Awareness and Action: A Travel Companion

By Mary P. Lahman

Are you aware of how your words create worlds? How your language and listening habits impact interactions in the classroom, at work, and on the road? Created as a practical guide for learning to communicate well in these contexts, Awareness and Action connects theory with practice.

In Part 1, explore how your senses, previous experiences,

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Institute of General Semantics
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780986076411

Book preview

ATravel Companion grew out of my desire to update Awareness and Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior. Created as a practical guide for communicating well at work and on the road, this manual includes reflection exercises immediately following each section. Because of its journal design and smaller size, you can keep the book in a travel/work bag to log new listening and language behaviors throughout the day.

For those unfamiliar with Alfred Korzybski’s theory of general semantics, you will find language practices that encourage you to account for how your senses, previous education, and current intentions influence the words you choose to label your experiences.

For those familiar with general semantics as a systematic inquiry into language use, you will learn about how the details you combine across levels of abstracting are limited by the facts you select within each level. In other words, you will be able to trace how each level of abstracting impacts what you know about other levels.

For all of us, an understanding of how listening impacts the abstracting process could improve our communication with others. I trust you will find daily practices that help you choose words that more closely align with the experiences they represent.

We begin with the intention to pay attention.

Alfred Korzybski first proposed general semantics, a practical method for understanding how humans use language, in 1933. Outlining a series of principles that would account for a world in constant motion, Korzybski believed that humans could use language that more accurately aligned with the process nature of reality. His general semantics methodology encourages systematic inquiry into how the human nervous system limits what people can know about any event. Trusting that humans could learn to delay responding to automatic and incomplete thinking processes, he provided practical strategies to do so.

In Chapter 1, we explore the limitations of our nervous systems in a process called abstracting. We build a sensory awareness of abstracting, when we explore how our five senses limit the details we can discern from all that is going on. When we understand how we combine these limited details to create meaning, we raise our verbal awareness. Finally, if we question how what we have selected and combined creates our worldviews, then we build a meta awareness of how we use language and how it uses us.

In Chapter 2, we see how listening impacts abstracting. We investigate how a multi-level listening process, in addition to different listening purposes and habits, deter our awareness of abstracting. We learn to make choices that maximize how we listen to the abstracting self and to others.

General semantics is a practical approach to delay the way we react, to retrain how our nervous systems respond. We build an awareness of language and listening habits in this section, so that we are ready to take action in the next section.

Exploring How Words Create Worlds

The particular peepholes that define [our] outlook on the world become too small for [us] to see its large and exciting horizons.

—Wendell Johnson (1946, p. 30)

ABSTRACTING

When we abstract, we select small portions of reality to attend to and leave out the rest. In the abstracting process, our senses and locations, not to mention previous training and experiences, limit what we encounter of all that is going on in the world. Bois (1978) created the acronym WIGO from the phrase what is going on . . . all known levels of existence, from atomic elements to galactic spirals racing away from one another (p. 78). Throughout the book, I will use WIGO to refer to a world in process—the constant changing of microscopic and submicroscopic levels of existence.

WIGO — a world in process . . . the constant changing levels of existence

Sensory Awareness

Devastated by what he experienced in World War I, Alfred Korzybski questioned the accuracy of human sense-making. As an engineer, he believed that people could live a saner existence by questioning their perceptions, much like scientists question lab data. He used a rotary fan to demonstrate how our sense of sight might hamper perceptual accuracy: "a rotary fan, which is made up of separate radial blades, but which, when rotating with a certain velocity, gives the impression of a solid disk (Korzybski, 2000, p. 382). In an ever-changing reality, he cautioned that what we see," may not be what is there.

Similarly, other senses may lead us astray. When I was a young child, my grandparents encouraged me to taste something new when I was visiting them in Florida. I tasted what looked and smelled like fried chicken, which I assumed was chicken because of my previous dining experiences. Yet, when my grandfather explained that I was eating frog legs, I gagged. I was certain that the frogs that my cousin and I chased around our backyards did not belong on a dinner plate.

Even though it was not logical, my emotional response demonstrates why Korzybski (2000) coined the term "semantic reaction" (p. 24). He proposed that we use intellect and emotion during abstraction. We create meaning as an "organism-as-a-whole-in-the-environment" (Korzybski, p. liii). We react to events with all of our senses. We cannot separate our mind-body-soul responses to a world in constant motion.

Kodish (2003) used the hyphenated verb, "think-feel (evaluate)" (p. 289) to help us remember that thinking includes emotions in the abstracting, or evaluating, process. For example, our nervous systems often report facts, which are really inferences based on experience. Chisholm (1945) explained how we