLP could be defined as a thinking model.  But let's
go with it for a moment.  Suppose we called NLP a thinking model?  After
all, take each of the communication models and let's ask, What lies within
and underneath each model?  The answer is Thinking.

 

Meta-Model of Language            Linguistic distinctions encoding how we
think.

Representational Model              Sensory representations encoding sensory
VAK thinking.

Sub-Modality Model                    Cinematic features framing how one is
thinking.

Strategy Model                              Representational steps in how a
thinking format is structured.

Milton Model                                 Hypnotic linguistic
distinctions that invite a person to construct thinking about possibilities
and in terms of metaphors (metaphorical thinking).

Meta-Programs Model                Thinking patterns that govern ways of
perceiving.

Perceptual Positions Model        Thinking patterns from different
perceptual positions.

Reframing Model                          Thinking patterns for framing
different ways of interpreting a word, experience, or person, thinking about
meaning in different way.

Meta-States Model                       Reflexive thinking patterns that
layer thought upon thought to generate more complex states.

 

One thing this perceptive highlights is that all 'thinking' is not the same.
There are many different kinds and dimensions of thinking.  It also puts a
spotlight on the driving force inside of communication-the quality of your
thinking determines the quality of your communicating.  As thinking can go
wrong, make mistakes, be fallacious-so can everything that thinking
generates.  No wonder change, and transformation of persons and
organizations, require new thinking in new and different ways.

 

What am I saying here?  I'm saying that what NLP is most essentially a
Thinking Model.  When you really understand NLP, you know that it is a way
of thinking, a way of rethinking, and a way to do both critical and creative
thinking.  With this in mind, then at the core of every change is
re-thinking.  It is fresh thinking and it is meta-thinking, that is, the
ability to think about your thinking so that you can make sure it is
accurate, specific, precise, creative, and ecological.

 

Thinking has been at the core of NLP from the beginning, but we missed it.
Perhaps we dismissed "thinking" as too small, too obvious, or not
distinctive enough.  Perhaps we wanted something more sell-able, something
more commercially appealing, something that sounded more sexy-
communication, change, reframing, modeling, etc.

 

Now as a Thinking Model, NLP (including Meta-States) offers us nearly
everything we need to build and articulate a model of thinking.  And
unbeknown to most of the field of NLP, that's what I've been doing in our
Brain Camp trainings and in the series of books on thinking.  It has been a
discovery long time in coming, but it is now coming in a training near you.
:)

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 "MIND" AS A VERB

 

One of the greatest distinctions in the Meta-Model is the linguistic
distinction of nominalization.  When you have one of these creatures, you
have a mystified noun.  It is a mystery because, since it is not a true
noun, it is challenging, sometimes difficult, and sometimes utterly
impossible to know what to do with it.  How different from a real noun which
is "a person, place, or object."  When you have a real noun, you can see it
or hear it or touch it or taste or smell it.  Examples of real nouns- your
mother, your bed, your toothbrush, shoe, shirt, car, eggs, hamburger, etc.

 

But then there are the false nouns.  These are verbs which have been
noun-ified.  Take the verb "relate" and when you nounify it, you have
"relationship."  The verb that's hidden inside of relationship is "to
relate."  It is unspecified, so we have to ask more questions: who is
relating to whom, relating in what way, for what purpose, over what time
frame, etc.?  Take motivation and what is the hidden verb inside it?  Easy.
First we get motive then we get move.  Again, unspecified, so who or what is
moving?  In what direction?  What is the style of the moving, toward or away
from, slowly or quickly, etc.?

 

Many, if not most, nominalizations are like that-it is easy to detect the
hidden verb and to expose the real referent.  That's good because if you
don't, you will be left with a distorted mental map about yourself, others,
life, and/or the world.  You will have a mental map that is false-to-fact
and that will trick you, even deceive you, about things.  Psychologists for
most of the 20th century were fooled by motivation.  They thought it was a
thing, an object, something real, and so off they went looking for it.  But
it is not a thing!  It does not exist as a separate entity.  It describes a
function-the thinking-and-feeling (meaning-making) function within a person.
Maslow got it right when he identified motivation as a function of the
driving needs that need to be gratified; he wrote a whole book about
that-Motivation and Personality (1954/ 1970).

 

Now for one of the most mysterious of nominalizations of all-"mind."  We
certainly talk about "mind" as if it is a thing, a real thing, an object
that somehow exists in our heads.  There is a whole field, Philosophy of
Mind, in which great "minds" theorize and philosophize about mind.  Some say
the mind is just the brain; some say there is no such thing, "it is a
figment of your imagination."  Then there are many other definitions, all
striving to specify what it is.  But, of course, that's the thing, it is not
a thing at all!

 

Fortunately, we do at times use the word "mind" as a verb.  Getting on and
off of trains or subways you see the words, "Mind the gap."  We hear our
mothers say, "Now you mind your mother and do what I tell you!"  We may hear
our parents also say, "Mind your brother while I go into the store," "Mind
your manners, you're in church!"  There are more: mind your own business,
mind your head, mind your step, mind me, mind yourself, mind the goats, etc.
There are even "conversational postulates: "Would you mind passing the
salt?"  "Would you mind closing the door?"

