Linguisitics

Language Determines the World We Experience

Language or Linguistics is the "L" in NLP. Language is the keyhole through which NLP work is done.

Heidegger said "Language is the House of Being". Certainly, language is a HUGE part of what it means to be human. It is what allows us to encode experience in a way that it can be played back to ourselves as internal dialog, and also shared with others, in both speaking and writing.

Robert Kiyosaki says the way to attract wealth is to start by increasing one's vocabulary for wealth. Without the words to describe wealth, it is impossible to experience it.

Additionally, there are examples of cultures whose language determines the richness of experiences. The Eskimo language has 14 words for snow, which each encode a rich set of attributes and behaviors and conditions into each word. English, in contrast has one word for it.

In Sanskrit, there are more than 10 words for love. In English we use the word love very loosely, applying it to people, possessions and experiences alike. In Spanish, the word for love is reserved for the most intimate relationships.

Language As a Representational System

In NLP, language is a representational system, and like the other representational systems in our internal maps, it is not the territory. Language can describe a person, place, thing, event, process, feeling, sight or sound, but it is none of those things. Language is like the finger pointing at the moon, but it is not the moon.

Language exists because we are equipped both to encode our experiences in language (a sequence of sounds), and decode those sounds as a new experience. The encoding of speech is controlled by a small area in the left frontal lobe (for most right-handed people) called Broca's Area, and the decoding of speech is controlled by a small area in the left temporal lobe (again, for most right-handed people) called Wernicke's Area. We know this due to observations of brain activity, and the loss of these abilities when damage to these areas occurs.

So wired are we to learn language, that we pick it up effortlessly as young children. So sensitive are we to language that we can separate out sounds from a vast variety of other sounds in our environment. So integrated are the speech centers in our neurology, that that every word we hear sets in motion a chain reaction in other areas of our brain involving emotions, pictures, memories, etc. Especially powerful words are those phased as questions. When we hear a question, we can't not try to answer it internally.

Why Language in NLP?

Because language is a shared phenomenon, we use language to "commun-icate" between people. Language helps us convey the rich but invisible and inaudible world of our subjective experiences to others, at risk that they may either understand our subjective world... or not... and so language is a risky proposition. When we communicate, we commune with others. When we miscommunicate or fail to communicate, we risk some degree of ostracism.

NLP practitioners use language to explore subjective experience, such as when using meta-model language patterns, whose focus is on precision of understanding. NLP also uses language to change subjective experience, such as when using persuasive, hypnotic or milton-model language patterns. Note that whether chunking down, up or sideways in NLP work, it is the subjective experience of the person that we are communicating with. We cannot communicate with empical facts, but we can communicate with people about emperical facts, and thereby not change the facts themselves, but the aboutness of those facts.

NLP practitioners use language to change people by intentionally changing their subjective experiences in ways that establish and support positive outcomes. Language is the key toolset for the NLP practitioner to do this. With language, skilled NLP the practitioner can lead a journey into the past, change the qualities of that subjective past, install resourceful thinking into that past in a way that it ie re-experienced in a new way, resulting in a re-imprinted or changed subjective person. With language, the skilled NLP practitioner can create a more focused or diffused outlook on present circumstances in order to help the subjective experience sort for opportunities, forgiveness, elimination of pain, beauty or any other quality of present moment experience that would normally escape the notice of someone. With language, a skilled NLP practitioner can lead a journey into the future, where clear and ecological outcomes are established and fixed to a certain future date and circumstance, such that the steps towards that outcome are inspired by its inevitable attainment.