Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner Manual

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This is the original text of my NLP Practitioner manual which I am donating to Wikibooks. I have not edited it from the original except for removing the publisher details.

NLP Practitioner Guide Book

Peter Freeth

Originally Published by Communications In Action 2008

Ingredients

NLP Practitioner 2

Ingredients 3

NLP Practitioner 10

Keep this in mind 15

Coming to your senses 18

Communication models 34

State 41

State Physiology 43

Submodalities 48

Compare submodalities 48

Swapping submodalities 49

Changing Submodalities 50

Anchoring 52

Basic anchoring 56

More anchors 59

Sliding anchors 59

Stacking anchors 60

Collapsing anchors 62

Outcomes 63

Well Formed Outcomes 66

PURE 68

Rapport 74

Congruence 81

Incongruence 81

Matching and Mismatching 84

State modelling 84

Congruence 86

Voice matching 87

Direct mind reading 88

Pacing and leading 89

Pacing and Leading Part 1 90

Pacing and Leading Part 2 91

Pattern interrupts 91

Calibration and strategies 93

Identify sequence 1 97

Identify sequence 2 97

Eye accessing 98

Strategy elicitation and modelling 104

Model a decision strategy 106

Model a skill or talent 107

Model a problem 107

Language 110

Meta Model 114

Simple Meta Model exercise 122

First sentence Meta Model 122

Unspecified Nouns (Deletion) 124

Unspecified Verbs (Deletion) 126

Nominalisation (Generalisation) 128

Lack of Referential Index (Deletion) 129

Simple Deletion (Deletion) 131

Comparative Deletions (Deletion) 133

Complex equivalence (Generalisation) 135

Lost performance (Deletion) 137

Mind reading (Distortion) 139

Cause and effect (Generalisation) 141

Presuppositions (Deletion) 143

Universal Quantifiers (Generalisation) 146

Modal Operator of Necessity (Deletion) 148

Model Operator of Possibility (Deletion) 150

Milton Model 152

Modal operators 160

Modal Operators 164

Logical levels 165

Logical Levels – as a coaching structure 166

Logical Levels – as a reframing tool 167

Stories – Narrative Communication 168

State story 171

Purposeful storytelling 173

Trance 175

Cycling representational systems 180

Utilisation pattern 180

Utilisation pattern 181

Pattern interrupt 182

Hypnosis scripts 183

Elman Induction 185

Self hypnosis CDs 191

Change Techniques 193

Swish 195

Visual swish 197

Squash 206

Reframing 210

Reframing – an alternative meaning of the same event 210

Head on reframing 212

Meta model reframing 212

State reframing 212

Perceptual positions 214

Meta Mirror 216

Six Step Reframe 216

Six Step Reframe 218

Association and dissociation 220

Self image association (VK association) 220

Self image Association 228

Fast Phobia Cure 229

Time 235

Timeline techniques 247

Basic timeline - Exploring a goal 247

Overcoming obstacles 249

Exploring decisions 249

The Undo button 250

Motivation 251

Super goals 252

What if? 253

Relationships to time 254

Future pacing 259

Coaching tools 260

SORT 260

Problem solving 261

1. Describe the problem 261

His voice tone changed when he talked about feelings2. Play back the problem 262

3. Ask questions 263

I feel differently about the problem

4. Intuition 263

The sorter 265

The Unsticker 265

Modelling 277

General hints 282

NLP modelling 283

Success Factor Modelling 283

Strategy elicitation and the TOTE model 284

The logical levels approach 286

The curious approach 287

The presuppositions of NLP 289

Certification practice sessions 296

Coaching tips 300

High involvement, low attachment 300

There’s no rush! 300

If they didn’t ask you to fix it, it isn’t broken 301

Trust your hunches 301

Focus on what you want first 301

Are you asking that great question for your benefit or for the client’s? 301

You don’t need the answers 301

The unconscious always knows what it wants 302

Do you need to say it more that the client needs to hear it? 302

We don’t have to fix the problem, only break it 302

First, watch and listen 302

Everything you need is in the first sentence 303

The client has everything they need to be everything they want 303

SORT 303

Relationship, Intention, Perspective 303

Out of car and body experiences 304

Useful quotes 308

[edit] NLP Practitioner

NLP in its purest form is all about personal excellence and is characterised by a curiosity about people and how they move through the world. NLP can help you to achieve goals, overcome personal barriers and communicate more effectively, building better relationships.

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming - an unfortunately complicated was to describe a study of the mind and nervous system (Neuro), language and the way that we build a linguistic map of the world (Linguistic) and our external behavioural patterns (Programming)

Many people describe NLP in different ways; a study of excellence, a model of human communication and behaviour or a toolkit for personal change are ones you may have heard. NLP is used in business, sports coaching, therapy, counselling, coaching, training, teaching, sales, advertising - in fact in any area where people want to achieve better results for themselves and others.

At the heart of NLP is a toolkit for understanding the intuitive mindset and behaviour of excellence in any field. Whether you are a high performing athlete, sales person or teacher, you have certain perceptions, certain skills and an attitude that enable you to achieve results within your own environment. By tapping into the intuitive excellence of experts in the field of personal change - therapists - the creators of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder created a broad and flexible toolkit for personal change. It works with our fundamental perceptions of the world, from which we form our beliefs and generate the behaviours that we hope will get us the results we want.

NLP as you might find it in a book or on a Practitioner training course comprises these techniques, and certainly they are highly valuable in many different everyday situations. Yet we shouldn't overlook the importance of the modelling tools too, because they are the means by which we can continually generate new techniques and increase the flexibility and effectiveness of NLP. NLP is a generative approach, meaning that we are always seeking to build on what is already working.

NLP isn’t new. It’s not something that was created in a dark cave on a mountainside somewhere. NLP is a study of real people achieving real and tangible results in their real lives. NLP is a way of sorting and organising our mental and behavioural skills, it doesn’t necessarily add anything new. It simply allows us to understand and refine our existing skills so that we can achieve more, easily and consistently.

You may say, “If NLP’s not new, what’s the point of learning about it?” and it’s the same reason as you might choose to go to a photography course, or a car maintenance course. Your car will run without regular maintenance, yet if you know some of the basics yourself, it will run more reliably and you’ll be in a much better position to fix it in an emergency. Without photography classes, you can still pick up a camera and take photos, you just might not get the same results that a professional would get with their specialist knowledge of lighting and composition.

This has interesting implications for the people who say, “NLP doesn’t work”, because they’re right. NLP does not sell or influence or lead. You do. NLP techniques do not help people to change – people do. The techniques those people use are nothing different to the intuitive talents used by people who are naturally skilful or effective. All that NLP is, at its heart, is a way of modelling and replicating those skills so that you can get the same results, more easily and more often.

NLP started life as a therapeutic toolkit, because the people who were first studied were therapists - professional communicators with a gift for helping others change - easily, quickly and permanently.

Yet thinking of NLP as simply a toolkit is a bit like saying that art is just paintbrushes, or architecture is just bricks. The tools you will learn on a course, or read about in a book, are the results of NLP – they do not define NLP itself. A good NLP Practitioner will go on to model excellence in other people and create new tools in new situations. Someone who has not embraced this spirit of modelling excellence will use the tools in a prescriptive, inflexible way and – guess what? – sometimes they will work and sometimes they wont. People with the flexibility to model excellence and create new tools just keep on going until the problem is solved, and usually it doesn’t look like they’re doing anything at all.

You might like to think of the techniques as being NLP’s footprints. By following in those footprints, we can retrace the steps of the people who created NLP and experience their journeys for ourselves, always remembering it’s the journey that is important. Getting your feet precisely into every one of those footprints is not, perhaps a good use of your time, because whilst you’re looking down at your feet, you’re missing the scenery.

Some people go into NLP training wanting to influence people or even use NLP on other people. Inevitably, these people fail to get anything of real value from the course because change must first come from within. The people who come to NLP training wanting to improve their lives and their relationships have already taken the first critical step - taking responsibility for change, and for the effect they have on other people. These people already know that it is they who must adapt, not others. Perhaps, in the past, they learned the hard way that you can’t make other people do what you want. They learned that you can only do what you want, and if you need other people’s help then you need to be better at expressing what you want, or change the action you are taking to get it.

NLP is about you. It’s not about what you can do to other people. If you try to learn NLP with an attitude of ‘I’m already good at this, I want to learn to do it to other people’ then NLP training will magnify that attitude so that it’s even more apparent to others.

If you are curious about yourself and other people, and if you are hoping to find new ways to get better results more consistently then you will definitely benefit greatly from learning about NLP.

The three levels of licensed training - Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer – have quite distinct aims. At Practitioner level, the key aim is to give you a personal experience of change. Before you start learning how to change other people, it’s very important that you have a personal reference for the way that people change and how the tools work. You will learn some basic change tools and by the end of the course you will have experienced some kind of personal change such as solving a problem or curing a phobia.

At Master Practitioner level, you gain more insight into the structure and application of the tools so that you can create new tools yourself and refine the use of techniques such as hypnosis. At Trainer level, you will learn how to learn about how to learn NLP so that you can train others.

You don’t need any training at all to use NLP, but you’ll only get a license to practice if you complete the course. You need to decide for yourself if that’s important to you but I would say that the experience of Practitioner training is far more useful to you than the certificate will be, and it is totally different to just reading a book, because reading a book doesn’t give you a first hand experience of what happens in other peoples’ minds.

All Practitioner course content is prescribed by the NLP licensing bodies, of which there are now several. The original licensing body is the Society of NLP - the one associated with Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP. All of the other worldwide licensing bodies essentially derive their content and licensing criteria from the SNLP, with differences on course length or additional content.

You can learn the basic tools and mechanics of NLP in a couple of days, but that doesn’t mean that you can use them elegantly and effectively. I’ve been learning and applying NLP for almost 15 years, and I still learn something new from every course I run and every client I work with. To think that anyone could learn everything there is to know in either 7 or 22 days is interesting – it’s far more important that you practice constantly and remember that the training course is only a part of the learning process.

One of the key responsibilities of any NLP trainer is to provide a safe environment where, if you choose to take part, you will learn what’s useful and important to you by exploring new ideas and approaches to situations which previously you, or others, may have found difficult.

Sometimes you might find a particular approach seems more comfortable for you – take this as a sign that you are learning within your comfort zone. If an approach or idea seems new or confusing, take this as a sign that you are stretching your personal beliefs and boundaries, increasing both your flexibility and your ability to get the results you want. This is a very good thing, and is fundamental to understanding how NLP works.

Above all, sit back, relax and enjoy the journey.

[edit] Keep this in mind

There’s one important idea that I want you to keep in the back of your mind as you read this book, or any other book.

None of this is true.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Nothing in this book is true. You may find that a great deal of it is useful to you, and you may find that many of the ideas and stories correlate very closely with your own experiences. You may even find yourself practicing the techniques of NLP and getting great results. This does not make them true.

You see, we don’t really understand how our minds and bodies work. Different people have created different models, and those models may be useful for us in getting certain results. For example, if you want to run faster, a model of how your muscles and bones function is useful, even though you may not understand how your mind makes your muscles and bones move. If you want to lose weight, a model of your metabolism may be useful.

If you want to get better results in your interactions with other people, a model of how your behaviour and communication relate to the outside world is useful. None of these models are true, yet they may all be useful.

So if there’s anything in here that you disagree with then that’s fine because it isn’t true anyway. On the other hand, if you love it and find it all works wonderfully then I’m very pleased for you.

Whilst none of this is true, there is one thing that I can promise you. It’s the one thing I can absolutely guarantee.

All of the ideas, techniques and concepts in this book will only ever work if you put them into practice. If you read something and decide it wouldn’t work, then you’re right. You form a belief which you then reinforce by deliberately taking action to prove it – by not doing the thing that wouldn’t work.

Therefore, all I ask of you, dear reader, is that you suspend belief or disbelief until you have truly found out for yourself. You will only know what works for you by doing it.

The techniques of NLP are simply its footprints, remember.

Being able to read a recipe book and follow the recipes to the letter doesn’t mean you can hold a dinner party. To do that, you have to think systemically, creating the right atmosphere for your guests and serving them dishes that complement each other and arrive in the right order. A dinner party is more than just eating, it’s the whole experience of an enjoyable evening with friends.

Sometimes people ask me if there are ever times when NLP doesn’t work, and I can only say that in my personal experience I have never not had a result. A particular technique may not have had an expected outcome right away, but that isn’t the same thing. I’ll often start one technique and then switch to another, or not even use anything that you would recognise as a technique at all.

This works because I put it into practice, every day, and so I hope you will continue to enjoy the very real benefits of doing the same.

1. What do you want from this learning experience?

2. How will you know when you’ve achieved it?

3. What exactly will you see, hear and feel?

4. What are you going to do to get it?

5. What can the other people here do to help you?

6. What difference will having this make in your life and career?

7. How will you put it into practice every day?

8. What difference will other people notice in you?

9. What opportunities will you create to continue developing your skills?

[edit] Coming to your senses

What equipment do you have for gathering information about the world?

Obviously, I can’t hear you, so I’ll pretend you said, “Your five senses!!”

And I’ll say, “well done!”….sort of. In that there are more than five. Here are some of the senses that you have - there may be more as we find out more about neurology and the way that your brain handles sensory information that is outside of our ‘normal’ conscious perception. Here are just a few of them…..

Now, this might appear to be obvious, and therefore trivial, but it is in fact the most important thing you will learn today.

Why? Because we must now accept that all of the rich memories, ideas, thoughts, pictures, sounds, poems, songs and desires that are in your head got there by coming in through your senses. They didn’t appear mystically and they didn’t arrive through intuition.

You might think that this is obvious, but it has an important meaning for our communication. The colour green, the sound of a car horn and the smell of lemon juice are easy to think of in terms of sensory inputs. What about honesty, professionalism and danger? What do these mean in sensory terms? What exactly does honesty sound like?

Almost everything that is in your head got there through your senses. Therefore, your senses are what you use to represent memories to yourself. You see, hear, feel, taste and smell memories using the same processing systems that allow you to gather real time information from the outside world.

Almost everything? Yes, except for certain instinctive knowledge that you were born with, such as how to breathe, beat your heart or swallow milk. If you remember that far back then you’ll know that it took you a while to learn how to regulate your body temperature and even longer to learn how to walk and speak.

Our senses are our only tool for gathering information from the world, yet as we grow older we ignore sensory information more and more and replace it with ‘experience’ or what we ‘know’. It will help you a great deal to gather more information if you try and forget what you think you already know. Intuition is one way that you notice subtle sensory information that gets missed in the fog of all the stuff you ‘know’ about.

Over the years, you have taken in vast amounts of sensory data and attached linguistic labels to it. We don’t fully understand this process, so we can’t tell computers how to copy it. We can teach a computer to understand that an object is both a table and wood, but if we smash the table up the computer struggles to understand that whilst it’s still wood, it’s not a table anymore.

Have you ever lost your car keys, only to find them right in front of you? Have you ever pushed a door that was marked “PULL”?

Look at this next image. Hold the book at arm’s length and, with your left eye closed, look directly and only at the left face. Move the book slowly towards you until the right face disappears. What’s happening? Do the same by closing your right eye and looking at the right face.

☻☻

Are the horizontal lines curved or straight?

Can you see the dots changing from white to grey to black as you look around the picture?

What do you see happening in this example? Look at it in the same way as you did for the similar one before, but notice what happens to the right face as you look at the left one. How do you explain it?

☻

Have you ever heard someone say something totally different to what they actually said? Have you ever daydreamed? Have you ever dreamed at night?

Well, if you answered, “Yes!” to any of those, where did that voice come from? Was it the one in your head? Don’t worry, we’ve all got one. Some of us have many, and they can come in very handy.

Here’s the first useful tip for you, and I can guarantee it is a very useful thing to know about. In fact, if you ever feel nervous or if you ever worry, or if you ever tell yourself you should have known better, then this will be a very, very useful thing to know. Are you ready?

Did you know that you have total conscious control over that voice in your head?

Did you know that if it nags you or criticises you, you can change its tone of voice to be anything you want. If it sounded really soothing and supportive, would you be more inclined to listen to its advice?

If it sounded really excited and enthusiastic, how do you think you would feel? Try it out now…..In a really critical, harsh voice, say, “That was rubbish, you should have known better”. Next, use a really kind and supportive voice to say, “Hey! That didn’t work so well, what can you do differently next time”. Pay attention to the difference in how you feel about those two voices.

Just so you’re familiar with the NLP jargon, the voice inside your head is called your ‘Internal Dialogue’. If you find that you criticise yourself when you get things wrong and that this makes you feel bad, just try this really simple exercise.

Next time you make a mistake and the voice says, “that was stupid” or, “that was a bad idea” say, in a genuinely curious way, “Thankyou! Now, how does that information help me?” You can try any variation on this, such as, “Thankyou! What do you suggest I do differently next time?” You will find that the results are quite different to when you just nag yourself. You can make up any form of words that are right for you as long as you follow the basic structure of ‘acknowledge value’ then ‘redirect to a positive course of action’. You probably already apply this structure when other people offer you criticism - don’t you? It just helps bypass the emotion of criticism and get to the real value - the feedback.

You may say, “But this doesn’t apply to me” in which case you should pay twice as much attention. When you’re in a business environment, some people will beat themselves up for making ‘mistakes’. You’ll know when they do this from listening to what they say, for example, “I told myself I should have known better” or, “I said to myself that this was wrong”. When you hear this, you can helpfully intervene by helping them change their internal dialogue.

So, what we know now is that everything you know is represented to you using one or more of your senses. For example, you ‘know’ the colour of your front door by seeing a picture of it. We also know that your senses may not be giving you the full picture, the whole story or a real handle on the situation. This is a very useful thing for you to know as a professional communicator.

So, the only way that you can gather information about the world is through your senses. As you get older and have more experiences, you filter your senses more and more and over time what you think you see, hear and feel about the world gets further away from reality. Often, this is a good thing and helps you to deal with the huge amount of sensory information that comes into your brain every moment of every day and night. Your biggest step forward as a professional communicator and learning enabler will be when you realise this and simply start paying more attention to what is outside than what is inside.

When you went to school and learned about nouns and verbs, you didn’t start speaking differently - you simply acquired a new labelling system for what you already knew about. You didn’t start thinking, “I must remember to use a noun in this sentence”. That labelling system only serves the purpose of letting two or more people share information using a common language.

All of our experiences and memories are based on sensory inputs, and those sensory inputs are filtered to reduce the volume of information that we need to process. Therefore, we develop an incomplete understanding of the world and our experiences in it through this filtering process.

Whilst the filters reduce the volume of information available to our conscious, rational minds, our unconscious minds are open to all available information.

This raises a fundamental principle in NLP, coaching and change work in general – when a client is operating from an incomplete map of the world, the information they need to complete it is already within them.

This means that we don’t need to teach or give advice, we just need to ask the right questions to draw that information out.

NLP is, in part, a toolkit for reorganising and completing our experiences so that they can be more useful to us in the future, enabling us to make better decisions and be more effective in our everyday lives.

We also need to consider that, together, these filters work to ensure you only become aware of a world that supports your beliefs. As Robert Anton Wilson said, what the thinker thinks, the prover proves. If you believe that the world is out to get you, you will delete anyone who helps you, distort a few interactions so that they mean that people are out to get you and then generalise those instances so that everyone is out to get you.

Imagine what would happen if you thought that:

People are untrustworthy
It’s hard to get what you want in life
For you to get what you want means someone else has to lose something

And now, just imagine what you could achieve if you knew that:

People are helpful
Anyone can get what they want if they focus on it
Getting what you want means everyone can get what they want at the same time

So there are at least two possibilities that we can explore:

Since we make the world up, we might as well make it useful and enjoyable

Since we make the world up, any map is not the territory and we need a way to bypass the filters and get to ‘reality’

If we combine all of the different filters together and refer to them as the ‘critical filter’, in that it is noticing critically, judging, deciding, then we can see that there are at least two mechanisms that we can practice and use to bypass the critical filter.

Whilst you may think it’s useful for someone to believe that the world is a) a loving place and b) safe, if they are experiencing that hallucination within a burning building then that hallucination is no longer useful. They need to temporarily see the world as a hot, threatening place so that they can organise their behaviour appropriately.

The final piece of this puzzle is the way that we then communicate this internal representation to other people:

If we believe the world is safe, we don’t say so, we simply act as if it is. If we feel unsafe but don’t want to let other people know that we think that, we say, “I feel safe” whilst our remaining 93% of communication says, “no I don’t”.

