[Neurons] 2008 Meta Reflections #49

[Dr. Hall]

From:  L. Michael Hall

Nov. 3, 2008

Meta Reflection #49

                        

 

       EFFECTIVELY LIVING IN LANGUAGE

 

 

 

If we are a class of life that lives in language (Reflection #47), then how
do we learn to live in language effectively so that it enhances our lives
and unleashes our potentials?  In the last Meta Reflection, I suggested the
first two steps.  Here I will add two more.

1) Develop an awareness of language.

What are you doing with your language?

What is your language doing to you?

 

2) Quality control your language.

Is your language enhancing and empowering rather than limiting and
diminishing you?

 

3) Chose to consciously use language for enrichment.  

Language offers you linguistic power-the power to call subjective realities
into existence and to create life-enhancing categories.  With your words,
you can do so many, many things.  You can bless and you can curse.  You can
bond and you can dis-bond.  You can ask, entreat, present, assert,
negotiate, sell, promise, anticipate, plan, lead, manage, and a hundred
other things.  By your words you can hypnotize and invent places in the mind
that can tap into your body's potentials for healing and actualizing.  By
your words you can de-hypnotize from the curses and myths that limit and
diminish you as a person.

 

Given this, how conscious are you of your language use?  How conscious are
you of the invitations that others offer you with theirs?  What choices do
you make with regard to all of this?  Are there any words or language
expressions that you have chosen to avoid?  For myself, I have eliminated
numerous words like "failure," for example.  That term no longer has any
place in my consciousness.  I can fail to reach a goal, I can discover what
does not work, but I can't be a "failure."

 

4) Challenge the language of diminishment.

Once you are able to detect language that diminishes you rather than unleash
your potential, then you can challenge that language as inadequate mapping.
This includes detecting and challenging language that dis-empowers, that
creates limitations to possibilities and potentials, and that are toxic to
your well-being and health. 

 

Actually this step of challenging language can be a lot of fun.  What I've
found is that by learning to play with words drives home the point that
words are words; they are just terms, labels, phrases.  They are not real.
And as just words, that means we have a choice about how much meaning and
seriousness to attribute to them.  After all, who's in charge?  You or the
words?  As you learn to play with words, you can learn to refuse to accept
words at face value as if they are literal descriptions of reality.   They
are not.  All words are metaphorical.  Words as symbols operate by standing
for and representing something other than themselves.  So any and all kinds
of word-phobia is silly.  The word isn't going to get you!  The word isn't a
monster.  It's just a word.

 

5) Challenge the Cognitive Distortions

As you play with words and phrases, and know that they are just symbols and
metaphors and potential maps (if you accept them), you now can catch
cognitive distortions.  Cognitive distortions are mostly the left-over
remnants of childhood thinking.  We learn the cognitive distortions as
children as some of our first steps in learning to think.  In developmental
psychology they are the thinking stages that we all go through as we learn
to become clear and critical in our thinking.  They are stages on the way to
adult thinking, formal thinking. 

 

Yet while they were useful for those learning stages, if perpetuated beyond
childhood, they create tremendous misery for us.  In fact, if you want to be
profoundly miserable, I can think of no better formula than devoting your
time to learning to use the cognitive distortions as an adult.  These are
the patterns that will not only make you miserable but enable you to spread
that misery around so that you create tremendous misery for your children,
lover, boss, employees, colleagues-everyone!

 

Now most of the cognitive distortions are identified within the NLP
Meta-Model which not only identifies them, but also provides ways to
question them.  As an aside, this really excited me when I first found this.
It filled in many of the missing details in the Rational Emotive Therapy
(RET) and Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) models that I was using at the
time.   So after some years of studying Korzybski I went to the
International Interdisciplinary Conference of General Semantics at Holfa
University and presented the connection between RET and CBT and the
Meta-Model using the formulations of General Semantics.  On my way, I
stopped in New York city and visited Albert Ellis who developed RET and told
him that the cognitive distortion distinctions in RET are also in the
Meta-Model.  He didn't believe it, and actually argued against it, but
everybody else could see the wonderful correlation between them.

 

And this is indeed where the Meta-Model becomes such a powerful tool-a tool
for questioning the cognitive distortions in our thinking and map-making so
that we chase away the misery of confusion and distortion.

 

 

                                                            




 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

International Society of Neuro-Semantics

Meta-Coach Training System

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

1 970-523-7877

1 970-523-5790 fax

     www.neurosemantics.com 

      www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com 

      www.self-actualizing.org

      www.meta-coaching.org

      www.ns-video.com 

 

The International Egroup for Neuro-Semantics is Neurons.  Sign up for Free
subscription on www.neurosemantics.com -- Meta Reflection articles sent out
every Monday.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20081103/3338cdca/attachment.htm>