Shlomo Vaknin's Blog, page 10

Confusion is the ground floor

Even if you’re not aware of it, the words and the syntax you use when you speak to yourself and others reveal a whole lot about what is really going on inside your head. It is not about the actual content of your speech, but the choice of descriptive words you use to express yourself. 

As humans, we are different from other animals in many ways, and one of the most significant of these is that we can communicate complex ideas. We communicate across time by literally inventing symbols, such as words, signs, pictures, metaphors and even hand signals, in order to transfer accurate meaning to another person. 

You learn your native language early on in life. You may take it for granted, but the language is definitely the most remarkable product of human ingenuity. Any language out there is a magnificent creation, which allows to symbolize our thoughts, and by that it gives us the opportunity to create more in the world. 

Look around you and imagine how your surrounding would look like if our ancestors would not develop a complex language to communicate. We would still live in caves and die before we’re 30. The language allows you to virtually freeze your inner and outer reality, and the product of your creativity. Then, you can use the same symbols in your language to unfreeze these metaphors and processes and ideas and communicate them back to yourself or to other people (or even animals).

Language gives us a golden opportunity to use our CNS across time and physical distance. Mozart’s mind composed Piano Sonata No.11 in year 1778. He used symbols created by other people to communicate sounds from his internal reality 350 years ago to your ears today! Seneca’s perceptions of what life means are still being taught today in every corner of the world, although he’s been dead for more than 2,000 years. Previous generations have left behind them numerous inventions for survival and comfort. Our generation, in turn, is going to leave behind its own contributions.  

Next time you drive on the highway, pay attention to the symbols around you, the markings on the road, the lights, the signs and how other drivers around you behave. Everything you enjoy around you today is the product of language, the ultimate form of communication. 

Language can bridge the gaps between humans or further expand them, it can enforce commonly agreed laws or be used as a weapon by totalitarian regimes. It can create wealth or poverty, health or disease, merely by ‘experts’ giving their biased opinions on daytime TV. Language can bring meaning to your life or drive you completely insane. It can turn friends into enemies and complete strangers to soul mates. 

Language is the act of interpreting perception. 

While you might not be adequate or skillful in perceiving your world effectively, you do so even ineffectively without conscious effort. In other words, you cannot NOT communicate, with your inner self/selves or with others. 

Language comes in three dimensions: Syntactics, Semantics and Pragmatics. The Syntactics dimension is about the relationships between different words or symbols (example fields: grammar, logic, mathematics). The Semantics dimension is about the relationships between words and what they point at (descriptions, processes, etc.). The Pragmatics dimension is about the relationships of words and their function or intended usage (propaganda, idioms, evaluations, etc.). 

In NLP we are concerned not with the meaning of words or their spelling or grammar, but with the relationships between your language and your behavior. NLP studies the usage of symbol systems, such as metaphors, and its effects on personal, social and cultural affairs. We recognize that there is a problematic relation of language to reality – the theory versus the actual event, the words we use in contrast the facts that occur out in the world. There is an inherited problem in the relations of the observer to the observed, between the knower and the knowable. 

Any language is a primitive construction, human made, and is therefore limited in its ability to accurately define and transmit the meaning of perception. 

We do not study ‘logic’ as infants. We study the construction of agreed upon structures of sounds. Habitual language has a tremendous power in its usage of structure and choice of words. The structure and inherent assumptions in any language remains unconscious until you expose them intentionally. When you’re conscious of the errors you make while speaking to yourself and others, and you observe the strong relationship between these errors and the limited choices you experience in life – then you have the freedom to change these structures and re-shape the puzzle pieces. 

Confusion is the ground floor in any engagement. On top of confusion there is a communicator and receiver that play together a game of words. The aim of this game is to be understood accurately. The real mastery of accurate perception and communication is when you fully understand and accept certain presuppositions: First, you must expect to be misunderstood. Second, you must expect to misunderstand. Third, you ought to try to minimize your misunderstanding, but you accept the fact that it cannot be eliminated. 

The Heart of NLP

“Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.” – Author Unknown By 1976, they added the concepts of non-verbal information (communication that takes place subconsciously) and representational systems (the ways our thoughts are made up of our senses). These concepts were used to model people, as well as in developing patterns forRead more

Roots in Modeling, Divergence into New Paths

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” – Doris Lessing  Modeling In the early 1970s, a professor and student at the University of Santa Cruz started the field of NLP. Richard Bandler was a psychology student at the time, and John Grinder wasRead more