If we are to effectively step into someone else’s world, we have to pay attention to as much of their communication as we can as well as having techniques to bypass their critical filters.

[edit] Communication models

The simplest communication model looks like this:

However, communication in the real world doesn’t quite work like that. First of all, the system will always contain noise:

In some systems, the effect of noise is cumulative; it adds up the more times you pass the message through the medium, so it becomes harder and harder to extract the message from the noise.

Imagine a system whereby we need to communicate in code. I have a codebook, and you have a codebook. In my codebook, it says that the code for “today” is “55”. In your codebook, it says that the code “55” translates into “tomorrow”. It sounds ridiculous! Yet that’s the way it works. How can we ever make ourselves understood?

If I have an experience in my head that I want to convey to you, I look in my codebook and translate those sights, sounds and feelings into words. Some of them translate easily, like “apple” or “table”. Some of them translate very badly, like smells that I had never experienced before, so I translate those vague experiences in reference to other, more familiar experiences. So I might say that a smell was like a cross between floor polish and smoke. But what kind of smoke? And what kind of floor polish?

So I translate my experience into the code of language and then hope that the original experience is recreated in your head.

And I don’t even check. I just carry on as if the message is received by you exactly as I intended it. And you carry on as if the message you’re receiving is exactly what I intended to send. As you nod to indicate “message received”, your nod also indicates to me “I’m thinking what you’re thinking”.

There is always a sender and a receiver in communication, who have different personal realities. They each have their own ‘map of the world’ formed by their experiences, perceptions, ideas, relationships, beliefs, cultures etc. They will perceive, experience, and interpret things differently. The same event will always be perceived differently by different people.

We could regard noise as being analogous to a noisy environment like a factory or busy street, where it’s literally hard to hear what someone is saying. Or we could consider those differences in culture and experiences as being noise, in that they affect the communication in the same way. We could also say that the transmitter is a source of noise, in that they transmit lots of information which may distract from the message they are trying to convey!

For communication to take place at all there must be some kind of shared space, a medium through which the participants believe it is possible to communicate.

Based on what the receiver perceives, and their interpretation of the verbal and non-verbal input, they will form a concept of what the meaning of the message is. It will mean something to them, and it may or may not be what was intended by the sender. We could say that effective communication is when the receiver has the same understanding as the transmitter, or at least that the understanding is close enough to lead to the same result.

In communication systems like the internet, a receiver signals a transmitter to say that the message has been received and that it makes sense i.e. that it contains no errors.

Human communication works in the same way, so if I say something that makes grammatical sense, you will probably nod. If I say something that makes no sense, you might look confused or say, “I don’t understand”.

The problem is this: the receiver nods to signal “I understand what you just said”, but the transmitter acts as if the nod means “I now have the same understanding as you do” when the result could actually be very different.

If a transmitter says a word such as “trust”, she has a certain meaning attached to it in her reality based on her experiences of it. However, because words also have dictionary definitions it might appear as if the word is something very precise. Of course, a dictionary does not define a word – it merely translates it into other words.

What travels across the communication medium is not all the associations that A made about the word, and not the intentions she had with using it. What crosses the medium is symbols, just like the codes I mentioned earlier.

When the receiver hears the word or sentence he will interpret it based on his experiences, perceptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions. He might also add in information from his own experiences in order to make it mean what he thinks it is supposed to mean.

There may be some agreement, at least within a particular culture, on some common experiences and objects. When you say “house” or “airport” or “happy” or “sad” most people will have an understanding very close to yours. But if you say words for abstract qualities, like “trust”, “best”, “right”, “wrong”, and so on, then there is huge margin for error.

To have effective communication we need to understand this process so that we can compensate for its inefficiency and potential for error and misunderstanding.

Is there a simple solution? I’m not sure there is. I think the first step is to be aware of this process. I think the second step is that when someone says, “I understand”, they don’t really mean that they understand – they mean that they have processed something which sounds grammatically correct and which they have made some sense of. If your message is important, it’s worth checking that what they received bore some relation to what you think you transmitted.

In NLP there is a presupposition – “The meaning of the communication is the response you get” – which perhaps applies here, because we can determine the effectiveness of communication simply by observing what happens as a result and comparing it to what we intended to achieve.

[edit] State

You tend to perform well when you feel like it. No surprise there.

‘State’ means your present physical and mental condition, so you might be tired, happy, curious, careful or fascinated - all of these are states. Your state is partly influenced by your thoughts and partly influenced by what’s going on around you in the outside world. You’ll realise by now that this really means that your state is wholly influenced by your thoughts!

The two key ways to quickly influence your state are through your physiology and your focus of attention.

First, we’ll talk about physiology as it’s really simple, really powerful and really easy to ignore. If you are alert and have plenty of water and oxygen, you will feel energetic and perform well. If you are lacking in any basic physiological needs such as sleep and light, you will perform below your best.

Getting the right physiology for an activity is the first thing you can do to improve your performance. In a warm, cramped room with no natural light, you’ll be lucky to keep your customers or colleagues awake, let alone in a productive state.

In a room with lots of fresh air, light and water, it’s much easier to keep people in an attentive state. There is absolutely no good reason for making life hard for yourself, so get the environment right first before you think about anything else.

People have all kinds of methods and routines for controlling or maintaining states. Perhaps you have a routine for getting ready for work, or for going out on a Friday night. Perhaps you have a lucky charm or item of clothing that helps you get into a certain state. Perhaps you can just think of a state and you’re there. The reality is that everyone has total control over their state, yet most of the time we just go with the flow, letting external events and people cheer us up or put us down.

Here’s an exercise you can try with a friend that influences their state through their physiology:

[edit] State Physiology

Ask your partner to name three states that they would like to explore.

Have your partner come up with a single word that describes each belief - usually a state adjective such as proud, relaxed or alert.

As you walk together, coach your partner to find the pace, breathing, posture and full physiology of the first belief. Having fully settled into the first belief, have them now adopt the second one. Continue with the third until they have tried on all three.

Finally, have them try on aspects of all three to create a new state. Find out how that feels for them.

State is an important starting point in NLP because, in a way, state is everything. Your state defines the meaning you make of the world, the choices you make, the risks you take and the language you use. The differences in your behaviour between a great day and an awful day may be tiny, yet they add up over time creating a state that builds throughout the day, reinforcing itself.

When you wake up, knowing it’s going to be a bad day, you program your sensory filters to notice things that go wrong. Anything that goes well is set aside as an accident or coincidence. When you plan for bad things to happen, they often do.

When you wake up, knowing it’s going to be a great day, you notice everything that goes well for you. Anything that doesn’t go your way is set aside as just a temporary setback. When everything seems to be going your way, it probably is.

You might say that you can’t predict or control what happens to you, and you might be right in saying that. What you can control is your response to what happens. Here’s an example.

A salesman leaves a message for a customer to call him. After two hours, the customer hasn’t called back. The salesman knows that the customer always returns calls promptly, therefore something must be wrong - the customer must be avoiding the salesman. Self doubt starts to creep in and the salesman’s state changes to reflect his negative mood. When the customer finally calls (he had lost his mobile) the salesman’s voice tone reveals his state and the customer thinks something is wrong. The customer’s state changes accordingly, confirming that salesman’s suspicion and they descend in a spiral of emotional states.

The only thing that the salesman can say for certain about this situation is that he has not spoken to the customer since leaving a message. The salesman’s response presumes that he has read the customer’s mind; the customer has heard the message and has made a conscious decision to not call back. None of this is true, so it’s just as acceptable for the salesman to imagine the customer going to the dentist, or just taking a quiet afternoon out to make an important decision. Neither this nor the pessimistic version is ‘true’ in an absolute sense, so which is the more useful to believe?

Let’s say the customer has gone away to decide whether to buy the salesman’s product or not, and currently the customer is undecided. When the customer calls back for more information, the salesman’s state could be the deciding factor. You may think that no customer would make a decision so lightly but in fact everyone does exactly this - we all buy from people we like to do business with. A friendly voice on the end of the telephone could be all the customer needs to decide. Conversely, a negative or pessimistic voice could swing the decision the other way by making the customer more aware of their doubts.

You’ve probably read adverts for instant, cure all influence techniques that will guarantee sales. The reality is that people succeed in any area of life by consistently being one tiny step ahead. A salesman who is consistently positive, helpful and persistent will succeed a little more than a colleague who lets his state reflect his worries. Those small changes are iterative over time and they build on and reinforce each other. Success is about doing the basics well, consistently - not about having the latest and greatest guaranteed technique. Oddly enough, NLP is about doing the basics well, even though many people try to sell it as a cure-all.

Your state is the filter through which you experience the world, and it’s the mechanism by which the people in that world experience you.

[edit] Submodalities

Submodalities are the components (sub) of our senses (modalities) and help us to describe the qualities of our sensory experiences in a way that we don’t do everyday, although other people will show you their submodalities non-verbally. If you haven’t noticed this before, you’ll be amazed when you begin to pay attention to people more literally.

Dictionary.com says a modality is “one of the primary forms of sensation, as vision or touch.”

[edit] Compare submodalities

Choose two states such as disappointed and proud, and compare the submodalities of those states. Do the nice one last.

Visual
Motion/still
Colour/black and white
Bright/dim
Focused/unfocused
Associated/dissociated
One image/many images
Auditory
One point/all around
Loud/soft
Fast/slow
High/low pitch
Clear/muffled
Kinaesthetic
Location in body
Breathing rate
Temperature
Weight
Intensity
Movement

Submodalities are part of a state, and the link works both ways. When the state changes, the submodalities change. Conversely, when you shift the submodalities, the state changes.

[edit] Swapping submodalities

Take your partner’s excited state and have them help you to try on those submodalities. How does that state feel to you? What name would you give it?

[edit] Changing Submodalities

Changing the structure of a state to discover if it is possible to change perception and thereby experience of a memory.

Take the disappointed state and play with the submodalities, like tuning an analogue radio or old fashioned TV. Find the submodalities that seem to have the biggest effect on the overall state or the intensity of the response.

If your partner is happy to no longer feel disappointed about this memory, experiment with the submodalities, for example moving the picture closer or further away, turning the sounds up or down, moving the feelings around. In the past, the person may have neutralised the feelings naturally, corresponding to the submodalities. Instead, focus on changing their perception of the memory, for example:

Tearing the picture in half

Moving the picture to the location that corresponds to ‘things I no longer do’

Separate the picture into a ‘bad’ layer and a ‘learning’ layer. Throw away the ‘bad’ and integrate the ‘learning’.

Play with it – try some new ideas of your own.

Select a number of similar memories and continue the process until you can see your partner building a new pattern of separating and discarding the old feelings.

[edit] Anchoring

Your state is the basis for everything you do, so in NLP there are many techniques for managing your, and other people’s state. Possibly the most well known is anchoring, which is the process by which Pavlov famously got his dogs excited at the sound of a bell ringing. Of course, we don’t like to think of ourselves as being as easily influenced as animals so we don’t like the term ‘conditioned response’ yet it’s exactly the same principle, and advertisers know this too well.

When you see an advert that seems to bear no relation to the product, you can be certain that the music and imagery is designed to invoke a specific emotional response which you will then associate with the product or brand which is shown at the end of the advert.

In order to understand anchoring, we first have to understand a couple of concepts relating to our emotional state. Firstly, our memories are an important resource in accessing states, and secondly, we respond most strongly to changes in state rather than the state itself. If a state does not move or change, it ebbs away.

There’s a picture in the original NLP Practitioner course manual and many NLP books that looks like this:

This is slightly misleading as it only relates to states that increase in intensity, and it tells you to anchor when the state ‘peaks’.

Unfortunately you have no way of knowing when the state will peak!. To wait for the peak implicitly means that you have missed it!

The more effective way to think about anchoring is to anchor a state change or transition. Your computer (or any device in your house with electronic control) uses a clock to synchronise the processor with the other parts of the system – memory, disc drives and so on. The entire system is synchronised to the clock pulse’s transition, like this:

It’s exactly the same with anchoring, The key to making anchoring work is to set the anchor at the moment of a state transition.

Typically, anchoring is taught by using a memory of a time when you felt a particular emotional state. Often, on a NLP course, people will pick ‘relaxed’ and will then have trouble anchoring the state, and there is an important reason why; imagine yourself sitting down during a training course. From there to ‘relaxed’ is not a big change, and anchoring works by associating an event with a state change. In this example, your brain is picking up too much background noise for the state change to really stand out.

Here’s a picture of the state transition from ‘rest’ to ‘relaxed’:

Now, what if we anchor a state such as ‘excited’?

Much easier!

[edit] Basic anchoring

Ask your partner where they would be happy having an anchor applied - to their arm, hand, shoulder?

Ask your partner what state he/she would like to experience. Imagine being in that state yourself to lead your partner in.

Ask your partner to remember a specific memory of that state.

Explore the submodalities of the memory, and when you notice them go strongly into state, apply the anchor – touch their hand, squeeze their arm, have them say a trigger word etc.

Break state, then have your partner imagine experiencing the state strongly as you apply the anchor once more.

Break state, then test the anchor.

A break state is a very important part of the process, because you need to reset your partner’s state, ready to set the anchor again. To break state, either ask them about something in the room – the colour of the carpet, for example, or ask them to remember something that’s hard to remember such as which side their hot tap is on at home.

The more times you reinforce an anchor, the better it will work and the longer it will last. Remember, you want to leave your friend’s brain in no doubt about what to do when you fire the anchor. To test, just reproduce the anchor and find out if the memory or state comes back.

Language is a powerful anchor, and you can easily recall a state if you have anchored it with a word. A friend of mine is a professional squash player, and her current anchor is “Get off my court!!”

You’ve now learned a number of ways you can influence your state, and all of these techniques fall into two broad categories; focus of attention and physiology.

In reality, both work to influence our state and also as elements of our state. You know that if you smile while on the telephone, your voice tone changes. You also know that when you feel miserable, other people can see it because you sit and move differently.

To get people to move in their minds – for example, in a learning or negotiation context – it’s important to get them to move in their bodies. If a meeting is proving to be hard going, suggest you all get some fresh air and a drink. Get people moving and their minds will move with you.

Many high level, professional negotiators tell me that they rarely make any progress when sat around a table. The time when the negotiation really moves forwards is when they take a break, go for a walk and end up chatting at the coffee machine.

Do not underestimate the importance of physiology, because your mind and body are part of the same system so getting someone moving on the outside is often the easiest way to get them moving on the inside.

Finally, the simplest way to recall a specific state is to think of a time when you felt that way. If you want to be confident, remember a specific time when you felt confident. In order to process the memory, you feel the confidence not in the past but right now.

[edit] More anchors

Anchors are not only on/off switches – they allow us analogue control over the intensity of a state. In what situations would this be useful?

Sliding anchors

Ask your partner to come up with a state, and three different experience of this state at three different intensities. We’ll call them low, medium and high.

Anchor ‘low’ at a point on their arm, near the wrist. Then anchor ‘medium’ half way up their arm, and finally ‘high’ at the top of their arm.

Now move up and down the anchors, firing them at increasing and decreasing intensities. Then begin to fill in the gaps so that their unconscious works out that location on the arm equals intensity of response.

Test by sliding moving your hand along the points you have used to anchor and check your partner’s response.

How else, other than touch, could you set up a sliding anchor?

We can connect anchors to other anchors – for what purpose?

[edit] Stacking anchors

Ask your partner to choose a word that seems to represent the state they have anchored. As you ‘fire’ the anchor, they say the word to themselves, inside, over and over again. As you release the anchor, they stop. Repeat this a few times with careful timing and break states between each time you do it, and then test by having them say the word to themselves.

Did you ever try to edit particular songs out of a compilation you had made on audio tape? Well, whilst we can’t remove an experience or behavioural response, we can record over it. This technique, sometimes called a ‘squash’ doesn’t really collapse anchors, it connects them, creating a new response, so really it works more like the ‘swish’. The effect is to combine two states to create a third. Your physiology can be in one configuration at any one time, so you tend not to feel happy and sad at the same time. You might feel somewhere between the two, or you might feel yourself switching rapidly between the two, but what this technique does is to force both to coexist at the same time, or at least attempt to as your mind and body work out what the new sensations mean.

[edit] Collapsing anchors

Anchor an undesired response. Test so that the anchor works consistently.

Anchor a very different response. Not the right response, that would presuppose that you know how this is going to turn out. Again, test to make sure the anchor works reliably.

Now fire off both anchors at the same time, the undesirable response a moment before the different response, and holding the different response a little after you have released the undesired.

Allow your partner to integrate the experience by leaving them to get used to the sensations and make sense of what they feel.

[edit] Outcomes

The secret to getting what you want is knowing what you want.

Of course, that’s obvious, yet you’d be surprised how many people don’t have a clear idea of what they want. When you have a very clear set of outcomes, every action and thought reinforces those outcomes and takes you a step closer to achieving them.

When you don’t have clear outcomes, your thoughts and actions tend to be more random, so you have to think consciously about what you do, and you have to waste time correcting actions that take you in the wrong direction.

Frequently, people have a very clear idea of what they don’t want, and they only know when things are going wrong for them. They tend to bounce from one wrong course of action to the next, never settling on a clear direction.

In business, we think we set clear goals all the time, yet mostly these goals are not phrased in language your brain understands, so they’re actually quite useless.

A goal like “To complete this project by September 1st” sounds very specific, but it really doesn’t mean much to your brain. For a start, everyone involved will have a different definition of ‘complete’. Although we use dates and times as fixed, absolute markers, your brain treats them as very elastic concepts because we all have a different way of coding and representing time. In particular, the concept of ‘now’ is different for each of us. There’s more on this in the chapter on Time, so for our current purpose I’ll just say that ‘now’ is a flexible period of time that contains everything that’s on your mind; both things you’re currently attending to and things that you’re thinking about that stop you from doing what you ought to be doing.

In order to process a goal like “To complete this project by September 1st”, your brain has to create a representation of a completed project (different for everyone) and to imagine it as if that were happening right now (different for everyone) so when September 1st comes round, people disagree over the status of the project for two main reasons. Firstly, definitions of ‘completion’ differ from one person to the next. Secondly, and more importantly, in the time coming up to September 1st, people differ in their sense of urgency. You can imagine how disagreements can arise so easily.

Setting a clear outcome is fundamental to NLP, both for choosing a direction to move in and more specifically in undertaking change work. If you begin by getting the client to set a clear outcome, you will have far more flexibility and scope to explore than if you begin by looking for a problem to fix. You’ll also often find that setting an outcome is all that you need to do.

On a Practitioner course a few years ago, I asked for someone to help me demonstrate the Well Formed Outcomes that follows. She wanted to stop eating snacks while at work. After going through this exercise, she still hadn’t eaten crisps (which were the specific thing that she snacked on) two years later!

In the following exercise, you will help your partner to come with a goal. It might be something short term or something long term and aspirational. You may want to write the goal down, if you do so make sure you write it down precisely as they say it - don’t be tempted to paraphrase or restate it. Always use other people’s words, especially when their dreams are involved!

[edit] Well Formed Outcomes

Positive: Is that something you want, as opposed to want to avoid?
Specific: When, where, with whom do you want it?
Real – Sensory based: How do you know when you’ve got it?; What will you see, hear, feel, taste and smell?
Preserve the positive intention: What will happen if you get this result?; What won’t happen if you get it?; What will happen if you don’t get this result?; What won’t happen if you don’t get it?
Under your control: What is the first step that you will take?; What resources do you have?
Ecology check: Offer your hand, palm up, to your partner:; “If I offered this to you right now, would you take it?”

[edit] PURE

Just to remind you of what constitutes a ‘Well Formed Outcome’:

Positively stated: What you do want instead of what you don’t want
Under your control: You don’t need anybody else; achieving the goal is solely down to you
Real: You can see, hear, feel and perhaps taste or smell the outcome
Ecological: You don’t lose anything, or gain anything undesirable as a result of achieving the outcome

You might think to yourself, “Surely I don’t have to go through that checklist for every goal” and you’re right. A goal doesn’t have to be well formed, it’s just that if it is well formed you are more likely to get what you want. What are the implications of a goal not satisfying those criteria?

Positively stated: You’ll move away from what you don’t want, but you may not get quite what you do want.

Under your control: You can’t put 100% of your energy into achieving the goal, so it will seem more difficult or frustrating to achieve.

Real: You’ll get something, but it won’t be exactly what you want.

Ecological: You may get what you want but at some point an unplanned side effect will pop up, or you may lose something that you didn’t expect to.

So if what you want is some chocolate, and you don’t have a clear representation of the outcome, it probably doesn’t matter what kind of chocolate bar you get. If you want a new job or a new car, then you can’t afford to be so vague. You can determine how well formed a goal needs to be, based on how important it is to you.

