“This guy, Flash Thompson, he probably deserved what happened. But just because you can beat him up doesn’t give you the right to. Remember, with great power, comes great responsability“. (Uncle Ben – from Spiderman)Those words are the intriguing introduction about Michael Hall‘s post. Aren’t they?
When you take and develop your four innate powers, you thereby develop an authority within yourself. No one is born with this. This develops over time as a person recognizes and owns their power to respond and develops their mental, emotional, linguistic and behavioral powers. In APG trainings we use a simple meta-stating process for this, we invite a person to bring awareness, acceptance, and then ownership to one’s four innate powers. We call the result, “your power zone.”
Developmentally, every child will go through this process as a natural development of their cognitive and interpersonal powers. But many do not … and that’s because their parent’s didn’t graduate from Parenting 101 or because their parents never owned their own innate powers. The result: Children who do not know and own their inner powers. And that then results in children who grow into adult who have not developed their own authority to “write the script of their own lives.” Result: Adults of all ages who lives their lives trying to please someone else or live up to the script that someone else has written. Result: dis-empowerment.
Yet it is this power to respond and the mindfulness that you always have a choice in how you respond to life’s events and challenges that creates a solid sense of power, authority, control, and mastery within. We call this “response-ability.” And it shows up in terms of a variety of states: the state of proactivity, of taking initiative in life, of feeling in charge of your own self (self-control), the sense of being “at cause” in life, etc.
Now the key is to recognize that these are meta-states and not primary states. After all, where in your body do you feel responsibility or proactivity or initiative or at cause? These are not primary feeling states, they are evaluative meta-states. They require rich and robust frames of mind (meanings). That’s why if you treat responsibility as a primary state, access it, and “anchor” it in a traditional NLP way, you probably will not be able to set it as you could relaxation, joy, anger, fear, or other primary states. If you want to “anchor” responsibility, you will have to set meta-level frames and meanings.
What is the mind-set in responsibility? Typically it involves acknowledgment of one’s powers, acceptance of those powers, appreciation of them, and a self-definition of oneself as “at cause.” This involves several cognitive awarenesses:
“I’m the person in charge of my thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting.”
“I can hold no one else responsible for what I think, believe, understand, decide, remember, imagine, etc.”
“No one makes me or forces me to think or feel anything. My thoughts and feelings are mine, they are created inside my body, and they are created by the meanings that I create about things.”
Obviously, the rich and robust meta-state of responsibility is a no-blame state. It is also a no-victim state. Yes, terrible things happen in life. Yes, challenges, problems, and undesirable events occur. And yes, things can go wrong, plans can fall apart, the best intentions can fail to achieve objectives, people can trick and cheat us, rob and rape, and do all kinds of bad things. But to think and feel that you are a victim is a choice. You do not have to think that way. You do not have to feel that way. You do not have to make that decision.
How do I know that? By reading the biographies of those who have gone through living hells and who intentionally claimed their powers and refused to be seduced into the weak state of victimization. That is, they refused to victimize themselves with their thoughts-and-feelings. Sure bad things happened to them— concentration camps, murder of their lives ones, ripped away from everything that they had created and built in life, raped, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and so on. And yet, they maintained their inside-out authority. As Viktor Frankl said after torture and deprivation in several concentration camps, “They cannot take away the ultimate human freedom— the power to choose my attitude. They cannot make me hate them.”
Talk about living from his own Power Zone! Talk about operating from his own personal authority! Talk about living above and beyond his circumstances! Talk about empowerment.
When you meta-state yourself with the required elements that make up a healthy and robust state of responsibility you stop looking outside of yourself for beliefs, values, direction, authority, etc. Instead, you begin by looking within yourself. You begin to take charge of yourself:
What do I believe? What do I understand?
What do I value? What’s important to me?
What are my talents, skills, possibilities? What can I develop?
How do I want to live my life? Relate to others? Invest my energies?
As a result you create a solid sense of independence which then allows you to be healthily related to others in an inter-dependent way (rather than co-dependent). Then with this core sense of responsibility, you know that you and you only are responsible for your—
Health: fitness, energy, vitality, etc.
Wealth: money, saving, spending, investing, etc.
Mental health: learning, understanding, integrity to live by your values, etc.
Emotional health: self-acceptance, appreciation, value, emotional intelligence, etc.
Relationships: acceptance, appreciation, and value of others, social intelligence, etc.
Work and play: investment of your energies, development of your talents into skills, etc.
Responsibility is powerful, isn’t it?
Dr. Michael Hall, PhD
Neuro-Semantics homepage
Everyone as best as he can!
Have Joy
Giannicola