-To complain is to be human. Nothing unhuman about that. Find a human being and there will always be complaining. It comes with citizenship. When you are born human and grow up human, you learn to complain. To an extent, this is good. Maslow talked about this in terms of grumbles. He noted that when people get to the being-level of experience then your grumbles go meta. They become meta-grumbles. I didn’t invent that phrase, it comes straight from Maslow’s 1954 book. Meta-grumbles are grumbles about injustice, lack of beauty, need for more accurate knowledge, need for more profound meaning and meaningful— that kind of thing. It is not grumbling about money, bickering about someone else getting a promotion, or fussing about having to wait in line.

High level grumbles indicate that a person has moved to the being-level of experience and beginning to live a self-actualizing life. By contrast, low level grumbles typically indicate that you are still struggling to meet the basic animal needs for survival, safety (stability), love and affection (social needs), and self-needs (that you count and are a somebody). Yet everything can be distorted and misused. So can grumbling. Complaining can make a person’s life go sour.

In fact, when you are complaining and not taking action, you are just complaining. And with that, you are probably undermining, even sabotaging, your personal power and responsibility. Because that’s a pretty heavy charge as well as a profound understanding of the relationship between being a responsible person and a complainer— let’s look deeper into it.

First, note the contrast. Response-ability, as the power or ability to respond describes your actions when you are using your emotions to move you to take effective action to make things better. Complaining, as talk to someone else, assumes that you can’t do anything, so you are trying to enlist someone else to take effective action for something you care about. Yet in reciting a verbal list of the things you don’t like, don’t prefer, and want someone else to change —you are avoiding your own responsibilities. And isn’t that what children do? Isn’t that an expression of powerlessness and victimhood?

Shifting from taking actions and engaging in effective behaviors to just talking about things and reciting lists of grumbles both expresses the lack of power and deepens that lack. Think about this in terms of the following:

∙ Complaining that you don’t feel like getting up and going to work.

∙ Complaining that you aren’t motivated to exercise.

∙ Complaining that no one else you with a project.

∙ Complaining about the food in the cafeteria.

∙ Complaining that the temperature is too cold, too hot, not enough fresh air, etc.

The funny thing is that some people feel good, nurture themselves, and/or think that they are doing something constructive about a problem when they complain. Imagine that! All you have to do is think about that for a few seconds and recognize how silly that is. When someone recently complained to me, I asked about his complaining. “Have you thought about doing something about this problem?” They said, “I am. I’m telling you so you can do something about it.” Ah yes, you solve a problem that you have by getting someone else to solve it! The problem was that he didn’t like the air conditioner being set on the temperature it was set on. Prior to that, the setting of the temperature was explained to the group. But instead of accepting that and grabbing a sweater or layering clothes—effective actions he could have taken—he recited how cold he was to everyone who would listen. Poor man!

Here then is a pseudo-grumble, an illegitimate complaint. Here the dissatisfaction may be real, but in the final analysis, it is just a dissatisfaction that is better accepted with grace and magnanimity. After all, there’s lots of things in life that can irritate, annoy, and piss you off which aren’t worth rally a campaign against. Sure, you have to wait in line. Yes, sometimes the temperature in a room isn’t to your liking. Someone uses a word that you don’t care for. In fact, if you are looking for something to be dissatisfied about and complain about— there are plenty of things. You’ll find them everywhere! And if you develop a complaining perceptual lens, you will increasingly find them.

What do you do with complainers? Is there somewhere you can go to get away from them? Sadly, no. You’re just going to have to learn to deal with them! So rather than complain about the complainers, here are some ideas about how to respond:

∙ “Great!” (That will annoy them.) “What are you going to do about it?”

∙ “Sounds like you have a problem … to solve. How will you do that?”

∙ “Sorry to hear that [empathy], do you need me to coach you for accessing your resources so that you can either accept it, be gracious about it, or learn to reframe it?”

What do you do when the person you have to live with as a complainer is you? That’s more challenging. At least with an external complainer, you can leave. But you can’t do that with the internal complainer! Now you have to go to bed every night with that complainer!

∙ Access the states of observation and acceptance and reduce the amount of complaints you create.

∙ Access appreciation and see if you can find three values in every complain you create.

∙ Gauge the misery level that complaining creates for you so you sense the price you are paying for complaining your way through life.

∙ Imagine being in the presence of a truly Great Person, someone you stand in awe of, and notice how the tendency to complain melts away.

∙ Recognize that complaining is what undeveloped and irresponsible children do and give yourself a big kick in the ass when you even think about complaining.

∙ Find a Meta-Coach or a Neuro-Semantic Trainer so you can create some great meanings for the irritations of life.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

“Every age but ours has had its model, its hero. All these have been given us by our culture; the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic. About all we have left is the well-adjusted man without problems, a very pale and doubtful substitute. Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being, the one in whom all his potentialities are coming to full development, the one whose inner nature expresses itself freely, rather than being warped, repressed, or denied.” Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 4.

Now if Bandler had modeled Maslow rather than Perls, then yes indeed, how different indeed NLP would be! Well, after all, history is the story of accidents, coincides, and unplanned events— probably to a greater extent than planned strategic occurrences. That’s especially true of the beginning of NLP. It all began in 1972 when young college student Richard Bandler accidently found himself in a situation where he got the opportunity to listen to audio tapes of Fritz Perls. That happened because of another accident, some years earlier, when he got acquainted with Dr. Robert Spitzer and his family when he had a speech impediment. And that led to another fortunate opportunity, he got a part-time job in the warehouse of Science and Behavior Books.

Then, it just so happened that Dr. Spitzer, the publisher for both Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, receive a lot of audio-tapes of Perls’ speeches after Fritz died on March 14, 1970. So he decided that he could now finish the last book which Fritz had been working on. That’s when Dr. Spitzer got Richard, who was 21 at the time, to listen to those tapes and transcribe them. That’s how it came about that Richard “modeled” Fritz Perls— he heard the voice, tone, and language patterns of Perls with his gruff and frog-like voice doing the gestalt conversations like having someone hallucinate his mother in a chair and yelling at her. Richard thought it was funny. So he began playing around mimicking the psycho-drama of Perls. Then, from that, somehow Frank got him to “do” Gestalt as a class at Kresgie College, and out of that NLP eventually arose.

But Fritz was not exactly the best person to model. By his own admission in his biography, In and Out of the Garbage Can, he was a “dirty old man” and proud of it. He was rough and crude, cursed a lot and smoked even more, he had numerous mistresses, and he loved getting into the hot sulpher pools at Esalen with the young girls. In spite of his character flaws and lack of applying the Human Potential principles to himself, or maybe because of them, Perls was the person Richard modeled. Then, with Perls as his model, Perls set the tone for how Bandler play out his life for during the next few decades as he, consciously or unconsciously, incarnated Perls.

“He [Perls] liked to refer to himself as a dirty old man, and often introduced himself as such…” Anderson, 1983, p. 131.

