ABTI | Joseph Riggio International

You are here: Home / Archives for Personal Transformation

Personal Transformation

Time Sliding … Into A Future Perfect

Time Sliding … Into A Future Perfect

by ·

ADUMBRATION: Knowing where you’ve been before you get there …

Future Perfect Tense

The future perfect is a verb tense used for actions that will be completed before some other point in the future.

The parade will have ended by the time Chester gets out of bed. At eight o’clock I will have left.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/future-perfect/

Future Perfect Continuous Tense

The future perfect continuous, also sometimes called the future perfect progressive, is a verb tense that describes actions that will continue up until a point in the future. The future perfect continuous consists of will + have + been + the verb’s present participle (verb root + -ing).

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/future-perfect-continuous-tense/

Everyone I’ve ever worked with wants an edge …

When you’re seeking extreme or elite performance you need to maximize both what you put your attention on doing, and how you do it. This means that you need to know a few key things:

  • The Outcome – specifically what you are attempting to achieve or accomplish
  • Milestones – the steps to getting what you want that must happen in parallel or sequence
  • Metrics – precisely what to measure that will let you know that you’re getting what you want
  • Exit Criteria – knowing what achieving or accomplishing the outcome will be like so you know you’ve arrived

Getting “The Edge” all elite performers possess depends on your ability to imagine a future that hasn’t happened yet but will happen as you imagine it happening.

Exquisite Performance Happens In The Body First … And Then Follows In Time

There are two keys to imagining a future happening exactly as you intend it and then making it so …

  • The ability to language your future imagination and projections about the future as memories of what has already happened.
  • The ability to know within yourself as an embodied, body-based, feeling what it will be like for you when it has happened.

I’d also argue that the key to exemplary, elite leadership requires both of these keys to have been ingested, digested, and assimilated by you are automatic ways of being about your personal and professional intentions.

Most people who have seen great performances the achievements and accomplishments that result assume they are watching the performance where the result has been achieved or accomplished.

The performances that create the achievements or accomplishments that happen in real-time have already happened long before others witness what only happening for them in real-time.

The outcome that the performers realize in real-time in front of witnesses first happened for them when they had the embodied experience of it for themselves, and the many, many times they re-experienced it along the way to achieving or accomplishing it in real-time in the way others perceive it.

This is obvious in looking at any masterful athletic event or at any performance by great entertainers who spend weeks or months practicing for that specific event, and years developing the mastery to achieve and accomplish the outcome … e.g.: winning a gold medal, getting a Grammy or Oscar, or any other achievement or accomplishment of the same caliber … being awarded a Nobel Prize.

If this is the kind of elite performance and outcomes you aspire to you must become a master of creating futures before they exist, and that means mastering the two keys to creating futures that happen as you imagine and intend them …

It All Starts Here: Temporal Shifting (The Precursor to Time-Sliding)

“Once you’ve read this you will become what you are not yet but soon will be!“

In my training programs for my clients, including my executive and entrepreneurial clients, organizational and team leaders, and especially when I’m training other professional change artists … consultants, coaches, trainers, therapists, hypnotists, etc. … I refer to this kind of sentence as using hypnotic protocol.

When you use hypnotic language structures you force a specific cognitive process intentionally, it’s almost as though the structure of your language becomes a cognitive instruction itself.

When you read or hear, “Once you’ve read this you will become what you are not yet but soon will be!” in order to make sense of it you must move through time and construct a future-based temporal position to unfold the meaning contained within it.

Let’s dissect this sentence from beginning to end so we can see the loops created within it …

“Once you’ve read this …” assumes this will happen in the near future as most people will deconstruct the language … again, like an instruction, or almost a command.

Then we find the embedded phrase, “… you will become …” this is clearly an instruction or embedded command that remains undefined, i.e.: become what?

What follows is an ambiguous reference that can only be deciphered by the reader or listener who experiences it in reference to themselves … “… what you are not yet …” this presupposes both that there is something they are not yet, as well as in implied assumption about something they want to or would like to become that they need to fill in and complete in order to make sense of it.

This particular phrase, “… what you are not yet …” tends to shift things for most people because they move to a completely constructed reference that is this purely future based, or possibly exists outside of time in terms of any linear sequencing. It begins to set up a movement to a past reference about the future having already happened … just not yet.

When the temporal shift happens, from present to future, and then to past, for most folks there’s a vestibular shift as well meaning their sense of relative balance shifts because it feels like there’s a somatic movement of their center from one point to another. This is a very powerful thing to be able to do … with others or for yourself!

The end of the sentence “… but soon will be.” does double duty, it forces them to occupy the space where what has not happened yet has happened and shifts the experience to being experienced as a memory, something I refer to as creating a Future Memory … a thing that has happened, just not yet.

This is because in part the word “but” serves to negate what has just preceded it, i.e.: “… but soon will be.” is preceded by and immediately follows, at you are not yet …” When you negate “… what you are not yet …” the assumption is that you actually are already that which you are not yet.

The idea that you are already that which you are not yet creates confusion in the present that can only be resolved by moving to a future-based position where what has not yet happened in the present already has happened, or the creation of a Future Memory.

Creating a Future Memory is a critical step in establishing the mindset required to take action in the present that exceeds expectations built on either past performance or present evidence … this is the secret sauce of elite leadership … i.e.: both self-leadership and the leadership of others.

The temporal shifts that happen when you structure language in this way happen both mentally and physically … semantically and somatically. I build the entire SomaSemantics model around this way of using language to create transformational change.

Using the SomaSemantics model to create transformational change happens in communication as transmission (the sentence above and it’s breakdown forms an example of transmission), as well as in reception (the noticing of how someone is responding to communication interactions both semantically – the meaning they derive from the communication … and somatically – the shifts in their body responses as they experience the communication, e.g.: proprioceptive/postural changes … movement, gestures, expressions … literally any observable somatic adjustments including micro-muscular adjustments, physiological changes – breathing rate, blood flow changes indicated by skin color changes … eye dilation, focal positioning and blink rate …

It’s all patterns …
(everything that can be noticed counts)

The Art of Adumbration

What I’m pointing to and depending upon rests on the presumption that humans prefer patterns of familiarity, and when they encounter something that is uncertain or unknown they do whatever it takes to make the adjustments necessary in their perception and experience to re-find and re-set themselves on familiar ground.

Getting this idea about the human tendency to find and create patterns of familiarity is central to getting the power of adumbration and adumbrating …

We (humans) experience time as a pattern. Some time patterns are familiar … the movement of the sun throughout the day, the cycles of the seasons. When these patterns are disturbed in some way … a full solar eclipse or a particularly unseasonably hot or cold spell when we expect weather that’s more familiar to us … we feel off-center about what’s happening and desire a return to the pattern more familiar to us.

The key components of these experiences are the physical, somatic adjustments we make as we are going through the mental, semantic impressions they create in us. To make sense of what’s happening and find ourselves able to return to our center requires we create a vestibular adjustment in how we feel. Literally for most people, especially untrained individuals, unfamiliarity and uncertainty create a sense of being off balance that is vestibularly experienced as an actual body feeling.

When we are vestibularly uncertain we feel a certain compulsion to make proprioceptive adjustments to get to where we need to be to re-set our centers to a position of balance. An extreme example of this might be the vertigo some people feel when they experience something so unfamiliar or unexpected that they cannot find anywhere to place it in the framework of their thinking.

The shifts that happen when we are confronted by something that we have no framework to make any sense of create a simultaneous mental and physical instability that seems outside of or beyond reality as we know it. In these moments the most important and urgent thing will be to find the way to make sense of the experience, and place it into a familiar enough sense of what’s happened, happening, or will happen that their sense of reality becomes stable for them again.

When observing and working with extremely well-trained, elite performers like … special-ops U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Army Delta Force commandos, or U.S. Marine Force Recon teams, U.S. Navy “Top Gun” type fighter pilots, S.W.A.T. teams, Hotshot and Smokejumper wildland firefighters, extraordinary surgeons, world-class litigators, professional boxers, and championship martial artists … they all have the unique ability to deal with the flow of what’s happening in real-time despite the expectation of how things were supposed to have happened or should have unfolded for them. Then understand and accept the reality of uncertainty and chaos, and are able to adjust and respond in relation to the outcome they most desire despite the seeming evidence inhibiting their progress moving forward to achieve or accomplish it.

Superior leaders in business also understand and accept the reality of uncertainty and chaos, and they use it to their advantage. In most leadership positions there is a competitive field in which the strategies and plans they make, and the actions they take, happen. This looks and feels very much like the kind of performance we see when we examine the thinking and actions of other elite performers in other domains of excellence.

The ability to succeed in a competitive environment, where others are trying to gain the competitive edge, demands an exquisite precognitive ability to predict where the system is going as things are unfolding in real-time, and to act in relation to the intended future that hasn’t happened yet, but will if the right actions are taken now.

Using this knowledge of how we process our experience relative to our pre-existing frameworks and patterns of understanding can be remarkably useful. We can establish patterns of familiarity or unfamiliarity that lead to a natural presumption of where what we’re experiencing is likely to lead next, and our drive to continue or create a sense of stability will take over allowing us to fill in the blank spots in our understanding. It’s critical to realize that our drive for stability can and will override our ability to perceive reality with an explanation that fits our previous and current understanding and the framework that supports that understanding.

When our sense of familiarity with the unfolding pattern that we are experiencing becomes disrupted a vacuum that needs to be filled by us to return to the stability of understanding we demand opens and the most immediate explanation offered will be accepted and used to fill it.

The sense of the vacuum in reality that we experience in moments of uncertainty and chaos can only be resolved in a way that serves us best by either having elite preparation and the knowledge, skills and experience in dealing with uncertainty and chaos as it’s happening, or preparing ourselves to organize and align to a certain future outcome despite out current unfolding experience and the evidence it presents to us … or ideally both!

