[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #50

Mon Dec 15 12:43:31 EST 2014

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014 #50

Dec. 15, 2014

THE NEXT BIG THINK

---CRITICAL THINKING

In the past weeks I've been writing about both Mindfulness and Critical
Thinking.  I began with Reflection #46 on the Neuro-Semantics of
Mindfulness.  Now I want to put these together.  Both are at the very heart
of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.  How do they connect?  One aspect of mindfulness
is critical thinking- being mindful about how you are reasoning, thinking,
and using language.  When you are engaged in critical thinking, you are
expanding your mindfulness.

Mindfulness inevitably builds critical thinking skills for several reasons.
First of all because mindfulness requires an openness to experience, an
openness to perceiving things from multiple views, to seeing multiple
possibilities, and an openness to being wrong.  The possibility of being
wrong arises due to the presence of cognitive distortions and biases.  We
are all liable to mis-perceive, mis-hear, mis-evaluate, etc.  To not be open
is to become less mindful, less aware of our fundamental fallibility.

Mindfulness builds critical thinking skills secondly by recognizing the role
and predominance of our creativity.  If we become mindless when we go on
automatic, operate by habit, live by routine, then we increase mindfulness
when we play around with ideas, when we adventure into new and different
ideas, when we maintain our curiosity about how things work.  Mindfulness
enriches creativity and yet creativity without reality-testing, quality
controlling, checking the facts, and getting feedback from our innovations
can become unrealistic, fantastic, and crazy creativity.

What's the solution?   It is to complete the creativity.  That is, to move
from the wild-and-crazy stage of brainstorming to the innovation stage of
testing its reality.  That's where we apply our critical thinking skills.
We need both.  When both are working in unison we have
creativity-and-innovation and in human personality, we have mind-to-muscle.
We not only have great ideas, we also have the ability to embody and
actualize them in lifestyle.

One aspect of mindfulness involves being able to step back, and get the big
picture.  Doing this can orient you to your world and enable you to gain
perspective.  That takes you up and uses your self-reflexive consciousness
in a highly creative and practical way.  But don't stay there.  Your next
step will be to bring that big picture down so that you can see the details
of how you can operationalize it in practical actions.  In Neuro-Semantics
we call this meta-detailing.  It is one of the prerequisites of genius which
is more fully described in the book, Sub-Modalities Going Meta.

Getting the big picture enables you to gain perspective about the details.
Yet if you keep generalizing and keep moving up you will over-generalize.
Then the categories that you create and the classes that you generate will
become less and less useful and can even blind you from the critical
distinctions that you need to make.   It's critical thinking that brings
mindful awareness down to the critical details.  This is precisely what we
do when we use the NLP Meta-Model of Language.  The "Specifically what ...
who ... where ... when" questions focus our attention on the critical
details.  And that's where mastery is- Mastery is in the details.  That's
what distinguishes an expert from a novice.  By specifying the critical
success details the expert gets to the heart of things.

Both mindfulness and critical thinking enable us to "come to our senses" in
new ways so that we can be here-and-now- fully present to life in the moment
we are living it.  And both do this by enabling us to "lose our mind"-the
old mind of habit, routine, thinking we "know it all," and assuming there's
nothing else to learn.  It is that mind which so often blinds us to the
here-and-now.  Then we're not present.  Eyes we have but we see not; ears we
have but we hear not. 

One tool which I'm constantly recommending to our Meta-Coaches for this is
the skill of effective interrupting.  At a very basic level just asking a
person to self-reflect as they speak tends to interrupt their "talking off
the tip of their tongue" and becoming mindful so they can think critically.
"Did you hear what you just said?"  So in Meta-Coaching, the coach will ask
this from time to time.  And clients most of the time will say, "What?  What
did I just say?"

At a more advanced level, a Meta-Coach may ask, "Did you just hear that
resource (or, solution, insight, limiting belief, presupposition, etc.)?"
And again, this will interrupt most clients and they  will have to ask you
to repeat what they said so that they can begin to hear what they are saying
and what's hidden in their words.  I've even had clients question me, "Did I
say that?  Really?  Are you sure?"  The interruption interrupts their
mindless chattering and calls them to a mindful awareness.  

Another coaching interruption that we often do relates to a pattern of
behaviors.  This occurs when we ask someone if they have noticed that they
have now used a particular expression or linguistic phrase three or four or
seventeen times.  "I've noticed that you have used X-pattern some five times
now, are you aware of that?  Are you aware of how this may be limiting (or
enhancing, empowering, sabotaging, etc.) you?"

We often do this with the linguistic distinctions which the Meta-Model of
Language offers.  That's because each distinction has the possibility of
creating mindlessness.  Unspecified nouns and verbs do this which is why we
ask, "What specifically are you talking about?"  The speaker may think he's
clear, but his words do not create precision.  This is even more true for
nominalizations, lost performatives, cause-effect statements, complex
equivalences, and presuppositions.  Inside of these types of linguistic
patterns we can really become mindless- so much so that when we are
interrupted and asked to explain ourselves- we can't!  "What are you
referring to when you say X?"  "What exactly do you mean by Y?"

This is where learning and using the Meta-Model enhances mindfulness.  It
enriches your ability to be present and to engage in critical thinking about
how you have and are mentally mapping things in your world.  I mentioned
this with regard to some of the language used by the media in Ferguson
(Reflection #48) and in the metaphorical language of calling the heart a
"brain" (Reflection #49).  In the next Reflection I will do this with regard
to one of the most inflamatory subjects on planet Earth.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net

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