NeuroSemanticsHK

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #20

April 31, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #7

THE POWER MATRIX

And the Foundation of all Your Skills

Are you in charge of you? Do you have the power to take charge of your innate powers and of your choices as you move through life? Human beings need power—the power to take control of themselves. The term power literally, and simply, means “the ability to do” something. The word power speaks about both the resources and the ability which is require to do things— to take effective action in the world. So if power literally means, “to do,” then there’s nothing inherently negative about the idea of power even though many have connected negative beliefs to power.

Further and most delightfully, you like every other person in the world, come with four innate powers—four responses that you and only you can make. Did you know that? One of the challenges in communicating this is that what follows will sound so simple, so obvious, and so non-consequential, that you will be tempted to dismiss it. Are you ready? The four innate powers that you have are the powers to think, to feel, to speak, and to act. Simple, right?

Yes on the surface, yet there’s a depth to this fact that eludes most people. The depth? These four innate powers establish the foundation for all of your skills, and for that matter, all of the skills that are available on Planet Earth. These four powers describe how you are able to turn a talent into an actual competency. There is not a skill in this world that is not made out of the stuff of these four powers. Both the simplest skills that you can learn in a matter of minutes and the most advanced skills that take decades to develop are comprised of these four innate responses. Isn’t that amazing? Given that, what new skills are you planning to develop this year?

Further, each one of these responses is a rich and complex response. Your mental responses or powers range from representing ideas, framing, believing, understanding, deciding, identifying, imaging, remembering and that’s a short list. Your emotional powers are just as extensive and speak about your ability to translate thought into somatic experiences — otherwise known as emotions. These are your two private or internal responses– powers that are yours and that no one can take from you. They are yours; you generate them.

Your verbal responses or powers are not just that you can speak, but that you can use words in dozens and dozens of ways to achieve a wide range of outcomes. You can assert, you can ask, you can bless, curse, use words to sell, negotiate, connect, disconnect, hypothesize, etc. Your action responses or powers refer to all of the things that you can physically do as you move, act, gesture, etc. to make real your ideas and outcomes.

Given that each person has these four powers and that is it theirs to develop and to use—and that nobody can take these from you—how could any human act like a victim?  How could any person feel powerless, out-of-control, controlled, irresponsible, passive, etc.? The answer is paradoxical. At some level the person has given his powers away by powerfully thinking and emoting and speaking and acting in ways to deny his powers. Every “victim” has exercised his power to give away his power to some trigger. Sometimes being a victim is a very powerful response.

Another reason is that the person probably has failed to recognize and own his powers. That’s why on Day One of APG, the very first pattern that we do is the Power Zone Pattern which is designed to enable a person to begin to recognize her powers and to own them. We first meta-state our everyday states with awareness of the powers. Then we meta-state ownership of that state. And then we often meta-state fallibility to that ownership-of-power state because, contrary to the title of Robin’s book, Unlimited Power, we humans do not have unlimited power. All of our powers are limited, they are fallible, that is, they are “liable to error.”

When it comes to power, Martin Seligman mapped out a critical distinction many years ago in his studies of learned pessimism and learned optimism. He and his research assistants discovered that they could get all sorts of animals, from frogs to dogs, to learn to be a victim— to learn as it were, “I’m the problem, there’s no hope of change, and it will last forever.” They set up experimental situation where the thing learned was that “nothing I can do” can make any difference. The pain, the distress, the undesirable environment will not alter no matter what I do. Once learned, then the animal would just lie down and take it.

Later the research team learned that they could change things for these animals. By dragging the dog off of the electrified grid, the dog could learn “optimism,” that is, “there is something that can change things.” “I can change things.” “I am not a victim.” And what’s even more fascinating is that once the animals had “learned optimism,” they could not be re-taught “learned pessimism.”

This means that once a person learns awareness of her innate powers and that she can always do something, then she makes a meta-level learning. “I am not a victim anymore than I believe I am.” “No one can make me feel anything, whatever I feel is what I generate through my thinking, believing, expecting, etc.”

The Power Matrix also contains all your beliefs (meanings) about what you can and cannot do. Within it are your intentions— what you’re trying to achieve as you take action to do the things you do. Within this matrix also are many other key experiences: self-confidence, self-efficacy, ego-strength, proactivity (taking the initiative), etc.

You are a doer—there’s something within all of us that keeps urging us to be creativity engaged in things— wanting to do our best, wanting to make a difference. This aspect of the self-actualization drive generates our general restlessness and sometimes initiates our dissatisfaction with the way things are. What do you want to achieve? How many things do you want to achieve? How well do you tap into your response-able powers and take the initiative? These questions all relate to the power matrix.

