Edward T. Hall and Congruence

Do you know who Edward T. Hall is?

My husband Keith is re-reading a book of his, The Silent Language.

Hall is an anthropologist who originated the concept of proximics (personal space) and was an early writer on cross-cultural differences and non-verbal communication. He's written about westerners doing business in Japan. He did research with the Navajo and Hopi. He's also one of the people who greatly influenced early NLP developers like John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Judith Delozier, and Leslie Cameron-Bandler.

Hall was born in 1914 in Missouri and is still alive. He's been retired since 1977. He remarried in 2004, according to the timeline on his website!

According to Keith, Hall was saying things like this in 1959: "If a person really wants to introduce change, find out what is happening unconsciously and make it conscious." That's an interesting definition of modeling -- in this case, modeling of the problem to illuminate it and notice possibilities for change.

He also coined the term "congruence," which is now a standard part of the NLP lexicon. Today, in NLP circles, congruence refers to a person and all their "parts" being aligned. When we are congruent, our speech, non-verbal communication, and actions all match up.

If you remember your high school geometry class, you might observe that Hall borrowed this term from mathematics. Here's a one page refresher on congruence in math: http://www.mathopenref.com/congruent.html

On a side note: according to Keith, Hall also laid the groundwork for timelines, writing about the distinctions of "in time" (polychronic time, in Hall's terms) versus "through time" (monochronic time for Hall).