THE ART OF DEVELOPING MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES

Given that experiences do not come with built-in meanings, and given that it is up to each of us to attribute meanings, and given that there are many, many meanings that you could give to any experience—the challenge in life is to learn the art of developing meaningful experiences. How are you at this challenge? Do you have the required skills for this? Fail to do this, and you could very will become the victim of an experience. Then the experience (and the un-owned interpretations that you let it have) will control you.

This is a challenge. And it is a challenge that many people fail to master in life. They experience an event and in doing so, they seem to give up any and all of their power in determining its meaning. They default to cultural meanings, to the meanings of people around them, to the easiest and most hurtful ideas that pop into their minds. If someone criticized them, they default to assuming that words are real enough to hurt them, and so they feel bad. They don’t even pause for a moment to realize that at some level, they are accepting the words as given. In them there is not enough of a pause to wonder about the source of the words, where the person is coming from and what he may be trying to achieve.

The challenge is even more intense for every single human being who has not learned to do critical thinking. That’s because without the ability to question things and to produce clear and precise communications, you will inevitably use childish thinking patterns. You will automatically use the cognitive distortions that characterize how a little child thinks— generalizing, exaggerating, personalizing, emotionalizing, awfulizing, and so on. Yet if you do use those ways of thinking, the conclusions you will draw inevitably creates misery and falsehoods.

In the fields of therapy, coaching, and consulting, professionals learn to expect that where there is emotional pain, there is a high probability that the person is not doing critical thinking. Instead, the person is thinking in erroneous and fallacious ways. That’s the problem. They are not the problem, the thinking patterns are the problem. They are thinking in ways that attribute ugly, nasty, dark, and toxic ideas to some experience, and that’s the problem.

Where there is an experience, whether it is an experience that most people consider negative, but also for those that would commonly be considered positive, the experience itself does not determine what you will experience. Paradoxical, isn’t it? What determines the quality of an experience is the meaning you give to it. Your power to construct meaning and to attribute meaning is that powerful.

For instance, you can take a positive experience and turn it into a trauma. You could succeed at work, produce something that leads to recognition and bonus pay, but if you compare it to a colleague who did more and got more, you could feel really bad. Jealousy could eat at you; envious thinking could ruin the recognition. You could feel one-down and mistreated and “never given the breaks that others get.” You could go to a party with friends who care about you and find that the party makes you feel miserable. To do that, you only need to use a strategy of focusing entirely on what is not there or who is not there, and not what and who is there. Focus on the divorce you experience three years ago and how your ex- is not there and everybody else has partners, and then notice just how lonely, rejected, and hopeless you feel.

Conversely, the art of developing meaningful experiences starts with owning your powers of meaning-making. Once you do that then you can focus your attention on what is meaningful to you—what you value, what you care about, what you are grateful for, what is a blessing. This is not a shallow “positive thinking” message. The truth is that you can hold both positive and negative meanings in your mind at the same time. Yet a negative meaning does not have to overwhelm and obliterate the positive meanings.

“Yes, last year’s winner of this recognition award did more than me, but her success takes nothing away from me. I’m glad for her and I will be glad for myself. It’s foolish to compare myself with others, I will only compare what I’m doing now with what I have done in the past.” “Yes, it seems that most people here at the party have a partner, and when I’m ready I will set that as a goal; for now I will focus on the fact that I have loving and caring friends and we’re having a party.”

Meaning is the key and your power to make meaning is the determining factor for the quality of your experiences. Now you know the pathway to having much more meaningful experiences in life—develop your innate powers in your inner meta place. Become a well-trained and well- practiced meaning-maker extraordinare. Because this is central in Neuro-Semantics, you might want to consider some Neuro-Semantic training or coaching this year.