The vacuum that’s created in these situations provides us with a hypnotic opening that we can insert a suggestion into that will be likely to be accepted and used to make sense of what happened, is happening, and will happen.

Therefore, the ability to notice these patterns of familiarity and aberration to the familiar, especially regarding the ability to predict where the system is headed as they are unfolding is the art of adumbration.

No other skill creates as much advantage or gives you as much of an edge in responding to create the outcomes you desire than the ability to adumbrate the situation you are experiencing, and maybe no more significantly than in human interaction and communication.

Adumbration as Somatic Awareness

You ability to adumbrate begins with your sensitivity to your own somatic experience.

Begin able to notice the first and smallest sense of physical response in your body gives you what you need to open your awareness of adumbrating the situation.

Your body will respond to signals in the system, especially to subtle changes and shifts to the familiar, faster than your conscious awareness of those signals.

The ability to keep your awareness of these somatic adjustments gives you the adumbrative edge you need to stay ahead of where the system is going before it gets there …

Literally, the ability to track your own subtle somatic shifts as they are happening is the holy grail and rosetta stone to adumbrating and making the changes that allow you to position yourself where you need to be to get the outcomes you intend so that your experience is that you’re in the future waiting for the past to arrive to where you positioned to receive it and experience it in the way you derive the most value from in being in that particular position.

Preframing your experience to benefit you begins with using the structure of hypnotic language and protocol with yourself.

One group of folks that must do this professionally to succeed are traders in any of the markets … commodities, equity, currencies, etc. These folks are invested in reading patterns of activity that are suggestive of where the market will go, and take a position now that anticipates it arriving to where they predict it to be at some given point in the future. Active traders also make more specific presumptions about when the market will get there and time their trades to take advantage of the patterns of activity they are tracking.

When you speak with many of the most successful traders you’ll find they speak of a feeling they get about a trade. They track real information that arises in congregate and total for them as a feeling, and they may or may not then validate their feelings by backtracking and future projections based on the feeling they get using the information available to them.

There are also many very successful traders who will say that they cannot fully explain why they knew to make a particular trade but they felt it. Digging deeper you find in speaking to these successful traders that over their years of developing their skill and expertise they taught themselves and learned which signals to pay attention to, and what specific physical feelings meant about taking a trade or not.

In working with elite, successful business professionals, such as the executives in multinational companies and break-through entrepreneurs that have been my clients, I’ve found the best of the best do the same thing relative to the decisions they make as the most successful traders. They track real information that arises as a feeling for them about what to be doing and how to do it, based on a future projection that may or may not have a basis in previous results they can point to or use from the results produced in the past.

The ability to trust their “unreasonable” expectations about the decisions they make about the direction to take moving forward regarding taking massive “unreasonable” action and gambling on a potential opportunity, or pulling back from what seems an obvious win, when others in their space are tracking along with the obvious and familiar unaware of the future looming before them, separates what I refer to as elite, successful business professionals and the average executive or entrepreneur.

Often the way they speak to themselves, literally in terms of their internal dialogue about what they are noticing and deciding about, builds the confidence to set “unreasonable” expectations and to take the “unreasonable” action. When they express their thoughts externally you can hear how they construct their internal dialogue … e.g.: “When we have crossed the billion dollar revenue mark we will have already established a position on the market that will be far ahead of our competitors or their ability to catch up with where we now are relative to them.”

This kind of language is framed in what grammaticians call, Future Perfect language.

Future Perfect languaging is the essence of time sliding, adumbrative thinking and the ability to stand in a future that hasn’t happened yet, but will.

Time Sliding And Noticing The Somatic Signals

When I’m training folks to develop the elusive nature of profound adumbration and the skills of effectively predicting the most likely futures that align most closely with their intention I begin with the body.

Even when it may seem that I am doing language training, as when I’m teaching time-sliding language patterns, I am pointing to and emphasizing what happens somatically.

The ability to notice the vestibular and proprioceptive shifts associated with choosing an unknown future position to build your present operating consideration on forms the deep, cutting edge you need to go where you need to be to receive the future you are creating and intend to reap.

The kinds of futures I’m referring to are those realized by super-successful traders and the elite, successful business professionals I’ve referenced already. These are folks like Steves Jobs stepping into a future expectation and building technology that makes no real sense in the moment it emerged under his direction … the original iPod formed the basis, understanding, and desire for the iPhone that has been the company’s biggest success long before the iPhone existed or made any sense in the market as it was when he was making the investment to make it happen. I’d vehemently argue that Jobs was standing in the space of the success of the iPhone when he made the decision to invest in the first prototype of the original iPod.

Jobs repeated that success with his vision for the iPad, and we can point to any number of break-through entrepreneurs and thought-leaders in tech that followed the same patterns of massive investments in a future that didn’t exist when they made their decisions to make the investments they did. We see this in other spaces as well when we look to the history of inventions that shouldn’t have happened or couldn’t be done … the Wright Brothers ridiculous attempts (and failures) at creating a heavier than air flying machine (while everyone else was betting on zeppelins and balloons!).

First there’s a feeling of possibility, then a translation into future perfect internalized hypnotic language, then the internalized language is projected externally as time-sliding language expressed in future perfect continuous form, and finally we see the realized outcome of this process … long after the person who had the initial feeling felt it.

The key to getting here before you do begins with developing the ability to notice and trust the feelings you have about the future that are present in the current patterns as they are unfolding in real-time. When you can reliably notice the feelings about what’s about to happen but hasn’t yet in a meaningful way you can then practice translating them into time-sliding language.

The ability to use time-sliding language that references somatic experience, and creates it for those who read and/or hear it as well, generates the responses that make the intended future possible and bring it to full realization.

You must begin with tuning your awareness about the subtle, indistinct feelings you have about what’s unfolding to be able to recognize the patterns they suggest about what could and will be unfolding that is present in what’s enfolded and hasn’t yet become present.

It’s also imperative that you build confidence in your ability to notice and recognize these subtle signals to take even “unreasonable” action based on them that results in your system coming to rest …

Your system “comes to rest” when the embodied physical experience and cognitive mental experience are completely aligned and integrated into a singular common expectation about the future, a future expectation that flows naturally from the singularity you contain within … from this position it becomes virtually inevitable that what you intend indeed comes to pass, building a recursive reinforcing loop of confidence that radiates from you in everything you do, such that others experience it building trust and confidence in your ability to lead them as well.*

This is all very possible as I know, because I’ve trained clients globally to do it with surgical precision … this is the great adventure … knowing where you’ll be with certainty before you get there!

*NOTE: The idea expressed in the conception of “the system coming to rest” above is the essence of the triad, POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE. where POWER is the ability to take the action that creates the outcomes you intend, CREATIVITY is the ability to remain adaptable in face of uncertainty and chaos, and INFLUENCE is the ability to ENGAGE, ENROLL, AND EMPOWER others to create outcome that exceed those you are capable of creating on your own, that forms the fundamental leadership model within the MythoSelf Process work. This triad is the basis of self-leadership and the leadership of others.

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics
Sullana, Peru – 8 July 2023

P.S. : If you want to experience this in our upcoming live, intensive training and leave with your adumbrative ability turned on and tuned it … join me and Al Ridenhour for Generative Flow five-day intensive training at The Fives all inclusive resort, Playa del Carmen on the beach in Cancun, Mexico from 3-7 October this year!!!

Get all the info you need here:

The Five-Day Intensive
GENERATIVE FLOW℠ Training

with Dr. Joseph Riggio &
Lt. Col. Al Ridenhour U.S. Marines Ret.

https://www.eventcreate.com/e/generativeflow

Mapping Consciousness

Mapping Consciousness

by ·

Thoughts on Werner Erhard’s EST, Richard Bandler’s NLP and Joseph Riggio’s MythoSelf Process Models

“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” – Alfred Korzybski

This may be one of the most used, most misquoted, and most misunderstood comments driving multiple models of human cognition and behavior.

Maps, Territories and Models

The reason I say this about the Korzybski quote “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” is because it’s so often presented as, “A map is not the territory.” FULL STOP!

“A map is not the territory.” is a very different notion than “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” READ THEM BOTH CAREFULLY, AND NOTICE WHAT THEY ARE POINTING TO SPECIFICALLY.

I am a picky user of language, because language is our primary means of representing “what is”… i.e. the world, reality … and we act on our representations of “what is” NOT on “what is.”

Language is a composition of symbols in a syntax and grammar that give rise to semantic form, i.e.: meaning, or more accurately, the meaning we apply to the sequence of symbols in the language we use (see Saussure and his comments on signals and signifiers for more clarity). 

The semiotician, Umberto Eco, introduced a concept about text as potentially “open” versus “closed,” meaning that the texts are “fields of meaning” and not “strings of meaning.” This idea gives the semantic power (the ability to create and choose meaning) to the reader versus the author. Even when the author might clearly intend a meaning in an open text, it is the reader that confers it.

I believe that this is also true in verbal communication, i.e.: that the listener confers meaning, and not the speaker. 

Based on this observation the author and the speaker create fields of meaning from which their readers and listeners can confer the meaning they intend, without trying to close the system. 

To confer meaning in an open system the author or speaker need then to infer the meaning in the way they present the information they are representing, because the reader and listener will always interpret what is written or spoken and not simply absorb it “as is” unchanged. To do this requires a deep understanding of how the intended audience will transform what is presented as they interpret and incorporate it for themselves. There are some cases in theater and film that I can think of where the playwright or screenwriter has done this particularly well.

Presenting meaning in theater and film has the advantage of a four-dimensional format to express the intended meaning via physical expression and interaction with all that implies, happening through movement in space and time. The richness of the four-dimensional aspect of representation more closely simulates our lived experience than can be expressed in a two-dimensional format like text. Text however has the advantage of remaining more open, leaving more room to imply meaning without directly conferring it. Speaking can also remain more open in this way, with the advantage of simultaneously layering inferences in the non-verbal aspect between the speaker and listeners. 

