Chains Made of Words

The Gentleman Thief

Literature is littered with anti-heroes. Those charismatic characters that are really not that nice, but the reader falls in love with them anyway. However bad things get, we make excuses for them and still love them at the end. The authors manipulate us brilliantly from the first page to the last and we go with it willingly because that's what fiction is all about. It is a great illustration of the power words can have over us.

I've been upping my reading game recently and started to dig back into my favourite genres, Sci-Fi and fantasy. I'm also one for a bargain so look out for the 99p kindle offers on Amazon every month. A book popped up called The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi and I grabbed it. It was the first of three books about Jean Le Flambeur, gentleman thief and I bloody loved it ! Hannu was super brave. He based it in a future space where a lot of the concepts were invented and then made absolutely no effort to explain them to the reader ! So most of the time I wasn't even sure what was going one, but was loving the mad ride he was taking me on. Sounds weird but it was worth it.

Getting to the point before I lose you completely, there was a line in the third book that I thought was really powerful and relevant to this blog.

She looks into his eyes. 'And are you sure this is not a story you tell yourself? I know what mine was: Tawaddud the lover of monsters, the black sheep of the Gomelez. These are just chains, my lord of many names, chains made of words.

The stories we tell ourselves

Back in the real world it took me back 20 years to when I was training for my NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Master Practitioner qualification. We did a session on Metaphors for Life and the power they have over us, for good or bad.

A metaphor for life is a phrase you use to describe your life. So a good one would be:

Life is a fabulous adventure

A bad one would be:

Life is an uphill struggle

The shock for me was the power that these simple phrases have over us. Or, more accurately, the power that we give them over our lives.

The top tip from that session, and the homework, was to work out what your metaphor for life was and, if it didn't support you well, to change it.

I can't remember what my metaphor was but it wasn't a useful one. What I do remember is going into work the next day and throwing my mug in the bin. I'd bought it as a joke and it had a miserable chap with his feet up and the slogan:

life's a bitch and then you die.

It wasn't doing me any good and I didn't want to give it away as it wasn't a helpful belief to hold for anyone else.

The two musketeers

I had a colleague at the time who worked in London, so when I was down there we would grab lunch and have a chat. He would tell me about his family and his life and there was a fair bit of drama going on. I used to look forward to meeting him to get the latest.

Early on in our relationship he said to me that his wife and he were 'the two musketeers' and every story he told was one of conflict where he and his wife had each others back. They were both down the school seeing the headmaster because their boy was being bullied, they were fighting with neighbours over a number of things. It was almost like anyone who crossed their paths was an enemy to be defeated. They were very musketeerey.

Up until the metaphor for life session I hadn't thought much about it, but now it seemed obvious - they were living their metaphor for life and all their interactions with others were conflicts ! By the way, if you've just read this and have no clue what a musketeer is, google Three Musketeers.

The slippery slope

It was a massively powerful real world example of how a simple phrase can change everything. Their life probably hadn't been full of conflict but maybe there had been a couple of incidents in a row where stuff happened and they supported each other through it. Then over a bottle of wine one night one of them would have suggested 'we were like the two musketeers today'.

On the face of it, it's a really powerful metaphor that conveys absolute loyalty, so you can see why they would stick with it. But to be musketeers you need an enemy to fight, so interactions started becoming conflicts. The more conflicts the more reinforcement and before you know it the musketeer ethos was baked in.

My colleague left the organisation many years ago, so I don't know what happened, but I really hope they are not still fighting the world. Also I hope their son hasn't joined the musketeers.

Why just have one ?

A metaphor for life is just one example of how words can chain us. It is an overarching and powerful one, but it isn't the only one. Over the years I've realised that we can have different metaphors in different life contexts that constrain us or enable us. So you might find that you have a work one and a friend one and a family one and possibly more.

Then you can open it up and look at beliefs. They are, in essence, statements that we hold true at all times and they colour our world view. If you hold a belief like

Everyone is doing the best they can, in the circumstances they are in, with the thinking that they have, including me.

that's a pretty powerful enabling belief. But if they are more limiting, like:

I'm rubbish at being a good friend

I'm no good at my job.

Everyone I work with is an idiot

maybe you need to make some changes.

Breaking the chains

The reality is that some of the beliefs, values and life metaphors you have may be bang on aligned to the direction you want to go in and are helping you live your best life. I would also guess that, unless you have done a thorough audit, some of them are tripping you up, slowing you down and impacting on your dreams.

I'm hoping that this post will start you on the path to identifying any chains made of words you have and working on them. In Part 2 we will explore this theme a bit more to see how we can use words to lift us up rather than chain us down.

Mike xx