EXPERTISE

A FUNCTION OF FOCUSING

 

"If people know how hard I work to gain mastery,

it wouldn't seem wonderful at all."

Michaelangelo

 


The person who has probably most emphasized the relationship between focus
and expertise is Csikszentmihalyi and his work on the phenomena of flow.
For him, to get into the flow zone meant a special kind of thinking, a
special kind of attention, what he described as a near-total concentration
on the task at hand.  In searching for words for this state, he called it an
altered state, a hypnotic state, and a state of absorption.  In this state
of focus, you would be doing no multi-tasking because of the intensity of
your focus.

 

This focus state would also be a state of mental clarity in each and every
stage.  First mental clarity about your goals, then about your actions in
reaching your goals, then about your problem-solving and decision-making as
you identified the specifics for reaching your goal.  For Csikszentmihalyi
this mental clarity was something you had to work for in terms of your
thinking skills and abilities.  It does not come to the mentally or
physically lazy.

 

Speaking about the effort it takes, it was Csikszentmihalyi who came up with
the two axes, challenge and competence.  When a person unites both in a
singular action, she enters the flow zone.  If there is ability to perform
and the focus is entirely there, then one will easily get bored and enter
into the drone zone.  If there is the ability to take on the next level of
challenge, but only to do that, then one enters into the panic zone of
anxiety and stress. 

 

For the excellence of the flow zone, you have synergize both challenge and
competence.  In Neuro-Semantics we do that with the Meta-Coaches and the
Trainers by using deliberate practice-constantly adding a bit more challenge
to whatever level of performance a person can achieve.  Doing that keeps you
in the flow zone-always learning, always getting a bit better, always moving
toward excellence.

 

Now to do that, welcome the next level of challenge even if it scares you.
By doing that you can transform your fears into a challenge.  The amazing
thing is that when you frame it as a challenge, your fear becomes a compass
for you.  And eventually you can learn to enjoy the risk as you look forward
to the challenge as the next to step up to.  As you keep doing this, you'll
experientially discover that risks are always relative.   What is a 'risk"
at one time, becomes 'nothing' at a later time.  The more your skills and
competence increase, the less your sense of risk.   You'll also discover in
your experience that risk is actually needed if you are to stay in the flow
zone.  

 

Whatever you are currently doing to become more skillfully competent, how
much of a sense of risk do you feel?  If none, then you're playing things
too safe.  And you are probably selling yourself short.  If it is too much,
you are in danger of getting overwhelmed and too anxious and giving up.  So
aim for a moderate amount of risk-perhaps 5% more  challenge.  Push yourself
to reach beyond your current level of skill.   You will need to find the
sweet spot for yourself as we all do.  If you are a coach or trainer, sit
for assessment!  Scary?  Good.  It's good because when you don't know what's
going to happen, you pay more attention.

 

To find the synergy between challenge and competence, you also need the
right attitude.  You need a mind-set that allows you to stay flexible so you
can adapt.  The risk of acting is not about "success or failure," it is
about learning, improving, discovering new insights.  The motto in Silicon
Valley has been, "Fail early, fail often, fail forward."  And that's the
attitude-failure is a tool for progress.  No wonder experts themselves often
say that the

path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your
actions no matter the situation.  Notice the response you get, if it is not
what you want, learn from the experience, and go for it again.  Maybe, just
maybe, that's what Michaelangelo meant in his quotation at the beginning of
this article.

 

 

WANT MORE?

              See Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997)

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                          

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

 THE ART OF MANAGING

YOUR EMOTIONS -II

 

In the art of managing your emotions for your own emotional intelligence,
the first step is acceptance.  Without acceptance, there will be and can be
no control.  Why?  Because you cannot control what you don't accept.  By not
accepting, you reject it and what you reject, you put outside of your
control.  It's a vicious circle.

 

2) Explore to Understand.

If you want to know why it's important to accept your emotion, this is the
reason.  You need to understand what, if anything, your emotion is trying to
say to you.  As I noted in the earlier posts, mind and emotion are not two
radically distinct phenomena, they are actually two parts of a singular
process-your mind-body system.  That's why every thought involves an emotion
and why every emotion involves thoughts.  This is obvious with the primary
emotions: to have anger you have to have angry thoughts; for fear, there has
to be fearful thoughts; where there is sadness, sad thoughts, etc.  "As you
think, so you feel."  While that's the basic principle, it is not the only
principle.  There are many more.