Hypnotic protocol takes advantage of this open framework in speaking, and in the hands of a master writer in text as well. Inference resides at the heart of hypnotic protocol. By the precise and creative use of suggestion a pathway can be formed that provides the least resistance for the listener or reader to confer meaning. Many playwrights and screenwriters use hypnotic protocol to create the experience they want to confer to their audience, leaving less room for interpretation as the actors’ work unfolds the story being represented by them.

Let’s bring this back again now, with the fullness of what I’ve shared to the comment by Korzybski, “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” Maps seek to capture in representational form the structure of a territory, e.g.: a context or process, that allows the user to navigate and transverse the territory the map represents with a degree of confidence that they will successfully get from where they begin to where they intend to arrive.

The consideration of Korzybski’s comment then isn’t that maps aren’t what they represent, i.e.: “The map is not the territory.” but that maps are tools to navigate and transverse territories that when “correct” will be useful in doing so. Keeping this in mind we can move on to models which provide a similar if not the same function.

EST, NLP & the MythoSelf Process Models:

All three of these models, EST, NLP and the MythoSelf Process model, use the fundamental concept that Korzybski suggests in what may be the most famous quote coming from his own General Semantics model, i.e.: “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Werner Erhard and EST:

In the case of EST, NLP, and the MythoSelf Process a model of reality, or more precisely, a model of how to conceive of reality and our interactions in it, is organized and presented. 

I am a huge fan of Werner Erhard’s work and his EST model. In that work, Werner points back to some of the fundamental notions of Martin Heidegger’s ontological and phenomenological philosophy, especially his considerations on “being.” To massively simplify that application portion of Werner’s model he points to the perceiver of a context as giving meaning to the context, literally bringing the context into being by conferring meaning. He takes this idea to an extreme in suggesting that by our “word” – literally our speaking into being – we bring contexts forth and can transform ourselves and the world we occupy by doing so. 

The inverse of this is also true of Werner’s work, that by not “being our word” we live in a state akin to an automaton simply responding to the context we encounter like “meat machines” moved around by the feelings aroused by the stimuli we experience. The process that functions to create the cause-and-effect response of the so-call meat machine is the “story” we are living inside of that we presume is real, when in fact it’s just the stories that have been conferred upon us, that we have now colluded with, and from there bring forth new stories that contain the same contexts as the stories we have incorporated. This process creates a never-ending loop of repeating the same story of our life over and over with little or no relief. 

By “speaking our word” we can bring new contexts into being, and transform the story into the one we desire wholeform. One of the flaws I perceive in the EST model is the suggesting that we lead from “being” and not “thinking” or “doing” … and, and yet there is not mechanism or process provided for creating our “word” and thereby transforming our “story” without the “thinking” required to do so. The EST model can be a very powerful to create transformation, but requires a devolution into solipsisim to function as it’s presented. 

If I take the EST model literally the Rene Descartes ontological catch phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” becomes “I think it, therefore it is.” Without too much stretching the EST model can viewed through Korzybski’s conception of maps, as a ontological distortion that might read, “The map IS the territory.” 

Richard Bandler and NLP

The NLP model starts in a very different place than the EST model. NLP begins with the idea that what we know as being real is really representation, and the process we use to create, manipulate and utilize our representations determines how well they will work for us in creating the outcomes we desire. 

Werner Erhard in the EST model suggests that transformation happens by speaking it into the world, ignoring the story of how we have known the world to be, and choosing a context that brings into being our intentions. This process, as I’ve presented it above, is known in EST circles as “being your word,” i.e.: because I say it is so it will be so. (NOTE: I love this idea, even as I see the flaws in it … flaws I see even when it works. Being personally driven in a phenomenologically empirical way to arrive at my own conceptions, the human cost of this method of living and bringing into being my intended outcomes is just too high for me to personally accept.)

In the NLP model as presented by Richard Bandler there is a cognitive process that begins and ends in representational forms of sensorial experience that are able to be intentionally modified and manipulated to create a better map of the world from the point of view of functional usefulness. The individual who perceives the world does so by the way they represent the world to themselves internally, as well as to the degree that they are able to observe the world as it is, i.e.: to align their internal representations in a way that accurately describes the external context as it is now. The step after being able to accurately represent the world as it is now, is to have the flexibility to represent the world as you’d like it to be, and to manipulate the way you internally represent your experiences to generate responses that bring about your desired outcomes. 

NLP also has a secondary application of being able to map the way others internally represent the world to themselves by calibrating their verbal and non-verbal expressions in communication. A significant part of the process of mapping the internal representations of any context, i.e.: past, present or future, is contained in the language use to express the context by the language user. 

Withing the NLP model you have multiple sub-models that are designed to make sense of the language patterns of the user, e.g.: the Meta-Model and Meta-Programs, and to use language interventions to modify these patterns to a more useful form, e.g.: reframing and hypnosis. In addition NLP users are trained to notice the non-verbal aspects in communication as well, for instance the representational system preferences of an individual in context, e.g.: visual vs auditory, or visual to auditory, or visual and auditory. Any combination and sequence of the sensory modalites can be present, and a skilled NLP user will be able to discern by tracking language usage and non-verbal patterns what these combination and sequences are as they communicate and calibrate what they are observing. 

In the NLP model this ability to calibrate the way contexts are represented internally, and to modify these representations allow the NLP user to transform their experience of the context, make new choices, and create the intended outcome with much greater facility. It is also possible to use these same skills in communicating with other to bring about intended outcomes with them as well.

Joseph Riggio and the MythoSelf Process Model

Joseph Riggio (me, in the third person) has designed the MythoSelf Process model drawing on and from both of the models presented above, the EST and NLP models. In addition there is a deep draw on and from Roye Fraser’s Generative Imprint model. 

The Generative Imprint model can be considered an applicaiton of the NLP model emphasizing the access to the excitatory bias and using wholeform communication to do that, and then leaping beyond the representation of reality within the framework of the excitatory bias to a deeper transcendent experience of being alive in a wellformed way that expresses as a pervasive sense of wellbeing and infinite possibilities. In Roye’s model this transcendent experience is the Generative Imprint and is held in “symbolic, iconic, representational form.”

“Form” is a critical consideration in Roye’s model and work. He literally being from and ends what happens in the model by accessing the form of the Generative Imprint. Accessing the Generative Imprint aligns an individual with themselves in relation to their sense of place and possibility to the Universe or the Cosmos as it’s unfolding in real time. The experience of accessing the Generative Imprint brings the indvidual into a very hightened sense of being present through time, i.e.: their past, present and future, in a deeply aware, sensorial way.

I was a student of Roye’s in an intensive seven-year apprenticeship, becoming deeply immersed in the Generative Imprint model, how to access it and apply it for myself and with others. The main processes used to access and elicit the form of the Generative Imprint are based in the NLP model and it’s applicaitons.

After working closely with Roye and observing how he interacted with his clients over several thousands of hours in the training and clinical context with him there was no doubt regarding the intensity of his use of somatic form as well as semanitc form in his work. This observation led me to the first expression of what is now the MythoSelf Process model. The first unique distinction I brought to the MythoSelf Process model that moved it some distance away from the other three models I have been presenting and discussing is the primacy of the use of the body and tracking somatic from at the macro and micro levels of expression. 

Somatic Form in the MythoSelf Process Model

The main premise of the MythoSelf Process model has always been that the ontology of the individual is grounded somaticaly, i.e.: in the body. The somatic form gives rise to semantic form as sensorial experience is expressed in body sensations and responses. In the MythoSelf Process model we know reality as we experience it in sensorial form before there is any post-sensorial representation. 

This idea of pre-representational sensorial form drives all of the transformational interventions within the MythoSelf Process model that allow a user to access and modify their awareness of reality and being, as well as the reponses available to them to take action in the world creating their intended outcomes. 

In the MythoSelf Process model we hold a primary presumption that all of our experiences, including the realization of our intended outcomes, are a function of the action we take and choose not to/fail to take. The action we take are our behavioral responses, so if we desire anything in our lives, including the desire for it to be different in some way we need to modify our behavioral responses that keep the way we experience our lives as we do intact. 

Because we accept that we are ontologically grounded somatically, and our sensorial awareness drives our experience and way of knowing the world, we cannot change our behavior without first changing how we are in ourselves, i.e: somatically, and the way we experience the contexts we occupy sensorially. So within the MythoSelf Process model transformation becomes a soma-semantic function of shifting the sensorial filters we use and the way we sort and process the information we are experiencing and responding to in the action we take (or choose not to/fail to take).

This distinction of driving behavior sensorially, but shifting what and how we are perceiving in and about the contexts we occupy create a significant distinction in the MythoSelf Process model as a a priori model of behavioral change. Within the model we never seek to directly change behavior, instead we simply change the perceptions of reality we hold in the contexts we occupy, and those we intend to occupy, and allow our behaviors to follow form that way of perceiving ourselves and the context we are in or are moving towards. (NOTE: This process can be, and often is, applied to past contexts and events as we consider them too, leading to a reorganization of how we know the world about us and ourselvees in relation to it to be, including our relationships with others … past, present and future.)

