Living in Language

What does it mean to live in language? Language is like the air we breathe. By the time we are adults we have been languaging for so many years that we hardly give it a second thought. From the moment we wake up to the time we go to bed, we language our existence. Now, if languaging were simply the act of describing the world then I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. There would be no need to examine how languaging creates our experience because as a descriptive tool language holds no generative power. But on closer inspection language turns out to be exactly that—creative and generative. And when leaders and coaches begin to catch onto this, everything changes.

So! Languaging. You may be alarmed by how I am using the word language here (as a verb!) but I assure you this is intentional. The verbing of language comes from the work of Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist who noted that “anything said is said by an observer.” This feels obvious, but the implications are important.

Each of us, as an observer, perceives the world in our own unique way. Not only because of how we were shaped through our upbringing, experiences, and culture but also because of our biological structure. Seeing doesn’t happen through our eyes alone, it happens through our nervous system, emotional state, and cognitive awareness. I take the infamous quote attributed to Anaïs Nin, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are,” not as a statement about our character, but about our biology. How the world occurs to us is created through our thoughts, emotions, body, and language. This is what Maturana is pointing to when he uses language as a verb. The act of languaging consists of observing and speaking, and recursively being changed by what we say on what we see.

It is precisely this uniqueness, this difference between observers that gives us a clue that language cannot just describe the world as it is. If we are each unique observers then we each have a legitimate claim on what is “real”. But if that's the case, how can we ever make sense of things? One answer to that question can be found just by looking around or reading a history book—the world-generating capacity of language is attributed to a privileged few who were born with and/or have accumulated the right signifiers that their view of things is considered the “right” one (just bring to mind any manager you’ve had who, because of their positional power felt they were always right, and you’ll get a sense of what I mean).

This also happens when we talk to ourselves. Let’s zoom in (Eames Power of 10 style) to our inner critic. The inner critic is a particular kind of observer, one that occupies a negative view of our capabilities and effectiveness. Inhabiting a pervasive mood of dissatisfaction and frustration, the inner critic can only observe (and incessantly tell us) the thousand million ways we are falling short of expectations. And as part of our own observational facility, the inner critic, who we often mistake as ourselves, influences how we observe the world and what we say about it, thereby generating our reality through language.

If our inner critic is super active and we are beating ourselves up for not being more productive, efficient, smarter, better, prettier, wealthier, name-your-flavor-of-criticism, that will absolutely influence our observations of ourselves, what is happening around us, and the potential actions we can take. We will pay more attention to data that confirms the beliefs of the inner critic and discard evidence to the contrary. And this loop, this reflexive interaction of observation and language, creates our reality. Through languaging we have become lazy, stupid, worthless, and pathetic which, I have to point out, is not an objective, descriptive statement about who we are but the generative power of language to create who we mistake ourselves to be.

As observers we all language our existence in unique ways. What happens when we speak is that we reveal how the world appears to us. We highlight what matters, the beliefs that we hold to be true, what we think is worth paying attention to and what isn't, what we hope for, and what we want to avoid. Language shows who we are and how we participate in creating the world.

This is what I mean by “living in language”. Language is such a part of our material reality that we rarely stop to reflect on it, to understand the role it plays in creating our experience. We take language to be descriptive or a way of transmitting information, which it is some of the time, but our big mistake has been the assumption that this is all language does.

Over the coming weeks I’d like to invite you to pay attention to how you use language. Listen to your inner dialogue and see what you can learn about who you are as an observer and how you language the world. And listen to the conversations you have with others and see if you can sense into what language reveals about each person and the kind of observer they are.