Perls’ style, using Gestalt, was full of theatrical and dramatic techniques. It was a good show! He believed that life is a stage and so using the “hot seat” he led experiences of psycho-drama—

“… the more crying and volume, the better. Fritz would encourage the individual to project the various personalities of his or her psyche into the room and deal with them verbally and emotionally in an attempt to reintegrate the fractured self and so create a new gestalt or whole.” (Kripal, 163)

And that’s what happened in the early days (1972) when Bandler and Pucelik began their Gestalt Awareness class in Santa Cruz as Terry McClendon noted in The Wild Days of NLP.

But what if … what if Dr. Spitzer had been the publisher for Maslow and what if he had received a box full of tapes of speeches and presentations of Maslow, and what if Richard had modeled Maslow. Now imagine that! What if…? Here’s an imaginative thought-experiment. When I run that thought-experiment in my mind, my first thought is that NLP would be completely different today. As a strange coincide, both Fritz and Abraham Maslow died the same year, Perls in March and Maslow in June of 1970. So it could have happened. There are, after all, numerous tapes and videos of Maslow that have never been transcribed and published.

Now as a historical reference, Perls and Maslow didn’t get along very well. Perls was quite envious of Maslow and as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his biography of Esalen, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, (2007), Perls was there and wanted to “capture the flag” of the Human Potential Movement. He wanted to create it after his preferences, namely Gestalt. In fact, because he could not do that, he left Esalen in 1969 and went to Canada to establish a Gestalt Kabutz there. But he was too old and too sick and so he died so thereafter.

Fritz was a star at Esalen, he was a celebrity and Murphy even had a house built for him there. “Despite his favored position, Fritz remained insecure, jealous, and combative.” (Anderson, p. 133).

“Fritz was Murphy’s greatest problem. He was hard to handle, and he would not get in step with the human potential movement, even though everyone recognized that gestalt therapy was a principle ingredient of it.” (p. 133)

Walter Truett Anderson in his biography of Esalen, The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Wakening (1983) describes how Perls conflicted with everyone there. He had conflicts with Michael Murphy and Dick Price. He conflicted with Will Schultz. He even conflicted with Maslow.

“Nobody has ever described Fritz as ‘nice.’ … He would insult you by describing you, to your face and in front of a roomful of people, with any of the inelegant terms he had available to describe ways of being phony: bitch, shithead, weeper, mindfucker, crazy-maker. If you bored him, he might fall asleep in his chair.” (Anderson, 1983, p. 131)

Maslow visited Esalen twice every year. In 1966 Maslow appeared at Esalen to launch the first set of Leaders to be trained at Esalen. On that visit, Maslow describe the concept of “being language” as part of the higher being-values within the self-actualization needs. He appeared in the Maslow Room (which is still there) and of course, he was always received as the primary founder of the Movement. On that occasion, Perls was there, scoffing at the “fluff” and the “bullshit” of what Maslow was presenting. Everyone else was captivated and people were asking questions.

“‘This is just like school,’ Fritz called out. ‘Here is the teacher, and there is the pupil, giving the right answer.’ Maslow pretended to ignore this. Getting into arguments was not his thing, he preferred to have friendly high-level discussions about humanistic psychology.” (Anderson, p. 135).

While speaking on being language, Fritz who was nearly 70 years old, decided on a new way to insult Maslow.

“Fritz was sliding down from his chair onto the floor. In a few second everyone else had noticed, the whole group watched in horrified silence as Fritz slithered across the floor toward the philosopher, reached one supplicating arm toward him, and said. ‘Come down here with the rest of us; get down with the common people.’ Maslow told Fritz he was being childish, so Fritz proceeded to be childish in gestalt therapy style: do it all the way … He crawled around on the floor and made whining sounds and hugged Maslow’s knees. … ‘This begins to look like sickness,’ Maslow said.” (p. 136)

Perls had been looking to push Maslow’s buttons and that finally did it. Maslow was furious and threaten to leave. This was what Perls loved— psychodrama, shouting, yelling, stirring people up, and so on.

What would have been different about NLP?
Enough of that for now, let’s get back to the thought experiment. What woud have been different about NLP? Lots of things! NLP would have started from the source person of the Human Potential Movement instead of from the two people who were second-generation leaders– Perls and Satir. Then instead of the “dirty old” man, NLP would have modeled Maslow who was himself very much a self-actualizing person— caring and compassionate, intelligent and passionate, collaborative and visionary, etc.

“Maslow was as good a model of self-actualization … he had reached the top ranks of his discipline, but was still an unpretentious, available person. … The only thing anybody had against him was that sometimes he seemed too nice, too warm and generous, suspiciously lacking in rough edged. Gregory Bateson, who didn’t much care for Maslow, would sniff and say, ‘He was always so good.” (Anderson, p. 67)

Actually Bandler, Grinder, and Pucelik never model the persons of Perls, Satir, or even Erickson. What they modeled, or at least what came down as “NLP,” was what they did with their language. And that’s why NLP is essentially a Communication Model. Wyatt Woodsmall noted this many years ago— the founders of NLP did not model the persons, just their products.

In 1937 Maslow modeled Max Wertheimer who founded Gestalt Psychology and Ruth Benedict who founded Cultural Anthropology as the first two self-actualizing individuals. He then spent 40 years modeling hundreds more. He focused on human excellence, peak experiences, meaningfulness, being-cognition, being-values, character, etc. He also wrote a book on science, The Psychology of Science, about how to do science. That was one of the seminal books which began the movement to qualitative research. He presented ides about research questions, recommendations for how to do so, etc. NLP would have started with a respect for research and using newer methodologies for science rather than iconoclastically challenge and mock statistical models.

Yes, NLP would today be a very different discipline and field if Bandler had modeled Maslow rather than Perls. But, of course, he did not. He did not go to the source of the Human Potential Movement and somehow all of the original co-developers did not know or if they did, did not give credit to Maslow and Rogers and the movement seeking to make explicit the process of self-actualization. And that’s why, standing on the shoulders of so many insightful geniuses, we in Neuro-Semantics are correcting those historical errors in service of explicating Self-Actualization Psychology.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Being responsible as a person entails accepting responsibility for the responses that one can make to people and circumstances. In recent weeks, on just about every media outlet, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people fleeing as refugees from the war in Syria. We have seen pictures of babies and young children dying in the Mediterranean Sea as families have fled and tens of thousands blocked from entering various countries. There’s been a flood of migrants heading mostly for Germany and the UK where welfare benefits are the highest, and it has created a massive humanitarian crisis. Many of the refugees have arrived in some of Europe’s poorest states— Greece, Italy and Hungary.

So, what’s to be done? What can we do? Whose responsibility is this? What responses can the world make to this crisis?

Dr. Denis MacEoin, a Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, has gathered stunning statistics from an Amnesty International report (Dec. 2014) and has shown a thoroughly imbalanced response from the immediate Arab world around Syria. In reading the following, I began asking myself, “When will Arab leaders step up?” In doing so, I am putting out a challenge to Arab leaders: “Will you be responsible or irresponsible in this humanitarian crisis?”

Today the problem is that while countries in the European Union are experiencing an overwhelming influx of refugees from Syria and other collapsing Middle East countries, “the vastly wealthy Arab nations of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are sitting back and watching as Europe takes the toll.” That is not the behavior of responsible people and especially those who claim to be leaders, including spiritual leaders.

