…and respond to them too, including the ones you say to yourself.
This might seem like an arcane linguistic curiosity. The truth is it’s both highly practical and a very big deal.
Loosely speaking, an “embedded command” is a part of a sentence which if taken on its own, would be an instruction of some kind, or a statement attaching an attribute to a person or something like that. So in the title, “you understand embedded commands” is an embedded command.
Now the thing is…
Our unconscious mind pays attention to all this instruction even if our conscious mind doesn’t, and what’s more, it ignores negation. The classic illustration is “Don’t think of a blue tree”. Even if you’ve heard that instruction a 100 times, you still think of a blue tree.
So saying to a child “stay in bed” has a very different effect from “don’t get up.”
“Call me if you need to” is very different from “don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
A recent post on our obsession with tips closed with “Watch out for the tip junkies” to avoid any risk of accidentally encouraging you in the opposite direction from which I intended. Writing the more obvious “Don’t be a tips junkie” might have turned you into one (with apologies to all the great tips sources out there).
If you’re compiling a risk register, for example, take great care to avoid making a risk more likely, especially if it has a behavioral aspect, such as “team leaders have difficulty persuading their staff to adopt the new process.” That wording risks programming team leaders to have just that difficulty, and their managers too.
We talk about change being difficult, so guess what…
If you say a process or a relationship is going to be difficult, you can be sure it will be.
You know about this really…
I wonder though if you realize how much your own and other’s embedded commands are running your life, their lives, and probably much of the economy.
Have you noticed?
Make sure you “say it the way you want it.”