WAKING UP FROM THE TRANCE

In Brain Camp (the Neuro-Semantic Training that teaches Executive Thinking), the first and main point I seek to drive home is the shocking realization that — most of the time we are not thinking. Oh, the mind might be active and engaged in something, but it is not engaged in the task of the actual skill of “thinking.” And we all know this— well, we come to know it after it is mentioned, although we may not know it when we first hear it.

The reason is because anything repeatedly practiced eventually becomes routine and automatic. Autonomous. Oh yes, of course! We call this habit formation. Do anything repeatedly and eventually it “drops out of consciousness and into the unconscious mind.” If you are reading this, what was once (when you were 5 or 6 years old) a really difficult task (reading) is now so easy. Today reading is even inescapable for you. Today you cannot not read. See word —the meaning pops into your mind. It has become automatic. It operates as an autonomous program.

And like reading, most of the practiced actions of your life have now moved to become automatic. And the result of that is that now you are not thinking. Instead you are just responding (or worse, reacting). In fact, thinking about what you are doing may mess them up.

With habit formation, you turn something difficult and challenging into a skillful set of actions that are smooth, easy, and that can be performed inattentively. You do that when you type, drive, rollerblade, ski, get dressed, cook breakfast, and a thousand other things. With conscious attending and thinking, you learned how to do something and that “learning” is now integrated into your mind-body system. We say that you now “know” it unconsciously or that “your unconscious mind” knows it. Now the behavior is integrated as a unit or as a whole, so that the components of the activity can now occur outside of conscious attention.

This is both good and a challenge. It’s good because it frees the higher levels of your nervous system, brain, and frontal cortex for new and exciting next-level challenges. It’s a challenge because your attention is so easily lulled into relaxing and not engaging in the effortfulness of actually thinking. Now you can default to not-thinking. You can default to your previous thinking and go on automatic. And while being on automatic has its benefits— when you are there, you are non-attentive, programmed by your past experiences, not-learning, not in sensory awareness, drifting, and in an unconscious trance.

There are numerous ways of being on automatic. In Brain Camp we list— reactionary thinking, borrowed thinking, lazy thinking, agenda thinking, and being “sure” (knowledge thinking). In all of these semi-conscious states, while you brain is working— you are not mindful. You are unconscious. Think about it as being in a trance that you need to wake up from— because only then can thinking truly begin.

Sometimes what we learned becomes outdated. The activity, as such, no longer works due to a change in context, the environment, our stage of life, or other factors. Now we need to update what is out-of-date. And that requires becoming consciously mindful once again so that you can unpack the pieces and establish a new level of learning. This is the unlearning process. To break the habit that was formed, you have to come back to awareness. You can’t change what you’re not aware of. You could also think of this as waking up from the trance you’ve been in.

Fritz Perls had another way of describing it. He said we need to “lose our mind and come back to our senses.” Here he was speaking about the “mind” that encodes the old program but which is no longer effective. That “mind” is the mind that holds an old belief, decision, understanding, knowledge, identity, etc. which imprisons one in the old learning, the old program for functioning.

“Coming back to your senses” refers to identifying the building blocks of the old learning so that you can re-arrange things and construct a new learning—a new program. We do this in NLP in numerous ways. We model out the sensory components of a behavior, experience, or skill which then reveals the old TOTE (test-operate-test-exit) program— the strategy we have been using. This deframes the old learning. It is the fragmentation pattern that Milton Erickson so frequently used with clients.

All of these are ways of talking about unlearning— waking up from the trance, coming back to your senses, breaking down the strategy, deframing, fragmenting the old pattern, etc. It is to shake yourselves free from the old automatic program so that you can re-think about what you are doing, and why, and how. It is about becoming mindful again so that you can learn afresh and stay current in an ever-changing world. And if you are someone who needs to “think for a living” this is crucial.

For more about all of this, see Executive Thinking (2019), Mind-Lines (2005), Winning the Inner Game (2007). www.neurosemantics.com