Of course, since it takes only seconds to create a Well Formed Outcome, why should you go through life not getting exactly what you want more easily?

People often ask how Well Formed Outcomes relates to goal setting tools like SMART.

SMART is usually applied to the activity rather than the outcome. The other big problem with SMART is that a goal is meant to be Achievable and Realistic. From a NLP point of view, if you can imagine something it is achievable, and it’s not up to me to decide if your goal is realistic. In Well Formed Outcomes, the ecology check automatically tests that the goal is achievable and realistic, because if it isn’t, you know you wont achieve it and you will convey that information during the ecology check.

The one useful idea in SMART is that a goal is time bound. There is no time limit for a NLP Well Formed Outcome because a Well Formed Outcome will generate instant action, therefore it doesn’t matter when the goal has to be achieved, as the act of planning it will lead to the action required to complete it.

I find that in practice it’s useful to have an idea of time, as it is often helpful in creating a sense of urgency which is vital in an effective prioritisation process. If you don’t know which outcomes are more important or urgent, you can’t prioritise your resources effectively.

If you do want to use SMART or any other goal setting process, my advice would be to use Well Formed Outcomes to check the goal being set before applying SMART criteria to it.

Earlier on I mentioned our perceptual filters that reduce the sensory complexity of the world. Now that you know about state and outcomes, I’ll just tell you a little more about those filters.

How do those filters know what to filter in and what to filter out? Simply, you program them. Mostly, you program them unconsciously so that you are more aware of opportunities to satisfy your current interests and needs.

Your beliefs are an essential component of your filters. What you know to be true about the world tends to influence the world – or at least it seems that way. You see and hear things that are true for you, and only when a situation conflicts with your beliefs do you become aware of them.

Your beliefs allow you to delete what is contrary to them and to distort and generalise the world so that it conforms to your beliefs. For example, if you believe other people to be intelligent and considerate, you will interpret their behaviour and respond differently than if you believe other people are generally stupid and selfish. Therefore, your beliefs mould your behaviour by colouring your perceptions.

Another important component of these filters is your state. Depending on your state, you will perceive the world differently. When you are feeling overly critical of yourself, a colleague’s praise sounds like sarcasm. When you feel good about yourself, a colleague’s sarcasm is shrugged off and you might even feel sorry for them. Your state influences how you interpret the world and the actions of people around you, so when you feel like doing something, you notice more opportunities to do it.

Finally, you program your perceptual filters with Well Formed Outcomes. When you have an outcome, you notice more opportunities to achieve it.

This is essentially why Well Formed Outcomes is so powerful – because it is a means of programming your natural, internal resources so that you don’t have to think about achieving the goal – you just find yourself moving towards it, easily and naturally.

The downside of Well Formed Outcomes in an organisational context is that you may be asked to achieve goals that are in conflict with your own needs or values. You can either choose to live in conflict or you can choose to take a different course of action, based on what is in your own best long term interests.

We are goal directed animals, and we act in pursuit of goals, both large and small. NLP offers you a way to access those resources so that you can achieve goals that lead to the life you want.

This could be one reason why, when you realise what you want and admit to it, chance seems to act in your favour, coincidences bring you new contacts and new opportunities and your efforts seem to have a greater influence on the world and other people.

As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”.

[edit] Rapport

You probably remember ‘body language’ from the 1970s, where a certain posture had a specific meaning for everyone. To get round the problem inherent in generalising the behaviour of individuals, the idea of ‘clusters’ was introduced. If you lean back in your chair and put your hands behind your head, you’re arrogant. If you wiggle your toe then that’s a cluster, so the original meaning may be different. Or not. It’s the same with Tarot cards, where a card has a certain meaning, unless the client looks doubtful in which case the card was upside down and the card means the opposite.

Anyway, rapport isn’t something you do - it’s more like a measure of the quality of a relationship. It may be a long term relationship or it may be a simple transaction.

You could think of rapport as being that thing you have with people you like, when you’re on the same wavelength, see eye to eye and feel a real connection with them.

You can think of rapport as being a conduit for effective communication. Without it, it’s very difficult to engage the processes of agreement and compliance. In other words, people are more likely to do what you want if they like you. Having said that, and assuming that you’re a naturally likeable and gregarious person, there are still many things that people do to stifle natural rapport.

The first and most important thing is to be in rapport with yourself. Self doubt and confusion lead to incongruence that other people will pick up on instantly. They may not recognise it consciously but they will still find it hard to accept what you say. When you’re in an incongruent state, you’re more likely to generate confusion and doubt in other people. You may choose to do this, in which case incongruence is a very useful tool.

In general, in most situations, it is more useful to have rapport than not. You can practice all the body language stuff, matching and mirroring body posture and echoing voice tone, but how do you do that with a group of people?

The simplest answer is don’t bother. If you are congruent and friendly, you will find that a group or audience gradually gets into rapport with you. You’ll know the experience of getting the audience ‘on your side’ and you may also notice the moment when that happens. What you can start to notice is what exactly you do that makes that change happen. When the audience’s state shifts, what did you do that made it shift?

Rapport is a very good indicator of group compliance and you will find that when you raise subjects in a meeting which are contentious or engage opinion, the audience splits into smaller groups. Pay attention to who shifts first and who follows them and you will learn everything you need to know about the hierarchical power structure of the group.

Most of the time, we get into and out of rapport with people unconsciously, so our beliefs and thoughts are revealed non-verbally, regardless of our efforts to hide our true feelings. Regardless of what people say, they will show you who and what they agree and disagree with.

If there’s one simple thing you can learn about rapport, it’s that you can choose the people you want to get into rapport with. If you feel that a salesman is being a bit too persuasive, or that someone secretly disagrees with you, even though they say differently, then it’s worth having a quick check of your state to see what’s going on.

“Body language”, as devised by Allan Pease in the 1970s possibly came from a Freudian era where psychologists thought that people’s behaviour could be neatly packaged and explained with clear cause and effect, and where everything had its own meaning.

For example, if you put your hands behind your head, you’re being arrogant. I think that the idea of body language is helpful in that it gets people to think of their physical state as a means of communication, but it’s not helpful to think of specific gestures as having specific meanings.

I think Pease’s basic premise here is fine, but he falls into the Freudian trap of having to assign meaning to each action, rather than thinking of an action or posture as being one component of overall communication. I say ‘Freudian’ because one of the things that Freud did was to associate specific meanings with dreams. For example, if you dream of a chair then you are really dreaming about sex. Personally, I would rather dream about sex than chairs. If I want to dream about sex, I’ll dream about sex. No need to dress is up as a chair. Maybe he had a chair fetish?

Anyway, this ties in with Mehrabian and Argyle’s work where you could think of ‘body language’ as being part of the 93% of unconscious communication, rather than being a language in itself.

Therefore, we all understand non-verbal communication, but we are consciously aware of its meaning to different levels. At one end of the spectrum, some people need a slap in the face to pick up on unspoken information, whilst people at the other end of the spectrum are now said to have a high EQ, or Emotional Intelligence quotient. Whilst you may or may not believe in EI, there’s no doubt it has helped revive interest in good old fashioned people skills.

You’ve probably heard about sales training courses where people are taught to ‘match’ or ‘mirror’ the way that their customers stand or sit in order to get into rapport. There are certainly some interesting things you can learn from doing this, but personally I don’t recommend you actually do this in real life.

Personally, I think it’s a bit contrived to adjust your ‘body language’ to get into rapport with people. If you get on with someone, you’ll be in rapport with them. If you’re not in rapport, there’s probably a reason for that and you should pay attention to what it is.

You could think of rapport as a barometer of a relationship, rather than something separate to it.

It’s worth having a play with rapport, and paying particular attention to the way that it influences communication. If you’re out shopping and you see someone selling something like double glazing or credit cards, stop and watch - from a safe distance!

Watch how the level of rapport influences the conversation and shows you how good a job the sales person is doing. In particular, watch the intricate dance that ensues when the shopper is trying to say no and get away from the sales person.

There is another very important aspect of Mehrabian and Argyle’s work which we might overlook. We cannot consciously process the huge amount of sensory information that is available to us, so we rely on short cuts to help us reach conclusions and make decisions. Robert Cialdini offers an excellent description of these short cuts in ‘Influence: Science and Practice’.

When our words match the non verbal components of our communication, our communication is said to be ‘congruent’ and when one of the components does not match the others, our communication is said to be ‘incongruent’.

The problem that congruence presents is that it is a short cut for determining honesty.

When the words match the sounds and pictures, we tend to accept what is being said as true, or at least believable.

This means that if someone lies to you and they absolutely believe what they are saying then you won’t be able to detect the lie. Of course, if they really believe what they are saying then they are telling the truth – from their point of view.

So, it seems that most of the time, people interpret congruence and incongruence as follows:

Congruence: Honest; Believable; Credible; Confident; Knowledgeable

Incongruence: Dishonest; Unbelievable; Lacking knowledge; Evasive; Uncertain

So a mental short cut is “congruent=trust, incongruent=don’t trust” – which you can see is very useful for any social species whose survival depends on the other members of the herd.

It is useful to think of congruence as a state of harmony between conscious and unconscious communication. When we detect incongruence, what we can be aware of is a misalignment of conscious and unconscious intention.

For example:

A salesperson presenting about a product that he does not fully understand

A manager having to reprimand a member of staff over something he believes is actually OK

Someone agreeing to a course of action that she does not believe is right

Someone committing to a goal that he does not think he can really achieve

So a useful response to incongruence is to explore the unconscious intention that it represents.

You will recall that we filter our sensory information:

In some situations, we distort sensory information to turn incongruence into congruence, because that is what we expect. For example, when a sales manager asks a salesman if he is going to hit his target, and the sales man says, “yyyyesssss….I’ll try”, the sales manager might hear “Yes!” because that is what he needs to hear.

So in order to make the world meet our expectations, we sometimes distort sensory information in order to create the congruence or incongruence that verifies our expectations. As if things weren’t complicated enough already!

[edit] Matching and Mismatching

Loosely match each other’s posture. Start a conversation about anything - the weather, sport, your jobs etc.

When you sense that the conversation is “in flow”, break rapport by mismatching. Change the direction or posture of your arms and legs and most importantly, break eye contact. You can do this gently, by looking at your partner’s chin, or shoulder, or more obviously by looking away completely.

Finally, match again to restore that good feeling!

[edit] State modelling

In threes, B adopts a specific state by recalling a specific time when they have experienced that state strongly.

A coaches C to match B even more precisely, guiding C to match B’s physiology as exactly as they can, including:

Eye movement
Breathing location, depth and speed
Finger location
Foot and toe movement
Centre of balance

A now asks C to describe their state - how they feel and what they’re experiencing

B comments on how close that is to their own state and experience

Congruence

Ask your partner 10 questions to which you both know the answer, e.g. what colour is the sky today? Your partner will reply truthfully. Watch out for anything that they do consistently, such as move their eyes a certain way.

Next, ask your partner 10 questions to which you both know the answer, e.g. what country are we in? Your partner will reply untruthfully. Watch out for anything that they do consistently, such as move their eyes a certain way.

When you think you have picked up their subtle, unconscious patterns, ask them another 10 questions to which you do not know the answer, such as “what car do you drive?” and they can choose whether to answer truthfully or not.

Using your knowledge of their response patterns, tell them if the answer is true or false. Don’t think about it, just say what feels right, the first thing that comes into your head.

[edit] Voice matching

Your partner speaks a short phrase which you repeat back, paying more attention to the volume, pace, pitch, rhythm etc. than to the words. Your partner coaches you to make the matching more accurate and you continue until it’s as perfect as you can make it.

[edit] Direct mind reading

Client: Think of a recent event, something with a strong emotional connection – good or bad. Just think about this event or experience and really amplify it. Really amplify the feelings you get from the memory. Keep running it through in your mind, over and over. Hear the words and sounds, see the images bright and clear.

Practitioner: Just allow yourself to relax and enjoy being in rapport with your partner. After a while, notice any feelings or sensations you experience and start to daydream about the kind of experience that could lead to those feelings. When you are relaxed and ready, start to put your ideas, images, intuitions into words. Think about the kind of feeling you can feel, describe the feeling and notice your partner’s response as you get closer to understanding what your partner is thinking about.

Just start guessing and refine your ideas as you go. Do not sit there and think until you have got it right, you never will. This is an interactive process. Test your thoughts and uses your partner’s responses to guide you.

[edit] Pacing and leading

Pacing is the process of maintaining ongoing rapport. Leading is the process of directing a person’s responses through rapport. The rule of thumb is to get rapport first, then to pace, then to lead.

Why would you want to lead someone? Well, firstly, NLP is not non directive. It is not person centred counselling. It is outcome oriented, and to achieve an outcome means to go somewhere other than the present state.

Secondly, the problem is not the problem as the client states it – the problem is that they have been unable to resolve what they think the problem is. Some aspect of their undesired behaviour is based on a world view which perpetuates the problem. To get them out of this, at their request, requires you to be a guide to alternative possibilities. Therefore your first task in achieving change is to introduce the possibility of change, and that can be in any form. A simple change in state, a joke, a different point of view can be the first step in the process of change.

Pacing and Leading Part 1

A: Ask your partner questions that are taken from their current experience, that require a yes or no answer, such as:

Are you sitting down?
Can you see a window?
Are you looking at me?
Are you enjoying the course?
Did you travel to get here?

B: Respond no to each question. Notice how, over time, your state changes along with your responses.

A: Gradually shift to questions about things that are possible but not necessarily true, such as:

Do you like me?
Would you like to give me some money?
Will you buy me lunch?

B: Notice how you feel towards these questions.

Pacing and Leading Part 2

Repeat the exercise, but this time B will reply yes to every question.

A: Ask your partner questions that are taken from their current experience, that require a yes or no answer.

B: Respond yes to each question. Notice how, over time, your state changes. Notice what happens inside, and notice what happens to your responses.

A: Gradually shift to questions about things that are possible but not necessarily true.

B: Notice how you feel towards those questions

Compare what happened in the two parts of this exercise.

[edit] Pattern interrupts

Pacing is also vital in performing a pattern interrupt, which can be an excellent way to temporarily distract the conscious mind and communicate directly with the unconscious.

Have you ever been distracted while in the middle of something like making a drink, answering the phone etc? Do you remember the feeling of confusion and not being quite certain what it was you were doing?

There are two ways we can use a pattern interrupt; either play an existing pattern such as a handshake and interrupt it half way through, or pace the client’s ongoing reality and then say or do something which conflicts with this completely. When you do this, you have a second or two to use a direct command which will be accepted more readily, such as “have you noticed how easy it’s been to let go of this problem yet?”

[edit] Calibration and strategies

Calibration means fine tuning your awareness to the person you’re working with, so that you can pick up their conscious and unconscious information. Usually, if a coach is struggling to get a technique to work, it’s because they’re focusing on what should be happening instead of noticing what is happening.

A strategy is a sequence of mental and physical steps that a person goes through, consistently, to produce a certain behaviour. Programming (the P in NLP) refers to these strategies and the way that we learn and assemble them to produce complex patterns of behaviour. You’ll usually find that the words program, pattern and strategy are interchangeable in NLP.

As an apprentice, I learned a basic fault finding procedure that now enables me to fix pretty much anything that breaks around the house.

It turns out that it’s also a very useful process for coaching with NLP, because NLP is about processes and interconnected systems, and systemic change. When one part of my dishwasher failed – a small relay in the control electronics – it wasn’t just the relay that didn’t work. That in turn meant no hot water which in turn meant that the dishwasher didn’t wash the dishes. One small component affected the whole system, so no matter what it is that we’re working on, we must always think in terms of systemic change.

If you’ve ever had something repaired, only for it to have something else wrong with it as a result, then you’ve experienced the effect of not thinking systemically. The problem is rarely in the same place as the symptom – a blown fuse being a good example.

1. Get user to describe problem

Find out what the user thinks is wrong. The first problem isn’t the system – it’s in the user’s perception, and the most common fault is ‘user error’

2. Reproduce problem

Reproduce fault. You need to make sure that the system is doing what the user says it’s doing

3. Verify normal operation

You need to know what the thing is supposed to do when it’s working!

4. Isolate and replace faulty component

A gradual process of working back from the symptom until you find the root cause. In a complex system, there may not be a single cause.

5. Test system

Test system fully to make sure it’s all working the way it should be. Steps 4 and 5 loop until the system is working as it should.

6. Get user to test system

Get the user to test the system to make sure they’re happy with it and that they understand what went wrong and how they might avoid that in the future.

This sequence of steps, whilst useful as a process for finding a faulty component in a system, is also an example of a strategy. If you observed a very good engineer, you wouldn’t necessarily see them doing these steps in an explicit sense. You would see the same consistent results, but to get to the implicit steps, we need to elicit the unconscious strategy.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone about business processes in relation to knowledge and experience. In one particular aspect of an engineer’s job, there is a twelve step process that defines how to terminate an electrical cable. The person I was talking to said that he watched an experienced engineer terminate the cable and noticed that he only performed nine out of the twelve steps. This proved that experienced people don't necessarily follow documented processes.

I asked if the engineer had really skipped three of the steps, or if it only looked that way to a casual observer. It turned out that the engineer had followed all twelve steps, but that something very important had happened for three of them - he had done them in his head. For example, one of the implied steps was to measure 25mm from the end of the cable. The engineer didn’t need to do that because he had a visual strategy for accurately estimating that distance. Can you hold your finger tips about an inch apart? If you can, then you have a similar strategy.

Any repetitive task that you can perform without having to think about it is an example of a strategy, and what’s absolutely fundamental to NLP change work is your ability to figure out what that underlying strategy is before you do anything that resembles a technique. In fact, the better you are at figuring out these strategies, the less reliant you will be on techniques because by understanding the strategy you will have everything you need to influence the results that the person gets.

[edit] Identify sequence 1

Get your partner to talk about any memorable event. As they do this, pay attention to their language, specifically words that indicate they are recalling visual, auditory or kinaesthetic elements of the memory. As they relate the story of the event, make a note of the sequence. Notice any particular patterns or connections that seem interesting to you.

[edit] Identify sequence 2

Get your partner to talk about something that they would like to be different in their lives – something that they would describe as an ongoing problem.

As they do this, pay attention to their language, specifically words that indicate they are recalling visual, auditory or kinaesthetic elements of the memory. As they relate the story of the event, make a note of the sequence. Notice any particular patterns or connections that seem interesting to you.

[edit] Eye accessing

Memorise the question then look your partner right in the eye as you ask it. If you read the question from the book you will miss the eye accessing which occurs as soon as your partner understands the question – usually about half way through!

Where is your bed in relation to the window?
What’s your favourite colour?
How does confusion feel?
Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?
How would a dog sound if it could talk?
What’s the second letter on a computer keyboard?
How hard do you have to close your car door?
When was the last time that you were cosy?
Is your hot tap on the right or left?
How does it sound to walk in snow?
What do your bedroom curtains look like?
What is their texture like?
What noise do they make as you open them?
Is your wardrobe door easy or hard to open?
When did you last hear your name?
When were you last in trouble?
What is the eight word of one of your favourite songs?
What colour clothes were you wearing yesterday?
What colour clothes will you wear tomorrow?
What did your first school smell like?
Which cupboard in your kitchen is the tea in?
In your car, how do you turn the windscreen wipers on?
What was your first taste of alcohol like?
On a telephone keypad, where is the number 7?
Where was the warmest place you’ve ever been?
How would you write your name backwards?
What was the last telephone number you dialled?
How does it feel to wade through water?
What mobile ring tone is most irritating?

Eye accessing is a contentious issue in NLP. It’s said that, in general, movement to the left infers the recall of an existing memory whilst movement to the right infers the construction of a new experience. This doesn’t apply to everyone, and it certainly doesn’t mean that someone is lying, just because they’re making new pictures in their head. With some people, the left to right accessing is exactly reversed so, once again, it’s important to pay attention to the person in front of you, not the generalisation.

If I ask you to recall some visual detail of a memory, such as the colour of a colleague’s shirt, you may not remember it right away. You might recall the overall scene, then ‘try out’ a number of different colours until you feel you’ve got the right one. This would, for many people, involve a lot of eye accessing up to the right – but you wouldn’t be lying.

You will often see a sequence, for example, to recall the sound of walking in snow, you may see your partner look up first, which may indicate they’re picturing snow before they can hear it.

Don’t be concerned if what you saw your partner doing differs from what you’ll find in NLP books – that’s quite normal. Take it as a sign that you’re paying attention properly!

