Enhancing your life with Exquisite Superlatives

“Superlative – an adjective or adverb expressing the highest order, quality, or degree”

[Please note, this was originally an article I wrote, entitled 'Exquisite Superlatives', that was published in Anchor Point: The International Journal of NLP, September 1994]

As you are aware, the words you use and your semantic response to those words – the meaning you make from the words – inherently determines the quality of your life and your experiences. And the most exquisite thing about being human is that you get to choose! You get to choose the qualities with which you relive and represent your memories to yourself and others, and how you future-pace your ongoing actions and immediate experience.

For example, at some stage you could choose to enjoy some pleasure, or you can ferociously decide to be completely enveloped with intense and exquisite pleasure NOW!! Which would you prefer? It’s your choice! Like playing a musical instrument though, the secret to mastery is both in practice and in having a superb repertoire to choose from. Having only a few notes or chords won’t allow you to play full and melodious songs  – Won’t allow you to play those beautiful songs and music that magically lift you up and take you to the most incredible places.

Developing a magnificent repertoire

So the key is in developing a working repertoire of fantastically descriptive words – evolving and refining a list of distinctions about life and living – a set of exquisite superlatives. By producing this list of exquisite words – words that have a deep, intense, visceral and profound meaning to you, words that are juicy, ferocious and unsurpassable – you get to alert your conscious and other-than-conscious attention to these qualities of ‘being’. You get to practice them and to elegantly facilitate the submodalities of superb, ongoing experiencing.

And you know, Richard Bandler is an excellent example of someone who uses words superbly to add juice to his life and to those around him. Richard doesn’t have “curiosity” in his life, he does “wanton curiosity,” he doesn’t expect his seminar participants to have “resolve” about their learnings, he demands that they have “ferocious resolve.” And words are intensely powerful.

Create a List NOW!

I know that much of this is obvious, and yet how often is it that consistently putting the simple and obvious into practice gets over-looked? As Moshe Feldenkrais might call it: ‘The elusive obvious’.

So create a list of superlatives to enhance your languaging. Through the action of creating and using your list, you will have developed an immense repertoire of descriptive qualities you are using to directionalize your living. And to gracefully assist you in this fantastic process, I share with you the following list. Use it to form the basis of your own ultimate transformational dictionary.

The Super-duper Hyperflockulated Exquisite Word List

elegant              glorious             priceless          magnificent
keen                  amazing            tremendous     scrumptious
intense              fragrant              prime              pure
brilliant             splendiferous      sensational      fabulous
ferocious           magic                superfine         absolute
profound           exquisite            fantastic           immense
succulent           total                  utter                 gorgeous
unsurpassable    keen                 fierce               extreme
ultimate             ultra                  spectacular      captivating
consummate      wanton             delicious          thrilling
awesome           immense           transcendent    radical
tatalizing           luxuriant            sublime           wondrous
voluptuous        outrageous         splendorous    entrancing
vivacious           delightful            beautiful          stupendous

Own this list, flesh it out, add to it and enhance it. Play with categorizing it into V,A,K,O,G,Ad (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic, Olfactory, Gustatory, Auditory Digital – Language) sections to gain even more distinctions. And tomorrow, don’t just get out of bed and have a shower, instead, ferociously launch yourself up and have a delicious and delight-filled shower; don’t just have breakfast, do a fabulous and incredible breakfasting; and don’t just have a nice day, do a sensational and unsurpassable day! The choice is yours.

Using your Superlatives

Let’s play with this a little to gain a deeper understanding of its usefulness. Think of something you like and notice the submodalities of the experience. Now, think if something you are absolutely ecstatic about – what are the submodality differences?

Ok, now think of some part of your day that was just average, just alright, nothing special, and as you picture it in your mind, repeat the words: “spectacular, superb, exquisite” out loud, 3 or 4 times. And say them with meaning. Notice the changes that occur in the submodalities of the experience. Powerful, wasn’t it now?

This is an example of the entrancing effect that exquisite superlatives can have on your neurology. And by the way, you also get to choose the submodality effects that the words produce. For example, you might anchor sparkle and glitter to the word “awesome,” an intense surround-sound lion’s roar to the word “ferocious,” or even a full-body, lustful flush to the word “outrageous”. Then when someone asks you how you’re feeling, tell them “outrageously, ferociously awesome” and then STAND BACK!

