It has been some of the diaries written by Chriscol that inspired my sharing of what I understand of NLP.  There is an area in our brain stem called the Reticular Activating System, and though it remains still a bit mysterious we are beginning to understand it and the role it plays in our personal motivation.  What I learned in that NLP class about the RAS and the diaries that Chriscol has written about on how to avoid that “stupid” fight with Republicans over their weekly xeroxed talking points lines up very well. I began to revisit my old NLP class from reading those diaries and practicing what was discussed.
I learned in that class to be very careful with my use of the word try because try isn’t an action word that works well in meeting our goals.  Try gets us stuck.  I didn’t believe it at first until the teacher said, “Fine, then try to stand up Tracy but only TRY TO.”  I did and found that completing the task wasn’t the message I sent to my brain and I stood halfway up and sat down.  We believe that it is the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that takes words in and processes them into motivation and try isn’t motivating.  It is better to say that I can’t or won’t or couldn’t and just handle the flack, it doesn’t seem to strip us of so much personal power.

Another thing that we are pretty sure of is that the RAS doesn’t understand negatives.  It only seems to process in one direction.  At the time of this class I was having problems with my daughter always spilling her beverages all over the place, everyday….sometimes twice…..it seemed like the more we talked about it the more often it happened and it was driving me crazy.  According to the teacher I needed to approach the subject completely differently.  I was telling her what I didn’t want her to do and I would say “Don’t spill your milk” and “Don’t take your juice into the living room” and I had spilled milk everywhere and juice all over the living room.  Apparently most people visualize internally an action before they undertake it.  When I told my daughter, “Don’t take your juice into the living room” her brain visualized taking the juice into the room but the RAS does not have a circle with a slash through it that it throws over the top of the visualization, it doesn’t process negatives very well at all.  I was told to reframe and get rid of the words don’t and not since they really confuse the RAS and little kids spill the milk and take the juice into the living room.  I started telling her to keep her milk glass upright and keep all glasses in the kitchen on the table and I only had two more spills before all spills stopped.

Being emotionally defensive toward the constant attacks works against us and countering with “I am not” and “I don’t” to their flung around talking points and character assassinations gets stuck in the RAS of the public because they visualize the action we claim to not have done and it just hangs in the air going no place after that.  How many people roll on the floor laughing whenever someone mimics Nixon well saying, “I am not a crook!”?  We all got a visual of him as a crook.  George Bush is a much bigger crook than Tricky Dick ever was but he doesn’t throw around don’t and not very often.  Sometimes I swear the guy is as dumb as a sack of hammers but somehow he carefully picks his way around any words that leave any negative impressions personally placed by him in the public RAS.

So defending ourselves often makes us look exactly as wingnuts want us to look.  We get defensive and we use don’t and not and we appear lost and weak.  It can sometimes be challenging to find different ways to say the same thing we want to say without using don’t and not but I have gotten very good at it these days…….it just works too well to ignore how stressless things can become when big people and little people really hear what I do want instead of what I don’t want.  In both cases all they really hear is I want and that’s what I get.

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