Read through the following argument (It may seem familiar :-) and try to see where the source of our couples problem is…
A: “Where the hell have you been?”
B: “I was at the office working late! Ughh, not this again…”
A: “I have been waiting here for over an hour!”
B: “Well I had an opportunity to bring in another client, but I had to act right then…”
A: “Work always comes first! I want someone who places our relationship first.”
B: “I’m sorry; I don’t want to hurt you… I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
A: “The ‘right thing’ is to take care of me and love me, I’m sick of feeling so alone.”
B: “I am taking care of you and loving you, didn’t you hear me say I brought in another client…?”
A: “I need someone who puts their relationship first! Someone who invests in it to make it work.”
B: “I am! Do you think I am in the office at 8:00 at night because it is FUN! I am busting my ass for this…”
A: “Your not… I’m leaving…”
B: “Fine, go…”
And so the story goes… This is a classic argument that has gone on through out the ages. There are a variety of ways to look at this. He doesn’t care about her, only his work… She doesn’t get the big picture… He should have called…
The fundamental issue at play here and in a large portion of arguments in general is that they are AGREEING with each other at a categorical level but are THINKING and COMMUNICATING on incongruent levels of ABSTRACTION.
So what the heck does that mean? Ok, let’s break this down into understandable chunks. Since this is a two part blog, today we will look at categories and tomorrow we will address levels of abstraction and to see what we can do to remedy the argument that took place above.
So let’s start with categories… when I say “categorical”, what I am referring to above is the term “relationships”. A communication category is any broad genre of subject matter that is driving the communication.
It is important to realize that communication is fluid, dynamic, unpredictable and difficult to control. As such, there are no rigid categories. But never the less, it is necessary to speaking about the same subject matter in order for communication to be effective. Although this may sound intuitive, and it is, there are still many instances where two people THINK they are talking about the same subject but really aren’t.
When two men are discussing the football game, the category is most likely sports. When two women are discussing their pig of a boss, the category may be respect in the work place. Our minds function in a way that allows us to take in the subject matter that someone else is communicating about and automatically/nonconsciously select a category for the communication. Often times it is correct, other times it is not… It is indeed our responsibility to be certain if there is any doubt.
Above, it becomes pretty clear that “relationship” is the category of subject matter that the couple will be communicating about. In other communication it may be values, or business or leisure or family, etc… There are no “set” categories, just basic “warehouse units” for subject matter.
For our couple above, communicating within the same category was NOT the issue though. That was the easy part… where the real difficulty comes into play that plagues most argument is when you start to look at the level of abstraction that someone is communicating at.
Tomorrow we will delve deeper into understanding abstraction levels in communication and how to use this to make you an effective communicator. As always, please visit my website The Communication Expert to learn more…
Although we will resume with our Quantum Linguistics lessons tomorrow, I think it is important to place some parameters, or boundary conditions if you will around what it means exactly to be an effective communicator. I am hoping to provide some context by which you can relate the information I am giving you in effort to help you better understand it.
Effective Communication is a bit of an elusive term. The web’s Wiki definition is “a reciprocal sharing of information and ideas of written, oral and non-verbal information according to a common set of rules”. Now although this seems to be a realistic and possibly effective definition, I contend that it is a wee bit idealistic and idealism in my book is not a useful attribute. Having faith in your communication partner’s ability or inclination to use Effective Communication may set you up for a fall.
My own contention is that Effective Communication is the appropriate usage of both verbal and non verbal techniques, styles, strategies and methods to achieve what ever goal the effective communicator is set on accomplishing.
Now, I realize that is a bit of a mouthful… but Effective Communication is a large and multifaceted subject. Getting your arms around it is quite a task and as such requires much understanding.
Key point. Effective Communication is not a digital commodity… In other words, this is not black and white. It is on a continuum that ranges from the complete and utter lack of ability to communicate right up to the ability to at any moment combine body language/physiology, facial gesturing, language, directionality, tonality and a host of other attributes to “control” someone's response to your Effective Communication.
