Traffic directions that work?
My mother-in-law picked me and my wife up from the funky new Eurostar train station the other day at St Pancras, in the heart of north London.
She got slightly lost, so my wife was on the phone giving directions. It was fascinating (and frustrating) to hear the directions.
In my world, what my wife should have been saying to her mum was that she needed to be coming back down the road she was going and should do a u-turn somewhere. What she was telling her to do was turn left then right or right then left. Wouldn’t that mean she’d be going parallel to the road she was on, still going in the same direction?
Anyway, that’s my world. In their world, they both knew exactly what she meant. I am often baffled, since learning NLP, about how any of us actually communicate in a way where the other person understand us.
Bring on the meta-model.
Tags: Language