UN-INSULTABILITY

“You hurt my feelings when you did that!” “Well, you hurt my feelings when you said that!” “You should apologize to me!” “No, it is you who should apologize to me!”

I overheard that exchange in Starbucks the other day. And it went on and on as they argued about who hurt the other one the most! Finally one stood up, pushed the chair into the table with a big thud and said, “I’m not going to take this insult any more!” And with that, stormed out.

Whoooa! That’s when my thoughts turned to the “Taking Criticism Positively” pattern. Early in NLP someone developed that pattern. And why not, if you’re busy doing anything significant or if you’re not doing anything, you are going to be criticized. Someone will take you to task for what you are saying and doing. How you then respond in your communications will then determine if you can come to an understanding of each person’s point of view and work things out, or not. And to respond effectively almost always requires that you say something, that you communicate with them. So that pattern was about how to think and frame “criticism” in your own mind so that you can “take it positively”— that is, look for the positive intent, match the person’s words and state, find out the validity of their point, and see what can bring a resolution to the situation.

The result of this suggests that to take criticism positively, you can do the following:

1) Reframe “criticism.” Change the frame so that you move it from meaning a threat or danger to you so that it means that another person simply has some negative thoughts about what you said or did.

2) Recode criticism. Notice how you represent the “criticism” in the theater of your mind and edit the cinematic features so that you see, hear and then feel it in a different way. How close or far are your images? How loud or quiet is the voice? What words are you repeating to yourself? What tone of voice? Any other sounds like music playing? How big is the person in relationship to you? What happens when the words sound like Elvis Presley singing? Or Bugs Bunny? Or Elmer Fudd? What if you edit the words so they are spoken in a sexy tonality? And what happens if you see the critic in diapers with a rattle in hand throwing a tantrum?

3) Positive intention. And what if you also know that behind every action is some positive intention? If you set that frame and operate from the intention of finding those intentions in others, then every “criticism” offers you a chance to engage in an exploration! You may have to scratch your head a lot and ask lots of questions to find

out, and in the meantime the person’s “criticism” fails to push buttons or make you the puppet of someone else’s string pulling.

This is the basic NLP approach. In Neuro-Semantics we have taken this further. We focus on accessing a meta-state of un-insultability. This refers to accessing a state wherein you are beyond insult, un-insult-able. What would you need to think, believe and feel so that there is no “insult.” Have you ever been in such a great state and someone tried to insult you and it just didn’t effect you at all? Suppose a drunk on a street corner said critical things to you as you enter a theater to receive an award? How much insult would you take then?

The process for un-insultability involves several things:

4) Unconditional self-value. What if you knew both in your mind and in your body that your worth, value, importance, dignity, and self-hood was unconditional? What if you set a frame of meaning that who and what you are as a human being is not conditioned upon any temporal factor like looks, money, status, degrees, clothes, etc.? What if you knew and felt in every fiber of your being that your esteem as a human being is that of a sacred and precious being and that it is above and beyond your actions, behaviors, experiences, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, relationships, etc.? Wouldn’t that be a great state to operate from?

5) Self-Acceptance. And what if you also operated from a frame of mind and state of acceptance of life as it is? That would end the fight. That would unplug the buttons that could “get” you. When you fully accept your fallibility, mortality, and humanity, then what “button” can anyone push to rattle your cage?

6) Playfulness. Now it can become a respectful and playful game of discovery rather than that of one-up-manship. First by making the button-pushing game fail, you can surprise the criticizer. Now some respectful humor can lighten things up. So if someone calls you “a son-of-a-bitch!” you can now playfully agree, “Yeah, I know. What kind of a son-of- a-bitch am I specifically today?” “And am I a loveable son-of-a-bitch or just a fun-loving one?”

The Boy Potential in The Matrix movie said, “There is no spoon.” Similarly, “there is no insult.” And that’s especially true for the person who lives in the Matrix of Uninsult-ability. So if you know The Matrix Model (2003) and have been trained in it, then you can use it to reload your Matrix and live in a world where there are no insults. “Insults” is a man-made experience only available to those who live in the Insult Matrix. Here’s to the unleashing of your uninsult-ability!