 

Now when it comes to mind as a verb, what are we actually saying or asking?
To "mind the gap" is to think about and pay attention to the gap.  So with
"mind your mother," we know that she means, listen to and think about what I
told you.  "Mind" as a verb means think, think about, pay attention, focus
on.

 

Now you know the hidden verb inside of "mind," it is think.  Yet again, we
have an unspecified verb, so we have to ask more questions: Think in what
way, think how, think about what, etc.?  Now when it comes to thinking,
there are essential thinking skills: considering, questioning, doubting,
detailing, and distinguishing.  There are constructive thinking skills that
lead to eureka moments: inferring, organizing, creating, and synergizing
(systems thinking).  Then there are the advanced thinking skills: learning,
deciding, discerning, reflecting, and sacrilizing (valuing). (I have
detailed these thinking skills in Brain Camp I and in the forthcoming book,
Thinking for Humans, 2024).

 

What is your "mind?"  Well, since we know it is not a thing, it must be a
function, and given that the hidden verb is "think," what we refer to by the
word "mind" is your thinking functions.  Question: "What's on your mind?"
Answer: whatever you have been thinking-your thoughts, your ideas, your
constructs.  Question: "What's in the back of your mind?"  Answer: previous
thoughts that you now use as your thinking filters or references.  "What
does it mean when you say you must be losing your mind?  Answer: It means
that you are forgetting a thought or not comprehending a thought.  "Do you
have a good mind?"  Now we are asking about the quality of your thinking and
if you can think in clear and reasonable ways.

 

Mind- a mystery especially when you don't know how to de-nominalize.  Mind-
the wonder of human ingenuity, creativity, and innovations when you know
that it is your thinking and the quality of your thinking.  Mind- the result
of your thinking.  Your mind is your own self-creation!   Given that, how's
your mind?

 

 

 

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 YOUR TALK:

YOUR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

 

To assert that your talk reveals your thinking (#40) is to identify the
field of study called Psycho-Linguistics.  While this field uses the
language of linguistics and grammar, it is not strictly about linguistics
and grammar.  It is about how the way you talk reflects your inner
psychology.  This describes the very same phenomenon that the phrase
neuro-linguistics also refers to.  It refers to what your linguistics does
inside your neurology, how it influences the neurons in your brain and body,
and how that puts you into various states.

 

What does all of that mean?  It means that NLP is not about linguistics and
grammar per se, but rather about the effect of language within the human
person.  And while many people get turned off with regard to the Meta-Model
of Language, NLP's first model, that is typically because the trainer did
not understand it him or herself and did not know how to train it.
Accordingly, in many NLP schools, the Meta-Model is mentioned and then
quickly passed over thereby conveying the idea that it is not that
important.  But it is.

 

Actually, the opposite is true.  I could easily make an argument that the
most important model in NLP is the Meta-Model of Language.  Once upon a
time, Richard Bandler himself made that argument.  He said that "everything
that had been created in NLP was created with the Meta-Model."  How about
that!  In fact, it was that statement in 1989 that made me question my own
understanding of the Meta-Model.  It challenged me because I could not
explain how the Meta-Model would have been at the heart of creating
everything in NLP.  And, I wanted to know.

 

Consequently that sent me on a several year study of the Meta-Model.  It
also sent me to my first studies in Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and
from that, I collected seven linguistic distinctions from Korzybski's work
that should have been included in the original Meta-Model but were not.  In
adding those, I called the result The Extended Meta-Model.  That's now in
the book, Communication Magic (2001).

 

Now psycho-linguistics or neuro-linguistics refers to one of the most basic
and essential mechanisms in human experience-how we think and how our
thinking generates our "sense of reality," that is, our model of the world.
To think is to use various "languages."  First, we think using the sensory
representational systems of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.
This thinking is without words.  Next we add words, that's the
meta-representational system and the first words are sensory-based words.
Words enable you and I to create categories, classifications, concepts, etc.
and these then become our thinking templates or perceptual filters.  This
shifts to a higher level of thinking-conceptual and evaluative thinking.

 

As you do any of these kinds of thinking, you send signals to your body how
to feel and what to do.  In other words, this is how you "program" yourself
so that you can do whatever you do.  You program yourself for how to feed
yourself, walk, run, ride a bike, dress yourself, read, write, do math, use
a computer, etc.  Your programming for how to be, and how to function as
you, is a function of your neuro-linguistics and neuro-semantics.

 

This means that the language you speak is an important determinant of how
you think.  And as you think, so you feel, respond, speak, and behave.  Your
linguistics in all of its multiple forms organizes your thinking processes.
Even a single word can operate an organizing structure for your thinking. 

 

For example, if you mis-use the word "race" to designate different ethnic
groups, you thereby program yourself to see and distinguish different
"races."  It is actually a mis-use of the word because there is only one
human race on this planet.  We are all members of that one and singular
race.  We are not different species.  If you talk about "the human race" and
include every single person in that category, you have no room for racism or
being a racist.  Then you will be color-blind as Martin Luther King, Jr.
described in his "I Have a Dream" speech.  Given this, all of the non-sense
today about racism is a self-generated problem that can disappear very
quickly when we change our languaging.

