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A goal is a personal objective. Something you want to achieve within a specific period of time. Successful people are goal-oriented. They know exactly what they want they are working toward the achievement of their goals every single day. They tend to accomplish far more than the average person in all aspects of life.
Milton Erickson used language very systematically in his work, often in unusual ways. These patterns were first described by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in their book, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson. M.D. Vol. I.
Understanding and using the Milton- Model with integrity is a prerequisite to effective communication and influence. The following examples and will help you to chunk this task down by practicing the distinct patterns to bring them into your unconscious competence.
Often the Milton-Model has been called the inverse of the Meta-Model Patterns. Think of a continuum moving from the language of specificity and information gathering, the Meta-Model, and moving to the opposite end of the continuum with the ability to influence and be artfully vague with the Milton-Model.
Being artfully vague allows a communicator to make statements that sound specific and yet are general enough to be an adequate pace for the listener’s experience. Using the Meta-Model recovers specific information that is deleted in any sentence; the Milton-Model provides ways of constructing sentences in which specific information is deleted. This requires the listener to fill in the deletions from their own unique internal experience.
Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It’s a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s to come. The first day of school, going to a job interview, or giving a speech may cause most people to feel fearful and nervous. If your feelings of anxiety are extreme, last for longer than six months, and are interfering with your life, you may have an anxiety disorder.
Becoming an expert communicator requires precise information gathering and linguistic skills. Learning distinctions of language and how to create clarity will prevent, or at least lesson, the slippage of meaning that occurs with assumptions and over-generalizations.
Having knowledge of the Meta-Model language skills in this chapter, combined with the awareness of non-verbal communication learned in earlier chapters, will give you the awareness to be a good pattern detector and to more effectively get your point across. Another benefit is that when others are being vague, you will be able to ask just enough questions to bring specificity to the conversation or written document.
We often hear the phrase “use it or lose it” in reference to brain fitness. With the growing awareness of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, there is a greater concern for maintaining brain function and avoiding disease.
Brain Fitness is the state of brain health and mental well-being that makes you “fit” for life and work demands. It’s a fundamental measure of the brain’s ability to function efficiently and effectively during work and leisure activities, to be healthy, to resist disease.
Brain fitness can be protected and nurtured by lifestyle, by formal education, by being actively mentally engaged in life, and by targeted practices designed to challenge important mental skills.
Healthy lifestyle habits including mental stimulation, physical exercise, good nutrition, stress management, and sleep can improve brain fitness. On the other hand, chronic stress, anxiety, depression, aging, decreasing estrogen, excess oxytocin, and prolonged cortisol can decrease brain fitness as well as general health.
For many people, being aware of their internal images and voices is a simple matter of fact. For others, this skill is not so readily in their awareness. Being able to create a rapport with the unconscious mind to allow an awareness of inner thoughts is crucial for healing limitations from the past. We have identified several reasons for a person not having conscious access to their internal world:
Hyper-vigilance for safety.
Previous emotional trauma.
Not even knowing to “look for it.”
Habit or other familial patterning.
Not using both hemispheres of the brain in balance.
When we understand the cognitive functioning of each hemisphere we can be more purposeful about how we process information – when a challenge is more of a right brain issue, or when the left hemisphere’s style of thinking will give the best results.
The purpose of future pacing or attaching new learning to events in the future is to give us an opportunity to move forward into new adventures easily and with a deep sense of centeredness. A tangible example would be a dress rehearsal for an event, like a wedding or performance, so that the event will be well-practiced and familiar when it actually occurs. Mental future pacing is done in the imagination with visual imagery predicting success.
Anchors are the triggers or cues that create the meaning and/or response we give to circumstances and events. An anchor can be established in any of the modalities. Our purpose in this course for studying this phenomenon is to:
An anchor can elicit either a resourceful response that is appropriate for the situation, or it can elicit an unresourceful response, often out of the person’s awareness or control and at the extreme becomes a phobic reaction.
Anchors are the super glue that stick experiences together – behavioral habits and routines, sleep postures, that special “our song,” smells, even words are just anchors for certain ways of thinking based on our history and experiences.
In calibrating for distinctions we are going to be using our sensory skills to notice the details and information being presented. As we gather this information it is important to pay attention to sensory-based descriptions. This will keep us from “mind-reading” or “hallucinating” or interpreting through emotional responses and assumptions.
Sensory-based information is describing what is actually existing behaviorally and environmentally, rather than the generalities of emotion.
For example: “She must be really mad at me!” would become, “I haven’t received a phone call for three days from her and I wonder what has happened.” Or, “I just know she’s mad at me.” becomes “The look on her face has a furrowed brow, piercing eyes and clenched teeth, and her breathing is shallow and rapid.” And, she could be mad at someone else!
The benefit of becoming more and more sensory aware is that we notice finer distinctions of information and we let go of assumptions and mind-reading that could lead us to delete, distort or generalize important information.