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