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?

 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.