 

Amazing, isn't it?  Words program the mind.  The way you talk organizes what
we call your "personality."  No wonder Neuro-Semantics, as an upgraded
version of NLP, focuses so much on cleaning up your thinking so that you can
speak with more clarity and precision and so you can then live with more
truth and compassion.

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

meta@acsol.net  

 WOKE THINKING SICKNESS

 

While the content of what is called Woke claims to care about social
justice, it only cares for justice for a few, not for everyone.
Originating from the "Black Lives Matter" movement, Woke thinking lacks
almost any common sense.  The first un-common sense thing that came out of
it was the defunding the police movement.  Now just a few years later, we
see many of the people who jumped on that bandwagon reversing themselves.
Why?  Because the rate of crime has been sky-rocketing, because mobs of
people rob businesses in daylight, and because the hands of police have been
tied so that they fear protecting the public

 

However, above and beyond the ideological contents of Woke is Woke thinking,
and that's the real problem.  Because Woke thinking is driven by an
ideology, and as with every ideology, that thinking is inherently biased by
its unspoken assumptions.  Consequently Woke thinking is not scientific, not
realistic, and not rational.  Rather than true thinking, it is "agenda
thinking."  When you start with an agenda, in this case a political agenda
based in Marxism and Socialism, that's why it is nearly impossible to reason
with a woke thinker.  Like every ideological thinking, woke thinking doesn't
seek the truth, but to prostyle in order to gain followers to the Woke cult.

 


Now if you use your brain well, and if you think in the way that thinking is
designed to be used, then you use it to grasp as best you can the
"territory" of the world.  Grasping it enables you to map it.  That's what
thinking is-your mental mapping of what you construe is present and how it
works.  You do that in order to navigate that territory.

 

If effective thinking puts in touch with reality, it is the means and design
of science.  It is the scientific attitude.  When we do science effectively,
we discern what is there, how it works, how to manage it, etc.  You consider
all sides, tests the validity of statements, keep your hypotheses open for
adjustment as new information arises, etc.

 

But Woke thinking does not do any of that.  For example, in biology we know
that there are two sexes and only two.  Every biologist knows that.  There
are males and females and everybody either has a penis or a vagina.  That's
the sexual facts.  For the term "gender," we generally use it as a synonym,
although "gender" also carries with it the cultural ideas of what each
gender is like, and how in any given culture we raise boys and girls.  But
today Woke thinking presents a mental map that in no way relates to reality.


 

Now regarding these facts, people within every culture develops views about
masculinity and femininity-beliefs, understandings, assumptions, etc.  These
views make up each person's psychology about males and females as concepts.
When these are framed in extreme opposition to each other, while there may
be clarity about male and female roles in a culture, there's usually also
unnecessary conflict between the sexes.  Then men aren't allowed to cry, to
be tender, to nurture, to admit weakness, etc.  Then women are not allowed
ot be angry, speak up for themselves, establish firm boundaries, say no,
etc.  Of course, these "problems" are problems of our framing and especially
cultural framing, not of reality.

 

Sexual and gender identities are functions of framing and meaning-making.
As an identity, what you think about being male or female depends on your
beliefs, understandings, permitting, forbidding, framing, etc.  If you are a
biological male and "feel like a woman" that's a psychological issue, not a
biological one.  If you're a biological female and "feel like a man" your
psychology is off.  Your biology is a given, you are either male or female.
If you have a problem with that, the problem lies not in your biology but in
your mind and emotions.  So trying to "solve" a psychological problem
biologically is a living "outside-in" approach, and will not be very
satisfactory.  And as such, it is a superficial and shallow "solution." 

 

While it is certainly possible to change one's sexual features, something
accomplished by surgery, hormone therapy, etc., chopping off breasts and
penises and reconstructing sexual parts is irreversible.  Because of that,
as a psychologist, I say that no child, adolescent, or even young adult
ought to ever make that choice.  After all, any decision that is
irreversible ought to be reserved for a time in life after the brain has
full matured -which is in the mid-30s.

 


And once a biological man has made all of the changes to become a woman, he
should never be allowed to compete in women's sports.  Let them invent some
transgender league of their own.  Women have fought long and hard for their
own leagues and for respect of their sports.  That should not be thrown away
to men who want to be women.  Everybody knows that gives them an unfair
advantage and, in the long run, will destroy women's sports.

 

Now when you try to reason with a Woke thinker, to have a rational
conversation, you'll discover the sickness of their agenda thinking.  Woke
thinking seeks to shut up anyone who disagrees.  Woke thinking bars
conservatives from college campuses and disserters from boardrooms.  Why?
Because the Woke thinker has a "religion" to promote.  That person will
argue by calling names, using labels ("racists" is their favorite),
generalizations, emotionally associating you with extreme examples-forms of
cognitive distortions and fallacies.  Their use of language itself is sick,
it is the doublespeak that Orwell described in his novel, 1984.

