WHEN THINKING BECOMES SERIOUSLY CONTAMINATED

When it comes to thinking, real thinking, thinking through a problem to a solution, thinking up new creative ideas, thinking about a loved one and how to connect or communicate— the problem with thinking is that all thinking is contaminated. And this is one, if not the, biggest problems with clear thinking. Our thinking is not clean. It is muddled, convoluted, biased, and flawed.

Yet for most people, most of the time, it does not seem this way. I suppose it is like a pair a glasses that very, very slowly gets some dust, then becomes a tiny bit cloudy, and does so for days on end and the person wearing the glasses does not look at the glasses, but only through them. Eventually vision becomes a bit dull and foggy, but the person adjusts to the film that collects on the glasses. Their seeing is contaminated but they don’t notice.

So with thinking. You think about what you have to do, the people you encounter, driving, traveling, chores, etc. All the while you seldom think about your thinking. Yet if you did step back and engaged your meta-cognition powers, you could then become aware of your cognitive distortions, biases, and fallacies. You could then be in a position to actually work on and update your very capacity to think with more clarity, accuracy, precision, creativity, etc.

Picking up on Alfred Korzybski’s famous quote that “the map is not the territory,” NLP framed thinking as the process by which you and I construct mental maps or models in our heads about the world. What we do when we think is map out what something is, how it works, it’s value or significance, its consequences, rules, etc. in this way we make meaning of things. Now isn’t that an awesome insight? By your thinking you construct the “meanings” of anything and everything in your life. That means that the quality of anything and everything in your life— and how you experience it— is ultimately a function of the quality of your thinking.

Wow! Now that should give you pause. It does me. It is not the things out there in the world, the people I engage with, the work I do, the traffic, the noise, or whatever that determines my experience or the quality of my life. It’s my thinking! Thinking is that consequential.

And yes, all of your thinking (and all of my thinking) is contaminated to some degree. The way you have been thinking has set up thinking-filters— perceptual patterns, meta-programs, cognitive distortions, and so on. You have constructed “beliefs” and “understandings” and these now contaminate your thinking. It’s circular. As a child when you first start to “think,” you created ideas and beliefs and understandings which today cloud and filter your thinking. Your

first thinking influences your second thinking. The capacity to think, which is your medium through which you construct mental maps about things, then becomes the filters through which you now experience the world.

We sometimes say that this is “the Catch-22 of consciousness.” You have to use your current mind (thinking capacities) to change your mind. And this is where your blind-spots can defeat you because it is hard to see the frames governing your thinking when you are inside those frames. The question is, How can we get outside of the frames (outside of the box) to see afresh? How can we unlearn what we learned when we are inside of that learning and it seems normal or natural?

This is not just a problem for those people who have a bad relationship with reality (the territory) and need therapy to readjust their maps so that they can better navigate life. It is a problem for all of us. For all of us our thinking is serious contaminated by cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and cognitive fallacies.

NLP accidently came up with a great cure for this serious contamination when the Meta-Model of Language was invented. Given how much we think in language and how much language itself distorts, generalizes, and deletes vital pieces of information —the Meta-Model gives you critical questions so that you are not so easily deceived and bamboozled by words. Those questions also activate your ability to think again in a fresh and out-of-the-box way. And when you do, you are mostly able to update your thinking, clean out the fog, and over-ride the old thinking programs.

Now if that interests you, then grab a good NLP book on the Meta-Model. Learning the Meta- Model is a great way to begin to clean up your languaging and mental mapping— to wit, your thinking. Recommendations: My book is Communication Magic (2001) from Crown House Pub. An update on the Meta-Model commissioned originally with Bandler. Magic De-Mystified by Bryon Lewis and Frank Pucelik, also by Crown House Pub. Is another excellent book on the Meta-Model. Introducing NLP by John Seymour and Joseph O’Connor is a basic NLP book, like many others, that has a chapter on the Meta-Model that gives you a quick introduction.