As a result, this is a skill that can be worked on daily and each little “tool” can be implemented almost immediately. It doesn’t take years to magically one day become a “effective communicator”. The degree of effectiveness will only vary depending on time and effort put forth.
Categorically, it is fair to say that among others there are 11 major areas to Effective Communication that one would need to be accomplished in to be considered an Expert Communicator. They are in no particular order of importance:
- Language of specificity. This is the ability to articulate, with laser accuracy the exact point or subject of your Effective Communication . In order to do so, you need to understand the various blind spots in language and how our brains work in order to produce these blind spots.
- Hypnotic Language. This is the ability to speak in a way that works directly with the rules by which our brains process information so as to be as influential in our communications as we find necessary.
- Directionalizing. This is the ability to draw your recipient’s mind in certain directions to change mood, dictate what information is being evaluated and lead your Effective Communication .
- Cognitive Belief Systems. This the ability to uncover and understand your recipient’s “rules” through which they dictate their own behavior.
- Meta Programs. These are an individual’s personal tendencies to behave in a predictable fashion in certain categorically defined circumstances.
- Quantum linguistics. This is the system of understanding the processes and subject matter that surrounds your communication partners own communication and the rules that hold their construct of “reality” together.
- Evolutionary Psychology. These are the neurological rules that drive most human behavior at the foundational level.
- Persuasion/Social Psychology. These are the resulting predictable behavioral tendencies that result from both evolutionary psychology and culturally directed development.
- Questioning Styles. The ability to utilize specific questioning models in a fashion that facilitates the accomplishment of your goal.
- Listening Styles. There are various styles of listening and each can and does play it’s own part in the outcome of any Effective Communication .
- Non Verbal Communication. The ability to utilize movement, physiology, positioning, limb and facial gesturing to move you closer to achieving your communication goal.
A Communication Expert is someone who has made it their life’s journey to study and utilize all of these systems in an effective manner. That being said, anyone can begin by studying one system and little by little add small pieces into their own repertoire.
As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…” Even the smallest component that can take seconds to learn from anyone of the systems above will help you in any and all facets of your life. Please feel free to peruse my site or visit my Blog The Communication Expert to learn more about Effective Communication .
During any effective communication, a communication expert will seek to understand, fully and multi-dimensionally what their communication partner is saying. When I use the term multi-dimensional, this simply means that there are many different directions by which to evaluate subject matter.
In referencing yesterday’s blog, we talked about seeking out boundary conditions when communicating with someone. In fully understanding the boundary conditions of the subject matter in a person’s communication, you will come closer and closer to objectively understanding them.
In Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), one of the core communication questioning models for defining these boundary conditions is the usage of Cartesian logic derived from geometry. I know it seems a bit space aged, but stick with me…
The coordinates are represented by the following:
A B = Theorem
A -B = Inverse
-A B = Converse is
-A -B = Non mirror image reverse
So how the heck does this apply to linguistics and communication? Let look at it in a literal sense then we can apply it to a real world example… This is ESPECIALLY helpful in a decision making strategy.
Let’s use the term “Kevin Hogan teaches”. From a Cartesian perspective, the literal boundary conditions for a communication are sought out by the 4 coordinates.
- The theorem is A(Kevin Hogan) B(teaches)
- The inverse is A(Kevin Hogan) –B(Not teaches [doesn’t teach])
- The converse is –A(Not Kevin Hogan[anyone other than Kevin]) B(teaches)
- The non mirror image reverse is –A(Not Kevin Hogan[anyone other than Kevin]) –B(Not teaches [doesn’t teach])
Whew! Ok, and you thought you were done with this stuff in high school. We are going to get to a real world communication example where you can apply this today in a moment but let me point out the beauty of this first. What you see above is an extremely thorough and eye open view of the subject of Kevin Hogan teaching. By looking at each coordinate separately you can see/uncover so much viable, pertinent and directly linked information pertaining to your subject. In a decision making process, this is essential to prevent your blind spots… On to reality…
Let’s say you are in a situation where you are attempting to sell something… This could be a product or even trying to get your teenager to take out the garbage. The “client” we will call them is really on the fence as to what they should do… Cognitive dissonance is a very difficult enemy in the decision making process and will generally (understatement of the year) push someone toward the path of least resistance. So let’s help them apply some logic to this… The follow questioning model is derived from the Cartesian Coordinates:
- The theorem is A(I will) B(take out the trash)
- The inverse is A –B or “What will happen if you DON’T take out the trash?