The Use of Story in the MythoSelf Process Model

A final commnent on the MythoSelf Process model for this writing concerns the use of story, specifically autobiographical narrative, in creating and stablizing the awareness of ourselves in relation to a specific perceptual position we hold and operate from to create our intended outcomes. This idea that story contains and holds our awareness intact connects the MythoSelf Process to Werner’s EST, Bandler’s NLP and Fraser’s Generative Imprint models. A distinction in the applicaition of story in the MythoSelf Process model is that we hold story as “open” versus “closed” in the way Umberto Eco suggests is possible. In the MythoSelf Process model a facilitator working with a client will create a story-form that infers the possibilities of creating and experiencing the intended outcomes of the client. The story-form connects both the specific autobiographical narrative of the individual client to the “field of meaning” that is also suggested by other stories in mythic form that support the individual in remaining in choice regardless of the extant, empirical evidience that suggests a given path, allowing them to draw on a much wider and bigger range of human experience and possibilities than they could contain on their own.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Sarasota, FL, 23 Aug 2022

Communication Mastery

Communication Mastery

by ·

Thinking is Communication … Communication is Thinking

I was speaking with a client this morning and it came up again …

THINKING IS COMMUNICATION … COMMUNICATION IS THINKING

It’s an idea that’s plagued me for half a decade now. It’s remarkable how clearly this makes sense to me today … how obvious it is to me.

Every once in a while I like to revisit the essence of what I do and why I do it, with and for my clients … i.e.: what value I bring to the work I do and am paid for with and by clients.

Here’s my latest update on that consideration, as of this Sunday afternoon, as I sit contemplating it here on 21 August 2022.

Introduction and History:

But let’s go back thirty years or so when I was first coming into the world of NLP, and it was introduced to be as a human communication technology. At that time the idea was that NLP was a way of considering communication and its implications in human interaction. Alongside the idea or interpersonal communication, it was also presented to me that NLP was an intrapersonal human communication technology too.

In the world of NLP the way we process language (the “Linguistic” part of NLP, “Neurolinguistic Programming”) was the critical consideration, especially the nature of syntactical processing, or the sequencing of the internal representations we use to think. In NLP terms this is the V-A-K-O/G representational systems comprised of V-visual, A-auditory, K-kinesthetic, O-olfactory, and G-gustatory, also know as a 4-tuple, where O & G collapse into an overlaid, singular representational form.

Beyond the primacy of the representational systems processing, NLP also looks at linguistic processing, the nature of how language creates representations and meaning. So there are models within the NLP model that address how we process language, like the Meta-Model which looks at the processes of Generalizing, Distorting and Deleting information in linguistic representations, or Meta-Programs which look at how we preference and evaluate language on a continuum of opposites to make sense of and create meaning from linguistic representations.

Then I think forward from that early indoctrination in the NLP model to my years of studying with Roye Fraser, including his training me in the model of work he developed, the Generative Imprint model. The Generative Imprint model is a meta-application of the NLP model that uses a unique positive orientation based in the excitatory bias, using a wholeform structure of perception and communication.

As I think about the years of apprenticing with Roye what stands out most is his use of hypnotic language to create wholeform interactions. Roye’s use of language was exquisite and aimed at what he referred to as the “symbolic, iconic representation” of the Generative Imprint, or a way a person knew themselves to be whole and complete, where they experienced a pervasive sense of wellbeing. This was his forte, and his raison d’etre too.

In the early years of working with Roye I came up with my own application of the Generative Imprint model I called the Mythogenic Self Process (the “myth-making” self process), which I later modified and shortened to the MythoSelf Process. The naming of the MythoSelf Process for my model has remained consistent now for almost 25 years, although the model has been through many revisions and refinements.

It took many years for me to clarify the essence of these models, NLP, the Generative Imprint model and my own MythoSelf Process model. As I was doing this I continued to explore and study other models as well, some philosophic, some psychologic, some an overlay like phenomenology and phenomenography, some others like linguistic and mathematical models, and a deep dive into brain-, neuro- and cognitive- sciences..

However, only after I seriously dove into the exploration and study of cybernetic systems in modeling human cognition and communication was it that all the pieces began to come together. This was the beginning of a profound understanding of the structure of wholeform thinking and communication I had mastered, under Roye’s tutelage and with his intense mentoring.

The Development of SSCT | Sensory-Systems Control Theory

Once I got that deep cybernetic patterns of human perception and cognition I could clearly see the connections between sensorial awareness and symbolic representation that form the basis of what we refer to as thought, and from thought, mind.

It became obvious to me that we transform our direct sensory experiences into symbols of representation so rapidly that there is no temporal gap for all intents and purposes between the two, i.e.: sensations instantaneously are translated into symbols in our conscious cognitive experience. This process is so instantaneous and absolute that reality as we know it is comprised of the symbolic representations we derive from sensory experience, and not based on the actual sensory experience itself.

This led me to develop the theory of human cybernetic cognition that progresses from sensory experience to perception, from perception to sense-making, from sense-making to meaning-making, from meaning-making to decision-making, and from decision-making to action-taking (behavioral response). I refer to this sequential process as the “Ladder of Perception.”

Most of the Ladder of Perception occurs outside of conscious awareness in the feed-forward system from sensation to response. With training the cognitive processing from perception to decision-making can be made conscious in hindsight, looking back from action-taking/response through each of the preceding steps of the Ladder of Perception model.

With advanced training and diligent practice the processing of the steps of the Ladder of Perception can become available consciously as they are happening, and with further advanced training before they happen in the cognitive sequence. When the process that will happen in the cognitive sequence can be considered before it has occurred and created a feed-forward effect in the system adumbration of the unfolding situation becomes possible.

When you can adumbrate the situation you are experiencing, what will most likely happen based on what has happened and is happening is revealed and can be acted upon before it happens as it will if the system is allowed to continue unfolding on the path it is currently taking.

Adumbrating gives you the opening and opportunity to intervene in a system before the event you want to alter has occurred, reshaping the context and framework to allow a different and most desirable outcome to become possible than is possible in the way the current context and framework are organized and being held.

The SSCT | Sensory-System Control Theory is a model that suggests that behavior is shaped at the level of sensation, and by changing the nature of perception behavior can be shaped and will follow. When we can and do choose what and how we are perceiving in the contexts we engage in we can shape the behaviors we need to express that will create the outcomes we desire. Obversely we cannot shape behavior by trying to change our behavior directly, since all behavior is an outgrowth of perception, and if the perceptions remain unchanged our behaviors will always revert to those in alignment with our perceptions.

Sensorial Awareness as Symbolic Representation

Ultimately we want to be able to choose the outcomes we create by our behaviors, because while we cannot necessarily control the contexts we find ourselves in, we do have control over what and how we are perceiving within and in relation to the contexts that contain us.

When we choose our perceptual position we can then manifest and enact the behaviors most likely to produce the outcomes we desire. Choosing our perceptual position requires us to become aware of the symbolic representations we are responding to in the context. By noticing the symbolic forms we are responding to, we can choose to shift our perceptual position until we generate the symbolic form that will and does allow us to manifest and express the most useful behavior in regard to creating the most desirable outcome.

One of the most potent ways to shift the symbolic representation is to shift the filters we are using for our primary way of attending to what we’re experiencing at the sensorial level of awareness.

This can include changing the primary filter, say from visual to vestibular, or auditory to proprioceptive, as well as changing what we noticing for within a given representational system and how we’re noticing for that information sensorially prior to the transform from perception to sense-making (NOTE: in the MythoSelf Process model in addition to the V-A-K-O/G 4-tuple we extend it to a 7-tuple of primary representational systems, V-A-K-O-G- and Vs-vestibular and P-proprioceptive).

Then as we progress through the Ladder of Perception sequencing we can force the sorting pattern of information that would best support our manifestation and expression of the behavioral response most likely to create the outcome we desire. When we shift the filters and force the sorts in this way we begin to reset the processing pattern we use in relation to this situation and the creating the outcomes we desire. Within the MythoSelf Process model this is called “creative expression.”

Creative expression can be partially or fully realized, and is or is not, by the facility that you have with shifting the filters and forcing the sorts to create the behavioral manifestation and expression that most aligns with your ability to create the outcomes you desire. The more elegant the pattern of behavior, the more we can say that you are realizing the fullness of you most profound, potent and powerful creative expression.

When you a fully realizing your creative expression in the behaviors you manifest and express you are living in the most aligned way possible with your innate sense of self, and aligning with that in regard to your external performance. In this way you have begun to create the outcomes you desire by being most who you are, and reducing the friction and compromise in the system. Ultimately when you have refining this pattern and made it the default way you take action the system comes to rest, there is no urgency, stress, anxiety or conflict you experience in taking action in this way.

We can say that when the system is at rest, and you are expressing yourself in the most elegant way possible you are in a state of flow, or what we call your State of Perfection.

By applying the SSCT | Sensory-System Control Theory to notice what happens at the sensorial level of awareness, and in the translation to symbolic representation prior to taking action, we can refine the perceptual position to bring the system to rest.

When you have patterned in the requisite perception training to notice the perceptual position you are holding and its effect on the Ladder of Perception sequencing, and you are capable of choosing the position you adopt and hold to bring the system to rest, you are accessing the reference point of your State of Perfection.

Since the process requires you to attend to your sensorial awareness in a pre-representational way, it is useful to think of this as a somatic intention that occurs in direct sensorial experience had in the body-mind, before the translation to symbolic representation. Only after you have processed the sensorial experience somatically can you accurately identify the accuracy of the symbolic form to the sensorial reality. This transformation from sensation to symbol is a semantic transformation, turning direct sensorial experience into meanings that can ignite conscious decision-making leading to deliberate action-taking, i.e.: in response to an intentional outcome.

THINKING IS COMMUNICATION … COMMUNICATION IS THINKING

So we’ve now come full circle …

We are virtually always acting on the symbolic representations of reality we create from our sensorial experiences. The manipulation of symbolic representation is what we call thinking. Thinking in this way, as symbolic manipulation, operates as a communication process in terms of the use, interactions, applications, and manipulations of symbols, e.g.: words … i.e.: thinking is communication.

