Questions for coaches

Nominalizations
or
"Put your anxiety into a wheelbarrow, and bury it in your back yard"

"I have this anxiety", Jane said.

What should the coach respond? How about: "Oh, where do you keep it? What color is it?"

‘Anxiety’ is from that class of words called ‘nominalizations’, from the Latin ‘nominalis’, or ‘name’; words that appear to be nouns. Nouns are ‘naming’ words, words like ‘brick’, ‘ice-cream’, ‘elephant’, i.e. things we can touch, pick up, or at least see. In short nouns are things that we could put into a wheelbarrow.

A nominalization is a word that masquerades as a noun, but that you can’t put into a wheelbarrow (even a big wheelbarrow, such as you would need for ‘elephant’). Words such as ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, and ‘nervousness’ are nominalizations.

So what are these ‘nominalizations’ if they are not really nouns? They are verbs, pretending to be nouns. Now, a verb is a ‘doing word’. A verb is an activity; something that we start doing at some time, perhaps quarter after four in the afternoon, and stop at some other time, say six thirty the following morning.

The problem with nominalizations is that by masquerading as a noun, they become things that we ‘own’, all the time, whether we like it or not. By thinking of them as things, we lose responsibility, and hence control, over the doing.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) seeks to give responsibility, and hence control, back to the doer.

"I have this anxiety", Jane said.

"Oh, how do you make yourself feel anxious?"

"How do you know you are feeling anxious?"

"Do you do this all the time, or if not, how do you know when to start feeling anxious?"

By asking these questions, you begin to allow your client to re-access the process they use to create anxiety (or fear, or nervousness, or other negative emotional states), and the strategy they use to begin to access this state (ie what they do immediately before). Bringing the process into conscious awareness is the first step toward change.

"Nominalization" is one of the verbal patterns within the Meta Model. As human beings we constantly delete, generalize and distort our experiences in order to squeeze them into thought sized pieces. The Meta Model seeks to reconnect thoughts about an experience with the underlying experience itself, by reversing certain of these deletions, generalizations and distortions. The Meta Model is one tool in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

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© 2007 International Center for Positive Psychology and Hypnosis