Fact #1: 95% of the first 3.8 million refugees fleeing Syria are located in five countries. With the exception of Turkey, those five countries are among the poorest in the region: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Amnesty’s breakdown of the figures are these:

∙ Lebanon hosts 1.1 million registered refugees— 26% of the country’s population.

∙ Jordan hosts 618,615 registered refugees— 9.8% of the population.

∙ Turkey hosts 1.6 million refugees— 2.4% of the population.

∙ Iraq hosts 225,373 registered refugees — 0.67% of the population.

∙ Egypt hosts 142,543 registered refugees — 0.17% of the population.

Amnesty International is calling for at least 5% of the refugees to be resettled from the main host countries by the end of 2015, with a further 5% to follow by the end of 2016. But that’s only a total of 380,000 people.

Fact #2: Six countries speaking the same language (with regional variations), belong to the same ethnic group, share the same religion and much of the same culture, and are among the wealthiest countries in the world. Yet they have no room at all for their fellow Arabs. The six Arab Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain have offered zero — 0 — places for desperate refugees! Now, what’s with that? Do Arabs in these six countries not care? Do they refuse responsibility to their fellow human beings?

Dr. MacEoin writes, “They [seem to be] perfectly happy to let hundreds of thousands to squeeze into an already saturated Europe, into countries that have not, for the most part, succeeding in assimilating or integrating existing Arab, Turkish, Somali, and other mainly Muslim minorities.”

Nor is he alone. There are many others now joining the criticism of these six Gulf States. Others who have been speaking out include the following:

∙ Sarah Hashash, Middle East and North Africa press officer at Amnesty International, has “called the Gulf Arab states’ behavior ‘utterly shameful’ and criticized Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for officially taking in zero refugees.”

∙ Daniel Gorevan, a NGO official, Oxfam’s Syria country director, states: “Gulf countries clearly can and should do an awful lot more.”

∙ Danish Finance Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen: “I’m most indignant over the Arab countries who are rolling in money and who only take very few refugees,” “Countries like Saudi Arabia. It’s completely scandalous.”

So, when will the Arab Leaders in those six Gulf Countries step up to their responsibilities? When will they open their doors and their hearts to this humanitarian crisis? Do they fear that there might be terrorists planted by ISIS among the refugees? Welcome to the same fear that every nation has who is receiving the refugees!

The choice of being and living in a responsible way entails doing responding the best that we can given the situations of life. This is especially so for leaders and even more so for political and spiritual leaders. Where is the outcry among Moslem leaders within these countries? Isn’t it about time?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Responsible Apologizing

Some time ago in an interview, Donald Trump said that he doesn’t ask for forgiveness; he doesn’t need to. Since then he has used his media savvy intelligence—not only saying whatever comes to his mind—but also by seemingly intentionally saying provocative things. Why would he do that? Well, it certainly captures the media’s attention, he gets more air time, and by that it has given him a dominating influence in the field of the candidates. So it works. It also allows him to stand out. So unlike the overly cautious political correctness of the others, Trump stirs things up, gets attention, and then later offers a calmer and more reasonable explanation. But now he is beginning to pay a price for that.

The price? A call to apologize. Several have called upon him to apologize for various things— for the names he has called people and for insulting implications that he has intimated. Yet he refuses to apologize. In the Republican Debate this week, when called upon to apologize, he took another tact—he uttered very kind and complementary words to those he had formally insulted. He did that about Jeb Bush’s wife, “I hear she is a fabulous women.” He did that about Carly Fiorina, “She has a beautiful face.” Still he would not apologize. He was asked to apologize directly and explicitly, he said he would not. “I didn’t say anything wrong.”

Dictionary: An Apology can be written or spoken as an expression of one’s regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, or wronged another.

What’s with it that a person can’t utter a simple apology? “You’re right. That was a mistake. I’m sorry for doing that to you, I apologize for what I did.” While I can buy that much of exaggeration and bragging of Trump is for entertainment purposes and to get the attention of the media, and that it does indeed set in motion a focus on him— a simple apology is also powerful and important. A simple apology can go a long way in healing hurt emotions and can be the smartest thing for a person to do. In this instance, it would be the most politically expedient thing to do. But he doesn’t.

That brings up the questions: “Why not?” “What holds him and/or any other person from doing so?” Further, given that this is a human problem and not particularly a political one, what stops so many people from just owning up what they said or did, acknowledging it, and saying so?

At the heart of apologizing is recognizing and owning what one does and says as one’s own. Actually, this is a critical aspect of being a responsible person. After all, this is what being responsible means and entails. Owning your words and behaviors and accepting that they have consequences, when you make a mistake, you say so. When an error of thinking or judgment occurs, you acknowledge it and do whatever you can to make things right. This is the point of making an apology: to make things right between people.

This is important due to the obvious and ubiquitous fact: Things can go wrong between people. We say things that another person doesn’t like, we call names, we insult with disrespectful behaviors, and so on. Then they feel “hurt” about such because it violates their values and what they want and believe in. When people make promises and then break them, we feel betrayed. At that point we cannot sweep it under the rug and pretend that we did not betray a trust, we need to own up to it.

The power and wonder and elegance of an apology is that it enables us to back up. We can go back and re-do something. We can shift into reverse gear and then back up to un-do the path that we have traveled. Imagine a car without a reverse gear. How easily you could drive into a dead-end with no where to go. That’s not a very wise move! With a reverse gear, you can back up, make amends and get to start all over again. It gives you a new beginning. That’s what’s great about an apology— you can have a new beginning!

In claiming that he doesn’t need to apologize, Donald seems to be proud of this. He seems proud that he doesn’t have to say he is sorry for the results or consequences of his actions or words, and that he doesn’t need to ask for forgiveness. Yet now this is to his detriment and unless he changes his tactics on this one, he will find himself in those dead-ends without a way to recover.

The power of an apology is that in acknowledging a mistake, in making amends for a wrong, for expressing sorrow that words and/or actions which led to misunderstandings and hurt feelings, we fail to admit that we are human— fallible and “liable to err.” There is no virtue in trying to present yourself as above fallibility. Pretending to be infallible or perfect is an illusion and, after all, who wants to be around such a person?

If you and I want to truly become a highly responsible person, it’s required that we learn how to apologize and make amends. It takes nothing away from a person, in fact, it adds to a person’s character and quality of character. The person is big enough to apologize, to admit a wrong, and to reverse to make course corrections.

Another politician make that mistake decades ago. Over an activity that was really a little thing, a burglary in a hotel (Watergate), Nixon’s big problem was his cover-up, his refusal to own up to things. He derailed by the coverup, not the burglary. Then there was Clinton and his protestations, “I did not have sex with that woman,” which dominated the news until he admitted that he did. It wasn’t the sex that was the problem, it was the coverup, the denials, the refusal to just simply own up to his responsibilities.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Responsibility is a meta-state. It is comprised of a primary state as you engage in doing or experiencing something in the world. Then to that primary state of engagement, you layer onto it a few key variables—awareness, ownership, acceptance, appreciation, etc. Then all together these come together to generate a strong personal sense of both the ability and the sense of obligation to respond. When awareness of your fundamental powers plus a sense of ownership come together it gives birth to the meta-state of responsibility.

