For Agree/Disagree or Yes/No
Pair up with another person and engage in a pleasant conversa-tional style of asking simple and easy questions. For this exercise, ask light-level questions and then confirm them with "Yes/No"
questions while you simultaneously pay attention to the non-verbal responses the other person gives you as he or she non-verbally says "Yes/ No" in agreement or disagreement wilh what you say.
"You say your name is Bob?"
"What do you like to be called?"
•'Bobby? So you prefer that?"
"Were you born in California?"
"Do you own your uwn car?"
Calibrate to what constitutes a yes/no response n on-verbally for your partner Notice differences between the non-verbal responses for "Yes" and from those that accompany "No."
For example, some people will spontaneously and unconsciously tense their jaw muscles for "No/' and relax them for "Yes" Some people will have a paler complexion for "No," and a Tedder or flushed look for "Yes." Some will till the head forward when conveying "Yes/' and back for "No."
As you calibrate, notice muscle tension, eye movements, gesturing, eye relaxation/tension, mouth, breathing, etc.
When you feel that you can distinguish between the "Yes" and
"No" messages that a person gives at the non-verbal level, then ask your partner tu not answer ihe question verbally, bul only non-verbally. Then continue to ask questions and observe responses.
After each question, let your partner know whether you think he or she gave a "Yes" or "No" answer. When you get four right answers in a row, switch roles.
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Doing thiy will train your intuition for the "\e#, I agree" non-verbal signals and the "No, I disagree™ signals for a given person.
Practice with several people so that you can become even more aware of the variations in people. Ihen spend an entire day or two just noticing these kinds of agree/disagree cues that people give vou.
Appendix C
There "Is" No "Is'
Did you even notice that we wrote this book using the General Semantic extcnsional device called. E-Prime (except for quotations from others)? We
did-E-what? Eitglish-^r/merf of the verb "to be" (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been), invented by D. David Bourland, Jr. and popular-ized by Bourland and Paul Dennlthorne Johnston in To Be Or Not:
A11 E-Prime Anthology, I-.-Prime and E-Chuice empower people to not fall into the "is" traps of language.
The "Is" traps? Yes, Alfred Korzybski (1941/1994) warned that the
"is" of identity and the "is" of predication present two dangerous linguistic and semantic constructions that map false-to-fact conclusions- The first has to do with identity—how we identify a thing or what we identify ourselves with—and the second with attribution—how we frequently project our "stuff" onto others or onto things without realizing it.
Identity, as "sameness in all respects/' does not even exist. It can't.
At the sub-microscopic level, everything involves a "dance of electrons" always moving, changing, and becoming. So no thing etui ever "stay the same" even with itself. So nothing "is" in any static, permanent, unchanging way. Since nothing exists as eternal;
buL since every thing continually changes, then nothing "is." To use "is" mis-speaks, mis-evaluates, and mis-maps reality. To say,
"She is la/y...," "Ihat is a stupid statement.--/' falsely maps reality.
And Korzybski argued that unsanity and insanity ultimately lie in
identifications.
Prediaitian refers to "asserting" something. Sn to say, "This is good," "That flower is red/' "He is really stupid!" creates a language structure which implies that something "out there"
contains these qualities of "goodness," "redness," and "stupidity."
The "is" suggests that such things exist independent aft fa speaker's experience. Not so. Our descriptions speak primarily about our
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internal experience.' indicating our judgments ;ind values. More accurately we could have said, "I evaluate as good this or that/' "1 see that flower as red," "I think of him as suffering from stupidity!"
"Is" statements falsely distract, confuse logical levels, and subtly lead us to think that such value judgments exist outside our skin in the world "objectively." Wrong again. The evaluations (good, red, stupid) function as definitions and interpretations in the speaker's mind.
The "to be" verb dangerously presupposes that "things" (actually events or processes) stay the same. Not so! This verb invites us to create mental representations of fixedness so that we begin to set the world in concrete and to live in "a Frozen universe." This verb codes Ihe dynamic nature trfprocesses statically- "Life is tough," "I am no good a t math."
Do these statements not sound definitive? Absolute? "That's just the way it is!" No wonder Bourland calls "is," "am," and "are,"
etc, "the. deity modi.'." "The fact is that this work is no good!" Such words carry a sense of completeness, finality, and time-indepen-dence. Yet discerni ng the difference between the map and the terri-tory tells us these phenomena exist on different logical levels.
Using E-Prime (or E-Choke) reduces slipping in groundless authoritarian statements which only closes minds or invites arguments.
Tf we confuse the language we use in describing reality (our map) with reality (the territory), then wre identify differing things. And that makes for unsanity. There "is" no "is." "Is" non-references. It points to nothing in reality. It operates entirely as an irrational construction of the human mind. Its use leads to semantic mis-evaluationh.
Conversely, writing, thinking, and speaking in E-Prime contributes to "consciousness ofabstracting" (conscious awareness), that we make maps of the world which inherently differ from the world. E-IVime enables us to think and speak with more clarity and precision as it forces us to take first-person. This reduces the passive verb tense ("It was done," "Mistakes were made"). It
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restores speaker* to statements, thereby con text ualizing state-ments. E-l'rime, by raising consciousness of abstracting, thereby enables us to index language. Now I realize that the person I met last week, Personiaol ^k, "is" not equal in all respects to the person who stands before me, Person,,,,, W(Tlt. This assists me in making critical and valuable distinctions.
E-Choice differs from E-Prime in that with it one uses tftf "is" of existence (e.g., "Where is your office?" "It is on 7th. Street at Orchard Avenue,"), tite auxiliary "is" (e.g., "He is coming next week") and the "is" of name, (e.g., "What is your name?" 'It is Michael." "My name is Bob"). Though we wrote this in V- Prime, we have decided to begin to use E-Choice so as to avoid some circumlocution that we have used in the past(!).
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