[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #34

Sat Aug 23 15:35:32 EDT 2014

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014 #34

August 25, 2014

Writing #3

I LEARN BY WRITING

Of all the reasons that I write and love to write the primary one is this: I
learn by writing.  I don't know when I discovered that I could learn by
writing, perhaps it was in grade-school.  Yet if so, I have no memory of
that.  It wasn't until some point in my adult life that I began to
consciously realize that there were times when attempting to write something
I found myself actually learning new things.  Amazing!  How does that work?
I found it incredible that sometimes when I sat down to put an idea into
words, the very process of searching for words, of playing around with
different sets of words and different metaphors, I would from time to time
discover something new that I had not thought of or realized before.  And
when I discovered that, I really had my big why for writing.

Now I don't know how many times that happened before I became conscious of
it.  Yet once conscious of it, I began noticing.  And isn't it funny that
once you start noticing something, it's amazing how often you see it.  What
had been invisible suddenly becomes visible and you can see it in many
places.

For me this happened with writing.  I began noticing and experiencing more
and more often that while in the activity of writing, I would learn
something that I had not known before.  Sometimes in putting one thought
with another, an understanding or conclusion would suddenly arise that
enabled me to explain a concept.  And not infrequently, that new
understanding was something that a teacher had said, but had never made
sense-until now.

Writing, as a neuro-muscular activity, whether in long-hand or on a
keyboard, is a process that translates ideas into words.  What I discovered
was that that very process offered me a learning strategy.  That is, I use
writing not only to record ideas, but also to discover ideas.  Today what I
know about writing is this: 

If I can put an idea in words, if I can find those words, say those words,
write those words, then they are mine!  If I can't, then do I really know
something?  If I don't have the words, have I actually learned something?

This is especially true in the first two stages of writing of getting an
idea and free-writing.  When I'm at these stages I set my intention for the
purpose of discovery and learning, not expressing.  I write to see what I
know and what I don't know.  I may write many pages trying to articulate
some thought and if I happen upon it, I may then be able to express that
thought in a single sentence.  There have been times when it took three or
four pages to get a thought.  At that point I then delete all of those pages
and keep the short sentence of seven words that encapsulates the thought.  I
suppose it is like mining for gold in a mountain creek.  It may take many,
many pans of river gravel to get a small chunk of gold.

When I'm in those stages if you were to ask, "So what are you writing?" my
answer would be, "I don't know.  I'll let you know when I find it."  If you
were to ask, "What is the idea that you're working on?"  I also might
answer, "I don't know, I have not found it yet.  I'll let you know when I
do."

Now this also occurs for me in the auditory channel.  It happens frequently
in the Q&A (Question and Answer) period at trainings and workshops.
Sometimes in the inter-play between a question and trying to provide an
answer verbally, I hear myself saying things that I didn't know that I knew.
And not infrequently, I didn't know the answer until I uttered a set of
words.  Amazing!  But I'm not unique in this.  From what I hear from other
speakers, this is actually a pretty common phenomenon ... and often an
experience that makes the interaction with an audience so compelling.

Now to learn in this way is not easy for some people and there's several
reasons for this.  One is that to learn in this way requires that you give
up the need to be right, to be sure, and to be confident in what you know.
And some people just won't do that.  They have a need to be right and sure
and confident.  So to embrace uncertainty, to welcome ambiguity, to spin
around in a not-knowing state-for them-is just too disorienting.  Yet as the
literature on creativity has suggested for decades, this is one of those
prerequisites of creativity.  New and unexpected ideas will not come to you
if you don't create an inner openness and emptiness.  If you are fill up
with your own knowledge, or worse, filled up with your self-importance and
ego, new creative ideas have no entrance.

To use writing (as well as speaking) as a context for learning then, take a
moment to let go of the need to be right, to be sure, to have things figured
out.  Go for a learning adventure of discovery.  Play with ideas and
thoughts and words and phrases and let them all get mixed up, even to the
point of becoming disoriented and confused.  Let them all fuse together
(con-fused) so that later when you pull things apart and re-arrange them,
you have a doorway to new learnings.

I wrote my first NLP book (The Spirit of NLP, 1996) from the notes which I
took at my Master Practitioner course with Richard Bandler (1990).  My sole
purpose in writing was to learn.  Each day I wrote down what I could from
the presentations.  When I missed things, I would ask fellow participants to
fill in details that I had missed.  I would even track down some of the
presenters and ask them questions.  In writing, I first wrote for myself and
then as others discovered that I had extensive notes on the Master Prac.
Training, they wanted copies.  Ah, the dawning of a business!  And with that
I had my second reason for writing- I began writing for others as well.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

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