About responsibility, lots of people wonder, “How can I be a more responsible person?” “How can I help my employees take on more responsibility?” When I first got into real estate as a means for wealth creation, I asked myself, “How can I find renters who will be responsible and act responsibly?” Parents ask these questions about their children and their parenting, “How can I raise my children to grow up to be responsible persons and manage their opportunities, talents, etc. well?”

When a person is responsible, he or she is empowered to act on his or her abilities in a way that fits for the activities of life: working, relating, contributing, enjoying, growing, learning, etc. In this empowerment, the person is proactive in that he takes the initiative. She doesn’t wait around until she just has to act, she thinks ahead about what needs to be done (proactive) and then initiates a response (takes the initiative). These are expressions of being a responsible person.

Opposite to being and living responsibly is being reactive, playing helpless like a victim and so blaming and accusing, and/or being passive and letting opportunities and life pass one by without stepping up to take action. The opposite may also include being paralyzed by fear, dread, anxiety or some other emotion. Then instead of acting responsibly, one shuts down and/or gives in to discouragement, depression, and “just getting by.” That’s the weak side of things. The strong side is being irresponsible. That is, being hostile and destructive. This person fails to appreciate the value of things and is positively irresponsible.

In not being responsible then, there are numerous alternatives. On a continuum there is sitting passively and doing nothing and letting things get messed up by inattention and neglect. I’ve seen people do that in the houses which I rent— things go bad and things get messed up, not because someone has thrown things around the house, but because they ignored things that needed attention and let them go until. Then the problem grew and grew until it was a major disaster. Others are not being responsible because the actions they are taking are the wrong ones. They destroy the very things that are needed in their lives. I once saw the end result of a young artist who got into a negative state and in that state tore up and burned a decade of his art work. Now it was all gone.

That’s the dark side of responsibility— when it goes wrong, when it becomes irresponsibility. The bright side of responsibility is proactivity and initiative. Here the person knows and understands the responses that she can do, accepts the obligation to self and to others to handle those responses in a way that enhances one’s life over the long-run. This person operates from a sense of intentionality and choice. He sets high level intentions and then expands his awareness to understand his range of choices. He creates a set of practices (discipline) that accords with the exercise of his talents and skills so that it develops, expands, and manages them well.

As a responsible person, she will persist in that set of practices, recognize them as a discipline, and willingly organize her life around them. Then, when there is a set-back or disappointment and she is knocked down, she gets up again. She “bounces back” and this resilience itself is part of her responsible actions that keeps her on course and able to make great things happen in her life over the long-run.

From this description we can see that there is a sense of will on the part of the responsible person, they intend and attend (“will”) want they want and then follow-up with a set of practices (a discipline) that allows them to turn it into life-style. By contrast, the not-responsible person is either lacking will (energy, focus, interest, passive) and/or too willful (stubborn, insistent on his way, defiant, hostile, destructive).

In terms of Meta-Programs, this maps the continuum between un-responsible (irresponsible) to responsible and then over-responsible. Bob Bodenhamer and I put that in the book on Meta-Programs, Figuring Out People, as one of the semantic meta-programs that governs a person’s perceptual sorting and responding. My original research for this was stimulated by my need to find “responsible” people to rent my properties to. After having some not-so-pleasant experiences with some irresponsible persons, I wanted to figure out how to find responsible people. And I knew that advertizing, “Responsible persons wanted for a 4-bedroom home…” would not do it.

The continuum of how people handle their capacity for responding gave me the area to go find the clues which I needed. Now I could look at several areas of their lives to see if they responsibly handled those areas and if so, was this style habitual and in character for them. So today I ask and sometimes check out how they treat their car, their dog or cat, how they handle a conflict and a mis-communication, etc. I check on whether they are on the passive side or the aggressive side in terms of using their response-powers. In conversation with them, I look for situations where something didn’t go well, was a set back, something was a mistake and then use that to understand the person’s style of responding.

We need responsible people if we are going to have a good world— a good home, a good business, a healthy community, etc. So search for and helping to create responsible people lies at the heart of leadership at all levels. To your success in this!

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Is there an art in living a responsible life and stepping up to taking responsible actions in one’s life? There is certainly a strategy— the strategy begins with identifying, accepting, owning, and embracing your powers (Meta Reflection #35). It also involves recognizing the seductive power of irresponsibility which seems to trap so many people (#38). Here the strategy of what to do, and the knowledge of how to do that begins to blend into the art responsible living. First comes the understanding and knowledge that requires learning to recognize and avoid the irresponsibility seduction. At this point, you develop the competence of resisting blaming— blaming life, others, government, parents, history, human nature, and on and on. And this arises when you have learned and actually practiced stepping up to develop your innate powers.

A story. This week I received scores of emails which were sent to the HOA (Home Owners Association) distribution of 30 home owners in my neighborhood. Those of us on the board had discovered that we had several unexpected expenses with the water system, the pump house, etc. and so we went out a letter inviting a full neighborhood meeting. In response to the problem that we identified, three of the emails came back, hastily written, full of blame, accusation, and threats. The three blamed the builder, two of them threaten legal action, and the other was very “preachy” shouting about how stupid all the rest of us were, unable to understand things, and guilty of fraud! “It stinks of fraud” one home owner wrote.

Now being on the board and having 7 hours at the Houston airport … I responded to each of the three persons who were heavily infected by the virus of blame. I framed my responses that we all need to have calm and reasonable minds as we addressed the problem and that the task before all of us was to first gather information about the facts before jumping to conclusions. It all started when the president of the association sent out an email asking for $100 from each home-owner for some additional expenses that arose. You would have thought he had asked for $10,000 given the intensity of the accusations, blaming, and insults by three of them! Several pipes had broken and were repaired and the cost was an expense to the HOA and whether anyone agreed with the cost or the problem, the bill was ours and had to be paid. As a legal entity, that’s just the way it was.

But the emails were full of charges of “abuse of power,” “it’s not my problem,” “I didn’t agree upon the person who did the repairs,” “how much longer do we have to put up with this incompetence?” “It stinks of fraud.” This is what I decided to respond to. It wasn’t that I wanted to use email to establish the facts of the case— that is scheduled for a meeting at the end of the month. I mostly wanted to call attention to the process itself. I wanted to make the point: If this is the way we solve problems, nothing will be solved, we will just have a shouting match.

Did that resolve things with the three blamers? No. Instead one decided that I had “lectured” him about being cool and collected and who was I to do that?! Another wrote numerous mind-reading statements saying that I wanted to intimidate them to be quiet and not express their opinion. Another charged me with trying to manipulate the upcoming meeting by forcing people to take turns and not talk over each other— “That’s pure manipulation” he wrote.