In addition to words, symbols can also be communicated in any sensory form we are capable of processing, e.g.: the modalities of the 7-tuple. We are capable of, and do, process symbolic form internally as intra-systemic cognition (processing of information that is self-generated – our own internal thoughts) and inter-systemic cognition (the processing of information that is externally present to us). We can also make a case for inter-subjective cognition as being processed in the space we share with others in simultaneity.

However, what I’ve come to treat as most significant is the communication process itself. I have seen that when you learn to communicate with an exquisite level of clarity and precision internally and inter-personally your ability to express elite levels of performance follows inevitably.

What I mean by elite levels of performance is the ability to consistently maximize positive consequences and minimize negative consequences in the manifestation of your desired outcomes. When you are expressing elite levels of performance, most typically from a flow state or your State of Perfection, you create the outcomes you desire with the minimal cost of time, energy, and resources, including your personal goodwill. We refer to this way of performing as “effortless” in the sense that you proceed through the process of perception, decision-making, action-taking, and adapting that cycle iteratively based on the feedback you get from taking action without any undue urgency, stress, anxiety or conflict.

From the outside looking in, the outcomes you produce when you are operating in alignment with your State of Perfection being and remaining intact appears effortless, and you experience it as being effortless as well, .

When you communicate with others you are expressing your thinking, and they experience your thinking as a process or their own thinking … i.e.: communication is thinking.

Therefore as I consider where I bring the highest value to my clients I realize over and over again it resides in the way I help them recognize the quality of their communication, with themselves and with others, and to refine it to higher levels of quality.

People who work with me begin to recognize the inconsistencies in their thinking and communication processes and begin to experience significant changes in their life as they improve their ability to think and communicate exquisitely.

If you’re serious about wanting to experience the state of flow, effortless performance and the kind of exquisite thinking and communication I’m referring to here let’s find a time to chat.

In the meantime I’d love to read your thoughts and open a channel to exchange our observations and considerations as you have them too.

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Sarasota, FL

Inventing The Future …

Inventing The Future …

by ·

Private Work℠ Coaching with Joseph: Is It Coaching Or Something Else Entirely?

I get asked a question a lot that goes something like this …

“Hey, Joseph, I get what you do is all about being and not doing, but is it practical … what can I do with it?”

Now first of all I see the immediate contradiction that asking about doing represents, but I also get this …

“When I first meet them, almost everyone I start working with is addicted to doing … they literally feel off, or out of balance, when they aren’t doing something, they don’t know how to do nothing.”

“Yet, the first step in achieving greatness in anything begins in nothing, doing nothing first.”

Now that’s the first significant distinction. Coaching virtually always begins from, and organizes around, what to be doing … usually how to be doing something you don’t yet do, or doing something differently than you currently do it.

Changing what you do will be really, really important if you want to get something different than what you’re getting now … bigger, better or different results, outcomes that have eluded you from getting them at all, more wealth, improved health, a fantastic relationship, a vast range of human what humans aspire to and desire can be linked to what they do, and what they do not do.

Many of my clients are engaged in building and running businesses, often leading teams of people that they depend on for the results they want and need to create. To realize the outcomes they set for themselves, and their business, they need to do things that produce those results, they are all about making it happen.

BUT despite how obvious it seems, starting with a focus on doing almost guarantees they will continue to get results very similar to or the same as you’re currently getting, possibly with a minimal incremental increase, usually paid for with extraordinary effort in doing even more than you’ve been doing.

Yet, the conundrum of coaching, the way most people experience it and engage in it, resides in the failure to connect how when you are organized in this way, seeing doing as the driver of getting outcomes, it by default organizes perception driven by behavior.

When you consider what to be doing, or what you can do, i.e.: what it would be possible to do, as the starting point, that by definition determines and limits the outcomes you will even consider, and therefore what you will attempt.

“When you are driven by doing, doing sets the limits of your positive expectation, and positive expectation determines what you will achieve and won’t achieve, because it in turn limits and determines what you will and won’t do.”

And, this also sets the limits of coaching based in doing … updating doing, refining doing, improving doing, adding in new doing … it doesn’t matter the focus of the doing, any focus on doing will create these ripples of limitation in the system.

Now, when you want to improve you’re doing, the behaviors you express in relation to producing outcomes, coaching can be a brilliant way to do this … improve what you do and how you do it.

And, yet when you want to expand the boundaries of the possible, coaching may very well entrench you further in the limits of the boundaries you are operating in relation to now.

The Solution:

To quote my mentor, Roye Fraser …

“You have to go to where the problem is NOT.”

This means going to where you experience the world outside of, or beyond, the problem state.

The pragmatic linguist Paul Watzlawick says that there are two conditions for a problem to exist, 1) the way things are, are not the way you want them to be … or, to put it another way, you want things to be different then the way they currently exist, and 2) you have to believe that you need to do something for the situation to change, something that may be beyond your control or ability.

Taken to another level the analytic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggests that problems are nothing but “puzzles of language” or a perception that we encase in the way we express it in language … furthering the suggestion that when we change our way of expressing our perceptions the problem dissolves as the language we use to express cannot sustain the problem as we experienced in the problem state.

Roye also said something else that guides what I call doing Private Work with clients,

“The problem as they express it contains the solution to the problem.”

This took me a few years to grasp completely, because it requires unpacking and deciphering the language of the client inside their perceptual experience, while simultaneously remaining outside of and beyond the perceptual framework of the client.

So taking these two things together, to go where the problem is NOT, an accepting that, the problem as they express it contains the solution to the problem, we can begin to build a framework to guide the client beyond the limits of the language that contains the problem that exists outside of their frame of consideration as they know it.

This new framework begins in nothing, as in no projecting of the past into the future in a way that limits it, and no fixed expectation about the future that defines how to perceive the present in terms of what to notice and what we perceive to be important to us, or containing opportunities that exist that we might choose to pursue instead of and beyond what we considered from where we’ve already been.

“The concept of “Blue Ocean” thinking can almost be defined by starting from nothing, meaning that we consider anything as possible, and then begin to organize ourselves in relation to what has to be true to achieve what we’ve imagined from a position of pure desire and positive expectation … Private Work exists to expose the boundaries of Blue Ocean thinking, and position us to operate in relation to, and within it.”

Maybe we can point to this distinction as the primary difference between coaching and Private Work, i.e.: giving up the desire to achieve the results and outcomes a client arrives with, and moving from that and the limitations suggested, to a position that exists beyond limitation. In this way before anything else happens the problems the client arrives with are swept away by releasing the desires and aspirations that contain them.

In Private Work we begin from a position of pure possibility, starting from a clean state where anything becomes possible. We begin by accessing a familiar position where the state of possibility has already been experienced and revivifying that experience fully, in body and mind, and when possible spirit as well. Then we stabilize the state of possibility, and only then begin to explore what, you as a client, want.

We employ the trick of revivifying the embodiment of possibility as a fully realized experience in the moment, here and now. Using this position we can then project to a point in the future where a deeply desired outcome has been realized, and explore what it will be like to have that as a fully embodied experience. The emphasis on the embodiment of experience sets Private Work apart from coaching, as it both contains and exists beyond language, where almost all coaching exists in relation to and within the limits of language.

In a Private Work session we establish the desired outcome position as an embodied realized experience, and then track the language that emerges from that position … versus trying to embody an outcome position by creating it in language. We call the embodiment I’m referring to as a “felt sense of self,” which by definition transcends language, from which language emerges. This distinction provides a critical point of difference in how many coaches work, and what most coaches seek to do, in a way that forces us to claim that Private Work and Coaching are in two different domains of consideration.

  • COACHING seeks to get to something based on a pre-existing frame of reference, that always must include any limitations present in that frame of reference.
  • PRIVATE WORK seeks to get to a position where we begin from nothing, without pre-determined or expected outcomes, so that a completely new way of perceiving possibility emerges, and from there establish the means to achieve whatever emerges as a desired outcome, including Blue Ocean possibilities.

A Little About The Mechanism:

Working in the paradigm of Private Work we begin from an essential presumption, you have a Best State, a way of operating so essential, innate and native to who you are, that when you are acting from this state virtually anything you do seems effortless for you.

We call what I refer to above as your Best State, your State of Perfection.

You embody your State of Perfection as an integrated wholeform position in body and mind, where what you perceive as internal experience matches what you express externally. You don’t experience any difference between the way you perceive the world, yourself or yourself in relation to it, and the way you respond and take action in the world, for you they are one and the same things.

This allows you to form a perfect loop between your perceptions and your actions, including eliminating any hesitation or procrastination between perception, decision making and action taking, and noticing the outcome you create as feedback you can use to refine your action taking, leading you ever closer to realizing your desired outcomes. When you perfect the loop between perception and action you experience uninhibited positive expectation, releasing you to act freely in relation to getting whatever outcome you’ve decided upon, and have projected as your future experience.

In this way positive expectation and your desired outcomes, i.e.: what you intend, determine how you perceive what’s present and what you notice for, becoming the drivers of your responses and behaviors. When you can collapse expectation and desire in this way, you can choose outcomes that are impossible from within the pre-existing frame of reference. You can invent possibilities that aren’t present in the pre-existing frame of reference, but you can nonetheless project as fully realized outcomes in a future position you intend to occupy. As you master this skill you can also begin to collapse the time frame within which you create the results and outcomes you’ve projected, drastically shortening the distance between where you begin and getting what you want.

We can simplify the way we express this as an algorithm we follow …

  1. RE-Discover Yourself – this refers to your State of Perfection
  2. RE-Connect With Yourself – this aligns you with your State of Perfection
  3. RE-Invent Yourself – this allows you project yourself through your State of Perfection into your future where you have already realized your intention

Where each step moves you in time and space in such a way that as you complete the algorithm from one stage to the next, you become more and more skillful and manipulating your sense of moving through time, until it becomes effortless to position yourself in time where you need to be to create any outcome you intend.

So, if you want to redefine and refine how you do what your doing it may be that coaching will be your best bet.