Just imagine what you can do with this. What amazing submodality effects would be sublime to link to the word “immense”? What about “profound”? It’s a difference that truly can make a total difference.

Congruence - Becoming a Master of the Non-verbal Superlative

As you probably realize, the way you say the words is as important as the words themselves. And as a friend of mine, who is outrageously successful in getting what he wants from life said, “You know, it’s not only the exquisite words you say, it’s also the exquisite way you say them. When you express them with all of your body, all your mind, with total glorious abandon – when all your non-verbals completely and congruently match your words – then things really start happening.”

So now practice putting “oooowwwssshhhh” into the expression of your life. Explore the quality and intensity of both your repertoire of non-verbal superlatives and the non-verbal expression of your verbal superlatives. Get that orchestra hopping, turn up the volume, and make congruence a totally happening thing!

Using your NLP Skills

Some of the other ways you may want to use your powerful NLP skills to ensure that you get more and more vivacious delight from your life are:

• New Behavior Generator

Create a powerful part to use exquisite superlatives with unconscious competence.

• Timeline Installation

Create a compelling future by placing captivating reference experiences of using superlatives to make an intense difference along your timeline.

• Submodality Facilitation

Don’t just design the submodality experiences of each superlative, go further than that and amplify and intensify the submodalities of how you are valuing these ideas. Map across to the submodalities of utter fascination or magnificent obsession.

Other Ideas

You may also wish to place your list in a position where you will read it again and again – especially in a place that is unconsciously linked to important values in your life or living. For example, eating is an important and deeply salient (to the gut and heart brains) life function, so paste your list brightly and boldly next to the kitchen table, and peruse it as you eat breakfast each day. Preparing your mind for the delicious day that lies ahead.

Try watching some Bandler videos to note how Richard uses words exquisitely and to such great effect. Or gather some friends and have a superlative word party.

Use your words to profoundly enhance the music of your life.

And finally, play with these words, explore them, make them your magnificent obsession. They truly are superlatively exquisite.

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

Think about this...

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Here's some some thought provoking ideas and life enhancing logic explorations I've been playing with today:

1. What differentiates people in life and largely determines the results and outcomes they achieve is their actions and behaviours
2. Actions are predominantly created and generated by attitudes, beliefs, and decisions
3. Attitudes, beliefs and decisions are in turn engendered through thoughts, ideas and intuitions
4. Thoughts and ideas are guided and triggered by knowledge, learning and experience

It's kind of obvious when laid out like that... what differentiates the quality of your life over the long term is the quality of the knowledge, learning and experience that you build into your life. It really all comes down (and up) to knowledge, learning and experience.

Your thoughts guide your decisions and behaviors, but you can only think with the tools you have available in your mind. The more ideas, experience and wisdom you have in your toolbox, the greater the chance you'll think intelligent thoughts, have intelligent and life enhancing attitudes and beliefs, and correspondingly the greater the chance you'll do intelligent and life enhancing actions and behaviors. Hmmmm, simple really!

So here's the logical conclusion... If you want an intelligent and enhanced life, you need to fill it with intelligent learning, experience, knowledge and awareness. The more of that you do, the better you'll differentiate your life.

So that's my thought for today... What can you do to make a difference to your life? What books are you going to read this week? What online articles will you google and read? What learnings are you going to put into your life this week? Ongoing? How specifically are you going to learn and experience more in your life? What are you going to do to enhance your life today?

You learn something every day if you pay attention.

~Ray LeBlond

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

ps in my next blog post, I'll share with you a cool life enhancing device that I've been using to do more reading and learning with!

I wonder wonder wonder...

Wonder versus Hope

“Don’t wish for it to happen.
Don’t wish for it not to happen.
Just watch it happen.
Let the wonder of life unfold.” 

– Susan Jeffers

I came across this very cool neuro-linguistic distinction on the difference between hope and wonder and have been playing with it, and it’s so life enhancing I wanted to share it with you!

The idea came from a blog by Stephen Mills: The Rat Race Trap - Tools to improve your mind and escape the trap:

“I got the idea for this article from Susan Jeffers in her book Embracing Uncertainty.  It really struck a chord with me.  The whole idea is that hoping, wishing, wanting, etc. opens you up to disappointment because you cannot control the future.  When what you hope for doesn’t happen, your hopes are dashed.  You then judge the situation as “bad” because it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to turn out.  You are hurt, disappointed, frustrated, etc.