Seeing

Hearing

Feeling

Listening to voice in head

Whilst you could use eye accessing cues as a means of modelling a strategy, and there are times when this is useful, first you have to spend some time calibrating to the person who you are eliciting the strategy from otherwise you don’t have a meaningful frame of reference. Therefore, I would suggest that in all but the most extreme trauma cases, where non verbal responses are easier to work with, you can get everything you need through direct questioning. This also means you can get a lot more useful information such as belief systems, values and something called metaprograms which we’ll come onto later.

Probably the most important aspect of noticing eye accessing is that it gets you to pay attention to the connection between internal and external processes – the things that people consistently do when they’re thinking. Whilst we don’t need to know what someone is thinking, it is very useful to know how they’re thinking. By influencing the way that someone thinks, we influence the results that they get in the real world – a vital part of NLP’s change process.

[edit] Strategy elicitation and modelling

Modelling is a part of everything you do with NLP. It is the means by which all of these techniques were created.

What we are modelling is a series of mental steps which are sensory representations. Since our senses are the means by which everything gets in to our heads, they are also the references by which we process information and respond accordingly.

It is these learned responses to external or internal perceptions that we want to get at with modelling. The word ‘strategy’ refers to a specific sequence of steps that generates a behavioural result.

You can use the following notation to quickly record the steps:

Vi: for a mental image
Ai: for a recalled sound
ADi: for an internal conversation (Auditory Digital)
Ki: for an internal feeling or emotion
Ve: for something that they saw
Ae: for a sound they heard
Ade: for a conversation
Ke: for a physical sensation, touch, texture, temperature etc.

The final result might look something like this:

Ve  Vi  ADi  ADe  Ke  Ki

For a strategy that goes like this:

See a new sofa, picture it in your house, ask yourself if you can afford it, talk to a friend, sit on it, feel good.

[edit] Model a decision strategy

Ask your partner to recall something that they bought recently, which they had to make a decision about.

Your going to model their decision strategy by working through the internal and external sensory steps that they took in order to arrive at their decision.

For this exercise, you can stick to the three most commonly used senses; sight, sound and touch/sensation. This means that you should probably avoid a decision to buy something that they had to taste or smell.

First, you have to identify the very first point where their decision started; perhaps seeing something in an advert, or feeling that something needed replacing, or hearing someone talk about something, or whatever the first step was for them.

Simply work gradually through the decision, at each stage identifying whether it was Internal like a mental image, or External like a conversation.

A strategy that serves a specific purpose will be consistent over time, so a decision strategy will be the same for any decision. You can probably see how valuable this is in a sales context.

[edit] Model a skill or talent

Now ask your partner to identify something that they would describe as a skill or talent and apply the same strategy modelling process as before.

The key here is to be very, very specific about what you are modelling. If they say they are good at time management, that’s far too big a set of behaviours for this exercise. You might narrow that down to their ability to choose which of two tasks is the higher priority.

[edit] Model a problem

Now ask your partner to identify something that they would describe as a current problem and apply the same strategy modelling process as before.

The key here is to remember that what they describe as a problem is in fact a talent taken out of context, so treat it with the same respect and wonder as for the decision and the talent.

The test of excellence is only reproducibility. If a person can get the same result without having to think about it, they are working perfectly and their behaviour is working perfectly because it is achieving what it is meant to. Remember, every behaviour has a positive intention – it is designed to achieve something. Whether that something is good or bad depends only on context.

[edit] Language

Language is central to NLP – it’s the L! Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a study of the brain’s organisation of language and behaviour, so language is part of our behaviour and it also influences or even guides our behaviour.

Our entire mental map of the world is based on linguistic labels. From the moment we learn to talk, we want to know what things are called. When we learn a foreign language, we start by asking, “what is French for hello?” or shop, or bus, or more likely, two beers please. Words are labels that represent our rich sensory experiences, or handles that we can use to pull those experiences from our memories. And as we listen to language, these rich metaphors are streaming through our minds, which is one reason why stories and metaphors are so powerful. And it also raises the question of what happens when a label is ambiguous and could represent any of a number of experiences.

Our ability to encode the world using our linguistic labelling system is central to our society, our culture and our working lives. Language is the means by which we are able to communicate knowledge, enabling us to share information, solve problems and explore our surroundings. We can cure a disease and transfer that information to a doctor on the other side of the world, instantly. An explorer on the moon can describe what it’s like for the viewers back home. You can tell the people you are close to how you feel about them. You can read a book and learn useful things.

We can include visual communication such as icons, graphical user interfaces and even semaphore and Morse code in this too, as these are extensions or representations of linguistic labels or coding mechanisms. We could call these ‘second order’ signalling systems in that they are representations of words which are representations of experiences.

In NLP, there are broadly two models of language – the Meta Model and the Milton Model.

Virginia Satir used to ask her clients very specific questions that forced them to accept or explore unconscious thoughts and beliefs. For example, when a wife would say that her husband didn’t love her because he always worked late, Virginia would ask, “how do you know that working late means he doesn’t love you?” Of course, from our distant perspective, we know it doesn’t. You have probably had many experiences of basing a whole series of responses or behaviours on a single belief that later turned out to be misleading.

From people like Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson, the Meta Model was created. Simply, we construct sentences which are grammatically correct yet which delete, distort or generalise information. For example, if I tell you that you shouldn’t eat chocolate, it’s bad for you, you might believe me. If I tell you that you shouldn’t trust young men then you might believe me too.

Are those beliefs useful? Is it more useful that you also know how I know that, so that you can decide for yourself? Parents infect their children with beliefs every day – some are useful, some are not. The Meta Model therefore allows you to explore and unpick beliefs, assumptions and rules that have simply dropped off the edge of your conscious attention and become accepted as facts.

Milton Erickson was a Hypnotherapist in Arizona. He can perhaps be credited as the person who made hypnotherapy acceptable in western medicine, using it in a wide range of situations and helping patients that other therapists had declared ‘incurable’. Erickson was even able to help Cancer sufferers relieve their pain, simply by telling them stories. Milton Erickson suffered from polio in his early life and found himself able to spend many long hours paying attention to the effect that words had on people.

Milton Erickson’s language was the opposite of the Meta Model – it was full of deletions, distortions and generalisations, designed to influence the listener in a certain way.

If you listen to any statement or speech prepared by a politician, you will hear a lot of Milton language. For example:

“People will understand that the solutions to these kinds of problems are to be found not in the past but in the future, and everyone will appreciate what a difficult task this can be. You can also be absolutely certain that the government you have now is in a far better position than any other to tackle these problems and to resolve them in a way that is economical, effective and respectful to the local community.”

Does that sound familiar? Perhaps you remember hearing that before, about asylum seekers, or racial problems, or local policing policy? Actually, I just made it up.

Milton language is a vague framework within which the listener can place their own meaning. If someone tells you that you will be richer if you make a certain decision, you may or may not agree depending on whether money is important to you or not. If they say that you will enjoy even more of the things that are so important to you, you can only make sense of the sentence if you insert something of importance to you. The sentence, whilst sounding vague when we analyse it in this way, actually becomes totally unique and personal to each listener.

In this way, politicians, leaders and storytellers can communicate directly with every listener or reader in a very personal way.

Let’s explore these two language models in more detail.

[edit] Meta Model

The Meta Model is based on linguistic rules and structures which are not specific to NLP, you’ll find them in everything from books on transformational grammar to school books. However, what is specific to NLP is the way that those rules reveal lost information beneath them.

If language didn’t have a structure, we would have no way to know if something was missing or not. Yet because language has a structure, that structure gives us the information that we need to understand and even change underlying thought processes.

The Meta Model recovers information lost through our sensory filtering process.

We don’t just filter sensory information coming in, we also filter information going out as language. With a client, I’m not so interested in what they say, what I’m more interested in is how they have converted their experiences and perceptions into language, as that gives me an understanding of how they perceive the world differently than I do. By understanding their mental map, I can work with them to change it more effectively.

Let me just demonstrate how important this point about structure is. According to Stephen Pinker and all the people he got his ideas from, we are born with the ‘hardware’ for language. He demonstrates this by saying that all languages in the world, even those found in remote valleys that had no contact with other cultures, follow the same basic structures; either Subject Verb Object (SVO) or Subject Object Verb (SOV). So here’s our first simple Meta Model exercise. Since English is a SVO language, a grammatically correct sentence will be something like:

The cat climbed the tree

If we take out one of those components:

The climbed the tree

The cat the tree

The cat climbed the

Then it’s quite obvious that something is missing, right?

What about these examples:

The cat climbed

It climbed the tree

Same deletions, but now it’s harder to spot them. And since the clues aren’t so obvious, we’re more likely to fill in the gaps from our own experiences. If the cat climbed, I can call to mind an image of a cat going up a tree. Yet the cat could have climbed a telegraph pole or the curtains or my trouser leg, as one of my cats likes to do. If the cat climbing is the point, what does it matter what it climbed?

Well, if my daughter runs in and shouts, “the cat’s stuck” I need to know whether to call the fire brigade, coastguard or mountain rescue, depending on where the cat is stuck. If it’s stuck up a tree, I need the fire brigade. If it’s stuck inside the postman’s trousers then I don’t think a dozen burly firemen are going to help the situation.

Here’s another way for me to demonstrate this idea to you. Can you tell me what is missing from this diagram?

Ok then, how about this one?

Or this one?

So the problem is that we communicate half formed half truths, and the listener fills in the gaps from their own experiences and makes their own meaning from that. And in doing so, the speaker also reinforces the half truths of their own experiences. So what we need to do is recover the lost information to give both the speaker and listener an opportunity to discover more fully what is being communicated. In the case of the cat, a simple question such as “Where is the cat stuck?” will do nicely. In the case of the more complex transformations of language that we churn out, we need a few more questions. Our ability to fit information into patterns in order to make sense of it is what underpins our ability to notice Meta Model patterns.

Each of the following categories is a specific form of deletion, distortion or generalisation. Of course, natural language contains all of those, so the Meta Model as covered in Practitioner training is a good way to train yourself to recognise the potential for missing information. You can then choose where to focus your questions to recover the most useful information.

[edit] Simple Meta Model exercise

Get your partner to tell you about a recent experience that they can recall clearly and believe they remember well. Then ask them questions about what they haven’t told you e.g. what they were wearing, what they could see and hear around them etc. Instead of asking “what else could you see”, go for specific elements, for example, “what colour were the curtains” or “how many clouds were in the sky?”

Find out how much more your partner can recall, and notice if there are any patterns to what they say they cannot recall.

[edit] First sentence Meta Model

Ask your partner to state something they would like to work on in a coaching session. Write down their first sentence or two verbatim, including ums and ahs.

Then both go through and analyse it, picking out:

Deletions, Distortions and Generalisations
Ambiguities
Active verbs and nominalisations

Notice what additional information has been communicated in the structure of your partner’s language.

[edit] Unspecified Nouns (Deletion)

Example: “I want a new job”

Response: “What new job?”

This is classed as a simple deletion, leaving out what the speaker wants to change. You might think that your natural inclination is to ask “What change?” anyway, yet in practice, people just accept the statement by inserting their own meaning.

For example, a wife might say, “I fancy a change” and the husband thinks it means a new hairstyle whereas the wife means a divorce. An extreme example? Perhaps, unless you can think of a situation like this in your own experience.

We process language and derive meaning within a frame of reference. For example, what is the opposite of black? What is the opposite of red? With no frame of reference it’s harder to answer the question.

When a conversation is taking place within a particular context, or when you have a high degree of rapport, vague communication is processed as if it is specific. For example, my wife often asks me to pass her “the thing” as if I know what she is thinking.

Here are some more examples for you to practice with.

I need it now

Talk to the customer

Get the problem fixed

We need this done today

Get me a sandwich

I need a new car

I read about it

[edit] Unspecified Verbs (Deletion)

Example: “She ignored me”

Response: “How exactly did she ignore you?”

As with the nouns, this is a simple deletion. We often accept that something has happened yet fail to find out how it happened. Conversely, we often have a problem with how things are done rather than what people do. “I don’t mind being made redundant, it’s the way they told me that upsets me”.

As with the unspecified noun, we accept the validity of the action by interpreting the language within our own frame of reference. We need to check the action or behaviour in order to understand the speaker’s frame of reference and recover the meaning that they intended.

Here are some more examples.

He did it

I calmed the customer down

I’ve taken the heat out of the situation

I’ve seen the writing on the wall

He’s running the department badly

This company is going places

I told him, now he should do it properly

[edit] Nominalisation (Generalisation)

Example: “I want recognition”

Response: “How do you want to be recognised?”

A nominalisation is a verb that has been turned into a noun, indicating a ‘stopped’ mental process. Imagine yourself at a meeting, making a decision. Now imagine yourself meeting with people, deciding about something. Different? My guess is that in the first example, you imagined a still image whereas in the second example, you imagined a moving image.

When people are ‘stuck’ you will hear them using many nominalisations. One of the most useful things you can do to help them is to ask questions where the nominalisation is turned back into an active verb.

At other times, it’s useful to turn a verb into a nominalisation in order to stop a mental process. If someone is talking about something that is emotionally distressing, stopping their verbs can stop them from having a strong emotional response or going round in circles.

We made a decision

I have a bad feeling

There’s no relationship

Our customers have no patience

He makes a bad impression

We need better management

I want more direction

Your work needs more attention

We had a great meeting

[edit] Lack of Referential Index (Deletion)

This deletion misses out the person or thing that the statement refers to – the object of the statement.

Example: “They don’t rate me”

Response: “Who says they don’t rate you?”

The writing’s on the wall

They should know better

People make mistakes

Those products are expensive

This happens every day

We shouldn’t do that

You must turn your mobile off in the office

[edit] Simple Deletion (Deletion)

Example: “I’m unhappy”

Response: “Unhappy about what?”

An even simpler deletion than the unspecified noun or verb, the simple deletion is also known as a ‘sentence fragment’ and is unusual in the Meta Model in that it’s not grammatically correct. With the other examples, the fact that the grammar is complete and correct tends to make the listener accept what is said automatically. At least the simple deletion alerts most people to its presence by providing insufficient information to the listener.

We tend to process simple deletions by filling in whatever is necessary to complete the grammatical structure. When you are strongly in rapport with someone, you can almost finish each other’s sentences. We finish each other’s sentences anyway, and with simple deletions that means we sometimes insert meaning which was not intended by the speaker.

You can’t

We can manage

I know

I just can’t start

It’s perfect

It’s all wrong

I don’t want to

[edit] Comparative Deletions (Deletion)

Example: “Our new product is more effective”

Response: “More effective than what?”

Response: “More effective than when?”

With a comparative deletion, the speaker is creating a statement based on an implicit comparison criteria. The criteria itself is implied, and so the listener learns the ‘rule’ by absorbing the language. Often, the object of the comparison is missing too, so the listener learns to equate ‘better’ with ‘best’.

Challenging comparative deletions is useful, not because it’s important what is ‘best’ but because we can learn a great deal about the speaker’s perceptions and criteria.

This is far more efficient

Everything is better now

She’s much brighter

This is more like it

She’s more fun

Blue is better

He’s more tolerant

[edit] Complex equivalence (Generalisation)

Example: “He’s silent…..He doesn’t like what I’ve done”

Response: “How do know that him being silent means that he doesn’t like what you’ve done?”

This is a very interesting generalisation. The speaker takes two complex, unrelated concepts and holds them as equivalent. The, if one is true then the other must logically become true. If I equate my personal worth with promotion, and I miss out on a promotion then I feel worthless. If I equate love with being listened to and someone doesn’t appear to be listening to me then they don’t love me.

The complex equivalence and the cause and effect are the basis of how we generalise rules about the physical world and are vital for our survival. In the case of the complex equivalence, rules such as “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight” would have been critical to our survival as a species. The same rule generating program now creates rules such as “Boss’s door is closed, he is in a bad mood” which may not be useful.

A good relationship means never having to say sorry

If I stay in this job I have to work harder

You can’t have a well paid job that is enjoyable too

You can’t trust sales people

Marketing is an easy job

If you want success you have to give up your home life

If I do that I’ll get into trouble

[edit] Lost performance (Deletion)

In this case, what we need to recover is the person doing the thing in question – the person performing the action.

We often take the response or behaviour of one person and generalise it to apply to all people. You’ll hear sales people say, “Customers don’t like this product” when what they really mean is, “I couldn’t sell this product to one customer”.

Once again, some universal rules are useful. If one person can be successful, anyone can, so a belief such as “people can be successful” could be useful, whereas a belief such as “people always fail” might have less desirable results.

Example: “Things never get done here”

Response: “Who doesn’t do things?”

People make mistakes

They should have seen it coming

They’re always doing that

This report needs finishing

A meeting was held

Mistakes have been made

Nobody is pulling their weight

Customers won’t buy this

Sales people are pushy

[edit] Mind reading (Distortion)

Example: “You don’t rate me”

Response: “How do know that I don’t rate you?”

Response: “What leads you to believe that?”

Response: “What makes you think that?”

I know what you’re thinking…you never mind read. With a mind read, we act as if we know what someone else is thinking. Of course, you may be right so the point is that you do not know for certain and it may not be useful to respond as if you do.

With a mind read, you might do something, or not do something, because you know how someone would react. You may know that person very well, but the only way to know what they are thinking is to ask them.

I know you don’t believe me

He doesn’t want to help me

You just don’t care

My boss thinks I’m lazy

He’ll hate you if you do that

The boss is in a foul mood today

Mary’s really happy now

[edit] Cause and effect (Generalisation)

Example: “He makes me cringe just by speaking”

Response: “How does he make you cringe?”

Response: “How do you make yourself cringe when he speaks?”

Very similar to the complex equivalence, the cause and effect has the result that if an event takes place then another, unrelated event must also take place. If I know that, when the boss has his door shut it’s going to be a bad day and I see the boss’s door shut, I will notice opportunities to make it a bad day.

The cause and effect implies a relationship in time, so that when one event takes place, another will automatically follow. This is useful in the physical world, so that if I step off a cliff, I will at some point in the future hit the ground with a ‘splat’.

When we apply the cause and effect rule to people, we often get into problems because people do not follow the same physical rules as inanimate objects.

My boss makes me angry

If you do that I’ll leave

We can’t do that because it won’t work

If I do the presentation it will go badly

There’s no point trying, he won’t listen to me

I won’t apply because they’ll never give me the job

Things always go wrong when she walks in here

[edit] Presuppositions (Deletion)

Example: “I’ll do that after I win this contract”

Response: “How do you know you’ll win that contract?”

Presuppositions are the components of the sentence which must be held true in order for the sentence to be grammatically correct. The presupposition works at the unconscious level at which your brain parses language, ready to be decoded and translated into meaning, therefore a presupposition is accepted as true even before you consciously understand what has been said.

When we process language, we process all meanings and hold them temporarily until one stands out by fitting the context of the information. Therefore, presuppositions are a very powerful influence tool.

When this plan fails I’ll say ‘told you so’

It will be easier when he leaves

What will the next reorganisation bring?

When are you leaving?

You’ll enjoy it once you do it

Once you make a start you’ll find it easy

Verbal language conveys only a small part of communication, the rest being made up of voice tone and physiology. In practice, this means that verbal language is a shortened, condensed version of a rich mental representation. Whenever you communicate, you’re passing only a tiny part of the information required, so the listener has to insert part of their own experience in order to derive meaning. This all happens unconsciously and instantly, making presuppositions so powerful.

Take a moment to consider these questions, paying attention to your state and the way that you think about your response:

Are you thinking about doing NLP training?

When are you thinking about doing NLP training?

Why are you thinking about doing NLP training?

Are you thinking about your career?

What plans are you making for your career?

What plans have you made for your career?

What plans would you like to make for your career?

Remember - every single sentence you speak is full of presuppositions - they’re part of the syntax of natural language. They help us to keep our language short and relevant so that we can reduce the number of words we need to convey a simple concept or instruction.

Our common frame of reference generates useful presuppositions, without which we would have difficulty communicating verbally. We could say that, usually, we communicate from our own frame of reference, whilst rapport creates a shared frame of reference.

It’s always worth noticing the presuppositions that people use naturally, as they give away a great deal of information about their own frame of reference, their values, their beliefs and their needs.

Think of 5 questions with presuppositions that reinforce a belief

Think of 5 questions with presuppositions that change a belief

[edit] Universal Quantifiers (Generalisation)

Example: “He never listens to me”

Response: “Never?”

Response: “Was there ever a time when he did?”

A type of generalisation, the universal quantifier takes a single example and makes it apply to all cases or at all times.