All of this made me reflect on the theme of what is the Art of Living Responsibly? Here’s my reflection so far: I think the art comes in from one’s character and one’s state. Responsible people know and quickly acknowledge when they make a mistake. They say so. And depending on the circumstances, try to make things right. Living responsibly means recognizing that we have responsibilities that are both personal and social. As a social being in multiple social contexts, how I conduct myself means making responses in both dimensions.

The art of living responsibly also includes challenging and confronting. Are we really responsible when we let bullies or big-mouths intimidate people? Do we not have the responsibility to help create a context or culture where we can bring out the best in each other?

In the midst of the flurry of emails, five of the home owners chimed in. Four were very polite and validated the points I was making about being respectful. One, however, “yelled” at the three blamers accusing them of being loud and throwing an adult size tantrum. He “yelled” on the email by writing in ALL CAPS! AND USING BOLD AND EXCLAMATION MARKS WHEN HE REALLY WANTED TO MAKE A POINT! I wrote him privately thanking him for his intention while pointing out the contradiction—“You are blaming them for blaming.”

Two others wrote to me, saying that they appreciated my courage to stand up to the neighbor who had threaten to sue just about everybody in the neighborhood. But ask, “Are you afraid he will sue you?” When I asked, “Are we not responsible for the quality of conversation in our community?” he acknowledged that, “well yes, but…” And then proceeded to say that he was not the kind of person to do that. He would prefer a low profile.

All of this speaks to the subject of the art of responsible living and how we hold ourselves and others responsible for our actions. Some seek to escape from responsibility, some are irresponsible and blame everybody and everything else for problems (real and imagined), and some passively accept responsibility but out of weakness, not strength, others accept and own responsibility as a matter of duty, and others see response-ability as a resource and a means of changing the world. I want to be increasingly more in that last category. How about you?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Ultimately responsibility is about your actions (responses) and about your ability to take action. In a word, it is about what you are able to do now which can make a difference in your life as you meet your basic human needs. Did you get all of that? There’s a lot packed into that sentence so don’t read it too quickly. Especially don’t race through it. If you do, you will miss a lot which is packed into it. Let’s unpack it.

∙ Able: This speaks about the capability and the capacity for action which comes from the awareness and ownership of your innate powers (Meta Reflections #31). Ability is first of all the innate potential and ability depends on both knowledge and skill practice to become actual. For ability to develop you have to learn and incorporate what you have learned so you can execute what you know. What do you know and what are you able to do to unleash your potentials?

∙ Do: This refers to taking action. The responsible behavior is something that you do, it is not about your opinions, beliefs, excuses, emotions, or what you feel, but actions. It is about, What are you going to do?

∙ Now: This speaks about the time element which is today and into tomorrow. It is not the past. The past, at best, only refers to the conditions in which you learned something. It is not the problem. The problem is always one’s frames. The question is, “What will you do today that will make a difference for your future? The responsible person does not keep recounting his history of abuse and misfortune.

∙ You: This refers to the person who has the most influence to improve things. It is you, not others. So, What are you going to do?

∙ Basic needs: This refers to what’s required for any human being and arises from the innate “needs” (life requirements) for being biologically healthy (survival needs), psychologically healthy (safety needs and self needs), and relationally healthy (social needs of love and affection) and one’s meanings needs (self-actualization needs).

Let’s now summarize: What is responsibility and what is it about?

Responsibility is about what you are able to do now which can make a difference in your life as you meet your basic human needs.

If you take your powers-of-response (thinking, emoting, speaking, behaving) and integrate them by meta-stating ownership and embodiment, then you create responsibility. Then, regardless of the circumstances that life has thrown at you—responsibility is responding with the powers you have at your disposal and taking a responsible course of action to make things better for you and others.

To lead a responsible life and to take a responsible course of action, you need to be prepared with your basic powers (Meta-Reflection #35) for taking action. Doing that will make you responsive. Conversely, if you want to be ill-prepared for the world, or to send your child into the world ill-prepared— go out without thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting as if you are the one responsible for yourself. Instead blame. Blame others, blame your parents, blame your partner, blame the government, blame your school, blame history. In other words, yuou can be an empowered victim if you so choose!

But William Glasser calls this blaming “nowhere talk.” To do that, talk about your mother, father, brother and all of the people who hurt you. These may be easy to talk about, and blame, because they excuse your failures. There is however a price to pay. That’s because in the end— they lead nowhere (Reality Therapy, p. 38). That’s because it leads to both lack of responsible behavior and irresponsible behaviors. The irresponsible behaviors may be feeling sorry for oneself (emotional behavior), blaming the world (linguistic behavior), wallowing in misery and inadequacy (interpersonal behavior). For this reason, in Reality Therapy (1965), therapists accept no excuses for irresponsible acts:

“We accept no excuses for irresponsible acts. Students are held responsible for their behavior and cannot escape responsibility on the pea of being emotionally upset, mistreated by mother, neglected by father, or discriminated against by society.” (p. 70).

Nowhere talk focuses on the past. By then focusing on the past some people over-emphasize their inadequacy. That undermines their response-ability and weakens their will. Others think that if they can gain insight into the “cause” of whatever problem or mistake or bad thing that happen, that will solve the problem. But that’s an illusion. Whatever you learn about the past will not “solve” it. That’s because you still have to live with whatever happened, deal with it, and move on. Plus, learning what went wrong seldom tells you what to do right. So the sooner you learn to cope better, understand what to do today, the better.

Paradoxically, to be un-responsible or irresponsible requires using your “responses” to avoid effective responsibility(!). When a person is irresponsible, he is using his intellect to invent ideas, excuses, explanations that justify him. A pretty powerful response! The paradox is that every victim, every person playing helpless, weak, unable to do things—is actually a powerful person. What’s typically not recognized are the responses which the victim makes which are in his control. He victimizes himself by focusing on some inadequacy in self or frustration with the world and frames it as beyond his power to do anything and then argues for that perspective. In other words, he is using his mental and emotional and linguistic powers to be a victim. She clings to the secondary benefits of being a victim— others jump in to help, others give pity and compassion, she gets attention, maybe government assistance, etc.

In spite of how powerful irresponsibility is, it has a nowhere direction. It takes you nowhere useful. There are lots of secondary gains which people get from irresponsibility— self-justification, an excuse from effort, blame of others circumstances. Yet all of that is the loser’s way, not the way to win in life. Response-able responsibility is a very powerful meta-state. Try it on. It will do you good.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Monday August 24, Robert Dilts led us (the 140 of us at NLP U.) in singing “Happy Birthday” to NLP. Robert also encouraged those from different language groups to sing Happy Birthday in many different languages. That was one of the ways that the group recognized and celebrated the 40th Anniversary of NLP. For the celebration, Robert invited Trainers and Leaders from around the world, I was there with Ian and Paulette McDermott, Christine Hall, Frank Pucelik, and others who came in for a couple days before I got there, Tim and Kris Hallboam, Sid Jacobson, etc. I was glad that five of us there were Neuro-Semantic Trainers and Meta-Coaches.

