YOUR TALK: YOUR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

To assert that your talk reveals your thinking (#40) is to identify the field of study called Psycho- Linguistics. While this field uses the language of linguistics and grammar, it is not strictly about linguistics and grammar. It is about how the way you talk reflects your inner psychology. This describes the very same phenomenon that the phrase neuro-linguistics also refers to. It refers to what your linguistics does inside your neurology, how it influences the neurons in your brain and body, and how that puts you into various states.

What does all of that mean? It means that NLP is not about linguistics and grammar per se, but rather about the effect of language within the human person. And while many people get turned off with regard to the Meta-Model of Language, NLP’s first model, that is typically because the trainer did not understand it him or herself and did not know how to train it. Accordingly, in many NLP schools, the Meta-Model is mentioned and then quickly passed over thereby conveying the idea that it is not that important. But it is.

Actually, the opposite is true. I could easily make an argument that the most important model in NLP is the Meta-Model of Language. Once upon a time, Richard Bandler himself made that argument. He said that “everything that had been created in NLP was created with the Meta- Model.” How about that! In fact, it was that statement in 1989 that made me question my own understanding of the Meta-Model. It challenged me because I could not explain how the Meta- Model would have been at the heart of creating everything in NLP. And, I wanted to know.

Consequently that sent me on a several year study of the Meta-Model. It also sent me to my first studies in Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics and from that, I collected seven linguistic distinctions from Korzybski’s work that should have been included in the original Meta-Model but were not. In adding those, I called the result The Extended Meta-Model. That’s now in the book, Communication Magic (2001).

Now psycho-linguistics or neuro-linguistics refers to one of the most basic and essential mechanisms in human experience—how we think and how our thinking generates our “sense of reality,” that is, our model of the world. To think is to use various “languages.” First, we think using the sensory representational systems of seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. This thinking is without words. Next we add words, that’s the meta-representational system and the first words are sensory-based words. Words enable you and I to create categories, classifications, concepts, etc. and these then become our thinking templates or perceptual filters. This shifts to a higher level of thinking—conceptual and evaluative thinking.

As you do any of these kinds of thinking, you send signals to your body how to feel and what to do. In other words, this is how you “program” yourself so that you can do whatever you do. You program yourself for how to feed yourself, walk, run, ride a bike, dress yourself, read, write, do math, use a computer, etc. Your programming for how to be, and how to function as you, is a function of your neuro-linguistics and neuro-semantics.

This means that the language you speak is an important determinant of how you think. And as you think, so you feel, respond, speak, and behave. Your linguistics in all of its multiple forms organizes your thinking processes. Even a single word can operate an organizing structure for your thinking.

For example, if you mis-use the word “race” to designate different ethnic groups, you thereby program yourself to see and distinguish different “races.” It is actually a mis-use of the word because there is only one human race on this planet. We are all members of that one and singular race. We are not different species. If you talk about “the human race” and include every single person in that category, you have no room for racism or being a racist. Then you will be color-blind as Martin Luther King, Jr. described in his “I Have a Dream” speech. Given this, all of the non-sense today about racism is a self-generated problem that can disappear very quickly when we change our languaging.

Amazing, isn’t it? Words program the mind. The way you talk organizes what we call your “personality.” No wonder Neuro-Semantics, as an upgraded version of NLP, focuses so much on cleaning up your thinking so that you can speak with more clarity and precision and so you can then live with more truth and compassion.