The idea is to replace your hopes with wonder.  Instead of hoping you’ll get a particular job you wonder if you’ll get that job.  Instead of hoping your partner will act in a certain way you wonder if they will act that way.  Instead of hoping your child will do well in school you wonder if they will do well in school.  Instead of hoping a certain thing happens, you simply wonder what will happen.  Do the same thing with wishing and wanting.

This immediately takes the pressure off of the future by removing the need for it to turn out a certain way.  You are free to let your life unfold in the way it is going to unfold regardless of your hopes and desires.  Wonder frees you from the anxiety of a specific outcome.

This is NOT about pessimism.  Pessimism sucks.  Hope is better than pessimism.  Wonder moves beyond hope and doesn’t open the door for pessimism.  If you had ask me a few years ago what I thought about all of this, I probably would have said it was total crap.  What a difference a few years make!”

Words are powerful!

Now as you know from many of my blog posts (e.g. Life Enhancing Language, De-nominalising your world, Positive Words are life enhancing, O-priming your life, Positive Emotion Words) words are powerful tools that we use to filter, construct and create meaning in our lives.

It is through words that we limit ourselves or alternately inspire and direct ourselves. So a distinction like the one above is a gem. It’s a fantastic insight and really does produce a very different response in your neurology. And I wonder just how often and how life enhancingly you will use this insight now!

Wonder is a creative emotion

According to Dr Gordon Coates, in his fascinating exploration of the origin of human emotions and how to relieve emotional distress, the act of wanting or desiring leads to a cascade of emotional and cognitive responses. Two key parallel cascades occur - hope that the outcome will occur and fear that it will not. This in turn leads to both happiness and sadness, which lead on to more fear and hope. These then loop back onto themselves, creating ongoing stress and suffering. This can be summarised as:

Wanting/Desiring -> Hope + Fear -> Happiness + Sadness -> Fear + Hope

and is displayed in Dr Coates’ diagram:

Note how this links to the distinction above about the potential negative neuro-linguistic effects of hope. And contrast this with ‘Wonder’, which is a creative emotion that does not lead to the parallel cascades of happiness and sadness, and so is more generative. Wonder opens the mind to possibilities and contains no fears of loss. Wonder connects to freedom and choice and flexibility. It creates fascination. It's creative. It’s life enhancing.

So I truly wonder how much you’ve enjoyed today’s blog post and I look forward to hearing comments and feedback on how you use this cool neuro-linguistic tool.

with life enhancing wonder,
Grant

Read more of Susan Jeffers' book:

Embracing Uncertainty: Breakthrough Methods for Achieving Peace of Mind When Facing the Unknown

Connecting with others...

I was chatting with my friend Garry the other day about a recent holiday in beautiful Tasmania that he and his beloved had just returned from. I asked him what he'd found most life enhancing about the holiday. He responded that surprisingly, it was the conscious decision they'd made to connect with other people they met during their travels that had really made a life enhancing difference.

Now Garry is like me, we tend to enjoy our privacy and solitude, and don't normally do a lot of extroverted socialising. So on holidays, we'd tend not to spend a lot of time connecting and sharing with strangers. But on this trip, he'd decided to change that and see what would unfold through a more gregarious way of interacting with people. Along the way he'd met some really fascinating people and had his mind and life seeded with some interesting new ideas and opportunities. Connecting with others had been really life enhancing. I asked him to write something about his experience and share it here on the blog.

Here's Garry's report on a life enhancing holiday experience he had through connecting with and learning from 'Ron', one of the many people he serendipitously met in his travels:

Eco holidaying..  Ron's life enhancing perspective

Changing social values have brought forth, the modern 'eco holiday', broadly advertised and featuring a 'low impact' approach to the traditional holiday experience. A decade into this century, the travel/holiday industry has grown an increasing array of 'green' options, often with a concomitant price elevation. I'd like however to share with you a story based on a more basic approach to moving across this planet.

 Imagine this. Ocean Beach, west of Strahan Tasmania, the sun setting on an endless horizon. The Southern Ocean blue and peaked white with the energy of the wind. A man busies himself by a local viewing spot.

 A closer look, and he is removing rubbish. The type that litters most sightseeing spots. In fact he focuses on the bits of rubbish most people don't want to pick up, and he's equipped for the task with a 'grabber'. 