Forty years means that we have to go back to 1975 when The Structure of Magic was finalized and then published. Prior to that we have what Terry McClendon called, The Wild Days of NLP: 1972-1975. Those were the days that two different groups of people, some 20 people in all, co-created the field and model that we now call NLP. What stands out for me about that is this: It took a community to create it. We often say that the co-developers were Richard Bandler and John Grinder, but that’s really not accurate. Frank Pucelik was also a key player as were another two dozen people who actually made it all happened.

Further a strange thing happened. Somehow the first group of people never really knew what they were involved in and saw no real future for it so except for Terry McClendon none of them stayed around and became leaders. It was the second group made up of Judith DeLozier, Robert Dilts, Leslie Cameron, David Gordon, etc. who actually stepped up to leadership and developed NLP as a field and discipline, this included Steve and Connaire Andreas (1975-1980).

From the beginning Bandler and Grinder did not provide anything that we would call “leadership” for the field of NLP. They were not, and are not, “leaders” in the sense of thinking about others, building a community, bringing out the best in people, grooming leaders, organizing conferences, creating ongoing support for trainers and up-coming leaders, etc. They did none of that. What they did was at the creation level; they articulated “the magic” which they found in Perls, Satir, and Erickson.

Richard embodied those skills in himself by his gift of mimicry and patterning; John used the formulations of Transformational Grammar (TG) to give it professional and academic credibility.

John brought into NLP the Cognitive Psychology premises from Chomsky (TG) and George Miller (having worked in his lab).

Frank was from the beginning the connector that put the people together and organized the first Gestalt Therapy class at the College.

But they also did not understand what they had or its potentials. After Richard chased Frank away in 1976, Richard and John became business partners for a couple years to take advantage of all of the bubbling energy and creativity and money which was available during that early period (1976-1979). For them it seemed to be about money, seminars, fame, power, etc. It never seemed to be about community, gifting people with tools for changing the world, grooming others to be leaders. That fell to Robert Dilts who has done the most in this regard and Leslie Cameron Bandler who put the format of the first trainings together (now called Practitioner and later, Master Practitioner). Judith joined Robert as did Todd Epstein and many others.

Robert Dilts is reported to have once said, “NLP was created by two wild individualists who modeled three wild individualists.” And also, “Richard and John gave birth to NLP but never stayed around to father the field.” So in the field of NLP, the originators never led, and have never provided leadership. We tried to get them back involved in 1997 at the Visionary Leadership Conference. They would not come or participate. That was repeated at the Millennial Project (2000), and it happened again now at the 40th Year Anniversary. Although Richard Bandler did send a short video recognizing what we were doing. That’s a first! Late by 40 years, but a warm and kind gesture.

So who have been the leaders? Mostly that second group mentioned above. Then joining them were many of the second generation of trainers who arose. Many of them began exercising a lot of influence via the NLP Associations that arose in most countries, in the Journals, and at the Conferences. These leaders sometimes pulled people away from the others to create a “kingdom” around themselves. In those areas of NLP, they were exclusive rather than inclusive. And they were mostly organized around a business model of some sort.

The leaders of NLP have therefore mostly been thought leaders. Those who wrote and/or clearly articulated NLP— its principles, premises, patterns, etc. in writings or in presentations became recognized as those leading out. This is how I “accidently” found myself in a position of leadership. I didn’t plan for it. I didn’t even understand that it was happening until later. I think there was such a hunger for leadership, that when I began detailing out the Meta-Model and expanding it (1991-1993) and then when I found and articulated a model for self-reflexive consciousness (the Meta-States Model, 1994-1997), people wanted to be a part of it. I wrote NLP books primarily to learn the model more thoroughly. Yet as more and more of my books appeared, I found that there was a following.

With the books came opportunities to train— both Prac. and Master Prac. and Meta-States and from that people wanted to join up and be a part of what I and others were doing. When Bob and I created Neuro-Semantics and registered it in 1996, just as soon as we put our Vision statement on the website, people started calling and wanting to join. That’s how the International Society of Neuro-Semantics was given birth. I trained Accessing Personal Genius (APG) for five years (1995-1999) before running our first Trainers’ Training. Soon thereafter the 90 million dollar lawsuit against the field of NLP ended with Bandler losing and “NLP” being put in public domain (Feb. 2000).

Fast forward to 2015 and we have now reached 40 years as a field. Frank Pucelik and I launched The NLP Leadership Summit in 2012 as a way to gather “the elders of the tribe” together so that they could get acquainted, begin a conversation of the future, and see if we can associate with one another. We decided to not create another association— just to associate as people with a common interest and vision— Promoting the value, credibility, and professionalism of NLP (www.nlpleadershipsummit.org). That is now fully underway and corresponds to what Robert, Judith, and Teresa are doing with the NLP Community Project. A big thank you to these three for their vision and leadership!

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Who makes the best person for political office— a politician or a non-politician? Having seen the mess that career politicians have been making of things in the USA and in other countries, the idea really appeals to me that we should try a non-politician for a change. Now having published a book earlier this year on Political Coaching (2015), I have been fascinated by the psychology, the neuro-linguistics, and the neuro-semantics of politics. Having now studied political science and having followed politics using NLP and Neuro-Semantics for more than a decade, there are a couple of phenomena which is currently taking American politics by storm. One is the fact that leading the poles are three non-politicians: Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carlson, and Carly Fiorina.

Now one person who most thought was the least likely person ever to be a serious candidate was Donald Trump. Pundits and critics did not take him serious in the least for the first weeks of his campaign. Then a week ago in New Hampshire, Donald Trump was called for jury duty and was asked to fill out a form which asked about his occupation. He said he could not bring himself to write, “Politician.” “I just can’t do it. So I wrote, Real Estate.”

I like that. Having studied several biographies of Lincoln, Jefferson, Mandela, and others, the paradox is that when almost anyone becomes “a professional politician” this invites and seduces that person to become their worse self, not their best. Why? Probably because by making your living in politics and by politics so often leads to corruption. When that happens the person is easily bought by interest groups so that he no longer serves the people. Anyway I like that about Donald Trump, and come to think of it, there are certain other things that I also like about him. I’m not writing this to promote his candidacy, but to point out some of the non-politician like things that he’s doing which is endearing him to people.

1) Trump is not Politically Correct.

In recent years, the need to be politically correct (PC) has reached levels that would make the fictional characters in George Orwell’s classic, 1984, proud. To be politically correct (PC) means to say the right words, and use the right euphemisms, and to not be too blunt or direct. Well, Trump doesn’t do that. Not at all. And because of that, it has caused a fervor among the pundits, journalists, and his rivals. Nor does he make any bones about it. He speaks his mind. He speaks off-the-cuff and there have been times when speaking he is actually thinking aloud about a topic, which he will adjust a few days later. I like that. You get the real thing with him, rather than the crafted “speaking points” that have been refined by pollsters and speech writers.

How different from the lawyer-like politicians who are oh-so-careful in how they speak. You can see and hear them being very “careful” in their speech, measuring their words, as if anticipating who could get an advantage over them if they speak what they really think.

By way of contrast Trump calls things as he sees them, as they are, and does so even if it offends their PC sensitivities. Apparently lots of other people also like it because it is a breath of fresh air in a field that is so staid and so obsessively politically correct. He speaks extemporaneously and without a script and that makes him sound real and authentic. And that no-nonsense approach is something I find desirable in a politician.

