Archive for Language
Does Your Mother Tongue Shape Your Thinking?
Posted by: | CommentsWords are just ways to express what’s in our mind. Right? Well, maybe not quite so.
In a NY Times article titled “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”, Linguist Guy Deutscher contends that our mother tongue in fact, trains our brain to think a certain way, and even alters our perception of reality.
Take words gender for example. While English speakers can equivocally evoke meeting a ‘neighbour’ for lunch or dinner without mentioning their sex, French or German speakers do not have this flexibility. Whether they like it or not, they will have to reveal the sex of their dining companion.
It gets even more subtle when you consider that many European languages assign genders on words referring to inanimate objects. As a native French speaker who has spent the past 20 years in a Chinese & English speaking environment, I can relate to how language shapes our reality. After 20 years of using mostly English as my main language, I still can’t shake off the deep and unexplainable feeling that the water in my glass is feminine and my bed is masculine. And my Chinese or English speaking friends just cannot understand how my mobile phone and my unconscious mind (this is getting weird!) are masculine, but I viscerally know that they are.
Hypnotic Language Patterns
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve just posted an article on Ericksonian Hypnotic patterns on the MasterMinds NLP Tutorial public blog.
Click here (or copy and paste http://www.mastermindsnlptutorials.com in your browser).
The Effect of “To Be” in Daily Conversation
Posted by: | CommentsAlfred Korzybski in “Science and Sanity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of identification. He used to train people to avoid saying “I am”, asking them “Is this all you think you are?”.
Have you noticed when we are asked “who are you”, often, we say our name, and maybe mention our occupation/job title? Is this all we are? The verb TO BE can be limiting and reflects our beliefs about ourselves.
His work was based on the view that human beings are limited in their knowledge by the structure of their perceptions and their language. Unable to experience the world directly, they resort to “abstractions” (non-verbal perceived impressions and verbal indicators expressed through language). The structure of our perceptions and our language (which determine our understanding) sometimes misleads us as to what is going on, what we must deal with. We create an abstraction and this is the reality we deal with. He called for an increased awareness in each of us of that process of abstraction.
Interestingly enough, some 800 years before Korzybski, in India, Shankaracharya, the creator of the philosophy of non-duality Advaita Vedanta, mentioned the human process of “Adhyasa”, superimposition of meaning onto the unchanging reality through our senses, and its remedy, “Apavada” deconstruction of the operation of the senses.
Expanding the structure of our language and our perceptions, we can truly achieve mind-bloggling results!
Mind-Changing Courses.
Print This Post
Using Language To Change Minds
Posted by: | CommentsAlfred Korzybski in “Science and Sanity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of identification. He used to train people to avoid saying “I am”, asking them “Is this all you think you are?”.
Have you noticed when we are asked “who are you”, often, we say our name, and maybe mention our occupation/job title? Is this all we are? The verb TO BE can be limiting and reflects our beliefs about ourselves.
His work was based on the view that human beings are limited in their knowledge by the structure of their perceptions and their language. Unable to experience the world directly, they resort to “abstractions” (non-verbal perceived impressions and verbal indicators expressed through language). The structure of our perceptions and our language (which determine our understanding) sometimes misleads us as to what is going on, what we must deal with. We create an abstraction and this is the reality we deal with. He called for an increased awareness in each of us of that process of abstraction.
Interestingly enough, some 800 years before Korzybski, in India, Shankaracharya, the creator of the philosophy of non-duality Advaita Vedanta, mentioned the human process of “Adhyasa”, superimposition of meaning onto the unchanging reality through our senses, and its remedy, “Apavada” deconstruction of the operation of the senses.
Expanding the structure of our language and our perceptions, we can truly achieve mind-bloggling results! In coaching, conscious use of language assist clients to expand their model of the world, and consequently, solve their problems.
Click here to learn how.
Belief Change
Posted by: | CommentsBeliefs are prime examples of generalisations about ourselves AND the world, which act as a spring board to all our decisions. Beliefs are JUST IDEAS, there is nothing intrinsically TRUE about them.
One of the most powerful character of beliefs is that they often become self-fulfilling prophecies.
A common example of this is when a person firmly believes they’ve lost something, and sure enough, they can’t find it until someone points out that the lost object is right in front of them!
