A lazy person who doesn't do anything useful is called "good-for-nothing". But, Dr. Michael Hall says...
You have power. You have four fundamental powers and from those four powers, all of your other powers, energies, skills, competencies, and expertise arise. As I’ve described these powers in the previous articles (#1-3), the point is singular: If you want to be empowered, claim and develop your innate powers. If you want to act like a victim, feel that “the world” is against you, that you have no choice, that you can’t determine your own life, then reject your powers, ignore them, discount them, rail against them, and set limiting beliefs in your mind about them.
Your powers enable you to have authority. I’m here talking about real authority. That is, your four powers enable you to author your life— to write the script of what you think, believe, understand, desire, hope for, speak, and act. And when you think of yourself as the author of your life, you author your values, direction, style, relationships, etc. This is yourreal authority. Without this, all of the external “authority” in the world will not give you a sense of personal confidence, efficacy, or power. And with this authority, nothing in the external world can rob you of your personal power.
Look at some of the world-changers. Look at Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela— how much external power did they have? Long before anyone recognized their leadership and long before they had any status or position, they had plenty of personal authority and power and energy. They knew who they were, what they were about, their values, vision, and direction. Long before recognition, they were actualizingtheir highest meanings and best performances. The energy of their power and authority was inside-out power.
This highlights my next point: Power is embodied in the energy of your speech and behavior. How is power transferred from the inside to the outside? How is the energies of your innate powers transformed so that it makes a difference in the external world? Answer: Through your body as you speak and act. That’s why performance is so important (and why I wrote, Achieving Peak Performance, 2009).
Now in Neuro-Semantic NLP we often speak about this. When we use our systemic model, The Matrix Model,we say things like, “With this model you can now follow the energy of your client through his or her system.” This is not a fluffy concept of psycho-babble so characteristic by people enchanted by various new age myths about “energy.” Instead, it is a description of the two communication loops that define the processes of empowerment. Here’s a review of those communication loops:
1) The horizontal loop is the traditional behavioristic loop ofstimulus—response. A stimuli occurs in the world that triggers a response from you. He curses at you, you respond by cursing back. She rolls her eyes while you talk, you consider her to be rude and inconsiderate. The “feedback” of these triggers into your mind-body system is followed as you respond and “feed-forward” your response back into the world. Stimulus—> Response.
2) The vertical loop is the cognitive and meta-cognitive self-reflexivity loop of stimulus —response. Now you are stimulating yourself with thoughts-and-emotions about the first level stimulus, you are thinking about it, you are feeling about it, you are meta-stating it with other states, other frames, other beliefs. You are feeding-back to yourself the next layer of thoughts-and-emotionsabout the first level and this can occur again and again. It can occur so that you create many layers of meta-states or meta-frames about the previous ones. This is your self-reflexive consciousness at work! And while you are doing this, you are also “feeding-forward” into yourself (into your body) orders / commands about how to feel, how to act, how to respond. This creates your feelings—your states. And this explains the responses that are created in your body which are sent out to the world in the horizontal loop. (I’ve written a lot more about these loops last year in Neuro-Semantics, 2011, and Benchmarking Intangibles, 2011).
So, to follow the energy through the human mind-body-emotion system — you follow the information into the system and through the system as it is processed, and then out of the system as the person responds linguistically and behaviorally.
Using The Matrix Model provides a way to distinguish the grounding state of a person, the person’s meaning-making and intentionality and then five facets of their “self” (their value as a person, skills and competencies [“powers”], relationships [“others”], their temporal self [“time”], and domain of experience [“world”]).
Energy always has a medium. Whether it is chemical energy, electrical, radiant heat, and so on, every form of energy has a medium. So in the sciences that handle those forms of energy, we are always asking about the medium. What is the medium of transfer? In humans, the medium isour body— our neurology, our multiple nervous systems. And that’s because energy within us shows up as nervous-energy as our protoplasm and nervous systems are activated and mobilized.
This is what we study and use in Neuro-Semantic NLP. It’s not just aboutmeaning and linguistics, it is about the transfer of our linguistic meanings in our bodies, and what words, ideas, understandings, beliefs, memories, imaginations, decisions, etc. are actually doing in our bodies. So, we “follow the information—energy through the communication loops” to identify, model, and understand what’s going on. Then with that, we can intellectually intervene to facilitate true empowerment and self-actualization.