THE SELF MATRIX

And Your Unconditional Value

Do you deserve to be here?  Do you deserve the things you have, your opportunities, your friends, your place in life, your loved ones?  Strange questions.  Yet people commonly ask themselves these questions.  They wonder about whether they have a right to exist, to live, to love, to act on their goals, etc.  These are ontological questions— questions of being.  There are more.  Who am I?  What is my nature?  What is life about?

In terms of meaning-making, the answer to all of these questions build up the construct of your self-image and self-esteem.  Now “normally,” if you had parents who graduated from Parenting 101 and got certified that they were mature enough and skilled enough to parent, then these questions were answered in a healthy and robust way in how you were parented.  That is, as they loved and cared for you, as they nurtured and gratified your needs in an age-appropriate way, you built a healthy mental map about yourself:

“I am loved and valued.  I count.  I am important.  I am respected and have the right to be here, and have the challenge to be my best self.”

You value yourself as a human being because you are a human being.  There are no conditions, no “ifs, but, or whens…”  Youare a human being and that makes you innately significant and important.  Consequently, you don’t have to prove anything.  You don’t have to meet any conditions to be acceptable, loved, respected, etc.  You have already met every condition that’s required— you are human.  We call this “self-esteem.”

Yet many have some very limiting and unuseful beliefs about self-esteem.  Commonly, we talk about one’s self-esteem beinghigh or low.  But either way, that would make it conditional.  And if conditional, then we have to ask— What is your self-esteem conditioned upon?  Do you have to be so smart, so fast, so strong, so pretty, so rich, or what?  “Esteem” speaks about estimating the value of something, rating the worth of something.  And if you rate your human worth on anything external like wealth, position, status, job, etc., then it is conditional and then you ask those ontological questions— “Am I good enough yet?  Do enough people like me so that I’m okay?”

Carl Rogers urged that we treat each other with unconditional positive regard.  No conditions!  You are important because you are human.  The Jewish, Christian, and Islam faiths begin from the idea that we are all “made in the image and likeness of God.”  Again, no conditions.  You are born valuable.  You don’t have to prove anything, reach any conditions.  You are free to become your best self.  You are free to express the potentials and possibilities that are clamoring inside.

Now for those who did not get to construct this kind of healthy self-image and self-esteem from the beginning, the next question is, “How do you esteem yourself as unconditionally valuable as a human being?”  And the answer is?  The answer is that you simply assert it.  You declare just as healthy parenting would declare it and then you act that way.  Act with dignity, respect, and innate worth.  In Neuro-Semantics we have developed a pattern for this as we access three states— acceptance, appreciation, and then awe (unconditional value).  We then apply acceptance and appreciation to our doing selfand then we apply awe to our being self.  This meta-stating process means that we put our being self inside of the frame of “unconditional value” and feel a stat of awe about oneself.

For many, doing that is very weird and strange and uncomfortable.  They are not use to thinking this way or feeling this way about themselves.  That’s okay.  Everything takes some getting used to.  This will require repeating the process until it begins to feel familiar and comfortable.  If there’s objections in the back of someone’s mind and they are asking themselves, “But is it right?”  “Is it okay?”  “Won’t I become selfish or self-centered?”  These are to be expected.  It speaks about the world that they have grown up in —one that did not respect their innate sacredness as a human being.  It speaks about the limiting beliefs that their parents operated from.  Again, repetition is the key.  Keep doing it.  Keep repeating the unconditional value assertion.  Just keep asserting this new frame until it becomes your frame of mind.

Without centering yourself with the dignity assertion that establishes your unconditional self-esteem, your intention in life will always be to proof yourself.  And with that as the purpose in the back of your mind, then whatever you do will have an ulterior motive.  Then you will tend to use situations and people to be okay, to be a somebody.  Conversely, the healthy alternative is to start from the frame that your worth is a given.  Then, having nothing to prove, you are free to express every potential that is within you to express.

This is the foundation for being centered, for taking criticism positively, for treating mistakes as a context for learning, for staying open and defenseless when blackmailed or threaten in some way, and for much more.  And now you know why we start here on Day One of APG (Accessing Personal Genius).

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #14

March 27, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #2

THE HOLOGRAM OF THE

MATRIX MODEL

The whole of your inner world, the inner construct of your Matrix, where you play your unique inner game is contained in the State Matrix.  It is all there, but you do have to have trained eyes and ears to see and hear it.  Otherwise it is invisible to you and you will see nothing.  Like a hologram, if you know how to “read” it, the state matrix not only grounds it in reality, but it also has within it the whole—the whole of the Matrix.  For this reason, we begin with the state matrix.

