[Neurons] 2012 Meta Reflections #2

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2011  #2

January 9, 2012

Teasers from the new Book: Neuro-Semantics (#4)

 

 

PREMISES OF 

THE NEURO-SEMANTIC MODEL

 

 

Premise 4: Neuro-Semantics invites and provides direction for how to explore
higher neuro-semantics states.  So how do you  get there?  How do you rise
above your first-level primary states and enter into the human experience of
these layers upon layers of meta-states?  How do you go about exploring the
meta-levels of the mind so that you can now enter into a person's inner
world more deeply?

 

Begin with rapport skills of NLP.  Listen for the specific words and
expressions that a person offers.  Watch for and detect her specific ways of
gesturing and using her body and then feed that information back, become a
living, breathing bio-feedback mirror to the person.  Do this in an attitude
of respect, care, and sensitivity, and you create the experience of
"rapport" or trust with that person.  Doing that typically creates the sense
of safety with you so that you earn the right to enter into that person's
inner world of meanings. 

 

The structure and strategy of rapport as discovered in NLP involves matching
and mirroring the outputs of a person- the energy that they express in their
speech and behavior.  You receive it at the primary level and mirror it
back.  As you then enter in further and further, you continue to repeat this
same process.  As you hear meta-level expressions- value words,
idiosyncratic expressions, beliefs, etc., you simply mirror it back as
expressions of those higher states, invite the person to confirm or
disconfirm, and hold it for them.

 

In this way, the receiving the person's feedback and mirroring back (giving
it back) makes you a living, breathing bio-feedback mirror which enables the
person to hold and ground the experience.  Typically, doing this rather than
problem-solving, giving advice, lecturing, teaching, correcting, etc., is so
new and strange that it is a incredible and marvelous experience that for
the first time enables the person is really able to see, hold, and embrace
oneself.  And with that, both you and them can then move up to the next
level.  Now the exploration has truly begun.4

 

This is why the first step in any communication with another human being has
to be listening, questioning, exploring, checking out, reflecting back, and
suspending judgment to enter into that person's world.  If you don't do
that, you can't even begin to "understand" the meanings that drive and
govern that person's experiences.  This "pacing" involves using all of your
output systems (not only your words, but our postures, movements, tones,
etc.) to match or fit in with the person you're communicating with.

 

To pace in that way is the basis for mutual understanding.  It enables you
to enter into the other person's structured reality.  It gives you a way to
try on another reality structure.  When you do that from a stance of respect
for the person, a desire to truly understand and to help, the person feels
understood, confirmed, and validated.  You don't have to agree with the
other person in order to create such strong and powerful subjective
experiences, you only have to match the other's experience of the world.
Doing so gives you entrance.

 

Then, from there you earn the right to lead them somewhere else.  You can
influence them in ways that will enrich and enhance their experience.  This
holds true whether you are a formal change agent like therapist, hypnotist,
teacher, marketer, manager, sales person, or less direct influencers- a
lover, parent, friend, etc.5

 

By receiving whatever the person says and respecting it as that person's
mental model of the world, and by not judging or evaluating it, but just
hearing it, that enables them to also hear it.  And whatever they offer you,
whatever they say is just words, just gestures, just emotions.  And it is
real to them.  It may not be real to you.  It may not make sense to you.
That's besides the point.   The exploration is not about you!  You don't
have to agree in order to understand.  You only have to hold this space and
let them go into the next higher level of their mind.

 

The next higher level is a layer of thought-and-feeling which operates as a
frame.  Its position, as a context for thinking and interpreting, makes it a
frame of meaning or a frame of mind.  And as such, it makes up the Matrix of
frames that the person lives inside of.  And from inside it is
psycho-logical.  Whenever or however the person drew the conclusions and
made the interpretations that created that layer of thoughts-and-feelings,
it made sense to them at that time.  Of course, it could have been created
by a 15-year old brain or a 5 year old brain or even a 9-month old brain and
so may be childish, ridiculous, wrong, even stupid.  Yet when created, it
made sense and continues to make sense until seen, examined, and then
changed.

 

Frames of reference which you and I experience as our frames of mind or
frames of meaning are like that.  Regardless of your age or mental capacity
or life circumstances, when you take a referent event that happens to you
and represent it within your mind (re-present it to yourself as your
thought) you thereby hold it in mind.  That is what the term "meaning"
means- "to hold in mind."  So whatever you hold in mind is what something
means to you.

 

This explains how you can get some really stupid, toxic, childish, and
accidental meanings lodged in your mind as your frames of reference.  Some
event happens and it catches your attention, it triggers a strong emotional
state, and so you bring it in by representing it in the theater of your
mind.  Then you don't let it go.  Instead you reflect upon it.  And yes, you
may reflect on it with a 3-year old mind!  You draw conclusions, you make
interpretations, decisions, beliefs, understandings, identities, etc.   You
layer thought-and-feeling layer upon layer building up a whole matrix of
frames about that event.   And given the primitive cognitive style of
thinking during infancy and childhood, it's no wonder that you create all
sorts of limiting, stupid, and even toxic ideas about things, about the
world, about yourself, about others.