- The converse is –A B or “What WON’T happen if you take out the trash?”
- The non mirror image reverse is –A –B or “What WON’T happen if you DON’T take out the trash?”
When the “problem” or subject of the communication is assessed in this way, this leaves little fodder for cognitive dissonance to grab a hold of. Although this is not tackling the emotional aspect of a problem, it can be a powerful tool in your communication arsenal… The result is a thorough and much more objective evaluation bringing you one step closer to being a communication expert. As always, please visit Communication Expert to learn more.
The term Quantum Linguistics, although sounding rather
menacing simply is referring to the multi-dimensional aspect of our thought
process and how that multi-dimensionality is represented with language. Well,
maybe I shouldn’t have used the term “simply” as this can be a rather
complicated topic.
The concept of quantum linguistics has its roots in the therapeutic realm of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). At the core of this concept sits the reality that for something to “exist” or be present, everything that surrounds “it” must NOT be “it”. OK, I know that is a mouthful so let me give you an example… and bear with me as you’ll see the usefulness of this shortly…
Look around your room for a second and find a lamp, or a TV or a chair. Now ponder for a minute that for this “object” to be a “TV” or a “lamp” or a “chair”, everything else around it must NOT be the “TV” or “lamp” or “chair”. Now, I know what you’re thinking… “What if there is another TV in the room?” Well, that is then TV2, it cannot be TV1… Surrounding TV1 is air, light, moisture, walls, a floor, etc… but no other TV1.
What surrounds the TV, where the plastic and electronics meet… well, air… these are “BOUNDARY CONDITIONS’ and these boundary conditions DEFINE what the object is. The utility of this for therapeutic purposes is simple. By defining the problem or issue boundaries you will have defined the area to begin working on to remedy the problem or issue. For instance, in order for a circumstance to be depressing, the circumstances that surround it must NOT be depressing… So while your divorce is depressing, spending time with your children and working out and success at work are NOT depressing. These boundaries are amazingly important… actually vital to determining where to begin with the therapy.
Now let’s extrapolate this out into every day life. Imagine you’re a sales person and your client has a “problem”… they aren’t buying your product J Them walking away is NOT buying your product, them thinking about it is NOT buying your product, them taking other phone calls is NOT buying your product. As you can see, these are boundary conditions that are setting up to define the “problem” which is “NOT buying your product”.
Although those are some boundary conditions, they are so obtuse that they are all but worthless with respect to helping you find the micro thin, laser specific boundary conditions that will allow you to actually start to solve your problem.
HOW do you find these boundaries? That is the $100,000 question and we are going to cover the specifics of this tomorrow as we dig into the actual MATHEMATICS of the questioning model. Stay tuned…
To learn more about effective communication, please visit my website.
In some of my past posts, I talked about the process through which our mind directs our attention and how it processes, stores and re-presents information. An inherent and inextricable result of this process is that our beliefs and as a result our perspectives on situations are directed by this process. In other words, when you are communicating about something, your communication will only ever represent your filtered perspective without conscious intervention from yourself or someone else.
So what the heck does this mean? Let me give you a metaphor… Let’s say you are communicating to a friend about your relationships and let’s visualize the subject of “relationships” as a house you are living in. As your talking to your friend, you are giving them information about the room you live in inside of this house… From where you are living, this is really all that you know about this house. Your so comfortable in your room that you have literally never explored any other areas… If you think about it for a second, it is actually kind of scary going outside of your room.
Your recipient can understand clearly, at least within reason what you are talking about and can fairly quickly envision the room and all of it’s intricacies… Well let’s take this one step further and say that you have a major problem with this house. Most times when you have a friend come stay with you, they walk away angry and never return again… You have lost countless relationships here and are just about ready to give the house up… From you where your sitting the house looks great! Why would they want to leave?