Think of someone who says, “I always fail”. There are two problems here; firstly, the person is only noticing times in the past when they failed and is filtering out times when they succeeded, because success would disprove the rule. The second problem is that ‘always’ means every time in the past and every time in the future, so by saying, “I always fail”, the person is setting their perceptual filters to notice failure in the future, and they are then generating behaviour that is likely to lead to failure.

In short, by creating a universal rule, the person will create a self fulfilling prophecy. This is a very useful ability if you apply it to a belief like “I am always successful”.

Nobody likes me

It’s always the honest people who lose out

Nothing’s the same anymore

Nothing works here

Everybody’s talking about it

We all need to do this

All our competitors are doing this

[edit] Modal Operator of Necessity (Deletion)

Example: “I have to take care of her”

Response: “What happens if you don’t?”

Modal operators modify the verb and are often an indication that the speaker is basing their behaviour or thoughts on rules – beliefs about their behaviour.

The important question to explore here is “how did they learn those rules?”

People are very good at learning rules and will continue to follow them – or break them – long after the need for the rule has gone away.

We shouldn’t do that

You have to get a good appraisal

You must arrive on time

You’ve got to laugh

You should always be dressed smartly

You must get that work done to day

You can’t leave yet

[edit] Model Operator of Possibility (Deletion)

Example: “I can’t tell the truth”

Response 1: “Why?” or “Why not?”

Response 2: “What stops you?”

Response 3: “What would happen if you did?”

Where the modal operator of necessity indicated the presence of a rule, this language pattern indicates the presence of a choice.

“I can’t tell the truth” indicates that the speaker has imagined telling the truth, imagined something undesirable happening and has chosen to not tell the truth.

Often, the modal operator of possibility indicates that the speaker imagines something bad happening in the future and takes avoiding action now. If you are running towards a physical brick wall, that’s a very useful ability. If the barrier has only been placed there by your imagination, it’s not as useful.

I can’t call her

I can’t apply for that job

I can’t finish that

I can’t imagine that

I can’t tell him that

I’ll never learn this

[edit] Milton Model

The Milton Model is also based on our fundamental grammatical rules but instead of using them to recover lost information, it uses them to lose information, allowing the listener to add their own experience or expectations in order to create meaning.

Mind reading: You might think…; You know…; I know what you’re thinking…; You may be wondering how you can use this; I know that you can read these words

Complex equivalence: Reading these words means you’re learning; Breathing is a sign that you can relax; Seeing these words means that you can focus

Cause and effect: As you read this, you know what to do next; By learning about NLP you can enjoy more; The next time you travel, you can reflect on what you have discovered along the way

Presupposition: What’s the most important thing you’ve achieved in your life so far?; How many new ideas have you had today?; When would you want to begin coaching?

Universal quantifiers: You’ll always be able to enjoy more; Everyone can relax; There are opportunities everywhere

Tag questions: This is the right thing for you to do, isn’t it?; Aren’t they? Won’t we? Is it not? Could it?

Lost referential index and lost performative: Whilst it’s true that…; They say that…; I’ve heard that…; It’s good to feel relaxed; People feel good about the right decisions

Tag questions: You can decide now, won’t you?; It’s good to relax, isn’t it?; Questions don’t carry suggestions, do they?

Double bind: Will you decide now or later…?; You can listen to me or not, it makes no difference to what happens; Whether you keep your eyes open or closed means you know how to relax

Selectional Restriction Violation: (Attributing qualities or behaviours to something which logically cannot exhibit them); It’s a relaxing chair; We’ve got a happy office; It’s a confident decision

Utilisation: Utilising the client’s present experience, e.g. you are holding this book and reading these words…

Negative: I’m not going to tell you that…; I can’t make you relax, you have to want to…; You couldn’t lend me some money, could you?; Modal operators; Should, ought, must, got to, have to, need to, will, want to…

Conversational Postulates: Can you tell me the time?; Can you imagine what it would be like?; I wonder how it will feel to succeed?

Quotes: The other day, someone said to me, “You can achieve whatever you want”; You can use quotes from films, books, repeat back what someone says, and embed a suggestion in quotes.

Ambiguities: Annoys/a noise… write/right… wait/weight…

You may recall that at the start of this chapter I talked about the experiences that are called to mind when we’re processing language. And you may be wondering how ambiguities can possibly be useful, because surely no-one would ever want to talk so confusingly?

When I worked in a large British telecommunications company, a colleague of mine was assigned a mentor as part of a HR mentoring initiative. In the period of time he was supposed to work with her, he never actually got to meet her once and therefore felt very frustrated when he read an interview with her in the internal magazine, espousing the virtues of the mentoring program.

He told me that the quote from her said how wonderful mentoring was, and how important a mentor had been to her, which made her hypocritical as she had never made the time to meet with him. I asked him to read the quote, and this is what it said:

“I cannot put into words the impact that having a mentor has had on my career. Certainly, if I had not had a mentor, I would be in a very different place today”

He repeated his assertion that this proved her guilt, and I asked him to read it again and tell me what it really said. As he read it a couple more times, the penny dropped. “It says absolutely nothing at all!” he exclaimed.

It was a perfect example of Milton Model language in action.

So, a hypnotherapist or an excellent public speaker may use ambiguities to induce ‘trance’ states. And a comedian may use ambiguities to create tension that is released through laughter (in other words, because they’re funny). Can you think of times when those peoples’ skills would come in handy for you?

“Make sure you have a pen, because in a moment I’m going to ask you to right now fill in an order form”

“You can feel the weight in your hands, and you can feel the weight in your feet, and you can feel the wait for the moment that you can let go and relax”

With written ambiguities it helps if you read the words out loud. You should form your own opinion about using this kind of thing in written communication such as sales letters or websites.

In NLP, we would use this form of language again to bypass the client’s critical filter. For example, a direct command such as, “be more confident” or “you are more confident” is easily rejected because it doesn’t fit the client’s map of the world. If we put that into Milton language, we might get something like, “I wonder how you’ll find yourself working even more confidently?” or “I wonder how much confidence it takes to ask for help with being more confident”

In Milton language, we can reframe beliefs, introduce useful suggestions, direct attention to more useful behaviours and outcomes, introduce possibilities, influence state and do many other things without every having to resort to trance, and it also means that we can influence people’s state and behaviour very quickly and covertly where necessary.

[edit] Modal operators

You saw modal operators in the Meta Model, and we can explore them in some more detail as they are a vital component of language for anyone interested in motivation.

A state has its own vocabulary. The words you use, your voice tone and the things you talk about are influenced by, and can influence, your state. Words themselves are powerful anchors.

When our thoughts easily become action, we are in a motivated state. Sometimes, we allow our thoughts to dissipate without translating into behaviour, or we think about something that we know we have to do, but we don’t want to do it.

Modal operators in language give us a great deal of insight into a person’s underlying belief structure and motivations.

Think about something that you do easily – something that you can always find time for or that you only have to think about in order to do it. What do you say to yourself as you think about it?

Can

Will

Am

Now

Want

Need

Now think about something that you’re really good at almost getting round to. Something that is your job, or that needs doing, but you really don’t want to do it, so you always find a way to avoid it. What do you say to yourself as you think about it?

Ought

Should

Must

Need

Later

Try

Do you notice a pattern here? And is it possible to swap the words we use round in order to change the states? You bet!

Take something that you need to do, let’s call it ‘X’. Pay attention to how you talk to yourself about it. If, for example, you say, “I really ought to do X today” then actively change the words. Say out loud, “I am going to do X today”.

Of course, you haven’t done it yet, it is in the future and is therefore still an uncertainty. We can make the language even more powerful by shifting it into the past:

“By the end of the day I will have done X”

Now we have the problem that, “the end of the day” is not very specific. Which day? And when exactly does it end? We can go one better:

“By the time I walk out of the door to go home today, I will have done X”

We can still make the language even more powerful still:

Stand up. Look up. Take a deep breath. Smile. Think about something you really love doing and really enjoy. Now say in a confident, musical voice:

“By the time I walk out of the door to go home today, I will have done X”

But be careful with this – you’ll find yourself whizzing through all your outstanding chores like a whirlwind. We need to even the balance up.

Take something that you always end up doing, even though you think someone else should do it.

Sit down. Look down. Think about something you hate doing.

Now say in a nervous, flat voice:

“I really ought to do that soon”

I know what you’re thinking… “If I can use this to manage my own state of motivation, could I use it with other people?” You are definitely getting the hang of this!

Listen carefully to the words that someone uses when they talk about something they really enjoy doing. Then make sure you use those exact words back to them when you talk about what you want them to do.

For example, when someone talks about something they had to finish off at work they might say, “I kept telling myself that I really should do it, I finally ran out of time and had to finish it off before coming here tonight”. When they talk about going shopping at the weekend they might say, “so I said to myself ooh! I’ve just got time to pop into town”. Now you have everything you need.

“You should stay at home instead of going to the gym, but you might get home and think ‘ooh! I’ve just got time to pop down to the gym’, and imagine how great you’ll feel for having done that!”

You have also heard from them that they are motivated to take action by the pressure of a deadline, and they take action when the bad feeling of doing the work outweighs the good feeling of avoiding it.

When you get to the Time chapter, you’ll find a useful version of the timeline technique that allows you to use this type of motivation productively.

The most important thing, as always, is to notice the words the other person uses, and use their words. Yours might make sense to them, or they might have the opposite effect. For example, ‘need’ motivates some people and stops others because it implies rules, so always pay attention to the person you want to develop a relationship with.

Modal Operators

Ask your partner to describe a situation that they would describe as a problem. Make a note of the modal operators they use, and afterwards, play them back and together analyse what the modal operators imply about the underlying beliefs and experiences.

[edit] Logical levels

Robert Dilts developed the idea of Neurological Levels, often abbreviated to Logical Levels, from the work of Gregory Bateson on systems thinking. Whilst some people protest that this isn’t NLP and shouldn’t be part of NLP training, it is very useful in many ways, and we can’t overlook the huge contribution to NLP made by Robert Dilts, particularly with Sleight of Mouth and his modelling of talents such as leadership, creativity and genius.

The Logical Levels framework has six levels, and they describe the hierarchical levels of organisation that you will hear within language, particularly language that a person uses to relate to themselves.

System: The bigger system that I am part of
Identity: Who I am, my role
Belief: What is true about my world
Capability: What I have the ability to do
Behaviour: What I am doing
Environment: Where I am, what is around me

Using the logical levels format, we can guide someone through a thought process which allows us to explore a problem in a structured way which tends to create alignment between the levels, leading to a higher degree of congruence which means that the person’s natural motivation and energy is transferred more efficiently to the goal or outcome.

[edit] Logical Levels – as a coaching structure

Explore an issue by ‘walking through’ logical levels. Begin at Environment, and at each level ask your partner to describe their experience. Make sure that they stay at the level you’re currently working on, which you’ll be able to hear in their language.

[edit] Logical Levels – as a reframing tool

Listen to your partner’s description of a problem or decision. Pick out the logical level statements, now shift all the levels up one as you reflect back the problem or decision.

For example:

“I can’t work here” becomes “You can’t do this work?”
“I can’t do it” becomes “You don’t believe you can do it?”
“It’s not working” becomes “You can’t get it to work?”

And so on…

Keep on conversationally reflecting back any statements that sit in the logical levels structure as questions, phrased one level above the limiting statement.

Notice what happens.

[edit] Stories – Narrative Communication

Listen to any conversation and you will hear a combination of:

Belief statements – which sometimes sounds like facts
Questions – for many different reasons
Narrative – which gives characters and sequence

This is a very important point. Human beings communicate with each other in a narrative. We don’t communicate using factual statements; they are linked by a narrative, which includes characters – who did what to who – and a sequence in time, so that we can recreate the situation mentally.

As one person is talking, anyone listening is translating their words back into the original sensory experience. Of course, they can’t translate it into exactly the original, so they are substituting their own experiences and references in order to make sense of it.

What does this mean for you as a professional communicator?

For a start, it means that the more narrative you use, the easier you are to listen to.

Secondly, it means that the richer your narrative, the more accurate are the pictures you create in your listener’s mind.

And thirdly, when we ask people on workshops what qualities they associate with excellent presenters, one which always comes out is that the presenter knew a lot about their subject. And when we ask how they knew that the presenter knew a lot – they told stories.

So narrative communication – storytelling is vital, it’s natural, you already do it and to be an excellent presenter you can do more of it, purposefully.

Right now, you communicate in many ways that already fit this form, including:

Anecdotes
Case studies
Reports
Any description of an event

Just within the past hour you will have heard many stories – start to listen out for them.

As a NLP Practitioner, you can now begin to tell stories with greater purpose, to communicate valuable information and to influence your listeners.

You can also pay more attention to the stories that other people tell. Your clients’ stories have the power to draw you into their reality, and you have to be able to resist that.

[edit] State story

You can use a story to help lead someone out of a particular state, towards a target state through an event which may or may not be related to either state.

Present state > event > desired state

So, begin with someone in a state that the listener will identify with personally. Then move through some kind of transition to a desirable end state.

“There was a customer of mine who was confused once, about a decision. They found that by talking to a colleague and taking some time to read carefully through the information that they made a decision that they felt very comfortable with and that they look back on happily.”

“I have another client who had concerns about using a consultant, yet when he decided to give me the opportunity to work with him he began to feel very reassured and was ultimately so comfortable with the decision that he now calls me just to chat about the state of the market and we have developed a really trusting relationship. I wonder how a relationship like that could really help you to get better results?”

Importantly, the transitional event doesn’t need to have anything to do with the present or desired states at all. There isn’t a logical connection between them – only a sequence of time which our pattern matching minds turn into a causal sequence.

For example., there was a world war, then I was born, then the Berlin Wall fell and Europe was reunited. There is no logical sequence there, and none implied, yet our minds create a causal relationship wherever there is a sequence of time.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful communication techniques you can ever employ. It directly influences the listener’s emotional state and it bypasses their critical filters. Stories can be used to change, to influence or even just to enjoy.

[edit] Purposeful storytelling

Tell a short story – perhaps something that happened at work, maybe a story about change, maybe a story about someone you know who has achieved something remarkable.

This isn’t just a random story though, it is specifically chosen to achieve a specific purpose; to change the listener’s state or to introduce a new idea or possibility.

We have, in our brains, a remarkable ability to build simulations – not just static maps of the world, but living models that, loaded with rules and starting data, will run by themselves and simulate the world and the people within it.

This ability ideally builds simulations of live role models, but in their absence, a story will serve a similar purpose.

A story will follow a sequence in time which a list of direct rules probably does not, so we can see how relationships between parts of the story connect over time.

If we strip a sequence down to simplified steps then we can’t form a simulation using that information. We could form a mental image of the checklist, or hear the sounds of the words, but to form a simulation it needs people.

If you’ve ever followed a recipe from a TV chef only to find it didn’t turn out the way it looked on the TV, you’ve experienced this directly. The recipe isn’t enough to reproduce the original, because that required a whole lifetime of experiences that you don’t have. Even making a simple omelette that requires you to beat the eggs – how? For how long? With what? Does it make a difference? Of course it does – if you want to reproduce the original exactly, and that’s what we achieve with NLP modelling.

[edit] Trance

For many people, hypnosis and trance summon up images of swinging watches, covert influence and people doing things against their wills.

Pick up any serious book on hypnosis, or go to any serious hypnotherapy course, and you’ll learn that there are many myths surrounding hypnosis and trance which are based on fear rather than reality. Here are a few ideas about hypnosis that you may wish to confirm for yourself.

Anyone can be hypnotised. People who think quickly tend not to respond to the slow paced, traditional trance induction as they get bored half way through. They respond better to fast inductions using pattern interrupts and suggestions. I can say that anyone can be hypnotised because everyone spends some time in a trance, every day.

It’s even possible to say that we live in a trance, all the time. Very few people spend any significant time in total sensory ‘uptime’ - a state of total focus on the outside world. Typically, our days comprise both attention to the outside world and the daydreaming, thinking and remembering that are all trance states. Essentially, a trance state is where one or more of your senses are directed inwards. Every time you remember a telephone number, think about what happened yesterday or worry, your senses are directed inwards and you partially disconnect from the outside world. A deep trance is where all of your senses are directed inwards, although even in a deep hypnotic trance you will still hear the hypnotist’s voice or a fire alarm.

If you think of a trance state as being a state of heightened focus of attention, then any time where you lose contact with the outside world as a result of intense concentration is a trance state. Being lost in a good book (like this one!) or daydreaming whilst driving are two common examples.

The magicians and witches of the middle ages were probably hypnotists. Magical spells and enchantments were most likely trances, exaggerated by fear and mass hysteria. In a modern world where dragons and unicorns are not as popular as they once were, the reality of hypnosis is much different, although the fears and doubts are much the same for some people.

So, the use of trance is natural and ethical, but not in a business context, right? Well, not quite. Remember that we move in and out of trance states naturally throughout the day, and that these states naturally coincide with other people’s attempts to influence you. If you’ve ever agreed to something without being sure of what you agreed to, or if you’ve ever found yourself doing something familiar automatically then you’ve probably experienced a trance state at work.

Many people say that the presentation slot after lunch is the worst one to get because people don’t pay attention. If you want to gain agreement to an idea, then this is the best slot to get! Some people plan their presentations so that the boring bit comes after lunch - in fact, that’s when you should be closing the deal!

If you’re in the middle of something that you’re concentrating on and someone interrupts you, you may experience a moment of confusion. This is known as a ‘pattern interrupt’ because a mental pattern or program has been interrupted. Now, think about what you do when you interrupt someone to ask for something - do you ask first, or do you make small talk first? If you’re interrupting someone to ask for something, get your request in early. Even better, make the request a question, adjusting your voice tone to make it an instruction.

“Can you sign my expenses?” gives the listener choice
“Sign my expenses” is perhaps a bit too direct
“Sign my expenses for me?” could work well
“Here are my expenses for you to sign” is an implied command
“Can you have a look at this report after you have signed my expenses?” is quite sneaky – it’s a presupposition

Try it - and find out for yourself.

So, is this ethical? Well, you do it anyway, so you might as well do it consciously and purposefully so that you can be sure you’re doing it ethically. You currently do this without thinking, so who knows what you get up to? In my mind, it’s better to do this with a specific purpose or outcome in mind rather than to do it accidentally and achieve random results.

Right now, you probably daydream whilst driving and worry if you go through a red light. Just imagine - if you were to daydream during a meeting, you might find yourself influencing people in all kinds of ways to reflect your current state of mind rather than the one you want to portray. You might take an advanced driving course to refine your skills behind the wheel, so you could think of NLP as an advanced thinking course to put you more in control of the way you interact with other people.

By watching what happens when people naturally move in and out of different states of mind, observers have build up a repertoire of behavioural and linguistic patterns which tend to move people towards the state of inward focus which we associate with hypnosis.

If you ask one of your colleagues or customers a really good question and they go quiet for a period of time while they think carefully, you have induced a trance state. Their focus of attention is directed inwards, so they’re not listening to you. We all get lost in our own thoughts, and an external guide can often help you to use these mental processes very effectively. The common name for such a guide is a hypnotist.

For you to use these tools ethically and professionally, it’s important for you to understand the kinds of patterns that we’re talking about, and that’s why I’m going to share them with you. You’ll recognise all kinds of patterns here that you use everyday, so this will help you to refine the skills you already have.

[edit] Cycling representational systems

If you rotate your focus of attention through your senses, you will find that your attention will become directed inwards. So, you can see these words, hear some sounds, feel the temperature of the air, see your hands, hear noises in the distance, feel the weight of your feet, see the colour of the paper, hear the words, feel that feeling inside and so on.

With corporate visioning being so popular, it’s not uncommon to hear managers ask what people will see, hear and feel when they achieve a certain objective. You can imagine how easily you can build this pattern into a presentation or business report.

[edit] Utilisation pattern

This pattern cycles your awareness from outside, to inside, to outside, and so on. Suggestions relating to states work very well with this pattern, so it’s a good way to become more focused, energised or relaxed. Point out three things that are in your client’s direct sensory awareness, make a suggestion and then ask where their attention is focussed. Here’s how it goes:

You can see the paper, you can hear the words, you can feel the weight of the book, you can realise how pleased you are that you bought it, and what are you aware of now?

Utilisation pattern

The coach alternates pacing and leading as follows:

1. True 2. True 3. True 4. Suggestion 5. “And what are you aware of now?”

The client signals any time the coach says something that ‘jars’ and is therefore not properly calibrated or paced.

