Following up on the two previous articles in this series, your real controllies in your accessing, owning, development, and expression of your innate powers. What are these? Your foundational response-powers (thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting). These are the powers that create a solid foundation for personal empowerment. That’s because every competency is made out of these response-powers.
And here’s the kicker, when you have full access to these powers and are actualizing your highest meanings into your best performances, you will not be look for all of the new age type of powers —reading-minds, remote reading of things, levitating, exercising telekinesis to move objects through space with your mind, sending energy through the ether, etc.
This highlights the difference between true and pseudo-powers, between a healthy and an unhealthy focus on power/control. It points to the direction to go when you want to truly and actually actualize your powers, and conversely, it use the pseudo-powers as signs regarding when a person is off-track. That is, when you don’t know, understand, know-how to access, develop, and use your true powers— you are liable to go off on a undisciplined chase for “power” or “control” for science-fiction “energies” that are delightfully presented in movies and TV shows but which are sci-fi.
For a person to be truly empowered, you have to take control of your fundamental energies— those given in your mind-body-emotion system and those based on solid science. And that’s why we have designedAccessing Your Personal Genius (APG) for your own mastery of the “flow” state by using the basic meta-stating pattern, Owning Your Powers. To succeed in anything (and everything) requires knowledge and skills. You have to know some things and be able to put that knowledge into action. That means using your cognitive (thinking) powers and integrating it into your state (emoting), language (speaking), and behaviors (acting). And that’s why we also run the Mind-to-Muscle pattern in APG so that people can close the knowing–doing gap and become implementers of what they know. (See Secrets of Personal Mastery for the content of the APG workshop or check out an APG workshop near you, www.neurosemantics.com / Trainings).
Human empowerment begins here. The person who lacks this will be looking outside to the powers of others or to magical powers from sci-fi movies. True human empowering is an inside-out dynamic. It arises from your thinking-emoting (your private powers) and shows up in the world in your speaking-acting (your two public powers). And when you have that, you are able to become the person authoring your own life—authoring your beliefs, your values, your sense of self, your goals, your direction, your way of being in the world. And with this development, you have moved from being externally-oriented and referenced to beinginternally-referenced. In NLP we speak about this development as a meta-program shift (see Figuring Out People, 2005).
Now in terms of self-actualization, if you want to actualize your own sense of power and control, recognize, acknowledge, accept, appreciate, and assume full ownership of your powers. You have the power of thinking, and from this power arises so many additional powers— the power of framing your thoughts, the power of believing, the power of intending, the power of identifying, the power of deciding, the power of remembering, the power of imagining, and on and on. Each of these mental powersspeaks about the meta-levels that you can set in your mind.
How many of these meta-powers do you have? How many do you actualize and use on a daily basis? In Neuro-Semantics: Actualizing Meaning and Performance (2011) I listed 103 levels. So whereas the NLP model, “Neuro-Logical Levels” has 4 or 5 meta-levels, that’s just the beginning. Because we have been mapping out meta-levels for your psycho-logics for years in Neuro-Semantics, we now have identified 103 levels! So, are you using all of your innate mental powers?
You also have the power of emoting and, similarly, from this power arises many, many more powers— the power of joy, the power of wonder, the power of love, the power of anger, the power of fear, the power of sadness, the power of appreciation, and on and on. How many emotional pow
ers do you have available to you? Anthony Robbins inUnlimited Power (1987) said he found 3,000 words indicating positive emotions and 5,000 words in English of negative emotions. That’s a lot! So, are you using all of your innate emotional powers?
ers do you have available to you? Anthony Robbins inUnlimited Power (1987) said he found 3,000 words indicating positive emotions and 5,000 words in English of negative emotions. That’s a lot! So, are you using all of your innate emotional powers?
You also have the power of speaking, and again, in a similar way, from this power arises many, many more powers— the power of asking, asserting, explaining, presenting, blessing, cursing, making poetry, making music, curiously inquiring, forgiving, asking forgiveness, negotiating, selling, and on and on. How many ways can we use words? How many different forms of linguistic power are there? Hundreds! So, are you using all of your linguistic powers?
You also have the power of acting— and from this power arises many, many more powers. From it arises all of the powers that are expressed in thousands of the different things we can do. From this arises every skill, every competence, every expertise, and every mastery. So, are you using all of your behavioral powers?
Ah, powers! Response-powers— we have thousands of expressions of these powers that are all innate to us. And this is the basis for human empowerment. If you and I are truly serious about empowering ourselves and others, this is where to begin. This also describes our focus in Neuro-Semantics —our training and certifying of NLP, of the Self-Actualization trainings, of Meta-Coaching, etc.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.