Peta Heskell is known as The Original Flirt Coach and has been on just about every TV and radio show you can imagine. Her expertise is all things relationship and uses flirting as a powerful metaphor for effective communication whether that's with loved ones, friends or in the workplace. If there are relationships in your life that are holding you back (or making you eat) then Peta can help you…and make it fun...
"Sticks and Stones may hurt my bones but words will do no harm."
Balderdash!
Words are infinitely more powerful than sticks and stones. You can use words to hurt or you can use them to heal Words are neurotransmitters which generate very powerful reactions and sometimes long term affect in the people at whom they are directed. And when we learn to use words with exquisite intentionality our communication need never harm a person again, unless we choose to do so with deliberation and reason. And of course, we always have choice to do the right thing.
As an inveterate poster on lists of all sorts, I’ve become more and more aware of how people are driven to make meaning of meaning and to interpret and rephrase. My ‘favourites’ are ‘It seems to me that you’re saying’ or ‘What I think you mean to say is’. My answer is always ‘NO I meant to say what I meant to say and I may not have conveyed it clearly enough for everyone.
So let me begin by saying all that I am about to say is not a statement of ‘fact’ it’s just my take and you can choose to accept it or not.
Ours is a culture that tends to focus on what doesn’t work – the problem state. You’ve probably heard people ask occasionally ‘how come they rarely print ‘good news’.’ You probably have clients who come to you with ‘problems’ . I’d go as far to suggest that if you have a website or put out literature, you probably use as attractors the semantic definitions of what are labelled as ‘problems’
Words are neuro transmitters
People feel the system is off, and search for those word labels such as ‘depression’ ‘stress’ etc Now I get that this is a hard concept to take on board… and that some may comment that they’ve solved this problem by calling problems ‘opportunities’ or ‘challenges’… and that’s another discussion altogether..
But let us begin where we are... using these semantic labels to describe a state of being and how they affect others. How do most people respond to hearing news like ‘I lost my job’ or ‘my wife left me’? The semantically unenlightened tend to put out a hand and touch the other person on the shoulder or arm whilst furrowing their brows and say with emphasis on the word they’ve chosen to label this state.
‘Oh dear, you must feel so awful, so upset, devastated’. Just something to think about. And as I write this, I am reminded that I am not immune to reverting to habituated negative semantic patterns.
Yesterday a client came to see me for her last session of 3. She’s made remarkable progress and is open to adventure and ready to begin her life anew. so she was in a pretty future oriented positive state. She asked me how I was… and I slipped… and said that yesterday Id been quite stressed.
Whoa! This was a hand to mouth ‘um’ moment. AND, as soon as the word came out of my mouth I noticed the shift in her physiology and I stopped. Awareness is the first step to enlightenment! And as is my habit I turned it into a lesson.
I asked her... how did you just react to my use of that word? What happened in your body?
We’ve been doing a lot of somatic work in our sessions so she’s primed to answer questions like ‘how do you know’ by describing to me the specific physical sensations she’s getting instead of saying something like ‘I feel uncomfortable’
She told me that she’d felt her body tighten across the chest and throat, momentarily. Of course she did... just using that word sends her to her own somatically held concept of ‘stress’ and she has to experience it somatically before she can make meaning of it. And I explained to her how important it was to take care in choosing our words so that we generate more desirable states in people.
Respect their words
On another occasion I’d asked a group to stick up their hands if they absolutely loved their work. I asked one lady what it was she did. She said ‘I remove unwanted entities from people’s homes’. I responded ‘You’re a ghostbuster’ and I noticed immediately the shift in her body. Turning it into a lesson, I pointed out that she didn’t like my ‘rephrasing’ of her words and how it noticed in her body. I then repeated the words she’d used and she shifted back into the previous somatic posture as we continued to explore what worked in her life.
Semantic leading to potential
In the model I use with all my coaching clients - Joseph Riggio’s MythoSelf ® process - I strive to keep my language clean. One of the first stages of the process, after chatting to someone in order to get where they are and their patterns as well as the way their body forms as they speak, is to ask a specifically constructed question.
“What’s true of you when you are at your best, absolutely?”
The question is designed to be generalised and it is designed to make a person somatically access their sense of ‘at their best’. Someone once asked if you could add in or substitute phrases such as ‘what’s true of you when you’re confident, lucky’. NO! These words are far more specific than ‘at your best’. As hypnotherapists you’ll get that the vaguer the phrasing the more it allows the system to generate their own specific response.
I remember times from my NLP trainings where I was frequently asked to ‘Remember a time when I was ‘confused’ or ‘confident’. The question always contained specific state words to which most people attach specific meaning.
