Destroying Generalizations
The thing I love about NLP is the pure linguistics. I still remember leaving my first NLP Practioner course feeling like Neo from The Matrix. Suddenly I could hear what was actually being said behind what was being said.
Of course, that’s a bit of a mind-read on my part as I imposed my meaning on someone else’s language. I digress.
One area of playing with words that often makes me question what I say is generalizations and I have gotten better at using them less, and recognizing when I am using them. And, I love it when I can help someone else with the same ‘word blindness’.
A friend of mine suffers(ed) from Panic Attacks. I spent a couple of hours with her once chatting about it and we made some headway in sorting the problem. I don’t ‘practice’ NLP with people often and after about an hour I realized that any patterns weren’t being taken on board, which is a sign perhaps of my own inflexibility? But, I remember challenging every generalization to her frustration.
So, I saw her yesterday for the first time in a couple of months and she hasn’t had one now for a while and she mentioned about generalizations (not in those words). She said that one thing had stuck in her head about how many days per year she had them compared to how many days she hadn’t and it completely flipped her problem on it’s head.
She went on to say that it made her realize that she was almost expecting them before our chat and it had dawned on her over time the infrequent nature of with which they occurred.
By switching her focus away from when she was expecting them to the fact that they rarely happened has allowed her ignore her original expectation that one was on it’s way.
I had a similar conversation with a family member last week but I am still working on it. So far, they simply don’t notice their own generalizations. But, I am having great fun pointing every single one out and she hasn’t hit me yet!
Tags: Language