2) He has lots of fun with his speeches.

Because he doesn’t even try to be politically correct, he is not stiff and formal. Instead he is informal and real, and watching him, it’s obvious that he is thoroughly enjoying himself and his audience. He will interact with the audience the way an entertainer does, not the way a politician does. That’s why people find him entertaining while he speaks and makes his points. Further, he’s had years of experience with this kind of a thing. For years he produced a business show on TV (how boring would that be) but did so in the most entertaining way. The Apprentice was always very well designed and put together so that it was a very high rating show and he played off of the “someone will be fired in the boardroom” theme. That is, he knows how to use the twin forces of away-from and toward to generate a creative tension. The intelligence to do this is a social and emotional intelligence that I have not heard anyone speak about.

3) He openly and unashamedly speaks about greatness.

At first the pundits and commentators took his over-generalized language as a sign that he lacked details and was not able to be specific. They heard him talking about making “American great again.” Or how he would describe someone as great, awesome, a smart cookie, terrific, etc. When asked about his own company, he doesn’t hesitate one moment to say he has a great company full of great people. When asked about how he is going to build the wall on the southern borders and a comment about Mexicans, he says that he has hundreds of great Hispanic people working for him, and that “the Mexican people are great, it’s their politicians who are sending murders and rapists here;” and “they are smarter than our politicians.”

He also speaks about the greatness of America and being a great president for jobs, great on the military, building it so that it is great again. When interviewed about his vision he talked about what we can do, not what we cannot do. How different that is from so many of the professional politicians who downplay greatness.

4) He thinks and talks like a CEO.

Well, of course he talks like a CEO! He is the CEO of his business, Trump Enterprises, and has been since he created it by himself as an entrepreneur. Long time before this, two decades ago, I was reading him about real estate and wealth creation. Business is his background and in terms of building a company, or buying a company, he talks like a business man. He focuses on competency, intelligence, and results. I think his appeal is that everything about his style goes against incompetency and bureaucracy. Business people know that there is not an unending amount of money, they plan, they budget, they watch the numbers, they adjust. Politicians seem to not know where money comes from and somehow get confused to think that the money belongs to the government.

Many are speaking about Trump as “articulating the anger and frustration of the population.” I wonder if that’s the dynamic at work or if he is simply coming to the issues of the country, the issues of government, from the perspective of business and simply doing what anyone with business acumen would see and say. Effective business people see problems and get to work fixing them. That’s what I sense that he is doing.

He speaks about building a wall. American politicians have been talking about this for 30 years; they have debated it for that long. Very little has been done. Opponents say it cannot be done. Trump says why not? We only have 2,000 miles to cover, and only actually 1,000 miles is needed. “That is nothing compared to the 13,000 miles of the Great Wall of China.” he says. He quotes the Wall that Israel has built to protect its borders. Business people talk about how to get things done.

When asked about how he would go about defeating ISIS, some people like President Obama say it cannot be done. We can only degrade them a bit. Trump says “go into the oil fields, take them over, stop ISIS’ primary source of income, and then take over the oil to pay for fighting the war against them.” Now that’s thinking like a business man, not a politician.

5) He hits back hard when he is hit.

At first when I heard him hit back hard I didn’t understand it and I certainly didn’t like it. I thought that his critical and negative comments would undermine his chances. But then some strange happened. Unlike others who have done so and suffered a severe set-back, each time he hit back at someone, he seems to come out stronger. During July and August, there were lots of people mocking him, and attacking him. His response, “When I’m attacked, I will attack back.” And he did. As they called him names, so he called them names– “Losers” was, and is, a favorite. And he usually hit back hard. He would as one on CNN said, “spew invectives.”

In giving them a strong dose of their own medicine it would, at first, caused things to flare up even more. But after awhile many of his critics stopped. He would do it without empathy or apology. At first I thought, “This political game that he’s playing is a dangerous one and will probably destroy him.” But it didn’t. In part, it was his refusal to be politically correct, but in part it was administering a strong dose of aversion therapy.

It reminded me of a proverb in the Bible. “Answer not a fool according to the ways of the fool, lest you be like him. Answer a fool according to the ways of a fool lest he be wise in his own eyes.” (Proverbs 23:3-4). So what is it? Do you or don’t you? The answer is yes. Sometimes you answer a fool in the same way; sometimes you don’t. It all depends. At first I didn’t like it because in most contexts, when you get into a word fight with someone—name calling, insulting, criticizing, taking jabs—it doesn’t make things better. Mostly it alienates even your friends. And that’s not good. Yet when we move to a much, much larger context, to the national political context, where people do not already know you, do not know your character, then the attacks and criticisms— if you smile and leave it alone and take the higher road—people will usually assume that the attacks are true and that you have nothing to say to the contrary.

6) He is funding his own campaign.

One of the biggest problems with most professional politicians— they have a hunger and greed for money and so they can easily be bought. But Trump has said at times that he doesn’t need the money and so far has not only not asked for donations, but has actually turned down money. One offered him five million, but he turned it down. I really like that. The temptation of money and greed seems to ruin so many politicians. This is epidemic in many countries and it is also prevalent in the USA which is why we have so many rules trying to stop it.

What will happen to Trump’s candidacy? No one knows. It is still a long, long time before the primaries and the general election. Yet right now we have him and the other non-politicians who are leading the pack and, personally, I like that. It’s a breath of fresh air in a domain that is typically stuffy and formal and overly managed.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Creating Response-Able Persons #2

This past week was the one-year anniversary of the original shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson Missouri which then led to thousands protesting and then to rioting which involved burning down businesses, looting, stealing, etc. That was a year ago. Now it seems to be happening again. At least this week there has been more protesting and rioting and more shootings. So, what is this all about? On the surface, the protesters say that it is about police brutality. Then there are the criminals among the protesters who use the protest as a cover for violence. Yet is it really about police brutality?

In the past year Eric Holder led a Federal Investigation directed by Obama and in the end they completely cleared and vindicated the policeman who shot Mike Brown. Meanwhile more Black policeman have joined the Ferguson Police Department, other African Americans have been joined the City Counsel and other community organizations. So, given these improvements, what’s the real problem? What do the protesters really want? What do the rioters really want?

In asking this question, I want to go deeper than the surface answers. Many people and the media keep perpetuating the false narrative that Mike Brown had raised his hands and said “don’t shoot.” The evidence however has shown that to be false. Brown actually attacked the policeman, grabbed his gun, caused it to go off. Then there’s the shallow and false answer that young black men all around the country are being targeted by police everywhere. To prove that, the pundits collect every incident where a white policeman shot a young black man and then over-generalize to draw this conclusion of police racism and brutality. The problem with that narrative is that it over-generalizes from a few instances by a few individuals assuming it is all the same. It is not.

Deeper Questions

Let’s go back and ask some deeper questions:

What is the real problem? What do all of the participants in these protests and riots want? What drives human beings to protest and what motivates human beings to become violent?