As a holistic term the word “state” refers to the human system, that is, to the mind-body-emotion system.  It refers to a person’s state of mind as well as one’s state of body and state of emotion.  In everyday talk we separate these terms as if they refer to different things while in truth they refer to a singular system, the human system which is made up of mind, body, and emotion.  Separating them occurs in language, not in reality.  That’s because where there is mind there is body and emotion.  Where there is emotion there is mind and body.  Where there is body there is mind and emotion.

This gives you three ways into the human system.  You can use the royal road of mind, body, and/or emotion to get into a person’s inner world.  Actually this offers you a very wide-range of questions and areas for exploring if you want to understand a person on that person’s terms.  Consider.

The State of Mind.  What are you thinking about right now?  What stream of thoughts are coming by your awareness?  What are you attending to?  And if you are selecting X to focus on, how are you representing that?  If I were to peak into the theater of your mind and see what you are seeing, what’s playing on the screen?  Are you representing it as close or far, bright or dim, big or small, etc.?  what are the cinematic features that you are using as you process that information?

All of those questions are primary state questions.  We can now step back one level and ask many, many more questions to find out what’s in the back of the mind.  Given that you are thinking about X, what do you believe about that?  What is the evidence that leads you to believe that?  What is your understanding about that?  What memories come to mind?  What can you anticipate as you imagine taking that idea into your future?  These are first-level meta-questions and only begin to explore this area.  In the book, Neuro-Semantics, there is a list of 102 meta-questions at multiple levels.

The State of Body.  What you might not immediately think of your head and brain as part of your body, they certainly are.  They are made up of cells and nerve pathways and the neuro-chemistry that determines which of many areas of the brain are processing information at multiple levels.  And from there, messages are sent to the rest of your body influencing all of the various nervous systems — autonomic nervous system, immune nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, etc.  The state of your body is highly influenced by what you eat and drink, your sleep, your exercise, your health, etc.  It is within your body— your neurology, your physiology— that you think and feel.  A simple head cold can at times drastically affect the quality of your thinking and emoting.

Further, how you use your body will influence both thinking and emoting.  Your gestures, your movements, your posture, how you hold yourself, and much more.  All of these facets of your body can powerfully affect your human system.

The State of Emotion.  Then there are your kinesthetic sensations, both internal and external, which give you the ability to “feel” (sense) things and when you add a cognition to them, you have an “emotion.”  These energy impulses move you, create motion within you, motion to move out from where you are, hence e-motion (originally spelled, ex-motion).  An emotion is an urge to move, to act, to do something.  In the so-called “positive” emotions we move out to keep doing what we are doing, it is the “go” system.  In the so-called “negative” emotions, we move out to stop— to “Stop, Look, Listen, and Change” because something is not working and/or because something is dangerous before us.

This is NLP 101.  It is one of the really valuable aspects of the NLP Communication Model because with this we can now do what is popularly known as Emotional Intelligence.  Long before that became the popular term for it, we called it State Management.

• State Awareness (emotional awareness) is the beginning place.  What state are you in?  How much of that state are you experiencing?  After all, it is an energy field driven by your metabolism.   How pure or mixed is that state?
• State or Emotional Monitoring. When does it go up or down?  With whom?  What triggers it?  Is the trigger an external stimulus or an internal one?  When is your state at its best?  When is it at its worse.  How do you influence it?  How do you generate this state via your thoughts and beliefs?
• State or Emotional Regulation. Now that you know what it is and a little bit about how it works, what can you do to turn it up or turn it down at will?  What factors gives you more management over the state?  What beliefs, understandings, decisions, permissions, etc. empower you to regulate it to serve your well-being?  What state interrupts (pattern interrupts) do you prefer to use so that you can manage your states better?
• State or Emotional Relating. With whom do you want to access a particular state and offer that to the person?  How easily can you access care, compassion, love, patience, thoughtfulness, calmness, etc.?  What are your best states for rapport building, connecting, communicating, relating, negotiating, etc.?

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #17

April 17, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #5

SELF

AND THE MATRIX MODEL

Given the de-emphasis on content in NLP and the focus on structure and process, if I had designed the Matrix Model abstractly or conceptually, I would never have even thought about including the five content matrices within the model.  It would never have occurred to me to do that.  Yet I did.  And I did so because there is one content which is extremely close to how you process information and create meaning.  There is also one content that “you never leave home without.”  You take that content everywhere you go and, in fact, you see the world through that content.