 

Now unless there are been plenty of corrective experiences or unless you
have engaged in a self-awareness program to chase out the limiting beliefs,
like most people you probably have lots of limiting frames at the top of
your Matrix of frames.  And most of them are outside-of-conscious awareness.
These are your unquestioned assumptions that organize your perceptions and
responses and that make up your inner reality.  If you were conscious of
them, your very consciousness of them would cause many of them to just
vanish away.  But you are not conscious of them.  They make up your
blind-spots.  So they operate as your unconscious, assumptive
presuppositions about life.  And that's what makes them powerful and
dangerous.

 

This highlights a central Neuro-Semantic distinction: Higher levels govern
the lower levels of thought and meaning.  And that leads to a key principle:
Personal effectiveness is about utilizing and using these higher meta-levels
of mind.  The best and most pervasive personal change is made at these
higher levels of mind.  And here lies the difference that makes a
difference.

 

Neuro-Semantics enables you to look at the frames of reference you use to
make sense of things.  Frames grow from how you take a reference event "out
there," bring it into your mind, represent it, use it as a map, and then
Higher levels govern the lower levels of thought and meaning.  

transform it into a frame of reference, frame of mind, and the frameworks of
your conceptual understandings.   "Mind" grows in this way.  It evolves and
transforms and emerges from within your neuro-linguistic system.  And just
when you have it mapped, it changes.

 

To tolerate the journey around the loops of reflexivity and up and down the
embedded frames within frames, you have to have a good stomach for putting
up with ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty, transitions, and transcendence.  

 

Premise 5: Neuro-Semantics de-mystifies many of the old myths of psychology
and philosophy. Recognizing this structure of mental-emotional frames
demystifies a lot in human psychology.  First and foremost it clarifies that
there's nothing wrong with you.  If you have a problem-the problem lies in
your frames, not in you.  This specifies another one of our key premises in
Neuro-Semantics (#1): The person is never the problem; the frame is the
problem.

 

Another demystification is this (#2): There is nothing inside you but frames
and frames are made out of images, sounds, sensations, and words.  There's
nothing alien within you which needs to be cast out.  The worst experiences
of a human being- the personality dis-orderings are just that, the
dis-ordering of a person's thinking-and-feeling.  The person is not flawed
or broken or sick, the person is suffering from flawed and sick frames.
That's why exorcism isn't called for, education is.  What is needed is a
renewal of the mind and the transformation of the governing frames.6

 

Another de-mystification (#3): There is a structure that makes
psycho-logical sense of every experience.  It all makes sense!  Well, it
makes sense from the inside.  It makes sense given the frames that any
person is living within.  If I had those frames, I'd be thinking and feeling
and believing and acting as the person who has these frames.  And because it
makes sense, because there is a structure that we can identify and make
explicit- transformation involves changing the frames.  It is as simple as
that; it is as profound as that.

The person is never the problem; the frame is the problem.

 

De-mystification #4: Human nature can be changed and that change can be
without pain.  Two of the old ideas are first, "You can't change human
nature," and second, "Change is hard and painful and takes a long time."
These statements were indeed true given the tools that mankind has had for
most of its history.  They were even true through the early years of
psychotherapy.  Yet with the tools that are now available in
Neuro-Semantics, we have made these old belief statements redundant.  After
all, if the problem is the frame, not the person, we do not have to fight or
wrestle or trick the person.  Instead we can align with the person and
facilitate the person changing his or her own frames.  That's because we can
change no one, but we can facilitate any person to choose to make changes
which he or she wants to make.

 

 

cid:image002.png at 01CCBE18.F382F440 

 

To order online: go to www.neurosemantics.com
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/>  / Click:  Products / Books.  Use Paypal.

Regular Price:

Paperback -  $25      Shipping:        $5 if inside USA

Hardback  -   $35                              $14 if outside USA

                                                                        The
Postal Package can hold 2 books.

 

Or to get the Special Pricing of:                   2 copies Paperback
edition for $30.

So you can give one to a friend:

Good during December and January -        1 Paperback & 1 Hardback Edition -
$45

 

To order the Special Pricing -Go to www.neurosemantics.com
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/>  -  

Click on   "Business"  

                                                            Click on "Pay a
Statement" 

                                                            Enter amount and
the shipping cost.

                                                            Type in your
Mailing Address and indicate books.

 

If you want to order more: contact Dr. Hall at  meta at acsol.net

 

 

 

Order by Mail:            NSP: Neuro-Semantic Publications

            P. O. Box 8

                                    Clifton, CO.  81520- 0008 USA

 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                              

1 970-523-7877                                               

     

What is Neuro-Semantic NLP?   Get your free subscription to "Neurons" ---
the weekly International  Newsletter of Neuro-Semantics.  Subscribe at
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com.   Dr. Hall sends
out  Meta Reflections  every Monday (Colorado time).  Trainers' Reflections
occur  on Tuesdays and Meta-Coach Reflections on  Wednesdays.   Contact Dr.
Hall at  meta at acsol.net  

 

For world-class Coach Training --- see Meta-Coaching System at
<http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org and at
www.metacoachfoundation.org  

 

Neuro-Semantics launched the New Human Potential Movement in 2007, for
information about the Self-Actualization workshops, go to
<http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20120109/be19f6af/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 77440 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20120109/be19f6af/attachment-0001.png>