If you want to go beyond anything you’ve considered before, and create the possibility for things you’ve never considered, or believed possible before, then it may be that engaging with me in Private Work℠ Coaching will give you the breakthrough you actually desire, that goes beyond the way you currently create and contain the problems that limit you, permanently.

If this intrigues you, you can make arrangements to schedule a complimentary strategy call with me here … Private Work ℠ Coaching with Joseph (https://abti.learnworlds.com/mytho-magic)

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Sarasota, FL

P.S.: I’d love to read your thoughts after you’ve read through this one … I think it’s profound in it’s implications, and I’d love to know if you agree.

A New Take On Trauma

A New Take On Trauma

by ·

I believe some of the greatest successes we’ve observed in the history of the world come from some trauma the individuals who realized these successes experienced at sometime in their life.

TRAUMA = LEARNING

I’d argue that individuals as renowned as Alexander the Great or Napoleon were in part responding out of trauma induced learning, as well as more modern figures we associate with high achievement like Steven Jobs and, many famous athletes and entertainers.

Most of my professional clients, including some of the world-class executives and entrepreneurs I work with, come to me because of the effect of unresolved, unrealized and unconscious trauma they’ve experienced in their lives … both part of what drives their success … as well as what’s hidden from them, that limits them.

The traditional take on trauma is that it has three forms:

Acute – trauma induced from a single incident

Chronic – trauma from repeated and prolonged abuse

Complex – trauma caused by multiple, varied events, often of the kind that are invasive

Furthermore trauma is most often defined as an intense emotional response to a “terrible event.” While this definition works well in a psychological or psychiatric setting, or use, it doesn’t define the absolute boundary of how we can consider what trauma is, it’s lingering effects, or how we might choose to approach addressing it.

I want to propose that trauma may be something entirely different, …

TRAUMA: a massive, intense learning experience … or, to be more specific, a massive, intense learning experience that imprints on the neurocognitive processing pathways, that often occurs beneath the level of fully conscious awareness, and leaves a neurocognitive response that remains out of conscious awareness.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D. – 2022

Assuming trauma creates an imprint in the emotional response that occurs in response to a “terrible event” it becomes acceptable to view it as something to be eliminated, removed, overcome or resolved – in other words, ‘fixing’ the emotional response system that has been somehow overwhelmed and/or damaged.

Abuse and trauma almost always leave a few generalized responses in the individuals who experience them, some are less life disturbing, others are more interruptive, and others still can be fully debilitating, depending on experience of the abuse, the trauma that’s induced and the individual response to it.

At the very least we can probably say that trauma will leave “emotional triggers” behind, some completely beyond the awareness of the individual experiencing them, except in the response that manifests as a result. Some of these triggers and responses are subtle, some are more significant.

Here are some examples of what trauma responses might manifest as, including those that go unrecognized as trauma responses by the person experiencing them:

  • Unexplainable procrastination or hesitation to act, feeling stuck
  • Low energy, low motivation, low or no ability to follow through
  • Fears and phobias, risk avoidance and/or avoidance of the unfamiliar
  • Eating disorders including obesity, bulimia and anorexia
  • Physical discomfort, headaches and/or body pain, profound fatigue
  • Anxiety, or panic with more acute or extreme trauma
  • Irritation, inability to connect with others easily or effectively
  • Lack of clarity, fuzzy thinking, inability to focus, and/or confusion
  • Inability to sleep or experience restful sleep
  • Feeling of isolation, disconnection or dissociation
  • Unreasonable lack of trust, relationship breakdowns
  • Low self-esteem, confidence and possible depressive episodes

Almost anyone who experiences any of these residual effects of trauma wants to get beyond the sense of “stuck-ness” that comes with them. Those who are thinking about trauma in a more traditional way may seek traditional psychological or medical intervention, because that has become the most familiar approach to take.

However, if trauma represents a learning experience, we might choose to begin by asking, “What learning happened as a result of the exposure to the event, or events, that induced the trauma?” This could take us to approaching radically differently than simply intending to ‘fix’ it in one way or another.

None of this means to suggest that trauma doesn’t leave emotional effects, and possibly emotional damage. It almost surely leaves neurocognitive effects, and shapes perception in particular ways. How the perceptual shaping manifests from trauma as response varies from individual to individual, from life changing to trivial, depending on many factors (too many to be discussed in this article).

The television series, Lie to Me, can be seen as a great example of how trauma can be viewed through a lens of learning. The premise of the show is that main character, Dr. Kal Lightman, played by Tim Roth, is a ‘deception scientist’ someone who’s studied the non-verbal signals of emotional response, and specifically micro-expressions, which are preconscious indicators of emotion. At multiple times in the show Kal refers to his protégé, Maria Torres, played by Monica Raymund, as a “natural.”

LIE TO ME, Tim Roth, Monica Raymund, Better Half , Season 1, ep. 110, aired April 22, 2009 photo: Isabella Vosmikova / TM and Copyright 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved, Courtesy: Everett Collection 20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the television program Dr. Lightman make it clear that first and foremost he’s a scientist, and his ability to do what he does comes from long and deep study, based in scientific research. As his consultancy grows he expands his staff to include Torres, who he’s discovered working security in an airport, a “natural” – i.e.: someone who has never studied the science and has never been trained in reading micro-expressions or signals, but who “naturally” learned to read deception and emotions at an elite level of skill.

We learn she’s become a “natural” as a response to both abuse, and the threat of abuse, experienced by her as a child in her home, presumably from her father. This would be an example of ‘chronic trauma’ and yet despite the damage that may have been inflicted as a result of that trauma she’s also learned to read people, and their intentions, at an incredibly astute level. Her exposure to trauma in this case created a profound learning as well.

We don’t see so much of Torres’ negative response to the trauma in the series, i.e.: the emotional damage it may have caused, although in the show it’s alluded to indirectly. Instead of the emotional damage caused by the exposure to trauma, we are presented with the residual effect of the learning she experienced because of it, i.e.: her elite skill at reading subtle emotional responses in people … she’s become a “natural” as a result of the trauma.

Okay, let’s restate where this has lead us …

TRAUMA =
EMOTIONAL-SOMASEMANTIC LEARNING

We can state with a fair degree of certainty from what many experts working with trauma have shared, including many medical researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists and others working in the field that trauma stores at some level in the body, and shows up in preconscious body responses (including the obvious ones in the list above) like sweating, heart pounding, shallow breathing, hyperventilating, tremors, the inability to move freely, and the opposite, explosive behaviors associated with anger and rage.

These traumatic responses are also all responses associated with the autonomic nervous system sympathetic response (ANS-S) to danger, threat, fear and/or stress. We know the ANS-S responses in the more familiar, fight, flight, freeze sequence.

Acknowledging that trauma may be even more associated with the autonomic nervous system responses than emotional ones, although they are intimately and inextricably connected, allows us to reconsider both what trauma is, how it’s experienced, and what we can do with it … including taking advantage of the learning it offers us.

The approach I take with clients that experience any of the symptoms of trauma that are below the level of acute debilitation, often not even acknowledged as signs of trauma at all, begins with eliciting the intention of the neurocognitive patterning that has been learned as a result.

For example, if someone comes to me and complains about issues like procrastination, or low motivation, or the inability to change some habit that interferes with their life in some way, I start by assuming that this behavior served them at some point in their life in response to some event or context they experienced. Only by understanding what the trauma response intends to offer can it be reshaped to provide the benefit without the debilitating effects.

Once we’ve uncovered the hidden intention of the learning that’s been experienced we can then update both the way to use that learning, and the deeply ingrained patterns associated with the trauma response that are parasitic and no longer beneficial or useful. I’ve done this work effectively with clients who display simply irritating, intermittent flutters of distraction, to clients who are experiencing full-blown cases of the effects of PTSD, sometimes working alongside their medical caregivers.

One distinction of the approach I take resides in the assumption that most of what my clients experience remains below any conscious level of awareness beyond the behavioral responses that are the after-effect of the neurocognitive patterns induced by the trauma, everything from overeating to hysterical responses to insignificant comments, and everything else in between.

Another distinction of my approach, using the MythoSelf Process and Somasemantic Modeling, can be seen in the direct somatic elicitation, calibration and intervention that forms the basis of the transformational changework that MythoSelf Facilitators and Trainers, including myself, use when working with clients.

This way of approaching transformation can be so effective that at times the change has happened before the client is even aware that anything has happened, yet when the same stimulus that had prompted the traumatic response is represented they don’t experience or display any of the previous trauma affects. While I expect this to work like this when doing this work with clients, I am still in awe at how effective viewing trauma as learning instead of damage can be, as are most of the clients I’ve worked with who experience it with me or another MythoSelf trained professional.

Within the model of work I refer to here as MythoSelf Process facilitation and Somasemantic model we define this kind of work as “structural” meaning a redesign and repatterning of the neurocognitive experience and expression. Ideally we seek to create what we call “Structural Wellformedness” meaning that they experience and expression matches the sensory data present in the the environment, and creates a desired and appropriate outcome for the person expressing their behavior response to what they are experiencing.

Structural Wellformedness is why thinking about trauma as learning is so valuable. specifically because the learning that comes via trauma remains, with none of the inappropriate or undesirable affects that can linger long after the event that induced the original trauma. This is often because, while the learning was useful and appropriate to the context that the trauma was induced in, cross-mapping that response to contexts that are similar, but essentially different, becomes somewhere between interruptive to debilitating.

Yet, when the learning remains, without the damaging affects of induced trauma, we often see the “natural” patterns that form the core responses of extraordinary success and behavioral fluency emerge effortlessly.

I’d love to read your comments to this article … thanks!