Now your friend happens to have a great advantage here… They are actually living outside of the house and can see all of it’s attributes. They can see the front door, the side garage, the lawn and pool in the back, the roof… They have come inside to visit you and on their way to your room they have seen the kitchen and the basement and all of the other rooms. They happen to know that on the way into the house through the rear entrance there is a big broken step and they themselves have been hurt by it at times… Not so badly that they didn’t come back though. But, they can see where this may be the problem.
Now you have no idea it is there… how would you? Your stuck in this room and have never seen the back entrance… So the question that comes to bear is, how does your friend get you to “see” that back entrance? This my friends is where the unbelievable power of directional language comes into play.
Directional language, or quantum linguistics is the process of directing someone's attentional processes through the usage of different questioning and language patterns. Moving forward we will be discussing some of the quantum linguistic patterns more in depth.
To learn more, please visit my website.
Hi All,
I just want to check in and let you know that I am swamped with putting up mini sites, creating headlines and my above the folds.... Please forgive me for tonights sabbatical from blogging. I will resume with my normal content tomorrow...
You’re standing there looking out over the ledge… The sun is really bright and all of your friends are there. It is a pretty long ways down; it has to be more than ten feet! The water looks deep and it sure is murky, actually it is mesmerizing in an undulating kind of way. You lost the bet with some new comer to your group and here you are... You almost decide not to do it and as you turn away from the water your betting “buddy” yells out “go ahead, people do it all of the time…” Ok… you jump!
As the pain rips through your leg like a chainsaw you instantly regret your decision. Why the hell would you decide to do this? Well there are a number of psychological mechanisms that brought you to the edge of the water… social recognition, loyalty, need for achievement, etc… But what tipped you over that edge of indecision? The final nail in the coffin is what is known as a Lack of Referential Index statement.
In referencing yesterday’s blog, another little flaw in our mental filing system will at times put us in a lurch unless we keep an eye on it. A Lack of Referential Index statement is one in which the actual subject of the statement has been removed altogether or has been replaced with a general label. In the instance above the statement “people do it all of the time” lacks an actual reference. People can be any number of “persons” with an infinitely varying degree of credibility and authority.
Some examples of Lack of Referential statements are:
“They said it was ok to do.”
“People are never going to go for that.”
“A person could really get into trouble doing that.”
“A husband really needs to take out the trash.”
“We have to get out of here…”
Our minds, in their constant search for cause/effect, predictability and pattern are automatically set up in a way where we instantly register such statements as fulfilling our own threshold for credibility and authority. Let’s reference the example above… Your friend said “people do it all of the time” and “people” is his head represents Larry the town drunk who jumped in last summer and broke his arm before being pulled out of the water and the local skateboard crew who have been at it for years. “People” in your head represents the group of friends behind you that you have known and trusted for years.
In following Grice’s 4 Maxims you non-consciously expected your “buddy” to adhere to your inherent threshold for credibility (Maxim of Relevance). Larry the town drunk and the skateboard crew are not credible enough for the jumper, but are quite credible for the viewer. Unfortunately his threshold for credibility didn’t match yours and had you recognized this up front you may have been able to avoid your broken leg…
So how do you handle this? How do you prevent yourself from becoming a victim of the Lack of Referential index statements? Please visit my website to learn more…
David J. Parnell | Communication Expert
Our minds, among other things, have an unparalleled filing system... We are
able to take massive amounts of information and store it away for a rainy day.
The mechanism that our mind uses primarily to do so is language. Language is an
amazing thing... With language we are able to take something completely
abstract, such as a picture or a view or a sensation and re-represent this
inside of someone else's mind. On top of all of that, we do it with amazing
efficiency... We are able to take something as abstract and dynamic as a sunset
and re-present this to someone else simply by saying "sunrise"... How
cool is that?