 

As Neuro-Semanticists, we think about how people think because as a person
thinks, so one reasons, emotes, communicates, acts, etc.  The inner game of
thinking governs all of the outer games of acting and relating.  That's why
we have to address thinking first.

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director

Neuro-Semantics

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

 DO YOU HAVE A GOOD MIND?

 

To succeed at anything-business, relationships, politics, health, fitness-
requires that you have a good mind.  That's because when you have a good
mind, you can figure what is going on, understand and accept reality, and
then generate good ideas about what to do.  You can do that because you have
learned a basic human skill-how to think effectively.  That's what gives you
a good mind.

 

Imagine the opposite.  Imagine a poor thinker.  That person will have
troubles defining the current situation, figuring out what to do, accessing
resources, and thinking through the consequences.  When someone is a poor
thinker, he falls back on the childish thinking patterns of the cognitive
distortions.  She over-generalizes, does either-or thinking, personalizes,
emotionalizes, blames, has tunnel-vision, etc.  No wonder the poor thinker
cannot effectively deal with reality and has troubles getting along with
people!

 

Effective thinking enables you to first of all comprehend the current
reality so you know what you are dealing with.  In effective thinking you
begin by openly considering all of the factors and variables before you
jump-to-conclusions.  Once you effectively define, detail, and distinguish
what is, then you look for effective solutions and resources.  You establish
a well-formed outcome, problem, solution, and innovation.  This is what it
means to have a good mind-a mind that enables you to figure things out and
create actionable plans for taking productive action. 

 

In this sense, no one is born with "a good mind."  A good mind is developed.
If you have a good mind today, it is because you have developed it.  You
have learned how to think accurately, precisely, critically, creatively, and
productively.  That doesn't happen without effort and direction.  That
doesn't happen without the discipline of learning how to use your brain and
"run your own brain."  Even basic school education does not guarantee that.
And why not?  Because even to this day, schools teach kids what to think,
they do not teach kids how to think.

 

Given that, who teaches people how to think?  That's a great question and
the answer is "Generally, no one."  Most people who have learned how to
effectively think have learned it on their own.  And they usually learned it
after some debacle where what they had learned generated more problems and
misery than help.  So they sat down to learn how to learn and how to think.
That's when they went meta to their thinking and learning and discovered
meta-thinking and meta-learning.

 

Who teaches how to learn?  NLP does, although mostly in an indirect way.  I
mostly learned how to think when I learned NLP.  It was one of the
unexpected and unintended consequences of learning NLP.  That's when I
learned that the first level of thinking begins with the sensory-based
information I picture in my mind.  I then learned that language is the
meta-representation system -a system about the sensory-systems. Then in
Neuro-Semantics we articulated that there are many more higher or
meta-levels of "thinking" coded as beliefs, decisions, permissions,
knowledge, concepts, etc.  So today, the people who teach thinking are most
the Neuro-Semantic trainers and sometimes, some NLP trainers.

 

Teach a person how to think and how to effectively manage one's thinking
powers, and that's how you create a good mind which can generate good ideas
that can change one's life and/or change the world.  Yet in reality, that is
just the beginning.  Success and productivity certainly begin with people
who are good thinkers who produce good ideas, but that is not enough.  It is
a great start, but only a beginning.  We also need good strategies-a
specific and workable strategy that will achieve a specific objective.
That's because without effective strategies, you will not be able to
implement your good ideas.  A good strategy answers the question, What
specifically will you do and how will you do it?

 

Thinking strategically means that you begin with a well-formed objective and
then think about the processes required for making that objective real.  A
wonder goal without the ability to plan intelligently is not sufficient.
The problem with not knowing how, that is, being ignorant of the how, your
brain will fill in your ignorance.  David Dunning explains how this works:

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's
filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences,
theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors,
and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate
knowledge.  This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest
strengths as a species.  We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate
theorizers.  Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day,
or at least to an age when we can procreate.  But our genius for creative
storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can
sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunat e, or
downright dangerous- especially in a technologically advanced, complex
democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with
immense destructive power."

 

If you want a good mind, then first and foremost, you need to learn how to
truly think.  That means to not assume that "good thinking is natural and
inevitable" or that "you don't have to learn how to think to be an effective
thinker."  Good thinking builds up a good mind; they go hand in hand.  The
problem is that there are many forms of non-thinking- pseudo-experiences
that masquerades as thinking.  In Brain Camp I we identify seven of these
masquerades of the real thing as a way to stay alert.  Then we cover the 14
essential thinking skills.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall@acsol.net  

 "PURPOSEFUL THINKING"

Well, Almost ... Actually Just VAK Thinking, Again

 

I began studying Critical Thinking in 2015.   In the beginning I
collaborated with one of our Neuro-Semantic trainers.  After he dropped out,
I created the trainings that are now called Brain Camp I, II, and III.
After three years of extensive reading and studying in that field, I wrote
the book, Executive Thinking (2018) having also written scores of articles
on "thinking."  Just recently I discovered that Richard Bandler began
thinking somewhat along the same line after that.  I discovered that when I
got his book "Thinking on Purpose" (2019).  Hearing some promotion for it, I
thought that maybe it mighty be further development of the mysterious and
wonder-fill phenomenon of "thinking."  But, sadly, it did not.