What is that content?  It is the content of your self.  Developmentally, the first thing you invent and the first meanings that you construct involve you as a person— Who am I?  What is my value?  Am I valued?  Am I loveable?  Do I have worth?  What can I do?  Who will be my friend?  Do I count?  As you and I enter the world, these are the first questions we seek to answer.  And fortunately, Developmental Psychology has a lot to say about this as does Phenomenology.  Accordingly, in the Matrix Model we have five aspects of self —aspects that function very much the way any perceptual filter or meta-program functions, we interpret the world through the content of the meanings, intentions, and states that we have created about Self.

For short memorable terms, we have designated The Content Matrices in terms of five key aspects of the self—

• Self is you as a person, as a living human being, your being— your worth, value, significance, loveability, etc.  In terms of being human, Self is your construct of your self-esteem.
• Power is you in terms of what you do, your behavior, your skills, competencies, talents, and achievements.  Normally we speak about this as your self-confidence— your trust in yourself that you can do something.  Here also is self-efficacy, your sense of responsibility, taking initiative, and being proactive.
• Others is you in terms of your relationships, your social self— who you are as you connect, relate, and get along with others.  This is you as a friend, lover, parent, student, teacher, and other key social roles in life.  It shows up as your social panorama.
• Time is you as a temporal being.  You live in time and time defines your sense of mortality.  Once you construct this aspect of life, you begin to live in the three time zones and to spend thought and energy to each.  As a temporal self you have a relationship to time and define yourself in terms of your age and your stage of life.
• World is you in all of the roles that you play in the many domains or dimensions of life.  In any domain or world where you spend much time, you also tend to play various roles which define who you are in that area.  Your role self entails your status, position, titles, etc.  And just as others see you in terms of that role, you also define yourself in terms of it.

All of this describes you— you in five dimensions, experiences, or aspects which, in turn, provides a rich description (and definition) of who you are.  Who are you?  To answer, you will talk about these five aspects of your life.   Who you are also determines what you perceive in the world and how you interpret things (the meaning matrix).  That’s because as it has often been said— You see the world, not as it is, but through who you are.

To be more specific, you see the world through the lens of your personal sense of worth and value (Self, self-esteem), the more conditional and lower your self-esteem, the more you see the world as threatening and overwhelming.  You see the world through the lens of your personal powers as you wonder about whether you can handle various tasks or roles or challenges.  The weaker your sense of your fundamental powers, the more you see the world as threatening and over-powering.  The less your sense of control over yourself and in owning your powers, the more you feel a victim in the world rather than a victor.

You see the world through the lens of your social self— your social skills, your ability to connect, your sense of being valuable to others, your social emotions, and your competencies to handle a wide range of social experiences from gaining rapport, sharing humor, conversing, negotiating, selling, to supporting, inspiring, etc.  The weaker or less enhancing your social self, the more frightening the social world will seem and the less able to handle the things required to make friends.

You see the world through the lens of your temporal self— your sense of your own beginnings, current experiences, and anticipated experiences.  As a temporal self you can hold in mind events that have happened and use them to define yourself and operate from the states that you once experienced just as you can anticipate future events that will happened and use them to determine what and how you think and feel today.  As a temporal self you can live in the past or in the future.

Finally, you can see the world through the lens of your role self— the roles that you have learned to play, the titles or statuses that you have attained, and you can so identify yourself in terms of those roles that to lose a role could trigger an “identity” crisis.  Your role self may over-lap with some of your social self, or not.  Over-identifying with any role tends to make you as a person less flexible, less able to adjust to new situations, and less authentic since your role tends to become your persona.

You, who you are, and how you understand your person, what you can do, your relationships, your experience with events over time, and the roles that you play in life, operate as a very powerful and determining meaning-making lens.  This is why there are times that you cannot understand something until you change.  This is also why that sometimes when you change, the whole world that you know changes.

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 “Neurons” #15

April 3, 2017

The Matrix Model Series #3

MEANING-MAKING

AND THE MATRIX MODEL

Within the systems model known as The Matrix Model, the grounding sub-matrix is the state matrix (the subject of Neurons #14).  If you ask, “Where does state come from?” the answer takes us to the most important of all of the sub-matrices, the meaning matrix.  It is here that you and I create meaning.  We create it— that is, invent it, construct it, call it into being— because apart from our brain and nervous systems (our neurology), meaning does not exist.

