COACHING COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

In the Meta-Coaching System, you learned about Cognitive Distortions and received a list of 13 cognitive distortions. These came originally from Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, two key leaders in the field of Cognitive Psychology. When I found NLP in 1986 I began integrating these cognitive distortions with the Meta-Model distinctions and later I even wrote a paper that I presented to the International Interdisciplinary Conference of General Semantics at Hoffa University on the relationship between these two sets of distinctions using the formulations of General Semantics.

As an aside, I stopped in New York city to see Dr. Albert Ellis. I went to his Rational Emotive Center so I could get a chance to talk with him. He must have been about 80 or so then and was just as feisty and foul-mouthed as always. As a someone who read Korzbyski and used General Semantic formulations, I thought he might like to know that I was working on integrating his work with the Meta-Model of NLP. In his gruff voice, he said, “Oh, that has been disproved!”