An important aspect of this type of induction is the utilisation of events and sensations in the room to pace and lead the client. This means that if you view hypnosis as something which mush happen in a quiet room with no distractions, you’re going to run out of things to comment on very, very quickly. The busier the environment, the more you have to work with, so this is an excellent exercise to use in practicing your general communication skills. Excellent public speakers have the ability to take anything in their stride and to act as if interruptions were planned by them – this is utilisation.

[edit] Pattern interrupt

Whenever you do something automatically, you are running a behavioural program that enables you to complete complex tasks without having to devote too much conscious brain power. Whenever you are lost in a pattern and someone or something interrupts you, your brain is stuck for a moment, unsure of how to complete the program. At this moment, you are open to suggestion. How many times have you been in the middle of something, or lost in a daydream, when a colleague has asked you a question and you’ve found yourself complying as if it were a command? Maybe you’ve also found yourself feeling bad that they made you do a certain thing, only to find that they have no memory of asking you to do it, merely that they mentioned it to you?

My wife does this all the time when I’m driving. She’ll wait until I’m at a junction, concentrating on the traffic, and then she’ll say, “I thought we were going to go the other way?” Before I know it, I’ve changed direction and she’s now demanding to know why we’re going the other way!

So, no-one’s immune to pattern interrupts because we would be unable to function without our behavioural patterns. When your PC gets interrupted, it crashes, so just be grateful that it only takes your brain half a second to reboot and continue. Imagine what it would be like if you had to run the disk repair program every time someone interrupted you, or you went to sleep without finishing what you were doing!

[edit] Hypnosis scripts

There are many sources on the Internet of good scripts that you can use in hypnosis. Here’s one that you can use for general relaxation, and to deliver a specific suggestion.

Before you see the script, a word on suggestions. Firstly, the suggestion must conform to the criteria used for Well Formed Outcomes, in that it must be stated positively and have no unwanted side effects. So, a suggestion that someone will give up smoking is very badly formed and will not have any effect. On the other hand, a suggestion such as “you will surprise yourself with how easily you forget to smoke” is much better, because it is well formed, and also because it’s phrased indirectly.

A suggestion such as “you will be more confident” can be quite jarring, especially if the person believes they lack confidence. Rather than accepting the suggestion, they will reject it. A better way to phrase this would be to choose a specific example when the person would like more confidence, for example “you can find yourself breathing more confidently”. You see the subtle difference? You’re taking the emphasis off the suggestion, so that the person can integrate it more easily rather than questioning it. If you think back to the Milton and Meta Models, you’re embedding the suggestion within a presupposition.

Now, it’s old chestnut time. Does this mean that you can command people to do things against their will? Opinion is divided on this, and I stress the word opinion. In my experience, a state of hypnosis is just a state. It does not render the person vulnerable to instructions, nor place them at your mercy. As you will find out for yourself if you try this script, the person in the trance feels alert and in control the whole time, yet very relaxed and at ease. If anything interrupts them such as an unwelcome suggestion or a feeling of unease, they will open their eyes and be fully attentive. Whether people are in a trance or not, they can still tell what’s good for them.

You move into suggestible states naturally throughout the day. Imagine a time when you’re daydreaming and someone asks you a question. Often, you answer before you even heard the question and you wonder what you just agreed to!

Now for the script, which is an ‘Elman induction‘. Before you start to read this, prepare a suggestion and write it down so that you can weave it into the script seamlessly. Your voice tone, pitch and rate of speech are probably more important than the words, so that’s something you can practice and play with.

[edit] Elman Induction

“In this exercise you must be happy to learn about how to develop your relaxation skills and follow instructions exactly as asked – Neither taking too long to follow instructions nor anticipating what will be asked.

Now take a long deep breath and hold it for a few seconds. As you exhale this breath, allow your eyes to close, and let go of the surface tension in your body. Just let your body relax as much as possible right now.

Now place your awareness on your eye muscles and relax the muscles around your eyes to the point they just won’t work. When you’re sure they’re so relaxed that, as long as you hold on to this relaxation they just won’t work, hold on to that relaxation and test them to make sure THEY WON’T WORK.

Now, this relaxation you have in your eyes is the same quality of relaxation that I want you to have throughout your whole body. So, just let this quality of relaxation flow through your whole body from the top of your head, to the tip of your toes.

Now we can deepen this relaxation much more. In a moment I’m going to have you open and close your eyes. When you close your eyes that’s your signal to let this feeling of relaxation become 10 times deeper. All you have to do is want this to happen and you can make it happen very easily. OK, now, open your eyes…now close your eyes and feel that relaxation flowing through your whole body, taking you much, much deeper. Use your wonderful imagination and imagine your whole body is covered and warmed up in a warm blanket of relaxation.

Now, let every muscle in your body become so relaxed that as long as you hold on to this quality of relaxation, every muscle in your body is totally relaxed.

In a moment I’m going to have you open and close your eyes one more time. Again when you close your eyes, double the relaxation you now have. Make it become twice as deep. OK, now once more open your eyes. …And close your eyes …and double your relaxation…good. Let every muscle in your body hold on to this quality of relaxation.

In a moment I’m going to lift your right (or left) hand by the wrist, just a few inches and drop it. If you have followed my instructions up to this point, that hand will be so relaxed it will be just as loose and limp as a damp dish cloth, and will simply plop down.

Now don’t try to help me. Let me do all the lifting so that when I release it, it just plops down and you allow yourself to go deeper still.

[Gently lift their hand by the wrist and drop it onto their leg]

Take a long, deep breath as you let yourself go deeper still.

Now relax the muscles around your eyes to the point where they won’t work… and pretend you can’t open them even though you know full well that you can. As long as you hold on to this relaxation, you can pretend that they just won’t work. When you’re sure they’re so relaxed that they just won’t work, continue to pretend that they won’t work and test them to make sure THEY WON’T WORK. Test them hard ……that’s right.

We want your mind to be as relaxed as your body is, so I want you to start counting from 100 backwards when I tell you to. Each time you say a number, double your mental relaxation. With each number you say, let your mind become twice as relaxed. By the time the numbers get down to 98, you’ll be so relaxed the numbers won’t be there.

Now, you have to do this, I can’t do it for you. Those numbers will leave if you will them away.

Now say out loud, the first number and double your mental relaxation. Say 100.

Now double that mental relaxation, say 99,……….now double that mental relaxation, let those numbers already start to fade. They’ll go if you will them to. Say 98.

Deeper relaxed, now they’ll be gone. Dispel them. Banish them. Make it happen, you can do it; I can’t do it for you. Put them out, make it happen! Are they all gone?

Now really enjoy the skills and relaxation until I say something important to you, which I want you to take in at an even deeper level, easily and honestly if it’s what you need.

[insert suggestion]

Now come back to this room when I’ve counted from 3 up to 1 and you’ve realised that you’ve learnt something important to you. 3…2…1”

I know people who use this regularly to help their partners fall asleep more easily. Some people even record it onto tape and play it to themselves to help them relax..

Whatever you choose to do with it, it demonstrates the immense power that you have with your voice and with the words you choose.

[edit] Self hypnosis CDs

A lot of people ask me, “Do self hypnosis CDs work?” as in will they help someone to give up smoking or lose weight?

As you may have discovered by now, hypnosis is a dance, an interactive communication process. Hypnosis is not something that one person does to another – both must be engaged in the process for it to work.

Even the best designed CD cannot know when you close your eyes or breath out, therefore whilst the CD may have some very well crafted words, it cannot achieve the same results as a human being.

However, I do think that these CDs can work, but for a different reason. If you take half an hour out of your busy day to sit in a quiet place and think about something that is important to you, that is very powerful in itself. If you need a CD to give yourself a reason to take time out then that’s as good a reason as any. Half an hour is probably more than most people spend in a month thinking about what is important to them.

[edit] Change Techniques

Now that we have explored some of the building blocks of NLP, we can move onto some of the more advanced techniques.

There are techniques for changing processes, for splitting problems, for combining problems, for using your creativity in problem solving, for neutralising the impact of an experience – all kinds of things.

The important thing to remember is that at Practitioner level, NLP training is essentially giving you a big bunch of keys. When you get to a locked door, you can go through all the keys, one by one, or you can take some time to understand the lock so that you’ve got a much better chance of getting the key.

By the way, at Master Practitioner level, we teach you how to pick locks, speaking metaphorically.

All of the techniques are based upon simple principles that relate to the way that we experience the world, and the way that we organise those experiences. Some people get stuck trying to explain all this in terms of neurology and connections in the brain. This, for me, is analogous to explaining how to use some software on your computer by explaining how the magnetic data is stored on the hard disc. Thinking in terms of the electro-chemical brain function is tells us absolutely nothing about the user interface.

[edit] Swish

Sometimes, people will act in a certain way through a habit or other unconscious process. No matter how hard they try, they always wind up acting or responding in the same way because by the time they realise they’re doing it, it’s already too late.

Anchoring was the process of connecting together a simple sensory input with a complex physiological output. We can also reverse the process of anchoring to break existing associations.

The technique for this is called a Swish.

This can be used to change almost any habitual pattern of behaviour e.g. smoking, habits, phobias etc.

You can use the basic swish pattern in many different ways, and it is one of the most powerful and important techniques in NLP. This isn’t exactly true, it’s just a useful way to think of it: if anchoring allows us to make connections, swish allows us to break them. It’s not true in that we can’t break connections, we can only overwrite them, so it’s essentially a re-anchoring technique. Yet if you think in terms of the effect of the swish as being to break a connection, you’ll be able to see how important and flexible it is.

A visual swish is very fast and easy to do, you can use an auditory swish in the middle of a conversation and a kinaesthetic swish is essentially the collapsing or stacking of anchors that we did earlier.

With the swish, we are setting up a new response pattern, a new ‘habit’ which is preferable to the old one. People continue to have habitual responses that serve no useful purpose for them, simply because the unwanted response has become so familiar. Because the swish is about rewriting unconscious responses, the faster you do it, the better it works.

[edit] Visual swish

Identify context: Ask your partner what he/she wants to change

Identify current state picture: Identify what your partner sees just before the behaviour that they want to change. You need to track down the precise moment that the ‘program’ runs, so that the person has choice over the response. For example, if you want to swish a fear of mice, don’t picture standing on a chair. Hold your hand up in front of the person’s face and ask them to put the picture there.

Create outcome picture: Now create a picture after the desired change. Make the picture more exciting and desirable. Hold your hand down and over to one side and ask your partner to place the outcome image there.

Swish: See the first picture clear and bright in the palm of your hand. Put a small image of the outcome picture in the bottom corner Quickly grow the outcome picture to replace the first picture as the first picture shrinks away over the horizon. As the images swap over, make a ‘whoosh’ or ‘swish’ sound.

Repeat three times.

Test: Try to think of the way you used to react to the situation. What is different?

You might feel a little self conscious, waving your arms at people and making ‘whoosh’ noises, but remember that everything is there for a reason.

Keys to getting the swish to work every time are:

Know what you’re doing in advance so that you don’t have to stop to think half way through

Do it fast. Very fast.

Hold the undesired current state only as long as you need to in order to start the ‘old’ response – sometimes less than a second

As you do the swish a number of times, continue to reinforce the desired state and fade out the undesired state

Don’t be tempted to swish in the ‘correct’ response – just go for anything that’s different. You only need to break the old pattern, a new fixed pattern is no more useful than the old fixed pattern, since our aim is to introduce choice.

In practising the swish, you will learn how to change habitual behaviours. There is a sequence of events here that happens very quickly because your brain only learns things quickly. Slow learning does not work, because it gives you time to think and thinking is not always helpful!

Helpful friends and colleagues often try to help by getting you to talk about the problem which usually makes it worse, because you get more of what you focus on. From a NLP point of view, the problem is already in the past and the swish pushes it even further behind you, focusing you on the present and future. A traditional counselling and therapeutic concept is that if you understand why you have the problem, you will be closer to solving it. The NLP concept is that understanding why you have the problem is of no use in solving it because the problem is not happening in the past – it is happening now. You feel your fear of public speaking now, not in the past when you recall a presentation that went badly for you.

In order to solve the problem, we need only to understand how it is operating now – the sequence of mental steps that operate now to lead you from the first thought to the emotional response that is the hallmark of the problem. In fact, we could say that the problem is not public speaking, or cold calling, or spiders – the problem is that you feel bad when you think about those things.

By finding the choice point in the process, you are finding the point at which it is easiest to introduce change.

This is a similar approach to stress management. There’s no point trying to manage stress once you are stressed, as it’s too late and trying to manage your stress (or anger) just makes you more stressed. Instead we need to focus on what happens before you get stressed so that you can go off in a different direction altogether.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. There’s no point looking at the map for directions to London when you’re already in Edinburgh. It’s easier to plan your route before you go in the direction you don’t want to go in.

The second important part of the swish is the outcome. You cannot replace something with nothing. You cannot just take a thought out of your head. It’s like trying to stop thinking about an annoying piece of music. You cannot turn it off, you can only replace it. This is because your brain is an analogue computer, so it cannot represent nothings or negatives. Therefore the swish does not take away the unwanted thought – it replaces it with a better one.

There are lots of ways you can do the swish without the amateur dramatics. You can swish with a piece of paper, by writing down aspects of the problem and then, when the person is really focussed on the paper (their state is anchored to it) just screw it up, throw it away and start again on a blank sheet with what the person really wants.

The simple process to remember for adapting the swish technique to any situation is:

Find the point at which the person has choice
Stop them
Focus their attention on what they do want

Remember – state is not just the trivial matter of how you feel – it is the mental, physical and perceptual foundation for everything you do, and it will greatly affect the results that you get.

Can you think of some other ways to apply the basic steps of the swish to bring about rapid change? Here are some suggestions:

In a restaurant, anchor the undesired state to the plate and let the waiter take it away
Use a flipchart or notepad to swish
Swish in a business report or PC presentation
Use objects in the car’s rear view mirror to swish

Just remember the basic steps:

1. Pace current situation

2. Interrupt

3. Insert alternate outcome

4. Change submodalities

5. Reinforce and future pace

6. Test

[edit] Squash

Imagine you have a dilemma. As you can see from these demonstration photos, mine was “should I bother to iron this shirt or not?”

You’ve no doubt seen people naturally ‘weighing up their options’ in their hands like this before, so this is a great example of a technique that you can use without people thinking you’re strange.

To start with, you take the two choices, or the two sides of the conflict, and hold one in each hand. Let’s call them A and B, just to stick with tradition.

With one option in each hand, take a moment to really clarify each one, imagining something that represents the option in the palm of your hand. Take some time to call to mind all of the images, sounds and feelings associated with each option.

When you’ve got a clear understanding of what each option is, just gently bring your hands together, slowly. Some people find this part incredibly difficult! Just allow your hands to come together at whatever speed feels right, and when your hands are close together, just squash the two options into each other, like this:

Now, this may be an odd idea to imagine, so bear with me. Many people, at this point, experience some very odd feelings – tingling across the back, the release of tension, conflicting feelings ebbing and flowing. It’s really interesting that these simple techniques can have such a profound physical effect.

If you have experienced such a response, wait until it subsides, and then open your hands. As soon as you do so, the very first thing that comes to mind, perhaps that you even see in front of you, is the result – option C:

The end result of this is that option C combines the important elements of A and B and ‘feels right’ as a course of action.

[edit] Reframing

Reframing is the art of changing meaning by changing perception. Have you ever changed an opinion of a person or event after seeing things a different way? And have you ever changed your behaviour as a result of that?

[edit] Reframing – an alternative meaning of the same event

Come up with some alternative meanings for popular fairytales e.g. Beauty & The Beast is a story about how if you kidnap a beautiful girl and hold her hostage she’ll eventually fall in love with you, so it’s really a story about the Stockholm Syndrome.

The important thing to remember is that our behaviour is a response to what we make an experience mean, it is not a response to the event itself, because our sensory filters and our perception get in the way.

Let’s explore and compare some different ways of changing the subjective meaning that someone assigns to an event.

[edit] Head on reframing

Your partner offers you a description of an experience that they would be happy to have an alternative meaning, you reframe it by saying “No you’re wrong, it didn’t mean x it meant y”. Discuss how that works out.

[edit] Meta model reframing

Your partner offers you a description of an experience that they would be happy to have an alternative meaning, you reframe it by asking a variety of meta model questions. Discuss how that works out.

[edit] State reframing

Your partner offers you a description of an experience that they would be happy to have an alternative meaning, you do something to change their state and ask them to think of the experience again and notice what seems different in its meaning. Discuss how that works out.

[edit] Perceptual positions

Ask your partner for an experience that they would like to have a different perspective on, learn more about, think differently about or just feel better about. This works well with experiences of personal interactions such as presentations or conversations.

Ask your partner to recall that memory and run through it, recalling every detail as if it were happening right now. Help your partner to fully associate and run the whole sequence through from start to finish. This is 1st position.

Now ask your partner to walk over to where the other person was, and step into their position. In this 2nd position, your partner watches the whole sequence again, watching and hearing themselves as if they are the other person. Ask your partner for any new information or insight they have in this position. Ask your partner how they feel watching and listening to themselves.

Now have your partner walk over to a 3rd position on the other side of the room. If they have difficulty dissociating from the emotional content of the memory, you can ask them to imagine stepping outside of the room and watching through a window, as a casual onlooker. Ask them to watch the whole sequence again, paying attention to the interaction between positions 1 and 2. Ask them for any new information or insight they have in this position. Ask how they feel watching and listening to the interaction between the two people in the room, and to note how the other person seems to be responding.

Now have your partner move back to the 1st position, in their own shoes, and run through the whole scene again, integrating everything that they learned in the other two positions.

[edit] Meta Mirror

Follow the basic procedure for perceptual positions, then at position 3 the client then moves to position 4, the meta position, and comments on 3’s feelings towards and relationship with 1 e.g. supportive, judgemental etc. Client takes this new information back to position 1 and comments on their new perspective on the experience.

Essentially, the client is commenting on how they judge themselves. This ties in to the self image exercise, because how you judge yourself is something that you learned from how someone else judged you – often a parent.

[edit] Six Step Reframe

This is a more complex technique than the ones we’ve explored up until now. It doesn’t help that the language of the original is so impenetrable and relies on setting up unconscious finger signals, where the client’s fingers wiggle unconsciously to indicate yes/no answers. My experience is that this is an unnecessary level of complexity for what is actually a very simple technique, based on a simple premise, that you can use in a wide variety of situations. As well as a problem solving technique, you can use this as a corporate creativity exercise.

It also doesn’t help that the original Six Step Reframe had seven steps in it. Really.

The six step reframe is a good technique for generating alternative ways of achieving complex outcomes, when the current behaviour has become a habit and is not getting the end result. The client may feel stuck, or like they are banging their head against a brick wall, yet they don’t know what else they can do.

Six Step Reframe

1 Identify the pattern of behaviour to change You have to be very specific about what it is that is to be changed. It is rarely as simple as the issue the client first presents.

2 Communicate with the part that generates the behaviour Every behaviour has a useful purpose and must be generated from somewhere – by a part that is responsible for achieving that outcome.

3 Separate the intention from the behaviour You need to identify the positive intention of the behaviour i.e. what is the part aiming to achieve by generating the behaviour?

4 Create alternatives Find the creative part – everyone has one even if they don’t think they are creative. They don’t have to accept they are an artistic person for this, just that they have a creative part.

5 Accept responsibility for change The original part needs to take responsibility for its outcome, and therefore for achieving its outcome more effectively.

6 Check for ecology Make sure there are no other parts that are dependent on or benefit from the behaviour.

7 Test

Future pace the change by talking though a number of future scenarios where the old behaviour would have occurred. Check for congruence.

[edit] Association and dissociation

Our emotional experience of an event depends on the point of view that we observe it from. How do people naturally associate and dissociate? e.g. “feeling present” or “detaching themselves from the situation”

[edit] Self image association (VK association)

You are self aware. You have a self concept that you can place into a map of the world. You can imagine yourself doing certain things in the future, going places, meeting people. And as a side effect of this self awareness, you are self conscious. That doesn’t make you nervous, it makes you consciously aware of yourself.

Where does this self image come from? Well, here’s the strange thing. It doesn’t come from your memory of seeing yourself, because you’ve never seen yourself. You might have seen a reflection of yourself, or a photo of yourself, but these are distortions. You have never seen yourself the way others do.

What you do have first hand experience of, though, is how you feel. You have direct experience of your sensations and emotions. And you take these sensations and from them create a self image.

You have a physical self concept that enables you to navigate, to locate your body in space. That’s called proprioception. And the self image enables you to judge how others see you.

You know how you feel but not how you look. You know how other people look but not how they feel, and you connect the two together.