Now I’ve been on a lot of personal development trainings in the course of my search for myself... and there has been much that I’ve gained but one of the things I am and always have been confident of having is ‘confidence’. So, it was really confusing to me that I couldn’t come up with anything. And at that early stage in my development... it sent me into an inhibitory state.
I went on a transderivational search of my own experiences of confidence… and there were so many that they all seemed to float into one muddled mass I couldn’t clarify one. The search for the ‘memory’ blocked me from having the ‘experience’.
I sometimes use the words ‘when you’re in what some call ‘the zone’ and ‘when it is as if you couldn’t put a foot down wrong’. And I make sure to ask if this makes sense to them.
Now consider the use of this opening phrase…
“There have been times when…. you have… felt a sense of being at your best...and you know what that’s like”
I guarantee that when you ask this question 9/10 times there will be a positive response even if only for a second or two. Of course you’ll get that the question presupposes that there HAVE been times... the words don’t generate a search until they’ve generated a somatic reaction as they access the generalised sense of ‘bestness’... Having the sense of being at your best is much more encompassing than having to remember a specific time in relation to a semantically loaded word such as ‘confidence’.
The response that I’m looking for is not semantic but somatic. It might only be for a moment, before they return to their habitual way of holding themselves... But in that moment they are displaying in their body all the micro muscular movements, eye accessing locations and other somatic markers of how they generate their best state.
One of the first ‘formal’ questions I ask my clients is ‘What do you want’? And I’m not surprised in this problem focused world that most of them begin the verbalising with what they don’t want.
I never work with a client on what he or she doesn’t want or wants to get away from... I always ask them to flip it and focus on what works and what’s possible. That’s because every time they consider what they don’t want, like the client to whom I used the word ‘stress’ they access a negative somatic configuration, thereby ingraining it even deeper into the somatic structure of how they hold themselves in the world.
Labels are personal
One of the things we do in this work is to calibrate and play back to the client the structural form of their own bestness. This is done using words very carefully - not to label - but to cleanly and accurately describe the movements Each time they access it, they generate somatic shifts... and its always the same structure and sequence. Once they are able to ‘do’ that without words we ask them to come up with a label.
And I am explicit in telling them that whatever words comes up and feels right. There is never any attempt to suggest a word or to ask them what they mean by that word. Because their word has their own emotional loading and is perfect. And throughout the session I’ll refer to this way of being as ‘what you call ‘confidence’. I leave behind any meaning I might make for the word and accept that it’s their label. And that’s all it is. A semantic marker with which to regenerate this generalised desired way of being.
If in doubt, try it out.
Must I? - I don’t think so!
One of my favourite ‘word crimes’ are found in the category of ‘modal operators of necessity’. I remember an acquaintance once telling me about a restaurant she’d eaten in and she said – you must go, you’d love it. As a person who tends to respond in polarity, it generated a specific feeling in my body and it wasn’t too pleasant. I reacted badly to the ‘must’ word. How did she know I’d love it... what did she know of my food tastes. I remember doing an awareness sparking exercise where we were asked to consider specific activities using different modal operators.
- I must do my accounts
- I should do my accounts
- I want to do my accounts
- I can do my accounts
- I ought to do my accounts
When you consider each of those words and replace ‘accounts’ with something that’s coming up for you as one of those ‘washing the dishes’ tasks that we all do in the course of a day… notice specifically WHERE in your body the feelings are generated and HOW they are different and WHICH feels best.
It’s interesting that many of us use might be extra careful when using words with our clients, but may frequently use these words to ourselves without even realising what we’re setting up. Finding the word that has the best effect on you and training yourself to use it will make it much easier to complete.
It’s just data
Another word crime that we commit is the labelling of a person’s somatic shifts. A girl was sitting in the front row of one of my courses and I noticed that she was furrowing her brows and shifting in her seat and sighing I could have labelled it as boredom, confusion, annoyance but I didn’t. Instead I asked her ‘Mary are you OK?’ To which she responded ‘No, I’ve got a dreadful headache’.
In my courses I’m also teaching people to ask good questions and we practice with asking the ‘how are you at your best’ question. I then ask them to play back what they noticed. It’s not surprising that most of them, despite having seen a demonstration, will default to labels. They come out with phrases like ‘she looked excited’ he seemed pleased/smug/content/angry.
I encourage them to train themselves to pause when they notice stuff going on with someone else and say to themselves ‘it’s just data’. This stops them from immediately labelling something according to their habitual patterning.
So next time you are in conversation with someone you might want to notice how they react somatically to words you use and similarly you can begin to notice how you react in your body to specific words and modes of expression.
The more aware we become of what words work for us, the more respectful we’ll be of trampling on other people’s semantics. This is the first step on the road to linguistic enlightenment and the ability to use words for the greater good as deliberately loaded neuro-transmitters.