 

The cognitive aspect of any and every emotion informs you about its message.
So far example, anger always tells you that something feels as if it is
violating your values.  Fear always tells you that something feels as if you
are in danger or that something is threatening to you.  Sadness always tells
you that something feels as if you have loss something.  Guilt always tells
you that it feels as if you've done something wrong.

 

But notice that while the emotion is sending you a message, the message is
indeterminate.  It is not absolute.  It is telling you that "something feels
as if..."  Now whether your anger, fear, sadness, guilt, etc. is true
depends on your thinking, your relating to someone or something, and the
context.  If there is a true threat, danger, loss, or wrong-then your
emotion is true and appropriate.  And you need to listen to it.  In that
case your emotion's message is critical for your well-being.  Listen to it
and take appropriate actions.

 

But if it is not true, if it is wrong-and it often is (!), then listening to
your emotion is not in your best interest.  In fact, it may be disastrous
for you to listen to it or to heed it.  And that's why the first thing you
have to do is explore the emotion to understand it.  That's why you start
with acceptance of the emotion.  By embracing the emotion, you can register
it, notice it, and then ask it, "What are you trying to tell me?"  At this
point, check out three key factors of the emotion.

 

A) Your thinking.  What are you thinking that's generating the emotion?
"I'm angry because John said I wasn't using my head."  If it were true, what
value does that violate?  "My honor."  So your honor is at stake when John
says those words?  Your honor is that fragile that those words disturb your
sense of honor?  "Well, he shouldn't say that!"  Because ...?  Because I
don't want him to say those words?  You mean he doesn't have the right to
think that, n a given context, you didn't use your head?  "Well, no ... but
I don't like him saying that?"  Did you use your head in that context?

 

Thinking generates emotions.  If the thinking is inaccurate, if it is
childish, if it is peevish to begin with, then the emotion will also be
inaccurate or childish or distorted.  So check it out.  How grown-up and
adult is your thinking?  What distortions, biases, or fallacies may your
thinking contain?  Is it current thinking or is it old dated thinking from
your childhood?

 

B) Your Body.  When any of us have not been feeling well, not sleeping well,
eating well, etc., our emotions can be on the edge and ready to over-react
to the most benign trigger.  You know this if you have a cold or the flu, if
you are sleep deprived, if you have been drinking too much. Because an
emotion is a somatic (body) response, if "the hardware" of your emotions is
under stress and strain-your emotions can be overly sensitive,
over-reactive, and therefore highly inaccurate.  You probably need a nap or
a bowl of hot soup or a walk in the sunshine!

 

Set your goal to have a "healthy mind in a healthy body" and then you will
find that your emotions will work more optimally.  Years ago I heard a
famous therapist say, "At the bottom of a lot of depression is a lazy butt."
For your body to be healthy you need to exercise your muscles for skeleton
strength, your heart and lungs for cardio-vascular strength, and to stretch
for flexibility strength.  That's why with many negative emotions, the first
thing to do is breathe deeply for a period of time.  It will dissipate a lot
of the emotional energy and change the bio-chemistry in your brain and body.

 

C) Your context.  Emotions are highly sensitive to where.  Because most
emotions are social in nature and have to do with our relationships to
others, to experiences, and to situations, where you are strongly conditions
how you experience your emotions.  There's several reasons for this.  One
goes back to meaning- meaning is entirely context-dependent.  What anything
means depends on where it is said.  "How are you?" becomes a very different
question when asked by a friend, a doctor, a therapist, your mother, etc.
And if the meaning is dependent on the context, so will the resulting
emotion.

 

Another reason goes to the fact that most people constrain their emotions
much more in public than they do in private.  What they would never consider
thinking or feeling in public, they would easily do if at home.  Sometimes
the transformative results in therapy, and even coaching, are delayed for
this reason-the person doesn't yet feel safe enough or comfortable enough to
disclose his thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes all of the negative emotions
that show up as frustration, stress, embarrassment, anger, fear, insecurity,
anxiety, and on and on that get activated at work ... and having a way of
expressing or releasing the emotional energy gets displaced improperly at
home onto one's partner or children.  Of course, that then creates all sorts
of emotional problems at home!  Second #2 in emotional manage: explore to
understand the emotion.

