I CAUGHT A THOUGHT

I remember when I first began teaching NLP (the practitioner and master practitioner courses) I began meeting people who complained about not visualizing. They said that they didn’t make pictures in their mind. When someone would say that, I would then repeat a little process that I learned from Richard Bandler. I’d ask for their billfold or purse and ask for a picture of their loved one or children. When they produced it I would point to the people in the pictures and ask, “Who is this?”

When they would tell me, “It’s my wife.” I’d ask, “How do you know?” They would say, “I just know?” “Maybe that’s not really your wife. You don’t make pictures in your mind, you are just looking at a picture that you’re carrying, how do you know that it is her? Maybe it’s someone else’s wife! Maybe it’s a mistress! How would you know if it isn’t?”

The design of that response was to provoke a person to catch their own thoughts. It was designed to set a question within a person regarding how do you know and recognize your thoughts. Of course, that’s just one way to evoke a person’s recognition of their internal pictures. There are many others. I learned to catch my auditory thoughts by “snapshoting” sounds. I would listen to something on TV or radio, then turn the source off and see if I could re-present it to myself. If not, I’d turn it on again and make another “snapshot” of it —noticing its qualities, tones, volumes, etc.

This is the exercise I recommend to anyone wanting to learn to visualize or to enhance the quality of their inner thoughts of images. Look at something, see it, really see it, now close your eyes and see it inside. Re-present its colors, shapes, form, etc. Now look at it again, really look at it for all of its qualities. Use your hand to feel it. Now close your eyes and feeling it—in your mind—see it. Then using your hand, knock on it and listen to those sounds. Now with eyes closed, hear those sounds and let the images emerge.

What’s all this about? It’s about catching thoughts. Most of the time we think and don’t even recognize our thoughts and especially don’t recognize the form or code of the thought. Yet because we humans have a brain with a visual cortex, an auditory cortex, a motor cortex, an associative cortex, etc., we think using the sensory modalities. This is the most fundamental level of our thinking and the genius of NLP. Others had discovered this long before NLP, but Bandler and Grinder put this together into a format that enable people to “run their own brains.”

This explains why NLP can be used for developing emotional intelligence. Given Daniel Goleman’s list of the four facets of EQ: self-management, social awareness, relationship management, self-awareness is first. No wonder Denis Bridoux and his associates wrote a basic NLP book (including Meta-States) entitled, Seven Steps to Emotional Intelligence.

Well, this week I caught a thought. I was watching the political debate between the vice president candidates and when it was announced that it was at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri—all of a sudden pictures, images, sounds, and even smells popped into my mind. And because there were so many of these sights and sounds, I became aware of them. In fact, I missed a bit of the beginning of the debate because of the intrusion of this inner movie.

Now I’m pretty sure you didn’t experience that. “Pretty sure” because the likelihood that you have not spent much time in the neighborhood of Washington University in St. Louis, Forest park, and Skinker Blvd. But I did. And as I caught the first thoughts of those sights and sounds, then also I caught higher level thoughts—old thoughts from 25 years ago when I lived in St. Louis.

When it comes to catching your thoughts, you can catch thoughts at many different levels. Here’s one way that we frame the levels of thoughts in Neuro-Semantics:

1) Awareness. The first thinking is simply being aware, sentient, and conscious. The content of this consciousness is whatever you’re aware of, whatever gets your attention, whatever grabs it. You are aware but not aware of that awareness. This is the mind of a small child or animal. It is only the beginning of consciousness.

2) Awareness of awareness: Then you catch a thought. You become aware of your thought. “I was just thinking about X.” “An image just popped in mind.” Or someone interrupts your daydreaming asking you “Where were you just now? Where did you go?” At this level you become aware of the two key sensory representational systems: visual and auditory and the snapshot or movie playing in your mind. At this level you experience the first meta-state.

3) Dimensions of thoughts: You can then identify the dimensions of your thinking in terms of their qualities. My images of St. Louis were of the stone buildings and green trees around Washington University. Some were close, others were far away. In this I was using the concept of distance as well as the concept of color to create and re-present my thoughts. At this level you catch your meta-modalities of the cinematic features of your movies (“sub-modalities” in NLP).

4) Narrative of the thoughts: Then there is our self-talk as we have a running commentary in our mind about our thoughts. We use this self-talk as our story to describe and narrate their meanings. At this level you catch your words and the linguistic representational system (the meta-representation system of NLP).

5) Experience of the thoughts: And if we use our sights and sounds in such a way that we imagine ourselves inside things, then we use the concept of “as if I am there again.” This re- creates the sense of the experience so that the messages you send your body accesses your kinesthetic encoding and activates your motor cortex. At this level you catch your kinesthetic sensory system so that you do not merely think the thought, but experience it.

6) Evaluation of thoughts: From there you can, and do, make all kinds of evaluations of your thoughts and thoughts-of-thoughts. You create metaphorical evaluations, intentional, meaning, etc. as we frame things with higher levels of concepts and understandings. At this level you enter into all of the 100 meta-levels of the meta-state distinctions and can map out the fuller Matrix in which you think.

Catching a thought— ah, that’s what any good Meta-Coach with his or her salt does! We catch the thoughts that operate as our maps of reality, the maps that either effectively enable us to get on in life or that trip us up. Because we don’t deal with “reality” directly, but through our maps, catching a thought is the first step in reframing. We catch a thought in order to know what framing we’re currently living in and what needs to be reframed.

Here’s to your successful thought-catching this week!