That's Like What?

The linguistic backdrop

In my book “Navigating The Ship of You” is a chapter called The Iceberg of Language
(here in article form http://pjwhypno.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-iceberg-of-language.html .)

In it I talk about Language in the metaphorical sense of an iceberg, with some language above the water’s surface and a much larger amount below the surface.

Now the conscious language, the seen or aware language above the surface, is verbal – it is the language we are not born with, but rather we learn in the course of our lives.  The other non-verbal languages are below the surface, out of conscious awareness. These are the various languages of our senses.

Also below the surface is a rather misty, grey area of inner language that I describe as the language of our Inner Self.

These below the surface languages are ones we are born with, albeit in a rather raw form.
As we grow we learn and gain a knowledge of verbal language, and we enhance and cultivate our ‘below the surface’ languages.

Yet here’s the thing – we use our knowledge of verbal language as our preferred vehicle of making, retaining and communicating meaning.

Of course certain things mean so much more to us in a non-verbal sense – the tender touch of a loved one, the sound of a beautiful melody, the smell of a rose, the sight of a beautiful sunset, the taste of a lemon – yet when we come to describe them, we use the vehicle of words.

When a baby cries, smiles or laughs it knows no words. It is communicating what is felt, experienced, at the level of the language of the Inner Self by the means of the most immediate physical response that comes to hand. As the baby becomes the infant, the toddler, it also starts to utilise the sounds, and eventually the words, it has learned that mean something.

In the broadest sense, the growing child discovers a “code” that makes communicating what it experiences, and what it feels, SIMPLER. And that interpretive code we know is verbal language.

One of the things we get very good at, even from an early age, is pattern recognition. It seems to be another of those inner capabilities we are born with, and that we then fashion and nurture from a very raw sense into something much more sophisticated. I would contend that it is part of our language of the Inner Self – the whole and wide ranging ability to perceive something as being LIKE something else.
And out of that wide ranging ability – once we have learned enough verbal language - comes our propensity for using metaphor in our pattern recognition and its communication, both with ourselves and others.

That’s Like What

Recently I was interviewed by my good friend Judy Rees for her Collaboration Dynamics series of podcasts. Whilst this was a pleasure and a privilege in and of itself – it is always great to have lengthy chats with friends and colleagues – of course there was a purpose to it all. And that was to explore, in terms of collaborative functionality, how I deal with the teams I coach with regards to their competitive performance.

Now, with Judy being “at the helm” so to speak, the particular lingua franca of the conversation involved her using Clean Language questions to elicit my metaphorical representations; to facilitate in a directed way, a journey through my metaphorical landscape.

Or – to put it another way – she used the linguistic lever of Clean Language to find out what was going on for me in my language of the Inner Self. And the most straightforward way to communicate with that below-the-surface Inner language is metaphor. Metaphor – our verbally learned means of representing one thing in terms of another, used below the level of conscious awareness by a part of us that has been dealing with pattern recognition since before our birth.

Now we use metaphor thousands of times all day and every day. We use it in our outer conversations AND we use it in our conversations with ourselves. In a way, the ratio of our outer usage to our inner usage, is also like the iceberg – with the inner usage being below the surface and therefore much more outside our awareness.

Now when we are present with any communication we are trying – all the while – to make meaning of it. This can be listening to someone talking in our own mother tongue, someone speaking in a foreign language, a painting we are looking at, certain sounds or music, the taste or smell of something, the time of day, where we are spatially, how we are being, etc etc. It is all data we are endeavouring to make meaning of. As we know, part of the meaning-making process is the question “Is it LIKE anything else I already know?”

And the very clever linguistic lever that makes Clean Language so powerful is the way that that particular question is structured.
When I hear, “What’s that like?” I give myself a different interpretation than if I hear it put as, “That’s like what?”
The juxtaposition of those three words, the position of the apostrophe, and the presence or the lack of any tonal nuance, all go to make something completely different.

Think about when you go to get a copy of a key. The key-cutter takes the original and matches it with a template key, and then cuts the template key on the lathe to match the original. A simple process – yes – and yet sometimes the new copy key will not fit the lock in the same way. Sometimes, if the cutter has not been diligent enough, the new key will not operate the lock at all.

And, in a similar way, “That’s like what?” seems to match the lock to the language of the Inner Self in a much better way than “What’s that like?” could ever do.

Discoveries

Now the content and direction of my conversation with Judy Rees was quite a fascinating journey of discovery for me, even though I have a familiarity with Clean Language, how it functions and how powerful it is.

My familiarity, needless to say, has been with using it on occasions with clients, or people I’m coaching. Sometimes, the revelations that have emerged for clients have been extremely useful and for one – a young student about to take his Common Entrance exams – quite life-changing.

I’ll allow you to come to your own conclusions from the podcast, rather than reveal my own retrospective discoveries. You can access the podcasts via the links below.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/collaboration-dynamics/id976747344

http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=62743&refid=stpr