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 THE ART OF MANAGING

YOUR EMOTIONS -I

 

When it comes to managing emotions, Aristotle said it best when he wrote:

"Anybody can become angry-that is easy, but to be angry with the right
person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right
purpose, and in the right way-that is not within everybody's power and is
not easy."

 

We can take the idea expressed here by Aristotle and apply it to every
emotion- to feel it and to experience the emotion is easy in comparison to
being able to manage it.  The wisdom here is that there's nothing wrong with
the emotion itself, it is just an emotion.  The challenge is feeling it in
relation to the right person, at the right degree, at the right time, for
the right purpose, and in the right way.  Ah yes, that's what we all find
tough.  Yet, it can be done.

 

You can effectively manage your emotions so that you have your emotions,
rather than they having you, by getting back to the source of your
emotions-your mind and your body.  Ultimately, when you learn emotional
management, you will have achieved what we call emotional intelligence-an
intelligent use and relationship to your emotions.  Given that, how does
this work?  How do you learn to effectively manage your emotions?

 

1) Start with acceptance.

The beginning place is acceptance of your emotions.  Why?  Because you
cannot control anything that you don't accept.  When you do not accept, and
when you reject your emotions-you thereby set up a fight, a fight that can
become a war.  Now instead of treating your emotions as symptoms of your
mind and your body, you treat them as some kind of enemy-and yet because
every emotion is your emotion, your rejection is a rejection of yourself.
That's why rejection (dislike, contempt, hatred, worry, fear, anger, etc.)
toward your emotions puts you in an un-win-able conflict.

 

To reject your emotions, or any one specific emotion such as fear or anger,
is to put yourself in self-attack.  Then all of the energy that you
experience in that rejection (your anger, fear, worry, anxiety, sadness,
etc.) becomes aimed at you.  And that means that all of that energy is going
to go against your mind and your body.  Think about that!

 

Then in that self-attack, your mind and your body will pay the price.
That's why you'll get migraines, aches in your back, neck, stomach problems,
ulcers, and all sorts of psycho-somatic illnesses.  The energy of your
emotions that are attacking you has no where else to go.  From a meta-state
perspective, the problem is the second emotion and response you are making
to your first emotion and response.  You are rejecting your fear; you are
hating your anger; you are depressing with sadness your worry, etc.  In the
book, Dragon Slaying and Taming (1995) this is the very structure of
self-attack as a pathology and why it is so disastrous to your well-being.

 

In Meta-States Training, we use the pattern Meta-Stating Troubling Emotions
to counter-act this "dragon" creating process.  If you use negative emotions
to reject an emotion or experience, then by turning that around and use your
positive emotions to accept, welcome, and embrace an emotion or
experience-you tame any emotional dragon.  Instead of hating, fear, or
angering at your emotion, you accept it and you permit it.

 

When you refuse to accept an emotion, you not only fight it and start a war
on your insides, you prevent your own awareness of your emotions.  You blind
yourself to what you are feeling.  As you then expel the emotion from your
awareness, you have less and less influence over it.  That's one reason,
rejecting the emotion and trying to make it go away, does not work.
Conversely, the paradox of acceptance is that by accepting the emotion,
giving yourself permission to experience the emotion, you thereby empower
yourself to be able to manage the emotion.

 

The pattern of Meta-Stating Troubling Emotions centers primarily in the
permission process.  Nor does it matter who took permission away from you-
whether it was a parent, a teacher, a theology, a philosophy.  What matters
is that now, as an adult, you take control and give yourself permission to
experience and embrace your emotions.  When you do that-you will gave a new
level of freedom and control.

 

With the acceptance of permission then you are able to do your "emotional
work."  You are able to let the emotion "move" (e-motion) through your body,
giving you the energy to take whatever actions you need to take.
Metaphorically, you let your emotions breathe and when your emotions
breathe, they become more healthy, and more responsible to your guidance.
Conversely, when you reject and fight an emotion, when you try to make it go
away, it gets stuck inside of your and becomes toxic-sick.  And then it
makes you sick.  Now you know why acceptance is step #1.