Strange as this seems, this fact is the dominating fact in human experience and one of the most shocking facts when people first heart it.  In fact, many people who tend to do concrete thinking will not, and perhaps even cannot, believe this.  They think there is such a thing as meaning.  They have lived in a world where people treat meaning as real and solid and factual, and so it seems stunningly ridiculous when they first hear a Neuro-Semanticist say, “There is no such thing as meaning.”  At first they cannot believe their ears.  “Of course, there is.”  “How can there be no meaning?  That’s stupid.  I know what things mean!”

Yet meaning does not exist outside of, or apart from, the human meaning-making capacity.  It does not exist externally as a self-contained thing or entity.  That’s why you’ve never walked down a sidewalk and stepped into a puddle of meaning.  You have never opened the refrigerator to find some left-over meanings.  Meaning is not that kind of thing.  In fact, it is not a thingat all.  It is a process of the mind— how you and I look at something.  It is the interpretation that we give to things, events, people, experiences, etc.

How do we do that?  Ah, now there’s a mystery if there ever was one!  We don’t know.  Read the 830 pages of Science and Sanity and let Alfred Korzybski share his knowledge about how you and I encounter the energy-manifestations of the world and then “abstract” from that to create what we call our “senses” (sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, etc.) of what exists “out there.”  Even the latest updates from the Neuro-Sciences does not explain how we construct our “sense of meaning” from the world.  Korzybski used the map–territory metaphor to describe it.  The co-founders of NLP used the word simulation— that we construct a simulation in our mind.  And phenomenologically, it does seem that we have in our “mind” (another mystery upon this mystery) a central processing place, a movie screen where we entertain pictures, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, etc.

Yet we do not.  It seems that way, but it is not that way.  Yet we use it and that is how we have consciousness of things.  It isas if we have a mental map or model in our minds that we use to navigate the events, objects, and happenings out there in the world.  So, without solving these mysteries, we begin working with the constructs that we invent.  These are our meaningssimply because this is what we “hold in mind” (the literal definition of meaning) and from these meanings we move through the world of things, objects, people, and activities.  Generally speaking, when we have a mental map that enables us to navigate work, relationships, wealth creation, leadership, friendship, and a thousand other objectives—if it works, gets us our outcomes—then we keep using it.  It it doesn’t, then we use the feedback of what did not work to keep updating our mental models until we construct one that works, at least for the present time.

In Neuro-Semantics, the Meaning matrix is central because by it we create all of the other sub-matrices within the Matrix.  This is also the realm of NLP.  Here we use the NLP Communication model to understand the first ways we construct meaning— via pictures, sounds, sensations, words, etc. to construct representational meaning. Here also we use the Meta-Model of Language to understand linguistic meaning.  We use the Meta-States model for understanding all of the meta-levels of meaning (beliefs, values, understandings, identity, permission, etc.) and we use the Meta-Programs model for understanding perceptual meaning.

A short and easy way to begin exploring meaning is to ask the four construct questions.  These enable us to figure out various aspects of meaning that someone presents to us (See Neurons #9).

What is it?                          Reference that you are selecting, linguistic meaning, name, identity.

How does it work?            Causation meaning, what causes what?  How does it function?

What is its significance?   Evaluative meaning, what value does it provide?

What is your intention?                 Intentional meaning, what is your purpose, agenda, or motive?

There are many, many more construct questions that you can ask, but these are fundamental as they show the beginning of a person’s construct of meaning.  That nothing inherently means anything, things can have dozens upon dozens of meanings.  And they do.  Open any dictionary and one of the amazing things about it is that the smaller and simpler the word, the more meanings it has accumulated over the years.  There’s a reason for that, words do not mean, people mean.  A word, as a symbol, is just that— a written set of letters or symbols or some sounds said in the air— it is the person writing or speaking the words that has some meaning to convey.  The person uses the symbol to try to convey his or her meaning.

Given that, now you can more fully appreciate the NLP Communication Guideline: “The meaning of your communication is not what you intend, it is the response you get.”  In other words, the meaning that the person hearing your words gives to the words.  That’s what your words mean to that person.  If you keep using the same words, you will create the same mis-communication.  If you want to get your meaning and understanding over to the other, use some different words.

Meaning, while seemingly simple, is actually a complex process.  That’s why there’s a whole discipline of training required to effectively communicate meaning, construct life-changing meanings for your life, reframe unresourceful meanings, etc.  That’s why the ability of a Meta-Coach or Trainer or Neuro-Semanticist to detect meaning and facilitate updating meanings is a special skill that requires study and practice.  That’s why we use the Matrix Model for all of this.

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