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics

Living Mythically

Living Mythically

by ·

Living Mythically … Taking Control Of Your Story

From the beginning of my professional practice I referred to what I do with clients as “a piece of work” and suggest to my clients do their work. There’s a bit of danger phrasing thing in this way, in that “work” is often heard and thought of as negative, something that’s hard or difficult, or as something in opposition to fun and play, something that’s not enjoyable. And, yet I think that to be a very small minded and limited point of view, that only applied to work you should never be doing in the first place.

My “work” is aiming my clients to live and perform in their lives mythically. By living mythically I mean taking control of their autobiographical narrative, or writing the scripts they live by, their own life story. There’s nothing I find more playful, enjoyable and worthwhile than doing this work, yet it can be challenging and sometimes downright daunting, and even then it remains completely playful, engaging and fun for me to do.

Establishing A New Profession …

Another way I speak of what I do professionally in my practice with clients is that I am a “Clinical Mythologist.” I guide my clients mythologically to discover the stories they have been living from, the story they are living, and the story they are living into. Once we uncover these stories we take it further to begin to take control of the narrative these stories create collectively … the continuity of past, present and future as a singular way of understanding who you are fundamentally. This is an “ontological/ aesthetic” way of knowing yourself … as a being experience life sensually, contained in the iconic, symbolic representations you form about yourself and your life. One way we do this is in the form of language, the language we use with and about ourselves, and the language we use to describe reality as we know it, including others and our relationships with them.

A “piece of work” then refers to uncovering an aspect of revealing the autobiographical narrative someone is living from, and the affect of that narrative in their life as a mythic form. Of course this also means we’re revealing them to themselves. The revelations we uncover are both ill-formed and well-formed.

Ill-Formed Or Well-Formed Personal Mythology?

Ill-formed myths are fundamentally distortions of reality, not real in some way. Ill-formed myths disconnect you from your life, especially in regard to your purpose, passion and power, and away from living playfully. The ill-formedness creates cognitive dissonance, meaning that when you are operating from ill-formedness what you experience doesn’t make sense, the pieces don’t fit and you cannot form a coherent narrative, or mythic form through time.

Ill-formedness in your personal mythology … the autobiographical narrative your living from that describes reality as you know it and the way you relate to it … leads to what I call mythological distress and ultimately mythological crisis … the story your living doesn’t fit you.

Eventually, an ill-formed personal mythology will lead to ill-formed behaviors, that cannot and will not create the outcomes you desired, or produce the life you intend to be living, the relationships you want to be having, the accomplishments you want to be realizing.

Well-formed myths on the other hand are those that match you intrinsically, the arise from deep within you, before any traumas or comprises of yourself were experienced or occurred. A well-formed personal mythology contains and describes reality as you know it to be as free of distortions as you are capable of achieving. This view of reality leads to coherence that led to a a natural sense of awe and wonder, and a way of being in the world that is playful, childlike but not childish.

Wellformedness in your personal mythology opens you to the possibility of living a life of joy and splendor, experiencing yourself and others in enchanted and enchanting ways … you begin to experience the epiphany or what it means to be fully human and fully alive … life becomes meaningful play, filled with purpose, passion and power without struggle, effort or compromise.

Taking Control Of Your Story, And Your Life

What I’ve found in working with thousands of clients individually, in groups and within organizations and institutions has been that doing the work of living mythologically requires simultaneously becoming aware of your autobiographical narrative and taking control of it. The way this happens begins with choosing to be the author of the scripts you are living from, and rejecting the scripts that others have imposed upon you … often without any conscious awareness that that has happened, or that the script you are running is not your own.

The “writing” of your story, and the scripts you run, rests on the ways in which you perceive and make sense of the experiences you have, the meaning you apply to those experiences, and the decisions you make that lead to the action you take … and, this of course leads to the outcomes your create, as well as those you don’t.

As one of the huge benefits of “doing your work” of uncovering, revealing and taking control of your personal mythology you’ll free yourself from the ways you found yourself stuck in the past … procrastinating, hesitating to act, acting poorly, running in circles and finding yourself trying everything and anything you can think of to move forward, and yet still finding your stuck either not moving or moving and winding up where you began.

I’ve worked often and intensely with clients helping them to get unstuck in many ways and places in their lives, including extremely often in the ways they relate to others in their personal and professional relationships. When you reset your personal mythology it frees you from conflict, resentment, envy, shame, guilt and all the other things that so many people struggle with … without ever needing to wade through the suffering of revisiting those emotional sinkholes.

I find another thing that comes up almost as often can be the way that you relate to your sense of discovering real purpose and meaning in your life and career. Knowing you personal mythology makes how what you do professionally evident to you, the meaning it has in your life, and in relation to others too. Passion come from knowing why you are doing what you do, regardless whether we’re talking about actions you take personally for yourself and with others, or professionally. One of the most powerful things this does for you will be a natural reset of your relationship with money … earning it, accumulating it, spending it and sharing it as well.

It’s also extremely interesting to observe how my clients experience a positive change in their health, physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually, when the take back control of their autobiographical narrative. When you choose to be the author of the stories of your life … what they are, what they mean, and how they organize you to experience your life as it unfolds and you move forward through it … everything becomes clear to you and you have choices about it all, including how those experiences affect your health and wellbeing.

You cannot not live in relation to your life’s story, the autobiographical narrative that shapes and forms you, your experiences, your relationships and the life you are living. Either you choose to take control of your personal mythology, the story you are living, or you are controlled by it.

What’s Next …

As I shared with you at the beginning I love “doing my work” … shaping the story I’m living and sharing my client’s stories, because by keeping my attention here I can help you “do your work” too, and become the author of your life. Let’s get together sometime and tell some stories, eh?

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process and SomaSemantics

Sarasota, Florida

P.S. – WHEN YOU’RE READY … you can always set up a time to arrange a complimentary call with me when you’re ready to begin again … YES, Joseph I’m Ready, let’s get together to explore my personal mythology and the life story I’m living.

P.P.S. – Get my book “Experiencing the Hero’s Journey” and go a bit deeper into the journey of your story by reading a bit about mine … in it I reveal the deep structure of ill-formedness, well-formedness and how to discover your own personal mythology and story.

Changing Minds …

Changing Minds …

by ·

Escaping The Matrix

“Remember … there is no spoon.”

(Author’s Note: This one is going to go deep fast, and then loop around a bit, all requiring some commitment, probably demanding a few readings, but I bet it will be worth many readings after you’ve read it once … ENJOY!)

Take A Walk With Me On The Wild Side of POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE

For thirty years I’ve been working with clients personally and professionally helping them become more:

  • Powerful in their lives, i.e.: able to take the action that leads to the results and outcomes they intend
  • Creative in how they approach thinking and decision-making, with an aim at helping them become more adaptable and artful in acting strategically
  • Influential in their interactions, becoming masterful at communicating authentically and persuasively to engage, enroll and empower others

This is ultimately about how you can develop deep personal mastery so you can create the life you want to be living … a life lived on your own terms, without compromise.

So if you’re ready walk with me for a bit and we’ll explore the journey I’ve take to where I am today in the work I do.

A Little Background:

In the early 1980s I began developing a model of thinking about thinking, or more specifically thinking about how to improve thinking, that I called “Transformational Applied Philosophy” … T.A.P.

I named what I was working on Transformational Applied Philosophy because I was focused on building a phenomenologically grounded model of transformational ontological change, designed around the work of a few philosophers I was reading deeply at the time.

The philosophers I was reading at the time included: Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel (post-kantian logic and phenomenology), Edmund Husserl (existential phenomenology), Arthur Schopenhauer (aesthetic existentialism), Martin Heidegger (existential ontology), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (embodied ontological existentialism), Ludwig Wittgenstein (metaphysics and analytic philosophy of language), and John Searle (analytic and linguistic philosophy/philosophy of mind).

Then I went on and found a few more philosophers who I added to the mix of my reading, social ontologists like Gilles Deleuze, a couple of the hermeneutic philosophers like Jurgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and those in the domain of philosphy of mind, neurophilosophy, cognition and embodiment like Patricia Churchland and, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

All of that reading was significant because philosophy has been informing people about how to live their lives well, to find a path of authenticity and purpose. Reading philosophy can be challenging, it dense and sometimes very dry too. And, one thing literally leads to another … and another, and another … ad infinitum, until you’ve read the entire canon of Western Philosophy at least (which of course I haven’t, and neither has anyone I know of, but some professional philosophers sure seem to have read 90% of it!).

I still read philosophy actively, more of the later kind … philosophy of mind, cognitive science and neurophilosophy … and this forms a great deal of my background, and current focus, about how I think about thinking, and help others to think better … i.e.: with greater clarity and more precision, leading to a dramatic increase in the ability to think with passion and strategically.

My realization was that while approaching my work with clients philosophically had great and deep value, what I am aiming at required something more than what staying just in the domain of philosophy offers me and my clients.

Going Beyond The Basics

When I found them I fell in love with informal logic and embodiment. This was especially true as the embodiment movement led through the extended mind phase led by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work (following Gregory Bateson), and evolved to an understanding enactivism/enactment, where the premise is that the mind exists in the interaction with the environment. Quite literally the environment, and the objects in it, the total context, is as much a part of the mind of the individual as the individual’s neural processing and physical/sensory experience.

So I began to look more and more into the domain of somatics and folks from F.M. Alexander to Moshe Feldenkrais to Thomas Hanna. That took me deep for many years, way into anatomy, physiology, and eventually into neuroscience too. But, because I was led there by an interest in the idea of undifferentiated body-mind singularity my focus for about five years centered on studying cerebellar response where movement predominates thinking, proprioception and vestibulation.

HEY, PLEASE STAY WITH ME … WE’RE GETTING THERE …

Somehow this stuff made sense to me as a set of intertwined connections linking and weaving it all together, especially when I began looking at it through the lens of narrative and mythology, and the structure of storytelling.

