*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. Salam Street Smart NLP! Teddi Prasetya Yuliawan Indonesia NLP Society <http://indonesianlpsociety.org>
