Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Why ‘Deletions’?
‘Deletions’ are where the speaker has left some information out. If that information is important, either because it’s holding the person back in some way, or because you need that information in order to do what they are asking you to do, you’re going to want to ask questions to recover what is missing.
What Are Nominalisations?
‘Nominalisations‘ are processes that we talk about as if they were things, verbs that we’ve turned into nouns. So ‘communication’ is a nominalisation – it’s been made into a noun so we can talk about it as if it’s a thing, but actually it’s a process. So is ‘love’, so is ‘rapport’, so is ‘business’, ‘work’, and at a bigger chunk level words like ‘the economy’ and ‘the market’. In real life these are not static objects, they are processes – people doing stuff.
So when we turn a process into a thing, we’re deleting the activity in the process and ‘freezing’ it into an abstract concept. That obviously loses a lot of information, which can cause problems in various ways.
The first way it can cause problems in communication is that your listener may not know what the nominalisation means. A lot of nominalisations are long words derived from Latin or Greek, and if a listener hasn’t been educated in that area, they might not understand what you mean. The term ‘nominalisation’ is an example; it means ‘the process of turning a verb into a noun’ and it’s not widely known outside of linguistics and NLP. John Grinder’s books are full of nominalisations derived from linguistics and logic that you don’t see every day, and it’s best to keep the dictionary handy when you’re reading them. The question “What does that mean?” is a useful one here.
Another problem in communication is that nominalisations can mean different things to different people, because of the loss of information that happens when you ‘freeze’ the verb into a noun. You may be reasonably clear about how you decide something, but when someone talks about a decision that they made, they’re not giving you any information about the process they went through to make that decision. So if it’s relevant, you may want to ask a ‘denominalising’ question, that turns the noun back into a verb and restores the steps of the process, like “How did you decide?”
If someone is just talking about a decision, they are not even including the quite possibly relevant information of who it was that decided.
Because you lose the details of the process, nominalisations become abstract concepts rather than anything you can form a mental picture of. You can form an internal representation of talking to someone, but ‘communication’ or even ‘conversation’ are vaguer, less punchy, less vivid. You have to go inside to find an example of those concepts, rather than being able to form sensory images straight away.
So if you really want what you say or what you write to sparkle, don’t use a lot of nominalisations – you won’t hold the attention of your audience as well as if you use juicy, sensual words that can leap out and grab your listener’s imagination. This is worth watching out for, especially if you’ve got a strong ‘Ad’ preference (‘Ad’ standing for ‘Auditory digital’, another bit of NLP jargon meaning that you prefer to think and process information through internal dialogue rather than using visual images, sounds or feelings) or you work in a business environment that encourages Ad expressions.
Aside from the obvious disadvantages of potentially not being understood and sending your audience to sleep, nominalisations can set up limiting ways of seeing the world. If someone says “I’m in a bad relationship”, it sounds like the relationship is something outside of them that they have no control over. What they are really describing is the process of them relating badly to the other person. So if you ask a question that ‘denominalises’ that statement like “How are you relating badly to that other person?”, it gives them an opportunity to re-examine what they have actually been doing that’s led to the bad result, and maybe change it.
Another feature of nominalisations is that they lend themselves to the passive voice, which has a distancing effect. If a company’s management says “The decision was arrived at to terminate your employment”, what they mean is “We decided to terminate your employment.” When you turn the process of deciding into the nominalisation ‘Decision’, it becomes a thing and the speaker can distance him- or herself from what they have done. If you want to recover some of the missing information, you could ask “Who decided that, and how did they decide?”
Questions to Think About
- What nominalisations do you use when talking to other people? Do they understand what those nominalisations mean – or rather, are the meanings they take from them the same was what you meant to say? How do you know?
- How could you use more sensory language instead of nominalisations, to add more clarity and engagement to your communication? (Sorry, I mean ‘to make what you say clearer and make your audience listen more closely!)
- What nominalisations do you use to yourself, in your internal dialogue? If the nominalisation has a positive effect on how you feel, think of some actual examples of it from your experience (this should strengthen the positive effect).
If another nominalisation has a negative emotional response associated with it, note where that comes from. What could you do to feel better about it? (Perhaps use submodality shifts to tone down the images or internal dialogue that it provokes). Once you’ve dialled down the emotional response, ask yourself what positive learnings you can take from the memories and associations that the nominalisation brings up, that will allow you to let go of the negative emotion for good.
Previously in this series on Meta Model language patterns and questions: ‘Generalisations’: Modal Operators of Possibility and Necessity
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