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 KINDS & DIMENSIONS

OF EMOTIONS         

 

In the four previous articles, I began offering some basic definitions of
what an "emotion" is.  In those articles, I made numerous distinctions so as
to create some more precision regarding the emotional life that we are
referring to.  One thing that is obvious from all of that is this: All
emotions are not the same.  Emotions come in many different sizes and
shapes.  We have already noted that there are many different levels of
emotions (#3) from primary emotions to multiple levels of meta-emotions.
There are also different kinds of emotions as well as emotions in different
dimensions.  Here are some more distinctions that we can make about
emotions.

 

The go/ no-go emotions.  Many emotions create a go energy.  They are
excitatory, positive, and energetic emotions that activate us to move
forward to our values, our goals, and our desires.  And conversely, there
are many emotions which function with a no-go energy.  They are inhibitory,
negative, and constraining emotions.  We commonly call these the "positive"
and the "negative" emotions although that description is not very accurate.

 

Sympathetic emotions.  As already noted, there are the sympathetic nervous
system emotions of the General Arousal Syndrome: stress, excitement, fear,
anger, lust, and excitement.  These are all primary emotions and when you
feel them, you can point to the place in your body where you experience
them.  You encode them somatically.

 

Parasympathetic emotions.  The parasympathetic nervous system also activates
a certain set of emotions such as relaxation, calmness, peaceful, feeling
centered, etc.  These restful emotions enable us to turn down the bodily
activation, allowing us to feel apathetic, sleepy, bored, etc.

 

Social emotions.  Because the social emotions actually make up the largest
number of our emotions, they suggests that one of the primary functions of
emotions involve how we relate to each other.  These include: kindness,
care, love, hate, compassion, apathy, forgiveness, jealousy, respect,
disrespect, empathy, sympathy, and the list goes on and on.  For this
reason, there's a very close connection between emotional intelligence and
social intelligence. 

 

Conscience emotions.  Some emotions arise from our sense of right and wrong,
our sense of the ethics that we want to live by in relating to others.
These conscience emotions start with empathy and sympathy, how we connect to
others and feel responsibility to others and sometimes for others.
Conscience emotions leads us to feel conscientious about our behavior, how
we relate, our integrity in living up to our values, our congruency or
incongruency.  Those with little conscience will feel very little in terms
of others.  A person who is sociopathetic may be unable or unwilling to
"take second perceptual position" and at least, try on what another person
may be feeling in order to understand them.

 

Cathecting emotions.  To cathect is to reach out with your caring energy to
identify with and connect with a person, thing, place, etc.  By cathecting,
we "bring the world into our sense of self" and with that, our sense of self
expands.  Our inner world expands.  The cathecting emotions include: love,
desire, attachment, bonding, etc.  When we de-cathect we withdraw our
identity, care, sympathy, sense of connection with the person or thing.  We
experience this as loss, as grief, as sadness.

 

Self emotions.  Because there are so many aspects of "self," there are a
great many self emotions: sense of self, self-confidence, self-doubt,
self-efficacy, self-identity, temporal self (past self, future self), role
self, gender self (masculine self, feminine self), etc.

 

Meta emotions.  Anyone with a self-reflexive mind inevitably applies
feelings to feelings and this generates the meta emotions.  These are
layered and complex emotions.  So in fear about fear, one experiences
paranoia and if you fear the paranoia, you may create a fearful mood, a
fearful attitude about life.  If you anger at your fear-of-your-fear, that
generates another multilayered emotion.  Generally bringing any "negative"
emotion and applying it to a previous emotion-you are attacking yourself,
your emotions and the energy from that construct has nowhere to go except
against your mind and against your body.  In Neuro-Semantics we call those
highly toxic emotions- "dragon states."

 

Pseudo-emotions.  Just as you can bring an emotion against an emotion, you
can bring emotions against thoughts, against concepts, and you can bring
concepts against emotions.  It is in this way that we create
pseudo-emotions.  They seem like emotions but they are not really.  While
"fearing failure" is an emotion, an emotion about a concept, "shame about
failure" may be a concept about a concept.  That's because the 'shame' here
may not be so much of an emotion as an idea- "You shouldn't be that way,
feel that way, talk that way. Shame on you!"  Actually you can create all
sorts of pseudo-emotions by saying, "I feel..." and then add a judgment.  "I
feel weird," "I feel like I'm going to be fired."  "I feel under the
weather."  "I feel judged."  These are not emotions.  They are judgments
masquerading as emotions.