 


In fact, throughout the entire book, thinking is simply refers to as
VAK-thinking, the thinking that works with into the components of your
movie-mind.  That's all.  It is the 1970s NLP model of thinking as only what
we do at the primary level.  Bandler has not even included the levels of
thinking that Bateson and Dilts developed, or the meta-levels of thinking
that I developed with Meta-States.  It is all primary level thinking, and
therefore the one and only "tool" is changing the qualities of your
pictures, sounds, and/or sensations (to wit, sub-modalities).

 

If you have read NLP books by Bandler, there's nothing new in this one.
Like all of the other books, this one is exclusively focused on the
modalities and sub-modalities.  It is about good thoughts and bad thoughts
(p. 69).  It is about adding pleasure to whatever you do.  When it comes to
beliefs-still failing to recognize that beliefs are meta-level phenomenon,
he still uses sub-modalities to alter them, which of course, does not work
(97).  He thinks of them as images to alter.  He also thinks that decisions
are "images."  "...and notice the image of that good decision" (115).  Yet
these meta-level abstractions are not pictures, they are concepts.

 

Meta-Stating: Now there is meta-stating in the book, but it is unrecognized.
He talks about seeing a belief (which presupposes a belief is an image
rather than a sentence!) And then saying to yourself with absolute
conviction, "It is stupid."  That's applying the state of "stupidity" to a
belief (p. 96). He also does that with "This is smart" (p. 98).  He notes
that "confidence is not just a state."  It's a modifier, but then he fails
to realize that because you can be confident about being happy, about being
hired, about not being hired, etc., it is a meta-state (163).

 

The following reveals the meta-state of knowing about a craving.  "Your
feelings don't force you to act.  Knowing you crave something should be
enough to tell you to not do it." (p. 201).  The knowing is higher to and
about the craving and therefore leads to a higher understanding.  Then there
is this: "As soon as you laugh at being afraid of something and you're fed
up with being afraid of going up in an escalator..." (p. 242).  These are
meta-states: laugh at fear; fed up about fear.  But, of course, he doesn't
know that.

There are inspiring statements about thinking and learning:

"We have to teach people how to be learning machines; this requires them
become problem solvers." (p. 16)

"If you just think, you can think yourself into problems.  It's really
easy." (p. 30)

"The biggest inoculation against our mental problems is a sense of humor."
(p. 34)

"You forgot that the reason you have a brain is so you would have your own
thoughts, not someone else's." (p. 42)

 

There are also some nice reframing which, of course, occur at a level meta
to the primary level.  I like this one: "When you feel bad exercising, the
pain of exercising is weakness disappearing." (p. 104).  And this one:
"Phones have become like pacifiers now." (p. 158)

 

About acceptance, he got that all wrong.  "... If you accept how you are,
you are committing to your stupidity." (p. 242).  Here he criticizes those
in the Human Potential Movement for urging "accept yourself the way you
are."  But acceptance does not mean condoning or resignation.  Not at all!
No one in the Human Potential Movement ever said that.

 

Bottom line- If you know NLP, you will not learn very much about thinking in
this book.   You will mostly get a good review of Bandler's take on NLP, and
especially how we think in the sensory-systems and if you change the
cinematic features (sub-modalities) of the images, sounds, and sensations
that you use-you will change your thinking.

 

Thinking on Purpose could have been a breakthrough book.  After all,
purposeful thinking itself describes a meta-state.  If Richard Bandler had
read and understood the Appendix on Meta-States in The Spirit of NLP (1996),
he would have known that.  He could have then identified the higher level
thinking which is involved at the meta-levels.




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 SO YOU THINK YOU "DESERVE"

SOMETHING?!

 

In these days of social media we hear a lot of people asserting that they
deserve various things- better salary, an opportunity, recognition, etc.
Many people march and protest demanding something that they think they
deserve.  But do they?  What do you deserve?  It seems like a simple and an
innocent question.  It is not.  The way the word deserve is thrown around
today, and the way that question to presented today, makes it semantically
loaded and not in a good way.  Look up "deserve" in the dictionary and you
will discover that the word means:

"to earn by service; to be worthy of (something due, either good or evil);

to merit; to be entitled to;"  "worthy of reward, award or praise."

"a reward for what you do, to merit what you received."

"to have earned as a right by one's actions." 

Examples: "the referee deserves a pat on the back for his bravery."
"People who park like that deserve to be towed away."  The laborer deserves
his wages; a work of value deserves praise.

 

Yet while the word deserve refers to earning and meriting something, today
it seems to be mostly used in the sense of unconditional entitlement.  When
used properly, it is a perfectly good word; when used improperly it is a
cognitive distortion.  It becomes a should.  "I deserve..." becomes a demand
for a reward without doing anything to earn or merit the reward.  Yet when
used this way, it becomes an injustice whine demanding that the world give
whatever the person wants.

 

Advertisers use deserve to sell things.  "You deserve a break today."  "You
deserve Miller's Light Beer."  "You deserve to drive the best."  These ads
imply that you have the right to demand what you deserve and spend to get
what you deserve.  When politicians use the word deserve they seek to raise
your dissatisfaction.  They imply, "Elect me and I will give you the things
that you deserve!"  "You deserve free health care."  "You deserve a four-day
work-week."  "You deserve more weeks of vacation."

