“BODY LANGUAGE” MYTHS
Words are funny. Sometimes a word or a phrase is used so much that even though it is non-sense and refers to nothing, people who use it regularly will eventually begin thinking that it is real and then believing in the non-existing reference.
Words are funny. Sometimes a word or a phrase is used so much that even though it is non-sense and refers to nothing, people who use it regularly will eventually begin thinking that it is real and then believing in the non-existing reference. Incredible! Yet it happens and because it does, one of the things we do in neuro-linguistics and neuro-semantics is call attention to this and become as conscious of it as we can so that we can then use language mindfully.
In Meta-Coaching when we go through the list of Cognitive Distortions we point this out about the distortion of “labeling,” and then we see an example of it in the distortion of “awfulizing.” The word “awful” is a pseudo-word. This is how Korzbyski described it in General Semantics. I wrote about this in Communication Magic (2001) and added Pseudo-Words to the Meta-Model. It is now part of the Extended Meta-Model that we teach people in Neuro-Semantics. I hope you learned it when you learned the Extended Meta-Model.