What we all do is to imagine that because we know how we feel, we know how we look. Similarly, because we know how other people look, we imagine we know how they feel.

One of the most striking ways that you can see this in action is when people are presenting. Someone who has an image of themselves as a poor presenter imagines that they look as nervous as they feel, when in fact they look perfectly relaxed. They then see a colleague present who looks relaxed and say, “Oh, you’re really good, you’re really confident. I’m rubbish because I’m so nervous.”

Then their colleague says, “No, I’m nervous inside even though I don’t show it!”

Does this sound familiar? It’s the process that I described, in action.

You’ll also see this when people are tying on clothes. They’ll ask you, “how do I look?”, and no matter what you say about how nice they look, they pull that face that indicates they know you’re only saying that to be nice, because they have already decided how they look, based on how they feel.

They will also take your facial expression and use it to reinforce their perception, distorting it wildly if necessary, for example:

“I can tell you don’t like it, you’ve got that look on your face”
“What look?”
“That completely blank expressionless look”
Or even
“What look?”
“That adoring smile… you’re hiding something”

It really is amazing how far we can stretch reality to meet our expectations… Anyway, back to self image. We each create a self image by relating how we feel to how other people look at us. We mind read other people’s responses and act as if those responses have any relationship to how we are appearing or acting. And in the case of criticism, guilt and embarrassment, the person with the response isn’t actually responding to you anyway, they in turn are responding to how they feel. Guilt and embarrassment are other people’s feelings which you have learned to reproduce in certain situations. They don’t belong to you.

This can seem like a tricky concept to get your head around, yet when you do, you’ll find it a very powerful and flexible concept.

The only evidence I have for how I look to you is how you feel about me which I mind read from how you look at me.

If your observation and spoken judgements of me are helpful and encouraging, I might tend to create a self image that elicits good feelings – pride, happiness, high self esteem and so on. On the other hand, if what I get from you is frowns, and tuts, and criticism, and “you’re not going out wearing THAT are you?” then I’m more likely to create a self image which elicits guilt, embarrassment, low self esteem and so on.

So the problem isn’t the self image in itself, it’s the way that we can create a self image that is so different from what others really see. Because of course, for someone to judge you in a critical way, what they’re really responding to is their own feelings, not you.

Here are some examples of situations where we can see this mismatched or disconnected self image:

Someone who believes themselves to be overweight or unattractive in some way and feels bad about the way they look.
Someone who believes themselves to be a poor or nervous public speaker
Someone who socialises with people much younger than themselves and dresses in a way that makes them look unattractive – the common expression is “mutton dressed as lamb”
Someone who sees themselves in an unusually positive way given the “reality”
Someone who tries on clothes in a shop and is disappointed that they don’t look they way they had imagined

What I have found is that people create a self image based on their feelings and project it out into the world so that over time they begin to look more like their self image.

What do we do with this information? How do we change a self image? Well I’ve found it’s rather easy and the key is in understanding that the self image is dissociated – it’s disconnected emotionally from you. So all you have to do is identify where it is and go and stand in it. Many people find they can simply imagine doing that, others find it helps to physically stand in it. Either way, you step into and become your own self image, and the moment you do that, you can become aware of the physical sensations associated with it.

At this moment, you can connect with the physical sensations that would be associated with the self image as it has been created, and in these situations it tends to feel uncomfortable in some way. So the next step is that I asked them to give themselves a shake and a stretch, as if they’re trying on a new suit and checking if it fits properly. As they become more aware of the sensations, they can adjust them, because whilst they have only been looking at the visual appearance of the self image, they haven’t had access to the detailed sensations.

Next, I ask them to step out and have another look. This time, as they become more aware still, they can make some changes to the outward appearance, and this will change the feelings and sensations again, so they step back in to check. I’ll ask them to step in, adjust, step out, adjust and so on until they can step in and feel really good. What’s important is that the feeling is guiding this, the appearance is following.

Finally, they step out and put the self image in a useful place. The physical change in the person can be dramatic.

You might be wanting to give this a go for yourself now, in which case you might be about to go back over the last few paragraphs to pick out the process. Don’t worry, I’ll summarise it for you.

[edit] Self image Association

1. Identify the location of the self image – where you see it

2. Either mentally or physically step into the image and associate with it

3. Become aware of the sensations associated with the image as you stretch and settle into it

4. Don’t like how it feels? Stretch it a bit more

5. Step out and have a look, making some adjustments to the appearance

6. Step back in and notice how it feels, continuing to stretch and make it comfortable, always being guided by the feeling

7. Continue to step in and out until it feels right – whatever that means for you

8. Finally, step out and put the image where you would like to see it and enjoy feeling good about yourself

[edit] Fast Phobia Cure

This is a dissociation technique that is very useful for reducing the strength of an emotional connection so that you can begin to work on the problem itself without getting into the emotional response that goes with it. Often, the emotional response is the problem, so this technique will change that response and hence change a problem into just an experience.

Fast Phobia Cure

Imagine yourself seated in the middle of a cinema. See the screen from your own eyes and notice the colour of the seats, the size of the auditorium. Be aware of the sensation of the seat comfortably supporting you.

Up on the screen, see a black and white snapshot of yourself in a situation just before an experience in which you would have had this response or feeling.

Imagine that you can step out of your own body, see yourself sitting in the front row looking up at the screen.

Now imagine yourself walking to the back row and sitting, looking at yourself in the front row watching yourself on the screen.

Once again, float out of your body, up into the projection booth, so you can see yourself sat at the back of the cinema looking at yourself sat in the middle of the cinema looking at the black and white snapshot of yourself on the screen.

In the back row or the projection booth you have to remember that you are not looking at the screen. Only the you in the front row can see the screen, the you in the back row is looking at you in the front row, the you in the projection booth is looking at you in the back row!

Turn that snapshot into a black and white movie running all the way through that experience in which you used to have a response. Let it run all the way to the end and freeze it as a still image.

Remember, all this time you are up in the projection booth watching yourself in the back row. You are not looking directly at the screen.

Now run the film backwards. Run the film backwards quickly, so all the people are moving backwards, all the sounds are played backwards, all the way back to the start.

Run the movie forwards at double speed, hear all the high pitched sounds. Play some silly music as a soundtrack to the movie. Keep running the movie backwards and forwards. When you’re ready you can add in some colour and gently slow the movie down until it is running forwards and backwards at normal speed.

When the movie can run, in colour, at normal speed with no significant response, step down from the projection booth and into you in the back seat. Then walk forwards and step into you in the front row. Then, finally, step up into the screen and back into the scene. Run the whole memory forwards and notice what has changed.

[edit] Time

In NLP, time is usually related to the set of techniques known as ‘timelines’. We’ll explore two areas of time here; firstly understanding how your internal perception of time relates to your external behaviour and secondly, how you can use timeline techniques to change past and future events.

Our subjective perception of time is a very powerful and valuable resource that can be used to create change or to plan effectively.

When we talk about time, we use words that also apply to space – we say things like:

Put it behind you
Your future is all ahead of you
Let’s look ahead
It’s a long way off yet, we don’t need to worry about it
Don’t look back
I feel like it’s on top of me
I can see a time when this will be different

As you might expect by now, these kinds of words can be taken literally. If someone says that they have put an experience behind them, it’s literally what they have done.

The way in which we interact with time also causes a few problems, in particular:

We imagine a future problem and act as if it is real now
We relive a past problem as if it is still happening now

Rationally, you know that those reactions are unhelpful. You know that if something hasn’t happened yet, you can choose or at least influence the way it turns out. You also know that if something has already happened, there’s nothing you can do to change it. Of course, people do get stuck in patterns of behaviour that we can get them out of.

There’s a whole branch of NLP called Time Line Therapy, in which a person’s subjective perception of time can be used to make significant personal changes. You’ve probably noticed that all of these tools started out as therapeutic techniques, which means that there’s not a lot of information around on how to apply the techniques in business. You can read entire books written just on the subject of timeline, so we’re going to cover just the most important bits here.

Essentially, you can use past timelines to change a person’s perceptions of past events, or future timelines to plan more effectively for the future.

As with the rest of NLP, timelines haven’t been invented, they’re just patterns that people like you and I already have within our natural though processes. We already have an internal representation of the flow of time that we interact with, and we already have both individual and generalised ways of interacting with time. Most people imagine their future being in front of them and their past behind them. If you ask someone to imagine a line that connects past, present and future, they will be able to point to it, even though they had never consciously considered it before. Think of a timeline as a graphical user interface for time, just like your PC’s operating software. If you look inside your PC, you won’t really find folders and notepaper in there. The interface is just designed that way so that it’s easier to use.

Where do you imagine the future and past to be? As I said, many people imagine that the future is in front of them, and the past is behind them. Consequently, your parents tell you that you have your whole life ahead of you, and friends tell you that particular experiences are all behind them. They might even say, “it’s all in the past now” as they point behind them, or wave over their shoulders. This is all extremely valuable information, as you are no doubt becoming aware.

My future is to my right and my past is to my left – I see all time laid out in front of me like a map. Everyone is subtly different, and it can be very powerful to explore those subtle differences. For our purposes, it’s useful to work with the ‘typical’ model as everyone seems to have an understanding of it, even though it may differ from their own experience.

Imagine you have several applications open on your PC, and you have the windows stacked on top of each other. You can only see the window at the front and to get to other applications you have to stop what you’re doing and switch programs. This is what some people experience when they think about future goals, so they tend to focus on the thing that is immediately in front of them and not see goals that lie further away.

We can see a relationship between a person’s representation of time and their behaviour towards time-coded events such as appointments and deadlines. The person who experiences time in the ‘now’ with a series of goals rushing towards them is generally very good at panicking but not so good at long term planning. They tend to be on time for events but tend not to see how experiences relate to each other through time. They see time like this:

In NLP timeline jargon, these people are referred to as being ‘in time’ in that they always experience ‘now’ with time flowing through a fixed point. As events get closer to ‘now’, their sense of urgency increases. They are ‘in time’ as if they are standing in a river.

Some people see time in a very different way, as if time itself does not move, only their perception of time does. These people are referred to as being ‘through time’ in that they see how events are connected through time. They tend to see time more like a movie than a sequence of snapshots experienced by ‘in time’ people.

This is what a ‘through time’ representation looks like:

People who see time like this tend to be much more relaxed about deadlines. They can develop strategies to be on time for things like trains and buses, but for things that have more flexible start points they can often be late, because late only relates to a concept of ‘now’. One common strategy is to set their alarm clock, but if they only do that for really important events, they can appear to be more laid back about what they see as minor events. When they look at the timeline, they see every time as ‘now’ because ‘now’ is a variable point of reference. ‘Now’ is whatever I’m thinking about now.

I speak from some experience here, because this is how I see my timeline. I can just about catch trains and planes, but try to get me to my mother-in-law’s for lunch and I’ll see that as a much more flexible deadline. Fortunately, my wife is very much ‘in time’. Or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it.

The simplest strategy that an ‘in time’ person can use to plan ‘through time’ activities is to write a ‘to do’ list. A to do list, a project plan and a storyboard are all strategies used to display a series of time coded events.

It’s often hard for people who are used to seeing time in one way to see it in the other way. After all, you have spent your whole life knowing what time is and being frustrated at other people for not seeing things the way you do. After all, isn’t it obvious that if you have to be at a meeting at 9:00 that you leave home at 7:00? Not to a ‘through time’ person. And isn’t it obvious that you shouldn’t just focus on the next thing you have to do, you should think and prioritise and look at everything you need to get done? Not to an ‘in time’ person.

And in any case, most of us have experiences of both, because they’re really just states. We will have a natural preference that we will slip into when we’re not thinking about it.

Now that you’re beginning to understand time, I’ll complicate it a bit more for you.

Consider someone who smokes and wants to give up. Or someone who stays late at the office, or always does all the housework. What they are acutely aware of, because it’s what they focus on, are the times when they are doing the thing they want to stop doing. They create a mental movie of those instances, connected together, and ignore the time in between. So the person who wants to give up smoking focuses on the times when they are actively smoking and, from that, deduces that they are always smoking. Certainly, if you watched a movie of someone, and in every scene they were smoking, you would say they were always smoking. In the films ‘Seven’ and ‘Ocean’s 11’, Brad Pitt’s character is eating in many of the scenes. Most people would say he was ‘always eating’. I guess it’s fair to say that Brad Pitt himself was eating, I just didn’t want to confuse him with a character he once played in a film.

What this person has created is a series of ‘in time representations in a between time structure’. ‘Between time’ is the space between the times you are not doing the thing that you are always doing.

This structure of experience collapses a sequence of events into a moment in time. For example, I think it will take me no time at all to fill my car up at the petrol station, so I don’t allow any journey time for it. Unfortunately, it does appear to impact on my journey time. You’ll hear people say things like, “It will take no time”, “It will only take five minutes” or “I’ll be back in a minute/flash/jiffy”. Logically, these activities take time. Subjectively, we collapse them into no time.

A between time structure could look like this:

Many time management training sessions get people to un-collapse time. I remember one from the 1990s which gave you a ‘time planner’ into which you had to mark time for yourself. The idea was that you set aside some time each day for planning, writing to do lists etc. rather than just reacting to whatever came your way.

Imagine you go to the cinema to watch a film. The poster outside is an ‘in time’ representation. It is one snapshot that contains everything you need to know.

Or you could think of it as the cover on the DVD case. The film ‘Funny Bones’ has a cover designed to make the British comedy appealing to am American audience. It actually has nothing at all to do with the film and has a picture of two of the characters that was never even in the film. The original publicity material features a still from the scene which actually summed the film up perfectly, although it wasn’t very exciting to look at.

The trailer for the film is a series of ‘in time representations in a between time structure’ – a series of snapshots assembled to give a certain meaning. The trailer will comprise clips taken out of sequence, and even clips which aren’t in the film itself. This, together with the voice-over, is designed to create an impression of the film – a meaning.

And the film itself? That’s the ‘through time’ representation.

So you can only really understand what the film is about by watching the film.

How is this relevant? Listen to anyone describe an emotional problem to you and they’ll give you something analogous to the movie trailer. It will have clips out of sequence, and it will have a voice over to explain what’s happening and how you are supposed to feel about it.

Listen to anyone in your business describe a complex issue and you’ll get a trailer. You’ll get a series of ‘relevant’ events, collapsed together into one. And the meaning of that is derived exactly from that sequence, so if a little editing is required to really underline the intended meaning then so be it.

And if you ask for a brief summary? You get the poster. And, of course, that contains exactly the information in exactly the sequence needed for the other person to convey the meaning they want to convey.

Sequence gives an experience meaning. It sounds almost ridiculous to say that, because it seems so obvious. You can only get a new job after you have applied for it. You can only feel bad about a meeting after you have been to it. Unless, of course, you can imagine it going badly beforehand.

Here’s the more interesting idea though; if you change the sequence, you change the meaning. And if you only imagine changing the sequence, you change the meaning too. Remember that the difference between imagination and reality is highly subjective and tenuous, assuming that there is any reality of course.

It seems odd at best, and a philosophical discussion at worst, to say that these words aren’t ‘out there’. They are in your head. The feeling of the book is in your head. The voice reading these words is in your head. The voice writing these words is in my head. And from your point of view, those positions are reversed. You can see the picture of me on the back cover, assuming that it is me and not a surgically enhanced stunt double, and you can imagine what I’m like. You can read intention into my words just as you read intention into emails and newspaper articles.

Remember back to our sensory filters – we delete, distort and generalise as a function of perception – they are not conscious processes. The meaning we end up with – the conclusion we jump to – is based on a very small amount of data.

The more we can recover the original ‘through time’ experience, the closer we’ll be to understanding it and, if necessary, changing it. Of course, we can’t change what actually happened, but we can edit a new trailer that changes the meaning. Take any film and edit it down and you can create a comedy, tragedy, documentary, anything you like. If you have ever been lulled into seeing ‘this summer’s hit comedy’ only to realise that the trailer was funnier than the film, then you’ll understand the power of editing.

Just imagine – if you could re-edit experiences in your life, what meaning would you choose to create?

[edit] Timeline techniques

The timeline concept in NLP is based on the exploration of a person’s sense of time as a means of changing the impact of past events or planning effectively for future events. Here are a few exercises that you can use yourself in exploring timelines.

[edit] Basic timeline - Exploring a goal

Imagine a line on the floor that represents time, with the future in front of you, and the past behind you. The point where you are standing is ‘now’.

Think about something you want to achieve and notice where it lies on the line – how far into the future it lies. It might be something quite ambitious, so you would like to achieve it but don’t yet know how to, or how difficult it might be.

Walk forwards until just before the goal. Notice how that feels.

Now step onto the goal itself, and notice how that feels. Finally, talk one more step so that the goal is completely achieved and notice how that feels.

Turn round and look back to the present moment, noticing all the milestones you passed on the way. Walk back to the present, taking with you everything useful you learned on the way so that the experience and knowledge can help you in the present.

When you get back to ‘now’, look towards the goal again. Has anything changed? Is it in the same place?

Of course, you didn’t really travel through time, your brain just thinks you did. If you’re keeping up with all this, you’ll know by now that this is the same thing, in terms of your sensory experience. And what else do you have to go on? As Groucho Marx said, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?”.

This is a very powerful technique for unlocking potential and exploring future possibilities. Here are a few more ways that you can use this technique.

[edit] Overcoming obstacles

There is something you want to achieve, and you know that there are many obstacles or barriers to overcome. Use the basic technique, stopping briefly as you get to each barrier before you step over it. When you reach the goal, turn round and look back through the obstacles you overcame or problems you solved. As you walk backwards through each barrier, be aware of anything you learn or notice.

[edit] Exploring decisions

There is a decision to be made, but you find it difficult to make because it has long term implications. Imagine you are standing at the branch point of a number of timelines – one for each choice. Explore each one, going way past the decision point and experiencing the long term implications of that choice before returning to the branch point.

Pay attention to any intuitive feelings you get whilst doing this. When you have explored all of the choices, take one step back and look at the time lines. Some may have disappeared, some may have moved. There’s a good chance that one will be in the centre, or will be prominent in some way.

[edit] The Undo button

There is a decision you made in the past that you’re not happy with. Turn round and face the past, looking back to that decision and noticing everything that has happened since then. Walk slowly back to the decision point, collecting up and taking with you everything that you have learned since then. When you reach the decision point, take one more step. Turn and face the future. With all of the experience you have brought back with you, what decision will you make? Move forward to the present, exploring the consequences of that decision. You might find that you still make the same decision!

Imagine that there is something you want to do in the future which involves work or effort now. It’s difficult to get motivated now for something that isn’t pressing, but you know that if you don’t put the work in, you will regret it. For example, going to the gym now to be fit for your holiday, or working hard now to pass an exam in the future.

[edit] Motivation

Start with the basic time line procedure. Picture, in the future, your goal in the way that you would achieve it if you put the effort in now. Walk up to the goal and stop just beyond it. Enjoy the feeling of having achieved that in the way that you wanted to. Return to the present.

Next, picture yourself in the future when you haven’t put the effort in – perhaps at the exam without having revised, at the presentation without having prepared or whatever. Walk forwards. There’s a good chance you will feel resistance, and a feeling of impending doom as you walk forwards. This is good, use it. Stop at the goal and take plenty of time to fully experience your sense of disappointment in yourself. Really regret not having made the effort! Now, grab hold of this feeling as you walk back to the present and stretch that awful feeling of regret all the way back to the present so that you can experience it now in relation to your daily planning and time management. Ultimately, you have to make time for good preparation. Until now, there were more pressing demands on your time, and you wouldn’t really devote much time and energy to this until it was too late. Well, this exercise makes it too late now!

Finally, imagine yourself in the present, making the time and effort to prepare well. Walk forward slowly, thinking about your daily and weekly routine and finding time to do the work you need to do. Continue doing this all the way up to the goal and notice how good it feels – both to have achieved the goal and to know that you made the effort and commitment necessary. Take this feeling and stretch it back to the present, pulling back that good motivating feeling and bringing it back with you so that you have it now.

[edit] Super goals

Ask your partner if he/she has a goal or dream for the future.

Walk to a position in time when they have achieved this goal and let them enjoy how that feels.

Walk a little further and think about where that takes them. What has their goal become? Ask your partner how that feels.

Walk to a time long past the time they first achieved their goal. Ask your partner how that feels. Ask your partner what person they have become with all this experience.

Walk slowly back to the present day, collecting up all the useful experience and learning, bringing it all back and integrating it into the present day. Has their original goal changed?

[edit] What if?

