CHAPTER 6: GET PRESENT TO ‘WHAT IS SO’
(ASSERTIONS)
“We create our world through our assessments…”
When people speak or think, they confuse between assertions and
assessments, and it is very common for people to hold their assessments
as assertions, their opinions as facts. This is where the core of the difficulty
lies. We create our world through our assessments, and then we forget we
created this world—because we start to hold our assessments as
assertions, as true, rather than perspectives and judgments. This
distinction of assertions and assessments, or of “what is so” and “what am
I making of what is s”‟, is critical. There are various statements that we
make in passing, and without noticing, that have an impact in the way we
operate our lives, such as
• “I cannot do this”,
• “This is an impossible target”,
• “The only way I can succeed is by doing this and this...”,
• “This is a daunting task”,
• “If only I had (this), then I could achieve (that)”,
• “I am not a morning person” and
• “She is so annoying”
All the above-mentioned statements are assessments, and yet we say it as
if these were assertions (and more importantly, we start to believe these
are assertions). To get a little more rigorous, let us take this last statement
“She is so annoying” and discuss it. The construct of this statement “She is
so annoying” makes it sound like “being annoying” is a fact about that
person. We make it sound like it is similar to other facts about her, such as,
•she is 5 feet 8 inches,
•she is a daughter of her parents,
•she is a sister of 2 brothers,
•she is a mother of 1 son and
•she is the general manager of a bank.
“You have authority in the matter of your life, simply
because you say so…”
The above-mentioned statements can be claimed to be facts about her.
Assertions are not dependent on the observer, and irrespective of who the
observer is, the above-mentioned statements remain as assertions.
However, when you say “She is so annoying”, you say it like an assertion,
which is like a claim of fact. It is almost like saying “She is 5 feet 8 inches
tall”.
Both these sentences begin with “She is _________”, making what comes
after “she is” a fact about that person. These sentences have been
constructed similarly, yet being 5 feet 8 inches is indeed a fact, and being
annoying is not a fact; it is your assessment of that person.
When you say “She is so annoying”, you are actually saying “Given the
observer I am, right now in this moment, I assess this person to be
annoying”.
When you say it this way, you are now saying that annoying is not a
property of hers. You are saying that it is you who assesses her as
annoying in that moment and that you may change your assessment of her
at a later date and time.
It is imperative to distinguish the distinctions between assertion and
assessment and recognize that one is a claim of fact and that the other is
just an opinion. Most often, we mix these up, and not create a distinction
between these two distinctions.