 

In spite of all this misuse, let's ask the central question that immediately
impacts our lives: What do you actually deserve?  The answer is nothing,
unless you do something!  If deserve refers to earning and meriting, then to
deserve, you have to earn it.  You have done something that merits and
warrants that you get it.  The US constitute and Bill of Rights speaks about
"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  The government was instituted
to protect these rights.  But they are not automatic.  You still have to
earn them!  For life, you have to take care of yourself and not do yourself
harm.  For liberty you get to exercise your freedoms and not forfeit them by
violating the law and losing your liberty.  For pursuit of happiness, you
have is learn how to be happy, adjust your attitude, and develop your
skills.  Do you deserve to be happy?  No, not automatically.  You deserve it
if you do what's required to attain it.

Do you deserve respect?  Not necessarily.  If you say to someone, "I deserve
your respect..." you are making a request, perhaps a demand.  Question: Have
you demonstrated respect to that person?  If not, then it does not sound
like you have earned that person's respect.  Saying you deserve respect
sounds like a should.  Does the relationship-the way each are relating-
establish that expectation?  Or is it an unrealistic expectation?

 

Now in an entitlement society, many are mis-using this word.  They think
they deserve all kinds of things because they want them.  It is as if they
think, "If I want something, I should have, therefore I deserve, and
therefore I can expect to get it."  They then make demands on life, on the
world, on government, on employers, on other people.  "My wants as
expectations are your responsibilities."  Of course, what that philosophy
generates is conflict, disagreement and disappointment.

 

The truth is neither you nor I deserve anything unless we do something that
earns or merits the reward that we want.  The next time someone says, "I
deserve X," ask, "And what have you done to deserve X?"  "How have you
earned or merited X?" 

 

An extreme example of this non-sense is currently going on by those in the
BLM movement.  They have decided that they deserve reparations for the
injustice done to their ancestors five generations back.  They themselves
were not mistreated.  No one did injustice to them.  In fact they live in a
free society where they could achieve "the American dream," if they put
their mind, heart and body to it.  Injustice was done perhaps five or ten
generations ago.  Someone (usually their tribal chiefs) sold their ancestors
into slavery to those who back in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were
engaged in slave trade.  But they now think that they deserve reparations.
Question: What have you done that earns that recommence?  The truth
is-nothing.  They don't deserve reparations at all.

 

Deserve is a perfectly good word when used about earning or meriting a
reward.  But used as a should, an expectation, a demand simply because you
want it-the word becomes a sneaky cognitive distortion.  It becomes a form
of pseudo-reasoning, a way to throw a tantrum and try to get what you
actually do not deserve.   It becomes a "guilt trip" for those who don't
know what the word actually means.

 

 

 

 

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

 HOW CAN I BECOME

TRULY COMPETENT?

 

Competence is everything!  Well, almost everything.  It is certainly why, in Neuro-Semantics, we train, coach, consult, write, run practice groups, hold conferences, etc.  We do so in order to enable ourselves and others to become competent at a whole variety of activities.  From self-management to parenting, to wealth creation, to leadership, to health and wellness, to eating right, to sleeping soundly, etc., competence is our objective.  We want people to become self-determining and have the self-efficacy to be competent in the things that they value.

 

When I say that competence is everything, I’m thinking about the following applications.  Competence is the foundation of confidence.  To be competent is to be confident and just about everybody wants that—who doesn’t want to feel confident in what you do and how you live?  Consider the opposite: Confidence without competence means you are fooling yourself and trying to con others into thinking you have skills and you can do what you cannot do.  The only way to feel truly and fully confident is to become competent.  But that’s actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people image.

 

Competence is the foundation for expertise.  Let’s say that you want to become an expert.  What’s required for that?  Basically, first develop your basic competence, then add 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice, and then you will develop expertise.  This is the finding of Anders Ericcson in his longitudinal studies on expertise.  This also highlights that competence is much more than merely having some skills.  Yes, competence requires skills and is built upon skill development.  Yet, as noted in the first article, you could have some skills and still not be competent.

 

Competence is the foundation for self-trust.  Once you develop a skill, any skill, does not mean that you will always be able to demonstrate that skill.  Skill competence comes and goes.  They depend on how you’re feeling, the sleep you got the night before, how things are going in your life, etc.  Competence is a wavy line—up and down, on and off, good days and bad days.  But once you take the skill to the level of competence, you develop a basic consistency that gives you much more control over the skill.

 

Competence is the foundation for self-efficacy, which is the foundation for entrepreneurship, and just about everything else, wealth creation, risk taking, leadership, management, resilience, and the list goes on and on.  I hope the point is made— because competency is just about everything in our lives, go for it!  Aim to become competent.  Don’t be satisfied with being mediocre or just getting by.

