From: L. Michael Hall
2023 Neurons #40
September 18, 2023
TALK REVEALS THINKING
“I wish I knew what you’re thinking!” Really, would you like to know the inner thinking and thinking patterns of a person? Easy! Listen to how the person talks. His talk reveals his thinking. So does mine and so does yours. That’s because the source and foundation of everyone’s communication abilities and skills arises from the way they think.
NLP bean with this assumption. It was not even a discovery; the discovery had been done long, long before the beginning of NLP. You will find it in Alfred Korzybski’s work in General Semantics. How you think determines how you speak and how you speak reflects how you are thinking— the quality or lack of quality of your thinking.
This idea is also the basis of the linguistic work known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This states that the structure of a language inherently influences a person’s perceptions, worldview, and cognitions. Your language determines your thoughts, your thinking, and your linguistic categories which, in turn, can limit your cognitive categories. Nor was that idea even new at the beginning of the 20th century. In the previous century, the idea was first expressed by 19th-century thinkers Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation.
What does this mean? It means that we can diagnose your thinking by your way of talking and communicating. When you open your mouth, we can peek into your mind! You reveal yourself via your words and your language patterns. They are not neutral. Now, does that scare you? It shouldn’t. Well, it should not if you have nothing to hide, no one to deceive, and if you are an open human being—open to your fallibility. You not only know that you are fallible, and not perfect, you don’t expect yourself to be so.
At the heart of communication is the paradox that you cannot not communicate. To say nothing is a communication. So when Biden will not answer reporters’ questions (which is now nearly all of the time), he is communicating. And when he lies (which is increasingly more and more as he is getting more and more Pinoche’s by the press), he actually is communicating in those lies.
For example, on 9/11 he said that he was at the twin towers the day after September 11, 2001 and saw “the hell” of the destruction. But of course, he was not. There’s a Sept. 12 video now playing in which he stood up as a Senator in the Senate and gave a speak on Sept. 12 about the terrorist attack. So he was not there. He did not see what he said he saw! Did he just forget? Is that part of the cognitive decline that he’s experiencing? Or did he see an hallucinatory imagination which he can no longer distinguish from reality?
Question. What does he say when presented with evidence he has been caught in a lie? That’s happened numerous times even recently. He denies, he blames, he engages in name-calling, he goes into storytelling to deflect, etc. And all of that communicates defensiveness about a person’s inner world, the world of their mind and heart.
If you use the Meta-Model linguistic distinctions, you can discern how people think. For example, you can discern how people think things are connected. It fits the structure of linear Cause-Effect thinking: “X causes or leads to Y.” “Victims” think and talk that way. “He made me so mad I couldn’t help myself.” “She disgusts me when she acts that way.”
You can also learn to discern when something thinks that one thing is equal to another thing. This structure fits the linear equivalence format: “X is or equals Y.” “Abortion is murder.” “MAGA republicans are racists.” Here differences are confused (fused together) and treated as if they are the same thing when they are not.
These inadequate ways of thinking show up in the inaccurate ways of communicating when you hear these vague and ill-defined statements, you know that the person is not thinking very clearly. Her communication is ill-formed rather than well-formed. If he uses lots of the deletion linguistic distinctions, his thinking will be vague, fuzzy, and unspecific. If she uses lots of the generalization linguistic distinctions, her thinking will be over-general, global, conceptual, and lack precision. If he use the distortion linguistic distinctions, his thinking will also be distorted in various ways.
Verbal vagueness reveals problematic thinking and creates a way of mentally mapping that will result in pain, distress, confusion, and all sorts of problems. With such you cannot develop well-being with ill-thinking, ill-communicating, and ill-behaving. For greater self-awareness, begin listening in to your own talk and communications. Use your words and language patterns as indicators to detect the quality of your thinking. Next listen in on the talk of people around you, of people on TV, and those using social media. How they talk is revealing of their inner Meta Place if you know what to listen for and how to interpret it. Welcome to the world of Neuro-Semantics.