[Neurons] 2009 Meta Reflections #48

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Meta Reflections #48

November 2, 2009

 

[Any emails sent to me personally

over the last week were not received 

due to internet problems. Do send again.

Michael]

 

 

MINING GREAT IDEAS

 

 

Nearly every week someone asks me about my writing, how I write so much or
where I get my ideas.  They ask:

"Where do you get your ideas?   And how do you keep generating so many ideas
for articles, trainings, new patterns, models, etc.?  How do you write so
much and how do you keep writing fresh ideas?"

 

And often the question comes in disguised form as when people ask how many
hours I sleep a night, or if I sleep!  Most are surprised to hear that I get
a good seven or eight hours every night.  And nearly every week I come up
with some new way of responding!  Sometimes I say something like- 

"You think this is prolific?  I haven't started yet, wait till I grow up and
decided that I am definitely going to become a writer!"  Or, "So you want to
know the secret?  Okay, I steal.  I read 2 or 3 hours a day and get great
ideas from the great writers that I read!"

 

Several times recently this answer has not satisfy the questioner.  They
said that there had to be more.  When I asked what led them to that
conclusion, they talked about the synergy that I've created and wondered how
that has come about.  So if there's more to it than just prolific reading,
what is there?

 

Part of the answer goes back to a particular belief that I hold.  I believe
in mining for the best ideas by going back to the foundational and seminal
writers and thinkers in an area.  What is "new" is not always what is best
or even what is actually new.  Over the years I have found lots and lots of
"new" things in Korzybski.  They are "old" things if we date them from the
time he penned them.  And yet they are "new"- in fact, brand new-in terms of
knowing the information, making the distinctions, and using them for
increasing the quality of our lives.  That's why I am always out in the
field mining ideas from those who have gone before.  There are often
incredible jewels left behind that no one has yet picked up.

 

When I first modeled "selling," I first read every book in NLP, which are
not all that many, then I headed to the library and had an "Oh my God"
response when I saw the rows upon rows of books on sales.  There were
thousands of them!  My next thought was, "Where do I start?"  That was
before everything became electronic and so at that time I could open up the
back of a book and see how many times it had been checked out.  Librarians
back then literally stamped the date of every sign out inside the book.
(And while that now seems really old fashioned, that was just back in the
1990s!)   I could also look at the binding of the book to see which were the
most worn.  Beginning there, I would read the ones most often read and look
for who they quoted again and again.  Who did those authors consider a
seminal thinker in that field?  I would then track down those authors.

 

That's when I discovered a principle that has proven useful again and again
in discovering where to look for the gold.  If you really want to know the
current paradigm thinking in a field, find the key theorists leading that
field and read them.  When I first discovered NLP and took my original
practitioner trainings, that's what I did.  I made it my business in the
first years to read everything Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir wrote.  Then I
read most of Milton Erickson's works.  Yet even more formative were the
actual theorists in the field of NLP- Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski, and
George Miller with his associates.  And even later I revisited this by
looking for and finding the hidden history of NLP (now in the book,
Self-Actualization Psychology) and other places.  And it was in tracking
down the premises of NLP that I found myself right back to Maslow!

 

And as you might know, in 1990 after my first two readings of Korzybski's
Science and Sanity I began writing about the missing linguistic distinctions
of the Meta-Model as well as some patterns that contributed to the
Neuro-Linguistic approach.  I'm sure others had read Korzybski, but had not
seen some of the things that I found.  And why not?  I think because of how
I read Korzybski- I read his works slowly, reflecting constantly, and
looking for other things in the text that could continue to  contribute to
NLP.

 

With seminal theorists like Korzybski I read slowly, and I still do, because
the writing is so "heavy, thick, and semantically loaded" with ideas.  I
have now read Korzybski eight times and am planning to revisit that work yet
again -each time with a notebook.  I have done the same with Bateson.
Actually, Neuro-Semantics arose from this very mining - and led to the
workshops in London with Denis Bridoux, "The Merging of the Models: General
Semantics and NLP."

 

In the past three years, I discovered that behind Perls, Satir, and even
Bateson was Abraham Maslow.  He is the seminal theorist behind the whole new
paradigm shift in psychology- the bright side or healthy side of human
nature.  More recently, moving to the application of self-actualization to
business and leadership, I have been catching up reading the work of Peter
Drucker.  When I read his The Effective Manager I discovered where Stephen
Covey got most of his ideas in Seven Habits, even many of his phrases like
habits of effectiveness, first things first, etc.  It was Drucker also who
admitted that he was completely wrong about management and Maslow was right.

 

Over the past three years, I kept seeing references to Tom Peter's classic
Thriving on Chaos.  I had made a mental note to find that book.  I finally
got that book in September and read it, then re-read it slowly.  And like
other seminal thinkers, here is a classic book on self-actualizing leaders
and companies-although not in those words.  So as I did with Peter Senge's
book in the past six Meta Reflections, so I'll be doing with Tom Peter's
book Thriving on Chaos.  It's a great book-far before its time, a book with
great ideas that still need to be broadcasted as wide and as far as we can
broadcast them.  So look for the results of mining in that book in some of
the following Meta Reflections.  And so now you know one of my secrets,
which isn't that big of a "secret," but it is an ongoing source of discovery
and one that so many in NLP have completely neglected. 

 

To our ongoing research and discovery into the structure of experience and
especially excellence!

 

 

 

Unleashing Leadership Workshop

 

The latest book in the Self-Actualization Series and in the Meta-Coach
series is Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies
(2009).   As a leadership development workshop, discover how to identify
your leadership potentials and unleash them --- whether for self-leadership
or leadership in an opportunity that awaits you.

 

Dec. 11-13, Imola, Italy

            Sponsored by Bless You --- Nicola Riva and Lucia Giovannini

            Nicola at blessyou.it 

            Special gathering on Dec. 14 for Meta-Coaches and NS trainers 

at the home of Nicola and Lucia.

 

 

 

 

--- Meta-Coach Trainings coming 2009 - 2010

                        

1) Australia

       November 19, 20-27 - Coaching Mastery.  Sydney, Australia

      Sponsors: Laureli Blyth and Heidi Heron                  

      Heidi at nlpworldwide.com              Laureli at nlpworldwide.com 

 

 

2) China --- 2010

      Meta-Coaching in two parts --   January 17-22 and May 9-14  (6 days
each time): 

Includes also Module II (Coaching Genius).  

            Guangzhou, China:  Sponsor: Team Huang --- supported by
Neuro-Semantic Trainers: 

Mandy Chai and Wilkie Choi   For Chinese---   yeshow at 163.net .  For English
speakers: 

Mandy Chai: chaimansun at yahoo.com.hk 

 

 

3) Mexico --- 2010

     In two parts --- March 4-7 (March 3 for Team Leaders) and April 15-18
(April 14 for Team Leaders). 

     Sponsor: Salom Change Dynamics-  www.salomchd.com  (55) 30930687 ---
emilia at salomchd.com

 

 

 

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

      <http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com 

       <http://www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com/>
www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com 

       <http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

       <http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org

       <http://www.ns-video.com/> www.ns-video.com 

 

To sign up for a free subscription to the egroup of Neuro-Semantics
(Neurons) go to  <http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com ---
you can  subscribe and unsubscribe there.   Meta Reflection articles by Dr.
Hall are sent out every Monday and meta-Coach Reflections sent out every
Wednesdday to the Meta-Coaches egroup.

 

 

 

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