 

Time emotions.  There are a wide range of temporal emotions.  Some are about
the past and some are about the future; very few are about the present
moment: nostalgia, hope, regret, worry, anxiety, anticipation, expectation.

 

Vestibular emotions.  The sense of balance that's generated by the inner ear
generates the vestibular emotions: dizziness, disoriented, balance, joy,
playful, etc.

 

So many kinds of emotions!  What this means is that when you begin talking
about emotions, don't assume that everybody is using that word in the same
way as you are.  They probably are not!  That's why it is always good to
check.  "How are you using the word emotions?"  "What kind or level of
emotion are you referring to?"

 FEELINGS ARE NOT EMOTIONS

 

While all of us use the terms feelings and emotions interchangeably as if
they were equivalent, they are not the same.  Nor are they synonyms of each
other. The truth is that they are two very different phenomena.

Feelings are, at their essence, kinesthetics.  That is, physical sensations
of the body.  If they are inside the body, we call them propriception and if
they are accessed from outside of the body, then we call them sensations or
feelings.

Emotions always entails and involves feelings, but are more than feelings.
To have an emotion, you also have to have a cognitive thought as noted in
the previous articles.

 

Kinesthetic sensations consist of a large range of bodily sensations-
pressure (soft, hard), oscillation of the pressure, temperature (cool, warm,
hot), moisture (wet, dry), movement (quick, slow), intensity (low, medium,
high), frequency (often, some, few), rhythm (rocking, up-and-down, etc.),
pain (biting, dull, constant, etc.), extent (local, general), duration
(short to long).  Further, the kinesthetics can be at many different
locations in the body.  They can have texture, shape, etc.

 

When we ask, "What do you feel?" if we are using the word 'feeling'
accurately and properly, we are asking for the kinesthetic sensations of the
emotion.  We can call attention to the beating of the heart, the pumping of
the lungs, and the muscle tension in the legs, arms, face, neck, back, etc.
We can invite a person to notice sensations within various parts of the
body.

 

For the General Arousal Syndrome that is commonly referred to as both "the
stress response" or the "fight, flight, freeze" response, the kinesthetics
of these emotions are pretty much the same.  Heart and lungs are highly
activated so that there is a definite shift in breathing-sometimes even
hyperventilating.  Eyes dilate, skin sweats, blood is withdraw from brain
and stomach and sent to the larger muscle groups preparing the body for
fighting or running.  Adrenalin is sent to provide more energy to the body.
And the body is overall highly activated.  But what do you feel in the
general arousal?

 

The amazing thing is-it all depends.  If you think, reason, and interpret
things in your environment as threatening, then you will feel fear or anger.
Fear if you think it is too much or that you don't want to get into a fight.
Anger if you think you can handle the threat and/or if you have a habit of
getting into fights.  If it is too overwhelming, you might just freeze.  But
if you think, reason, and interpret things in that same environment as fun,
exciting, a challenge, desirable, etc., then you might feel excited or
lustful.  Excited if the situation is positive for you (public speaking,
bungee jumping, etc.) and fits your values.  Lustful if the situation
involves sexual stimulus or arousal.

 

Four emotions- fear, anger, excitement, and lust-and they all have the same
feelings at the kinesthetic level!  The difference goes to one's cognitions.
The bodily activation is the same, a state of heightened arousal so that you
are ready to respond.  But at the cognitive level, the semantics (meanings)
are completely different. 

 

Actually, this explains why these four emotions can get mixed up, why fear
and anger are so intimately connected.  That's why underneath fear is
usually anger and why underneath anger is usually fear.  This explains why
the fearful move-away from person when he reaches a threshold, and cannot
take any more, can become extremely aggressive.  It's why sexual stimulation
can become quite perverted-a person cannot get aroused unless chocked or
abused in some way.  It's why the violence of rape is not as much about sex
as it is about anger.