Now, for all of the incredible benefits of this, it still has it's short comings. The almost frightening reality of the matter is that whenever we hear the word "sunrise", inside of every one of use is a completely unique concept of what a sunrise means. For one person it may be a peachy orange glow cresting over the top of a treeless mountain capped with snow. For another it may simply be the light hearted feeling of anticipation that they felt while watching a sunrise with a fated lover... More often than not, it is sufficient to use the term "sunrise" during your communication. It is only when it's accurate representation is necessary to convey a message that we may run into problems.
The term "sunrise" is an illustration of our second categories of deletions and is called a Nominalization. When a process becomes Nominalize it is basically turned into a noun, or a thing. In other words, you are taking an action or a process and turning it into a "thing". Some examples of Nominalizations are relationship, love and emotion along with the term sunrise. The classic test in neuro-semantics is to ask yourself the question of whether or not it (your process term) can be put in a wheelbarrow. If it can, then chances are that it is simply a noun and as a result if considerably more concrete in it's own representation. If it cannot, then you likely have a Nominalization.
Nominalizations notoriously leave out a ton of information when they are use in communication and as a result can cause havoc. Let's reference an example... A familiar Nominalization that causes a ton of problems is "relationship". Couples and spouses alike are in a "relationship". Both participants realize this, but major issues can and usually do come into play when individual definitions of a "relationship" clash or miss each other all together. For person A being in a relationship might mean that they will simply no longer sleep with someone else. For person B it may mean that they will give up their entire life to make the other person happy. I think you can see where we might run into issues in the future… Unless the specific underlying beliefs and expectations about what “relationship” means to each person, they are headed for disaster…
To learn more about Nominalizations and other components of communication, please visit my website.
“I never worry about action, but only about inaction”
Winston Churchill
What did Winston mean exactly? Did he mean defending your self, or making money, or developing relationships maybe? When you hear the word action, what comes to your mind first? It may be any number of things and in staying true to human form it most likely is…
To reference yesterdays VLOG, during communication people will generally meet (just barely) their own threshold of acceptability for Paul Grice’s 4 Maxims. As you will remember, there is the Maxim of Quality, Quantity, Manner and Relation. In staying true to the least energy principle, in communication they will relay just enough information to satisfy these… The communication problems can arise when their subconscious threshold for meeting these 4 Maxims differs from the recipient’s threshold.
Although Winston’s quote is extremely moving… Its functionality may be suspect in every day language. This is due to the blatant usage of Unspecified Verbs. These are process words that are missing a complete description. In other words they are verbs that are, to a greater or lesser degree, unspecified. They may also omit the actual verb, or the object of the verb, or both.
Examples of unspecified verbs are running, touching, hurting, moving and communicating. These verbs can mean any one of a number of different things depending on the situation and what the communicator has in mind. Allow me to illustrate:
Imagine you’re at work and your boss calls you into their office… Word came down from corporate and they want your division to pick up sales and your boss wants you to take care of this… In the meeting the boss’s communication is to “work harder so that your division can make corporate happy…” In an effort to get out of your boss’s office as quickly as possible you agree to “work harder” and shuffle along.
Well three weeks go by and your called to the principles… or I mean boss’s office again to discuss you progress. Upon presenting your numbers you are quickly chided as you haven’t done even half of what you were “supposed to do”. You walk out of the office bewildered and unsure of what to do next…
If you haven’t picked it up yet, the outrageously unspecified verb is “work” in the authorities communication. The verb work is amazingly broad and can mean anything form organizing to time management to specific activity and so on. As a result, you did indeed “work” harder. You stayed later and focused more… What they boss was thinking was that he wanted you to organize some teams so that you could delegate work to them. This may be a bit extreme, but understanding that there is a spectrum from completely unspecified to completely specified will show you that anything can be miscommunicated if we don’t pay attention.
To learn more, please visit my website…
I will now be moving forward in my series on language of specificity and talking about verbal deletions in communication. In order to do so I want to give a little bit of back ground about how these deletions in communication can arise. I've posted a video to have more of a conversational tone... as much as that is possible for me :-) I talk about the Paul Grice's 4 Maxim's of Conversation and how they interact with the least energy principle to produce gaps in conversation and communication...
David J.
Parnell | Evolved Communication