This is Ron, and his path across the land is defined by freedom, but he has made a deal between himself and the land. Whenever he stops in a location, he cleans it up. He always leaves his camping sites free of human rubbish. He considers it to be like a payment for the pleasure of staying. As the sun sets over Ocean Beach, he pays for the experience with his time and his efforts.

We talk about it and agree that sometimes just a small change in how we value an activity or experience can define a more rewarding path. He takes satisfaction and reward from both the natural beauty of the ocean scene and the fact that his passage has had a restorative influence on the space. Eco holidaying that is accessible to all.

So that's a vignette from Garry's experience of connecting with people and the life enhancing ideas and values that can be brought to your life through this.

I hope it inspires us all to task ourselves, to stretch out, to make more of our lives in every way, and to connect with each other and share life enhancing ideas and experiences.

smiles and life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

Beauty and art

I know it's a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) that beauty and art are life enhancing, but I wanted to explore some deeper distinctions on this, and bring to your conscious awareness the use of these as tools and filters for enhancing your life.

What is beauty?

We find things beautiful and aesthetic because at the deepest level, we have evolved to experience that which is life promoting and life enhancing as attractive and desirable. Beauty is nature's yardstick for survival.

An amoeba finds a dirty puddle as attractive, because in that environment it is safe and has lots of nutrients it can use to live and replicate itself. Humans typically don't find dirty, putrid puddles as beautiful and attractive (unless they are young boys looking for a mess to play in :). Instead, we find clear fresh pools, ponds and running, babbling streams as attractive and aesthetic.

The reason for this is that as an organism we need fresh water to survive. Dirty stagnant puddles full of amoeba and other pathogens are not good for our health and survival. Over millions of years of evolution any complex organism that accidentally evolved the desire and attraction for dirty water, would have died sooner than those that found clean, clear water as attractive. The sense of beauty and attraction to crystal clear pools would have come to dominate the population as those who enjoyed this trait managed to live longer, prosper and replicate their genes.

I know I'm simplifying things somewhat here... and there's a deep point to what I'm sharing. Our sense of beauty, aesthetics and it's expression in art and life, are pointers to that which is life enhancing. Art connects us with wellness, life, resilience and thriving.

The heart and gut mind, attraction and values

Listen to the deep wisdom of your heart and gut brains. They'll speak to you of love, attraction and deeply felt values. In Japan, there is an ancient tradition, still practiced today at the highest levels of management and society, called 'Haragei'. This translates roughly to 'stomach art' and its essence involves learning to tune into and trust the wisdom of the gut. It's also known as 'the unspoken way' because the gut does NOT communicate with words. The heart and gut communicate through hunches, feelings, tastes, desires, symbols and dreams -- through art,  beauty and aesthetics. With haragei the practitioner listens to the silence, to the gaps between words, to what is not said, to the shapes, pathways and patterns of behaviour and the world.

So learn to listen to and deeply bond with your ancient heart and gut brains. They provide an evolved wisdom that you can learn to connect with and tune into. And a powerful pathway to them is via your sense of beauty and art.

Look for the spirit of beauty rather than surface beauty

Seek beauty not in ephemeral fashions and fleeting trends, but in the deeper more enduring beauty of nature and timeless art.

Inspire yourself by surrounding yourself with wonderful works of art. Create your own art. Add value to life by gathering and creating beauty. Support those who bring beauty into our world.

Beauty is natures signpost to adding value to your life. Use it to enhance your life and the lives of those you love.


with life enhancing wishes from the heart
Grant




The Unspoken Way

The key to success in Japan is a thorough understanding of the workings of "haragei" - an idea affecting language, social interaction, and business dealings in particular. This volume examines the idea of "haragei"

Appreciating the ones you love

The little imperfections that make them perfect...

Hi, a good friend just sent me this wonderful and short vidclip and after watching it a couple of times, I felt it was worth sharing with you. It truly is life enhancing. After a bit of research I found that it comes from a TV Commercial by the Singapore Government 'ThinkFamily' initiative. The vid is moving and heartfelt. It's worth watching. It's all about appreciating the people you love and about "the little imperfections that made them perfect..."

I hope you enjoy it and that it enhances your life right now and reminds you to aim for excellence rather than perfection in how you do loving and relating.

smiles, Grant