 

Emotions have within them feelings (kinesthetics).  Feelings, however, may
be just that-a feeling, a sensation, and not connected to any emotion.  In
experiments, people have been chemically stimulated by having epinorphein or
adrinalin shot into their arms, and then asked, "What do you feel?"  Again,
it always depends.  In these experiments it depended on what they were
primed to expect.  If they were primed to expect to feel fear-they felt
fear.  If anger, then anger; if lust, then lust.  The determining factor was
not in the sensation itself, but in the interpretation-the semantics that
readied them to respond as they did.

 

"Feelings" and "Emotions"-not the same.  Shall we try to pass a law to
prevent people from using 'feeling' for 'emotion?"  I don't think so.  Nor
would it really make that much of a difference.  It's sufficient to simply
know that these are two very different phenomena and that you can understand
your own emotions better when you know that they have a bodily or somatic
base- a base of kinesthetic feelings. 

 WHY

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

 

Today nearly everybody knows about emotional intelligence.  Well, at least
most everyone has heard that term.  Emotional intelligence is today a pretty
regular offering in organization as business has been discovering that it is
not sufficient to have smart and talented people on board, they also need to
have some basic emotional intelligence.  In fact, the more a business
involves customers, teams, management, leadership, etc. the more emotional
intelligence is needed.

 

Why is this so?  Why has emotional intelligence become popular and what is
it all about?  The bottom line is that as a person can be intellectually
smart and know all kinds of things, if a person is not smart about oneself,
one's emotions, managing those emotions effectively, using one's emotions to
connect with others in healthy ways, etc., then one's I.Q. will be less
effective than it could be.  E.Q. (emotional quotent) is about being smart
about people and about yourself as a person.

 

Obviously I.Q. is important, in fact, critical for a person to understand
his world and cope effectively within it.  This is one's basic intelligence
in understanding and learning what you are doing, and how to do it.  I.Q. is
primarily intelligence of the outside world.  E.Q. speaks about your
intelligence of your inside world and the inside world of others.  It is
your intelligence in how you handle yourself in relationship to others, your
social intelligence, your intra-personal intelligence, and your emotional
intelligence about how to get along well with others.

 

Why is it important?  Because you and I are emotional beings.  Because we
are social beings.  Because a great portion of our ability to cope with
life, get along with others, and even get along well with ourselves depends
on our emotional intelligence.  It's important because the "logic" that of
our internal world is very different from the "logic" of the external world.
For most of us, it's obvious that the "logic" of our emotions is not the
logic of mathematics or physics.  Yet what may not be equally obvious is
that the "logic" of our thinking, reasoning, and interpreting also operates
from a different and unique logic.

 

In this series of articles, I will first identify what emotional
intelligence is, how we define it, and it's component parts.  I will then
relate it to the NLP Model about emotional states.  Long before the idea of
emotional intelligence arose, NLP had already focused on it and developed a
great many tools for developing it, only under the terminology of state.
Neuro-Semantics took this further as we introduced the idea of meta-states
which are, in fact, meta-emotions and all that is implied about these
higher/deeper emotional states.

 

>From there I will focus in the basics in Neuro-Semantics on what we call
Emotional Mastery.  The purpose will be to offer many of the distinctions
and processes that we use to facilitate a greater ability to manage our
emotions.  That's important for many reasons.  First and foremost, to create
a sense of control.  Then you will not feel that you are a victim of your
emotions.  Then, instead of feeling that your emotions have you, you have
your emotions!  Then, with a sense of being in control, you will be able to
manage your stress so it is not creating various kinds of psycho-somatic
illnesses and problems.

 

By managing your emotions you can then put them to good use- feeling the
emotions that move you (motivate you) to live life more fully- love, joy,
peace, etc.  Then, you can turn on the emotions that feed curiosity and
wonder so that you can learn and develop, so that you can connect and
contribute, so that you can unleash your best potentials, and equally so
that you can use your negative emotions for your overall good.

 

There are no "bad" emotions, there are just emotions.  And with every
emotion, there is a message of some sort.  There are appropriate and
inappropriate emotions, depending on the context.  There are useful and
unuseful emotions.  There are emotions to live in (the positive emotions)
and there are emotions to notice, learn from, and release (the negative
emotions).  And in the end, they are just emotions.  They are not commands
from heaven.  They are not infallible-they are entirely fallible.  And
because they are fallible, they do not always tell us the truth.

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 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?