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.