This phase of my work was deeply grounded in studying the work of Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist, and his “Hero’s Journey” model. There’s no way you can do this and avoid looking at the work of many other folks in related fields from psychology (e.g.: Carl Jung) to ethology (Konrad Lorenz) and anthropology (e.g.: Gregory Bateson), linking what I call the biological imperative with the creative imperative, leading to an aesthetic orientation.

Sometime in the late 1990s I was introduced to the work of Clare W. Graves, the developmental social pyschologist. Dr. Graves work impacted my thinking on many levels and shifted the framework of the model I been developing for almost ten years by that point. For the next ten years I would study the work of the post-autonomous, post-conventional developmentalists including Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and William Torbert.

OKAY, WE’RE THERE!!! (WELL ALMOST THIS TIME, REALLY …)

Mythological Expressions

By the early 1990s I’d begun referring to my model as “The Mythogenic Self Process” which became the “MythoSelf Process” by around 1994.

That was because of the impact of Joseph Campbell on my work. Adding up all the pieces led me to take a mythological turn, or what I think of equally as a narrative turn. I began to realize that our entire relationship to reality is structured like story, i.e.: in narrative or mythic form.

I’d moved well beyond the limited philosophical approach I’d begun thinking was the way to achieve significant transformational change with clients.

The way I approached transformation early on was based on a premise that the way we hold and process information in our brains as the manipulation of representations, both sensory memories and/or abstractions. That’s why I became (and to some extent remain) so fascinated with a philosophical approach. This approach has great validity when dealing with the cognitive process of making sense of and manipulating information, e.g.: language.

What was missing were the two elements that have become the signature pieces of the MythoSelf Process, sensorial cognition and dynamic movement. When I added these to using a narrative approach to uncovering the mythic form of the frame of reference that holds reality intact for an individual or organization, i.e.: the externalized temporally organized markers that are then internalized and acted upon, it all came together … finally!

(FWIW, I know this all very technical sounding, but I warned you up front this was going to take some commitment, but that it would be worth it, right? BTW, you can ask me about anything you want me to clarify in the comments section below.)

By 1999 I’d already begun training and certifying others to use the model and process I’d designed with great success.

For the next twenty years I’d continue to develop and refine the work I’d designed, and extended the reach of applications from sales and leadership training, to executive coaching, to team development, to intensive individual coaching, to mentoring coaches and consultants to use the model and process with client groups in virtually every specialization imaginable and with clients from eight to over eighty years of age.

What I had in hand was …

An aesthetically oriented, phenomenologically grounded and embodied model of transformational ontological changework that took into account developmental levels of awareness engaging the mythological form that supported the fundamental autobiographical narrative from which individuals and groups define reality as they know it to be in any given moment, operating it enactively.

WOW!!!

That’s surely a mouthful (and why I just refer to it simply as the MythoSelf Process model).

To get what it really is we’re dealing with all of that is actually essential. What makes this so strange to consider however is the typical orientation to reductionism, silos and linear thinking versus synthesis, integration and systemic thinking.

BUT … you can’t deal with dynamic complex systems, e.g.: human systems, without addressing the reality of that they are in fact dynamic complex systems!

The model of transformational changework I built, the MythoSelf Model, then is a model that shifts the fundamental way you perceive, think about and act in the world.

What’s at the center of the model is the shift in thinking from linear to systemic, and from fuzzy to precise. This requires a whole new way of using your brain than most people have ever experienced, one that is both more integrated and, far more embodied and wholeform than your education has ever made available for you to access.

Two other aspects of using your brain in this way is how embodied the experience becomes as you being thinking through and with body-based processing (somatically organized) as well as mentally-based processing (semantically organized) as an enfolded and entwined processing model of thought … and, how sensual and aesthetic this way of thinking is organized. When using the MythoSelf Process model as the basis of how you experience, perceive, process and act in the world aiming for beauty and elegance in form becomes a most sought for characteristic. Essentially this drives sensuality into decision making and performance (strategic action aimed at an intended outcome), making them beautiful as well.

Storytelling & Narrative Communication As A Control System

Way back when … virtually at the same time I began this journey from my study of the philosophers I’ve already mentioned, I also was beginning to read in the field of cybernetics, and cybernetic control systems based in communication.

I felt from the start that there was a direct correlation between what I was reading in cybernetic theory and the work I wanted to master in helping individuals and organizations make transformational changes. What I couldn’t put together was the mathematical orientation of many of the cybernetic thinkers I was studying at the time and how to apply them directly to helping people make the changes they desired.

The idea of systems that provided and operated on feedback made perfect sense, yet the mechanism of how to apply this directly with my clients eluded me for many years. It took the connection between mythological form/narrative and developmental theory to make sense of it as I now have and apply in my work with clients.

While the idea of a primary cybernetically organized mechanism to assist clients to make change made perfect sense, the specific methodology was a bit trickier to fully explicate and define.

When I brought together all of the systemic work I had been doing with individuals and organizations, as well as the mechanism of mythological form/narrative applied within a developmentally organized approach, it all became very clear that what I knew was working could be codified.

Stories are intrinsically cybernetic in the sense that they are self-contained systems. In stories language “controls” the movement of the narrative in terms of content, space as place, and temporality.

Where someone perceives themselves in space and time relative to the content in consideration determines what the content represents to and for them, and what’s possible as a result.

Narrative structure is based in organizing temporally, and placing actors and agents in relation to one another relatively in space, i.e.: who’s affected by the events that happen and how, where the events are happening, as well as when the events happen, are all part of narrative structure.

Organizing the stories we tell ourselves and others, as well as the stories others tell … especially those they tell about us … are all part of the mythic form of our life that organizes who we know ourselves to be in relation to reality as we know it to be.

Therefore the most powerful skill we can possess may be our ability to design, craft and tell potent stories … in storytelling we contain POWER | CREATIVITY | INFLUENCE simultaneously. When we tell stories intentionally, to ourselves or others, we shape and reshape reality as we know it, and in regard to how we relate to it.

Transformational storytelling sits at the heart and soul of the MythoSelf Process model. Storytelling is the essential and central skill that allows someone to create a future possibility that doesn’t exist for them as they are today. Using stories also opens up the possibility of shifting away from those things that limit an individual or organization.

I’ve designed the MythoSelf Process to allow facilitators of the Process to help clients make significant shifts towards what they want, as they simultaneously reset their relationship to what had been limiting them in the past, using narrative form as a means of updating their personal mythology.

Using a wholeform approach that takes into account sensorial and dynamic movement processing, as well as content driven sense-making, meaning-making and decision-making, defines the MythoSelf Process more than just a narrative or storytelling methodology as they are normally approached.

The MythoSelf Process creates a new wholeform reality by blending somatic and semantic modeling within a narrative, storytelling process that resets the temporal and spatial relationship of a client to the future-based position they intend to achieve.

Holding The Space For Clients Until They Can Hold It For Themselves

The new wholeform reality created by combining somatic and semantic modeling using a narrative, storytelling approach shifts the filters of perception and the sorting patterns that lead to sense-making, meaning-making and decision-making that precede taking action that produced the results that lead to achieving outcomes.

Only when an individual’s or organization’s filters and sorting patterns are fully organized and aligned with the outcome that’s intended, will the trajectory of action create the results needed to achieve the outcome that’s desired.

By shifting the filters and sorting patterns to align with a newly intended future, the individual or organization shifts the way they are paying attention, what they notice for, and how they notice for it, as well as what it means, needed to create that future intended outcome. This amounts to stepping into and living a new story that forecasts and leads to a new emergent reality.

Like this, what to do becomes obvious, even when it requires significant work to accomplish. In this way, operating from within the new story structure, moving towards the new emergent reality becomes effortless … regardless of how challenging it may be to do what’s necessary.

As the agent of change, “I” was the primary mechanism I had been seeking, and the specific way I could organize myself in relation to my clients to assist them in bringing about the change they sought when they engaged me became instantly clear as well (although it’s taken me another ten years to document and codify it fully).

There are two aspects to applying the MythoSelf Process in the way I have been building up to and describing … first by establishing the stories that need to be told and re-told, and second by holding a position in relation to your client that demands they operate from the position they’ll be in when they achieve their outcome. Doing this requires understanding all the “science” part of what I’ve been laying out here, as well as the “art” of knowing how to step into and adopt the position of choice.

In this way bits and pieces of what your clients need to be aware of starts becoming obvious to them. As the become aware of what they need, they simultaneously become more able to hold the position they need for themselves where noticing in this way is automatic and natural for them (without needing you to provide the structure and stimulus to prompt them to hold this position).

Over time the new position, actually a new reality for them, becomes how they are without effort or trying, it’s quite literally who they become (with your help of course, until you don’t need to help anymore).

This is a radical departure from how most processes, approaches, methodologies and models of transformational change operate. In virtually every other way of prompting transformational change it’s what the change artist does with or to the client that makes the difference. In the MythoSelf Process model the way you are as you do what you do with or to the client is what makes all the difference.

“Holding the position” is a cybernetic process, and personal communication … including the art of storytelling … is the ultimate control function in the system.

Stories form the mechanism to provide the intervention, or interventions, required to shift the system so the individual can find a way to permanently occupy the new position of choice, opening the pathway to a new possibility, a new future, beyond what would have been possible before resetting the system to the new position created in the relationship between the client and the facilitator.

In the end becoming that person, the one who can hold the position necessary makes it all worthwhile to have done all the reading, study and the thousands of hours of client work required to know how to discover what to do and how to do it, and then to do it.

Best,

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Architect & Designer of the MythoSelf Process

Sarasota, FL

P.S.: – If you would like to discuss the MythoSelf Process more, either as a coach or consultant … or, with the intention of exploring how experiencing the MythoSelf Work might help you personally … let’s talk, set up a complimentary consultation at your convenience: Schedule Time To Talk With Joseph Now