I’ll start with the subject of violence. Obviously violence against persons and property is a physical response and yet it inevitably occurs within a psychological context. So what is that context? It is powerlessness. It is the sense of impotence in feeling that one has the ability to effectively make one’s life better, to change things for the better, to address perceived injustices, and to unleash one’s potentials for being fully one’s best self. When one feels powerless to effect change and to make things better—violence becomes the person’s only option.

Now the idea that powerlessness lies at the heart of violence is an idea that numerous people have suggested for a long time. It is a central theme in Rollo May’s book, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence. The premise is that when people feel powerless then their felt sense of life is such that they have nothing to loose. This is what makes them dangerous. Rollo May (1975) said that those who act violently in our society are largely seeking to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they too are significant.

“Violence arises not out of superfluity of power, but out of powerlessness.” (May, p. 23)

“Violence is a symptom. The disease is variously powerlessness, insignificance, injustice— in short, a conviction that I am less than human and I am homeless in the world.” (p. 243)

Powerlessness and Violence

It is true that more young black men are arrested, and even killed, than those of any other group. Yet that fact alone does not tell us why. It does not account for all of the factors that come together to make that so. What is at the source of all the violence? How is it that many others can get caught up in the violence, into the mob mentality, and start to do senseless acts of destructive violence which pushes their own people and communities?

Given this, why is there so much of a sense of powerless among young Black men and in the urban Black communities? As a psychologist, one thing that stands out to me is that there are so few pathways for opportunity to the American Dream for them. By the time so many of them become adolescents, the key pathways to opportunity are seemingly gone—education, excellent role models at home or in the community, and mentorship in business acumen.

The power to control their lives and manage their future which they could have is mostly no longer available to them—at least in their perspective. For the majority of young black men, the culture of home and ethnic race mocks learning and education, “That’s for nerds and whites.” Their school systems has failed to provide a context of learning, mentoring, and role modeling. The Hollywood and Sports Cultures have dangled the idea of “get rich quick” and “get fame quick” via sports, music, and entertainment. The drug culture has provided a context for escaping the pain and anxiety but carries the price of addiction and then the need for more money for more drugs. Then the vicious cycle of all these factors and more leaves young urban people in a state of feeling powerless to do anything positive about all of this.

Powerlessness and Personal Significance

Here then is the real problem: by making people powerless in these ways, we have unintentionally promoted violence. Often violence is the end result of repressed anger and rage. So what are they angry about? They don’t sense that they have a legitimate way to struggle for a sense of significance. And, after all, “power and the sense of significance are intertwined.” (May, p. 35). And because no human being can exist for long without some sense of his or her own significance, the possibility of violence increases.

If this is the case, then people are looking for something whereby they can assert themselves and affirm themselves. This is a basic psychological principle, namely, we can only develop as a person to the extent that we can affirm ourselves and assert ourselves. Take that away, and there will inevitably be anger and rage. Recognizing this Rollo May wrote:

“The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary.” (p. 179)

What then do the protesters want? What do the rioters want? Is it not a structure whereby they can attain a strong sense of personal dignity, value, and meaningfulness? This points us back to the problem of the black culture in which the protesters and rioters live. While many come out of that culture just fine, many do not. Many come out with a set of values that they learned at home or church— others come out without such. That’s what’s missing—a set of values, personal discipline and responsibility that values self and resiliently handles the challenges of life. But with 72% of black babies born to unwed mothers (and the majority are teenagers at that) they are set up for poverty and all of the banes of urban life. The young black men are set up for lacking a strong responsible male image in the home.

Others are victims of other sub-cultures dominant in the black community such as the Victim Culture which frames the problem as centuries of slavery, that they are victims, that they cannot compete on even footing with others, that they should be entitled to special privileges, etc. Yet others have been programmed by the hip-hop culture that seems to think it is cool to call women bitches and hoes and each other by the N-word and to sing and dance about violence— assuming that it is just music and entertainment and it will do no damage. That’s the delusion.

Violence and Interpretation

There’s another factor about violence however that we must face: Violence is not automatic. Just because a person feels mistreated, unfairly treated, is frustrated and angry, is even outraged, that alone does not guarantee violence. Where there is a violent response by a human being, there is also a human interpretation. The reason for this is because we do not just react as humans, we respond. We choose our responses (and hence we are ultimately responsible for our choices and actions).

What does this mean regarding violence? It means that how you interpret a situation determines your readiness to strike back in hostility or perhaps to simply smile and move on. This means that how you see and interpret the world about you is crucial to whether you respond in violence or not. If one’s interpretations are decisive, then where are people getting their frames by which they create their interpretations of things?

From their culture! That’s why the culture of ideas, beliefs, understandings, etc. — the Hollywood culture, the hip-hop culture, the victim culture, the school system culture, the family culture, the church culture, the political culture lies at the heart of the problem. Here’s another way that we are responsible for the violence in our society. We are feeding these ideas which people then use for interpreting which creates their anger and sense of injustice in the first place. The real problem lies in the ways that people are interpreting their perceived sense of injustice.

Solutions

What’s the solution? Let’s go back to the solution Rollo May suggested in 1975.

“The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary.”

The problem isn’t power, power is the solution. Power is the birthright of every human being and that’s why each person has four fundamental powers of response (Meta-Reflection #34). Power provides each of us a source for a solid sense of self which enables us to like ourselves and feel interpersonally significant. Power enables one to have response-power (response-ability) which lets him know that he or she can make a difference to improve one’s life.

If powerlessness is the problem and source of violence, then the more we empower people to take charge of their lives, take ownership of their responsibilities, embrace the power of learning, the more we undercut the need for violence. Doing this will actually reduce the sense of injustice. By taking responsibility for how we interpret things, we will stop over-generalizing, stop framing ourselves as victims, stop waiting for someone to rescue us, and start taking creative action.

To undermine powerlessness, we need to reframe the current cultural interpretation. Too many people interpret what a person is by what he does or what she has. They make self-esteem conditional and dependent. Do that and then the lack of knowledge and skills, the incompetence to handle life’s demands create a sense of impotent powerlessness which, in turn, leads to violence. Let’s change this to your value as a human being is unconditional—so assert it. Affirm it. Don’t let a toxic culture tell you that you’re a nothing if you don’t have things or can’t achieve things.

The interpretation that the injustices of 2015 are equivalent to those of 1960 is another source of anger and violence. The protests today are very different from those of the 1960s and are not a continuation of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Then there was segregation and unjust laws on the books which disadvantaged the Blacks and privileged the Whites. But all of that has changed. Today, where there is racism, it is in a few individuals, it is no longer in the system. From time to time, a rouge policeman is discovered picking on Blacks and today, with everyone having a phone camera that person is usually identified and dealt with as he should be.

Interpreting things in these inadequate ways and undermining the pathways that would empower people with a sense of significance, choice, responsibility, and hope lies at the heart of the problem. The challenge today is to change these things. It is to enable people to gain true and authentic personal power to take charge of their lives in healthy ways, then the violence will go away. What the protesters and even the rioters really want is what we all want— to be able to actualize ourselves to be fully alive and human. This is the self-actualization drive within all people and is what we in Neuro-Semantics are dedicated to.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.