THE NEURO-SEMANTICS OF BEING GLORIOUSLY FALLIBLE

Errs. Mistakes. Failing to achieve an outcome. Faults. Strange that these very normal aspects of being human are somehow treated as not worthy of being human. Yet you were born a fallible human being and no matter how much development you experience or how long you live, you will always be a fallible human being.

While working on the leadership that’s entailed in businesses as the senior management level (which led to the book Executive Coaching, 2014), I have simultaneously been working on the leadership that’s required for governing an organization or a government. That will lead to Political Coaching which I’m planning for 2015 as Volume XII in the Meta-Coaching series. For three years I’ve been reading in political science, I have written about Political Coaching (to the Meta-Coaches egroup), and I have found myself talking about it more and more often.

That has led to many questions. One question I am constantly asked, as an American, is if I have or would I like to coach President Obama. And the answer is, Of course. And due to all of the scandals that have been mounting up in the Obama Whitehouse, the lowering of approval and trust in the poles, the majority of people thinking he has lied to them, etc., he certainly needs someone other than the political “yes” men that surround him to coach him. [Of course, this is also equally true for most people in power, most presidents and most CEOs of companies.]

Now if I were to coach Obama I would focus on something that has repeatedly occurred that seems to be one of his blind spots. Recently in the news this has surfaced again and is one of the saddest things about him, namely his seeming total inability to admit when he made a mistake. Even when caught in a contradiction or incongruency, he seems to be addicted to making excuses and explaining (justifying) himself. For instance, he said, “If you like your doctor (on your health care plan), you can keep your doctor, period.” When that turned out to not be true, he justified it in several ways. Then this past week, when the five terrorists were released for the sake of a single soldier who evidence seems to indicate was a deserter, he again justified releasing the terrorists.

This raises lots of questions: What is this inability to admit a mistake? What causes some people to seem completely unable to acknowledge what is obvious as an err or a failure and then just apologize, make whatever amends that can be made, and learning from it, adjust themselves to do better next time? What prevents them from making course-corrections? How is it that they seem to not have a reverse gear in themselves so that they cannot “back

up?”

As with everything human, it involves their neuro-semantics. The semantics (meanings) that they give to mistakes, errs, failures, etc. and the neurological states that they go into as a result. So what meanings do such persons invest in errs that creates this limitation and inability? The meanings that they construct about errors must make errors “bad,” fatal, and contemptful of their value as persons. They must semantically load an error so that it is not just an error, it is insult to their dignity, it questions their value as a person, and it absolutely ruins their relationships and reputation.

The solution to this? Easy. Simple. It is the recognition that we all make mistakes. If you are engaged in doing anything that’s significant and important and/or challenging, then you will make lots of mistakes and make them every day. You will make mistakes of the mind, of the heart (emotions), of speaking, and of doing. You will mis-perceive, misunderstand, mis-believe, make decisions that will undermine your well-being and success, mis-feel about things, mis-speak, mis- behave, etc. It’s inevitable! And why? Simply because you are a fallible human being. You are not and never will be infallible. If that’s distressing, then have a good cry and get over it. You are not God with infallible powers. You are a human being and a fallible one at that, which is great because it means you still have new things to learn and develop.

This week here in Mexico one of the coaches-in-training to become a Licensed Meta-Coach asked, “What if I make a mistake in coaching? What if I blow-it? What if I hurt someone?” I said, “Say you’re sorry.” David Murphy said, “Recognize the mistake and correct it.” Let the person know as soon as possible that you made a mistake and do whatever you need to in order to correct it. Say, “Oops! That’s not right. Let me do that one again.” Matter-of-factly recognize and acknowledge the mistake, don’t try to cover it up, be real, be human, and do the best you can as you move on.

Doing this gives you a back-up gear so that you can put yourself in reverse. Then like driving a car, if you go somewhere that isn’t where you want to go, put it in reverse, back up, and then let yourself start again, afresh. In missile and rocket design, once launched there’s lots of things that can cause the missile to get off target, but no worry. Make a course correction midstream. If cybernetic systems such as rockets can do it, surely human beings can do it.

In business we call this Risk Management. So when we design, create, and innovate something big and wonderful, we set out contingency plans. We create Plan B in case things go wrong, Plan C if things go south, etc. We think through the risk, calculate the probabilities, and create contingencies for worst-case scenarios.

In science this is call experimentation. We set out to experiment on one or more facets of a problem by altering key variables to see what happens. When the experiment fails, we have succeeded in learning something. The so-called “failure” is a success because we use it for learning, for adjusting the experiment, and for moving forward to the next experiment.

In NLP we say, “There is no failure, there is only feedback.” And this is the genius for recovering from an error, it is how to be gloriously fallible as a human being, it is how to make course- corrections in mid-stream, and it is how to not get locked into the limitations of denial of problems,

justification of errors, and refusal to admit that things don’t always turn out as we hoped.

The neuro-semantics of being gloriously fallible is that a mistake is just that— a mistake. So learn from it, put things in reverse, correct it, experiment, and course-correct. Here’s to being able to recognize the mistakes and accelerating your learning and to being openly receptive to mistakes and errors as just evidences of being human.