The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: For Milton Erickson, his sudden paralysis opened
his eyes to not only a different form of communication but also a
completely different way of relating to people. When he listened to his
sisters and picked up new information from their faces and voices, he
not only registered this with his senses but also felt himself
experiencing some of what was going on in their minds. He had to
imagine why they said yes but really meant no, and in doing so he had
to momentarily feel some of their contrary desires. He had to see the
tension in their necks and register it physically as tension within
himself to understand why they were suddenly uncomfortable in his
presence. What he discovered is that nonverbal communication cannot

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be experienced simply through thinking and translating thoughts into
words but must be felt physically as one engages with the facial
expressions or locked positions of other people. It is a different form of
knowledge, one that connects with the animal part of our nature and
involves our mirror neurons.
To master this language, he had to relax and control the continual
need to interpret with words or categorize what he was seeing. He had
to tamp down his ego—thinking less of what he wanted to say and
instead directing his attention outward into the other person, attuning
himself to their changing moods as reflected in their body language. As
he discovered, such attention changed him. It made him more alive to
the signs people continually emit and transformed him into a superior
social actor, capable of connecting to others’ inner lives and developing
greater rapport.
As Erickson progressed in this self-transformation, he noticed that
most people go in the opposite direction—becoming more self-
absorbed and unobservant with each passing year. He liked to
accumulate anecdotes from his work that demonstrated this. For
instance, he once asked a group of interns in the hospital where he
worked to silently observe an elderly woman lying under the covers in
a hospital bed until they saw something that would indicate a possible
diagnosis for her bedridden condition. They watched her for three
hours to no avail, none of them taking notice of the obvious fact that
both her legs had been amputated. Or there were the people who
attended his public lectures; many of them would ask why he never
used that strange-looking pointer he carried in his hand as part of his
presentation. They had failed to observe his rather noticeable limp and
need for a cane. As Erickson saw it, the harshness of life makes most
people turn inward. They have no mental space left over for simple
observations, and the second language largely passes them by.