 

Now for the How

Because the skills which are required for competence have to be developed one by one, you are going to need a lot of patience.  That means giving up your impatience.  The impatient who want to become competent over-night or in a weekend course are those who will never become competent.  Your skills will inevitably be on and off as you go through the learning process.  It is the nature of the beast.  Why?  Because you are moving your conceptual knowledge into your neurology.  And that integration process takes time.

 

Along with patience, you are going to need a powerful robust attitude toward mistakes and error messages.  That’s because you accelerate your learning process via the feedback process.  In other words, you have to be open to the error feedback messages.  If you make the fatal mistake of confusing your self (your ego, your worth as a person) with what you do, your behavior, you will not learn very well and it will take you a lot longer to become competent.  So, release your ego!  Separate person from behavior.  Stop making that fatal error.  What you are doing is just that— doing, behavior.

 

Next, practice one piece at a time.  Stop trying to do the whole competency or even the whole skill— set your sights on the sub-skills.  Deliberately focus your practice on each one so that your cells fire together and you create a neural pattern in your neurology.  Once you do that, you will develop a consistency that you can trust.  This is the pathway to competency.  Every manual that we have in Neuro-Semantics has been developed specifically for this.  For whatever competency you want, open up your manual, find the sub-skills and practice them over and over and over.  That’s the key.

 

Keep yourself inspired and therefore motivated by setting your intention on developing the competency.  Give yourself a great big why and then meta-detail everything you do in your deliberate practice with the big why.  Refresh your why everyday you do your practice.  As you do, forget the results.  That’s right!  Forget the results, they will follow if you do the process.  So focus entirely and exclusively on the process.  And what is the process?  Deliberately practicing the sub-skills!

 

 

META-COACH NEWS

·       The special book deal continues, most Neuro-Semantic books for $10, Postal Box holds 10, shipping $100 for the box.  In the USA, the shipping only $15.  Write to me at meta@acsol.net.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall@acsol.net

 

 

 NLP PATTERNS:

MODELS FOR THINKING

 

While I had studied numerous psychologies for many years, it was not until I
learned NLP that I was exposed to the idea of patterns and running patterns.
Nor was it that other psychotherapies didn't have specific processes to use
and to follow.  They did.  It was more the case that those processes were
looser in form, more general in approach, entailing a larger overview of
this process.  NLP patterns were different. They offer a protocol for how to
achieve a specific goal.

 

Learning NLP, in fact, is to a great extent, learning patterns.  It is
learning the precise steps of the pattern, the purpose of each pattern, the
elicitation question for each given pattern, the processes of the pattern,
and how to think about a pattern.  When you learn NLP, you learn the Circle
of Excellence, the Swish pattern, Six-Step Reframing, Setting Anchors,
Collapsing Anchors, and on and on.  Each pattern has a specific set of steps
similar to a recipe.

 

Further, each pattern is generally a strategy for how to do a specific thing
and sometimes the name of the pattern names that specific thing- Decision
Destroyer, Change Personal History, Movie Rewind.  And most of the patterns
arose from getting the strategy for doing a particular thing from one or
more persons who were already skillfully competent.

 

Ten years after I learned NLP, I had the audacity to gather all of the NLP
patterns that I could find in all of the books and manuals which I had read.
I then put 77 of them into a single source, The Sourcebook of Magic, Volume
I (1997).  That was the first book of its kind.  In doing so, I separated
out the most basic NLP patterns like getting rapport, anchoring, state
accessing, ecology check, etc. since these processes are used inside of
every pattern.

 

What are these patterns?  They are essentially thinking patterns.  If you
follow the strategy steps in a pattern you will essentially learn to think
in a specific way to achieve a specific outcome.  You will think in a way
that will create a specific resource or solve a specific problem.  I didn't
know it at the time, but each pattern gave me a new or different way to
thinking about a given subject or experience.  That's actually pretty
amazing!  In learning NLP, you learn to think more precisely and accurately.

 

Consider what happens when you learn the sensory representation systems.
You learn that you think visually, auditorially, and kinesthetically, and
also using your sense of smell and taste.  For the majority of people, this
is both obvious and a moment of self-discovery.  It was for me.  I knew I
thought visually, but had no idea that my primary rep. system was
kinesthetic.  For me, that explained a lot.  Later, when I discovered that I
actually could think auditorially-and that opened up a whole new world for
me.  Previously (well, 16 years earlier) a music teacher told me I was tone
deaf; as it turned out, I was not.  It was the case that I had not learned
to use my auditory system.  That's all.

Consider what happens when you follow the steps of the Movie Rewind pattern.
If you follow the steps, you learn to use your thinking potentials and
skills in such a way that you recode the way you think.  Now your old
thinking code no longer forces you to re-experience a traumatic experience.
You learn to think objectively-and just witnesses fact without your old
interpretations inducing a re-traumatization.  In this way, you take the
emotional charge out of the way you remember things.  Now that's quite a
learning!  And all you have to do is to follow the steps of the pattern.  Do
it enough times until this new way of thinking starts to habituate giving
you another choice.

 

Perceived in this way, NLP is most essentially a thinking and a re-thinking
model.  It works its "magic" psychologically by recoding your thinking.
This is especially obvious with the Meta-Model.  Here you learn to recognize
a linguistic cue (a word or phrase) that is ill-formed and immediately
transforms it into a well-formed one.  If a word or statement programs you
to feel miserable, you catch it before it performs that kind of an
induction.  You transform it at the linguistic level.

