HOW “THINKING” BECAME MY CURRENT FOCUS

When I entered NLP, I had already been thinking a lot about thinking. That came from my studies in Cognitive Therapy and especially RET where I learned about the cognitive distortions. Then I read Joseph Yeager’s book, Thinking about Thinking with NLP. So from the beginning, it was obvious to me that NLP, as a Communication Model, was about thinking. Realizing this, in 1986-7 I put “the languages of the mind”— how we think visually, auditorially, kinesthetically, etc. into the book Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987).

As I learned the Meta-Model, I realized that the linguistic distinctions which indicated ill-formed structures corresponded to the cognitive distortions of cognitive therapy. I even traveled to New York City and met with Albert Ellis (founder of RET). I wanted feedback on the theme that I was working on that the thinking patterns of RET correlated to NLP’s linguistic distinctions. Later I presented that paper to the international inter-disciplinary Conference of General Semantics. That paper is now one of the chapters in Developing Sanity in Human Affairs (1998, Hofstra University).