Recently, Cathay Pacific (I think!) opened a new route to Moscow and advertised “Fly to Moscow 3 times a week”. Do you REALLY want to fly to Moscow 3 times a week? Well, obviously not. When you read this sentence, your mind has to do some adjusting to get the real meaning: “Cathay Pacific has planes flying to Moscow 3 times a week”.

Now just check the internal effect that those 2 sentences have on you:
“Fly to Moscow 3 times a week”
“Cathay Pacific has planes flying to Moscow 3 times a week”.
Most readers will agree that the first one (as a command) bears more urgency, more weight, and feels more personal.

There is a law of language that is well known to anyone trained in marketing or advertising: the less clear the language, the more work the reader’s mind has to do in order to get the real meaning. What happens is, the reader has to do what we call a ‘transderivational search’, i.e. a search deep inside which produces trance. And anyone interested in language mastery probably ought to know about Milton Erickson. Read More→

Alfred Korzyb­ski in “Sci­ence and San­ity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. He used to train his students 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 deter­mines 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-boggling results! In coach­ing, con­scious use of lan­guage assist clients to expand their model of the world, and con­se­quently, solve their problems.

To learn more about how to use language: check out the next MasterMinds NLP Practitioner Course.