 

Yes NLP is a Communication Model.  That's how we have thought about it from
the beginning -a model about how communication works.  Within NLP is the
"Meta-Model of Language in Therapy."  That's what it was originally called.
Also within it is the Milton Model of Hypnotic Language.  And yes, deeper
still to communication is thinking.  Thinking that communicates with
precision and specificity as well as thinking that induces trance states for
all sorts of personal resources.

 

Now you know why we in Neuro-Semantics have been deepening the essential
core of NLP, the core that is within and behind all of the models, all of
the patterns, and all of the transformational tools.  You know why we have
established all three of The Brain Camps.

           Brain Camp I: Thinking for Humans.

           Brain Camp II: Learning Excellence

           Brain Camp III: Wise Executive Decisions

 

You also now know why I have been writing numerous books about thinking:

           Executive Thinking (2018)

           Thinking as a Modeler (2018)

           Executive Learning (2018)

           Executive Learning (2019)

           Humorous Thinking (2021)

           Metaphorical Thinking (2022)

           Executive Decisions (2022)

           Executive Wisdom (2022)

           Predictive Thinking (2022)

 

Amazingly, the entire field of Critical Thinking does not know that NLP is a
thinking model let alone the best critical thinking tool anywhere.  That's
why I wrote Executive Thinking (2018)-to introduce the Meta-Model as the
best tool for critical thinking.  But there's more.  NLP is so much more-
which will be the subject of the next Neurons article.

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

 REALITY FACING SECURITY

 

The phrase “secure enough to face reality” refers to the ability to know within yourself that you are okay as a person and that you are capable of handling the challenges of life.  Are you that secure?  If you have these two personal and internal resources, then you will be able to face reality without falling apart or getting into a highly reactive state.  That’s what happens when a person does not have sufficient ego-strength to face reality.  With this inner security, then the external challenges will not question you as a person (your worth or dignity) or overwhelm your ability to cope with life. 

 

Knowing your unconditional value and having developed coping abilities—now you can face reality for what it is and take effective actions to deal with things.  Now you can accept life’s challenges.  Acceptance is what indicates that there is sufficient internal security to face reality.  Conversely, rejection of life and its challenges actually makes it impossible to deal with life.  When you reject what is, you are fighting reality itself and as long as you are in a fight with reality, you are expending your energy, thought, creativity, problem-solving skills, etc,. in a realm that is self-defeating.  Why?  Because reality is what it is.  No matter how much you dislike it, hate it, wish it would be different, it is what it is.

 

If a loved one has died, then a person you have loved has passed on and is no longer alive.  If your house was destroyed in a hurricane, then the house is gone.  If you get a diagnosis of cancer, that is what you now have to deal with.  And this is where the magic of acceptance enables you to cope and move forward in life.  You don’t have to like the situation to accept it.  You only have to acknowledge it.  This “acceptance” is not the same as resignation—that is completely different. Nor does it even suggest condoning the situation.  Acceptance is an acknowledgment of what is.  And that makes it the beginning place for healing and resilience.

 

All of the previous stages of grief that Kubler-Ross identified in her classic study on grief —denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are actually unnecessary for grief resolution.  You will only experience these to the degree that you don’t accept life and its challenges for what they are.  When you accept, you don’t have to deny, rage, bargain, or depress.  Yet with acceptance, these become unnecessary. [They also become a waste of your time and energy.]

 

What does it take to face reality?  I’d recommend that you begin with unconditional self-esteem and a set of coping skills.  After that, you will need a healthy dose of acceptance.  But even without the first two, you could start with acceptance.  Acceptance can be the starting point for facing reality.  That’s because when you accept yourself, your skills, your powers, your situation, etc., your acceptance ends the fight.  It ends the inward fight against yourself, your history, things from your childhood, etc.

 

Acceptance is powerful for many reasons.  As a change principle: You can’t change what you don’t accept.  So acceptance begins the change process.  Also, you can’t face what you don’t accept.

 

What drives the pre-grief stages of a loss (e.g., denial, anger, bargaining, and depression) are cognitive distortions.  These arise when a person exaggerates a loss, personalizes it, emotionalizes, awfulizes, develops a tunnel vision about it, etc.   To experience security inside—out, begin by welcoming and embracing reality as that which is.  Acknowledge it.  The paradox is that when you begin with this kind of acceptance, all of the internal fighting against what’s real ends, and you can focus on coping.  Now you’re ready to do some high quality problem-solving.

 

 

META-COACHING NEWS

·       With this blog, we welcome another 20 or so new Meta-Coaches who have just graduated from ACMC in Kaula Lumpur.  The team in Malaysia were very gracious hosts and worked overtime to deal with the challenges that arose with the hotel.  This was the first ACMC in some 10 years in Malaysia so it was as if beginning for the first time.  Our hope is that the new Meta-Coaches will become the Community there and do such quality coaching that it will spread the word.  Then the trainers will keep busy training NLP as well as Modules I and II.

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877