There is a scenario that you would like to explore, tentatively. Use the basic time line procedure, but this time, do not bring the learning and experience back with you – leave it in the future as you explore each possibility. Step off the timeline as you walk back to the present.

Walk along different timelines to explore all the options you have before deciding, in the present, which is the best long term option.

[edit] Relationships to time

So, how do timelines correlate to behaviour?

First of all, think about the following questions and write down your answers somewhere.

1. Instinctively, point to the future. Where is it?

2. Instinctively, point to the past. Where is it?

3. Instinctively, point to ‘now’. Where is it?

4. Is ‘now’ inside you or outside?

5. How long is ‘now’?

6. Is ‘now’ in the past, present or future?

7. How fast is time moving?

8. How far into the future can you see, if at all?

9. How far into the past can you see, if at all?

Here are a few examples, and when you’ve read through them, consider the relationship between your own timeline and behaviour.

These all came from real people. As opposed to people who I have imagined.

Timeline	Behaviour
Future to the front, past behind.	Motivated by deadlines, long term planning tends to be obscured by short term needs. The past is gone and lessons from past experiences are not learned easily.
Future to the right, past to the left.	Deadlines have no strong meaning, the location of ‘now’ is relative. Good at connecting events that span long periods of time or planning long term projects.
Future to the front, past inside.	Good at planning to deadlines but unable to recover specific detail from memories. Envious of people who had visual recall of past events.
Future to the right, past to the left with the line passing behind head where it splits in two. Images are on a branch that comes round to the front, sounds continue behind.	Easy going regarding deadlines. Envious of people who can recall conversations, could recall images easily but no sounds.
Future to the front, ‘now’ is in a large black ball off to one side	Works well with long term goals but has a great deal of difficulty focussing on current tasks and is easily distracted.
No future, past behind.	Highly responsive to the current situation, lives ‘in the moment’. Doesn’t easily learn from past mistakes. No plans for the future.
Future way off in the distance, present out in front, past begins in front and passes through body	No sense of urgency! Goals more than 24 hours away are so far that they’re not important, and as soon as a goal gets close enough to worry about, it’s already in the past and might as well be ignored as it’s too late to do anything about it.

It’s not useful to look at timelines and say, “the person behaves a certain way because of their timeline”. Instead, think of the timeline as a graphical representation of their subjective sense of time, just as your computer screen is a graphical representation of the digital information stored on your computer’s hard disc.

On your computer, when you drag an image of a file on the screen, the information on the hard disc changes accordingly. Similarly, when something changes on the hard disc, the image changes.

This turns out to be a very useful metaphor for the timeline, because we can manipulate a timeline and bring about instant changes in a person’s sense of time.

As we do not have a direct sense of time, we perceive the passage of time through our other senses. When we change the image of the timeline, we are changing our perception of time, so by directly manipulating a person’s timeline, you can change their response to time related events such as deadlines and goals.

By changing the sequence of events, we can change their meaning. Something as simple as talking through an unpleasant experience from end to start is often enough to jumble up the meaning. People get so used to running through their carefully scripted problems that it never occurs to them that those experiences could be anything else.

We play out future scenarios too. We say that, because something went badly in the past, something similar will go badly in the future. The two are unrelated. The past doesn’t predict the future any more than the contents of my fridge predict the winner of the next World Cup. As investment fund managers tell us, past results do not guarantee future performance.

Our rule-making minds like to predict future events to give us a feeling of certainty, that feeling that you know what’s going to happen. That smug feeling of ‘I told you so’ even when things go wrong.

What would you rather have? A ‘told you so’ excuse for when things turn out as badly as you had imagined, or to have things turn out as wonderfully as you had imagined?

[edit] Future pacing

Future pacing is an important way of reinforcing new behaviours, and also checking to make sure that they are congruent over time and in different situations. It’s a very simple technique where you give a commentary of a situation that is in the future and you talk about it as if it’s happening now, whilst checking for any signs of incongruence.

For example, at some point you might put this book down for a while and ponder on some of the ideas you’ve read about. You might go back to previous chapters, or you might carry on through, as the ideas begin to work their way into your unconscious, helping you to apply NLP easily in whatever business situations you find yourself in.

[edit] Coaching tools

SORT

Until you have rapport, there is no point launching into techniques. In an environment were we are practicing a number of techniques, it is easy to focus on them and to dive right in once you think you know the ‘right’ technique to use.

Here’s a simple way to remember how to engage with a client:

SORT

So if you want to SORT a client’s problem out, remember, If you only have ten seconds with a client, get them into a resourceful State. If you have thirty seconds, get them to set an Outcome. If you have a minute, check for Rapport. Only when you have done those things can you even think about doing a Technique.

Or, to think about it another way, you need to have your State right before you set an Outcome, and only then get into Rapport, and only when you have those three do you go anywhere near a Technique.

State
Outcome
Rapport
Technique

[edit] Problem solving

In this exercise, you have to trust yourself to know the answer before your client does – that doesn’t mean that you know better than them, because you won’t be giving them that kind of advice. Wait and see.

1. Describe the problem

Have your partner tell you about a current, real problem they have. It can be anything, big or small, the only rule being that that they feel some emotional connection to it – maybe frustration, disappointment, confusion, guilt, anger, curiosity, whatever.

You may want to get your notepad and right now, think of a problem you currently have and make a note of it. It can be anything at all – whatever you have in mind write now.

As they tell you about it I want you to ignore their words completely. I know that, as nosey human beings, we like to get tied up in the content, offer suggestions, fix people’s problems and so on. Irritating, when people do that to you instead of listening, isn’t it! I want you to completely ignore their words and instead focus on only three things, and I want you to notice what they do when they talk about a particular aspect of the problem, or experience a particular emotional state. What I want you to pay attention to is:

Their voice tone Where they look What they do with their hands

DO NOT interact in any way other than to show you are listening and interested. Do not ask any questions at this point.

When you’re done, stay with your partner for the second part of the exercise.

I couldn’t pay attention to all 3 aspects, only 1 or 2 I noticed how every time my partner said x he did y I found it hard not listen to content He looked around a lot She moved her hands a lot His voice tone changed when he talked about feelings

2. Play back the problem

Play back your partner’s problem, concentrating on using the exact voice tone they used, looking where they looked (as if they were looking at something real) and moving your hands in the same way. If they showed you a direction, or an obstacle, or a picture, just reflect that back. You don’t have to understand what it means, you’re just respecting the fact that it means something to them. Don’t try to understand or summarise the problem yet.

Each take a turn to do that, and again you only need a couple of minutes each. I felt like my partner was really listening I felt comfortable with my partner I felt that my partner really understood me I was surprised that I do all of that when I talk My partner was very perceptive

What you have done by noticing your partner’s voice tone, eye movements and gestures is pick up on the key non verbal communication channels. You have started to focus on the 93% of communication where someone’s true beliefs, reactions and intentions are communicated.

3. Ask questions

I think it’s a bit unfair that we should spend time exploring your problems and not let you solve them, so the final thing we’re going to do is solve a problem only by asking questions about it. Remember, it’s not your problem so it’s not your responsibility to solve it. All you need to do is change your partner’s perspective of the problem.

The only rule is that you are only allowed to ask questions that you’ll find in The Unsticker (a few pages on from here).

These questions work in a particular way, changing your partner’s perception of the problem. Since they’re carrying around a representation, a model, of the problem in their heads, when their perception changes, the model changes and when the model changes, the problem changes. It doesn’t matter if you ask the same question more than once, you will get a different answer each time.

You have 10 minutes each for this – and if you solve the problem with the first question, just move on, don’t be tempted to dwell on it for the sake of it. Remember to ask these questions gently, as if you really care about the person’s problem, and as if you know that they already know how to solve it, they just haven’t realised it yet.

It really helped me to think through the problem It helped me to find my own solution It changed my perspective of the problem I feel differently about the problem

4. Intuition

I want you to use only your intuition for this. I know you have a strong intuition, and I know how aware you are of what happens when you trust it, and what happens when you don’t. With your partner, I want you to simply trust your intuition.

Don’t rationalise it, don’t explain it, don’t find reasons for it.

Just tell your partner what you feel their problem is really all about, and give them one single piece of advice.

Don’t sit there and analyse it. Don’t worry about whether it is right or wrong. It doesn’t have to make any sense. You don’t have to explain it. Just say what you feel is right.

The summary was absolutely spot on My partner discovered something really important that I hadn’t even mentioned The suggestion was really accurate My partner told me what I already knew I had to do He used the exact words that I have been secretly saying to myself

You see, the 93% and 7% don’t just work in the way we communicate outwards – they also apply to the way we take information in. What you have just done, by trusting your intuition, is allowed yourself access to more of your brain than just by focusing analytically. So if you really want to pay attention to someone, stop listening and allow yourself to really hear.

Instead of hearing just 7% of your client’s communication, through their words, we have started to focus on 100% of their communication. It’s in that hidden 93% that what they are really trying to tell you, what they already know, is conveyed. By paying attention to that, you will learn more about what is really important to them, and that creates greater empathy and strengthens the connection between you. That strong connection allows you to ask questions that normally you wouldn’t get away with, and those questions help you to change the person’s perception. Changing the other person’s perceptions is the basis for changing their opinions, needs and beliefs, and that is the basis for creating a very powerful relationship.

[edit] The sorter

In pairs, interview your partner to learn about a problem or other situation they would like to explore. Your intention is to help them resolve it. As your partner talks about the situation, notice key words or phrases that they mark out with gestures, state shifts or voice tone changes. Write these words and phrases down verbatim. If you can’t, ask your partner to summarise a particular point with a word or phrase that fits.

Now give the cards to your partner and ask them to sort out and organise the cards. They can do anything they want with the cards in order to organise them in a way that makes sense to them. Do not intervene at this point – just watch and notice what happens.

When they have laid out all of the cards, you can begin to ask questions about the structure and pattern of the cards. Notice any asymmetries, anything that stands out, anything that seems interesting. Ignore what is written on the cards, just look at the shapes and patterns. As you question the pattern, you may find that your partner wants to make changes. Ask them if any cards are missing, or if there are any that do not belong in the shape, and make any necessary changes. Keep going until the pattern resolves into something new, often a very specific and relevant symbol, that marks a shift in your partner’s thinking.

Change Magic

[edit] The Unsticker

When you have a problem to solve or you feel stuck or indecisive, you can use the world famous Unsticker.

It will make a difference if you get someone else to do the asking, so that you can concentrate fully on your answers. When you’re doing the asking, remember that the answers are not important to you, they’re only important to the person with the problem.

It’s very important that you choose questions randomly rather than looking through the list and picking a ‘good’ question. Picking a ‘good’ question means you’ve found one that fits inside the problem, so it won’t help you. Do not look at the questions – just choose a number between 1 and 200 and then turn to that question. Then ask away, and see how quickly the problem changes.

1 How do you know that this is a problem for you?

2 What would you be doing now if things were different?

3 Think of someone you know who you trust. What would they do?

4 Think of someone you know who you love. What would they do?

5 Think of someone you know who you respect. What would they do?

6 Think of someone you know who you hate. What would they do?

7 Think of someone you know who you distrust. What would they do?

8 Think of someone you know who you envy. What would they do?

9 When do you want this to change?

10 Do you need anyone else to do this for you?

11 Is this a problem that you need?

12 Do you need this problem?

13 Imagine it’s a year from now. How has the problem changed?

14 Imagine it’s a day from now. How has the problem changed?

15 Imagine it’s a week from now. How has the problem changed?

16 Imagine it’s a month from now. How has the problem changed?

17 Imagine it’s ten years from now. How has the problem changed?

18 Was this a problem a day ago?

19 Was this a problem a week ago?

20 Was this a problem a month ago?

21 Was this a problem a year ago?

22 Was this a problem ten years ago?

23 How is this a problem right now?

24 When did you first start to think this way?

25 When did you first start to realise this?

26 When did you first know about this?

27 When did you first find out about this?

28 When did you last think about this?

29 When did you last worry about this?

30 What has been the turning point for this problem?

31 What do you want to happen?

32 What do you want most of all?

33 Why?

34 How?

35 When?

36 Where?

37 Who?

38 What?

39 What if?

40 So what?

41 What would happen if you simply forgot all about this, right now?

42 What would happen if this just slipped your mind?

43 What would happen if you did?

44 What would happen if you didn’t?

45 What wouldn’t happen if you did?

46 What wouldn’t happen if you didn’t?

47 Why don’t you?

48 Why are you?

49 What extra resource or skill would make the biggest difference to you, right now?

50 Why bother?

51 Do you remember that time you were really creative?

52 Do you remember that time you laughed until you cried?

53 Do you remember that time you got into so much trouble?

54 Shall we just go for a drink instead?

55 Why not sleep on it?

56 Who cares enough about the outcome of this to help you?

57 Who stands to gain if you solve this?

58 Who cares enough about you to help you?

59 What needs to happen for this problem to disappear?

60 If the fairies came and took this problem away, what would you spend the 10p on?

61 Do you secretly enjoy having this problem?

62 Will you miss having this problem around?

63 How does this problem help you?

64 What does this problem do for you?

65 How does this problem benefit you?

66 If the Change Magician could grant you one wish, what would it be?

67 When you have solved this problem, what will you do with all that spare time?

68 How could you make money out of this problem?

69 How could this problem benefit someone else?

70 If you had a voodoo doll, who would you give this problem to?

71 When you look back on this problem, what will make you laugh most?

72 As you see yourself with this problem, what strikes you as odd?

73 As you see yourself with this problem, what strikes you as curious?

74 As you see yourself with this problem, what strikes you as funny?

75 As you see yourself with this problem, what strikes you as interesting?

76 As you see yourself with this problem, what strikes you as sad?

77 As you see yourself with this problem, what makes you smile?

78 As you see yourself with this problem, what do you notice first?

79 What colour is this problem?

80 What shape is this problem?

81 What size is this problem?

82 What does this problem smell like?

83 What does this problem taste like?

84 What does this problem sound like?

85 If this problem were a car, what car would it be?

86 If this problem were a shop, what shop would it be?

87 If this problem were a fruit, what fruit would it be?

88 If this problem were a vegetable, what vegetable would it be?

89 If this problem were a musical instrument, what instrument would it be?

90 If this problem were a piece of music, what music would it be?

91 What did you do differently last time?

92 What will you do differently next time?

93 Where would this problem be without you?

94 If you won this problem in a raffle, would you give it back?

95 If your child brought this problem home from school and said “look what I made!” would you pretend to like it?

96 What would be the best question for me to ask you now?

97 What would be the worst question for me to ask you now?

98 What would be the most useful question for me to ask you now?

99 What would be the most helpful question for me to ask you now?

100 If this problem were a person, where would you hit him/her?

101 If you found a wallet with this problem in it, would you hand it in to the police?

102 If you came home from shopping and found that the shop hadn’t charged you for this problem, would you own up?

103 If you saw this problem in trouble, would you help it?

104 If this problem was a bug, would you squash it or put it outside?

105 In years to come, will you be glad that you had this problem?

106 After you’ve solved this problem, what will you do next?

107 After you’ve solved this problem, what will be the next one?

108 After you’ve solved this problem, who will you celebrate with?

109 After you’ve solved this problem, will you miss it?

110 Can you think of a single good reason to keep this problem?

111 When will you have solved this problem yet?

112 What will be the best thing about having had this problem?

113 How will having had this problem have changed you?

114 How will having had this problem have helped you?

115 How will having had this problem have improved you?

116 How will having had this problem help you grow?

117 How will having had this problem help you develop?

118 What would you do if things weren’t the same?

119 What wouldn’t you do?

120 What can’t you do?

121 What mustn’t you do?

122 What won’t you do?

123 What wouldn’t you do?

124 What shouldn’t you do?

125 What would you do?

126 What can you do?

127 What must you do?

128 What will you do?

129 What should you do?

130 Who can you depend on?

131 Who can you trust?

132 Who can you rely on?

133 Who can you turn to?

134 Who else does this involve?

135 Who else knows about this?

136 Who else is concerned about this?

137 How do you know?

138 How do you know you’re right?

139 What if you were wrong about this?

140 What if this was really someone else’s problem?

141 Are you certain this is your problem?

142 What’s the one thing you would like most of all, right now?

143 What gives you the right to have this problem?

144 What have you done to earn this problem?

145 What makes you so lucky that you could have a problem like this?

146 What is this problem a sign of?

147 What is this problem a symptom of?

148 What does this problem demonstrate?

149 What does this problem prove?

150 What does this problem symbolise?

151 What does this problem signify?

152 What does this problem show?

153 What does this problem mean?

154 If this problem went away right now, what would you do with all that free time?

155 Is this problem really a symptom?

156 Are you worrying about the right problem?

157 Is there something more important beneath this?

158 Is someone up there trying to tell you something?

159 Erm...

160 Umm...

161 Aahh...

162 Erm... now you’ve got me stuck

163 Hmmmmmmmmm……. That’s interesting

164 Let me think about that one for a moment...

165 Oooh...that’s a good one...

166 Oh, that’s good. Let me write it down...

167 I’m not quite sure I understand. Can you think that a different way?

168 I’m not quite sure I understand. Can you think that from a different perspective?

169 I want to make sure I understand...can you think that from someone else’s point of view?

170 I want to make sure I understand you...what is it that you want to happen?

171 I want to make sure I understand you...what is it that you don’t want to happen?

172 A travelling salesman tries to sell you this problem. Do you buy it?

173 A travelling salesman throws this problem on the floor to demonstrate a new vacuum cleaner. Do you buy the vacuum cleaner?

174 Imagine your best friend has this problem. What is your advice to them?

175 Imagine your child has this problem. What is your advice to them?

176 Imagine a close colleague has this problem. What is your advice to them?

177 Imagine your favourite school teacher has this problem. What is your advice to them?

178 Imagine your favourite actor/actress has this problem. What is your advice to them?

179 Imagine your favourite cartoon character has this problem. What is your advice to them?

180 Imagine your parent has this problem. What is your advice to them?

181 Imagine I could wave a magic wand and make this problem go away, would you miss it?

182 Stop…. And think for just a moment

183 What kind of cake could solve this problem?

184 What kind of animal could solve this problem?

185 What kind of rock could forget this problem?

186 What kind of car could run over this problem?

187 How fast is this problem?

188 How slow is this problem?

189 How heavy is this problem?

190 How light is this problem?

191 How shiny is this problem?

192 As you look back on this, which question was the one that really helped you most?

193 As you look back on this, which question was the hardest to answer?

194 As you look back on this, which question made you smile the most?

195 Which part of this problem is the most furry?

196 Which part of this problem is the most spiky?

197 Which part of this problem is the most ticklish?

198 Imagine you bought a new pair of trousers and found this problem in the pocket. Would you tell the shopkeeper?

199 Are you secretly in love with this problem?

200 How does it feel to know you can laugh about this?

The Unsticker is © Peter Freeth 2003 and may not be reproduced without permission. The Unsticker can be found in the books Six Questions, ISBN 0954574818, and The Unsticker, ISBN 0954574850 and also online at www.changemagic.com and www.theunsticker.com

[edit] Modelling

Modelling is a very important part of NLP. It is the basis for all of the techniques, because they were modelled from the minds of people who were very good at helping other people to change. Therefore, the techniques are not NLP in themselves – they are the results of NLP.

I mentioned this right at the start of the book and it’s so important I’ll say it again. I’m also very pleased with my art metaphor, so I’m looking for an excuse to tell you about it again.

Many people confuse NLP with its techniques – including many trainers I’ve seen. People who confuse NLP with its tools and techniques reduce NLP down to eye accessing and body language (which it isn’t) and when they see NLP in action they say, “oh, that’s just NLP”. NLP is everything or nothing, depending on how you look at it, because NLP is the spirit of modelling excellence.

I’ve heard lots of people say, “I know NLP” because they’ve read a book and they think they understand the techniques. I’ve even heard HR managers in companies say, “Oh, we did NLP last year”.

NLP is the process of developing evolving models of excellence. Can you honestly say you have reached a point where you can stop developing excellence in your business?

It’s a bit like saying that art is just paintbrushes, or architecture is just bricks. The tools you will learn on a course, or read about in a book, are the results of NLP – they do not define NLP itself. A good NLP Practitioner will go on to model excellence in other people and create new tools in new situations. Someone who has not embraced this spirit of modelling excellence will use the tools in a prescriptive, inflexible way and – guess what? – sometimes they will work and sometimes they wont. People with the flexibility to model excellence and create new tools just keep on going until the problem is solved, and usually it doesn’t look like they’re doing anything at all.

In order to understand and apply NLP effectively, you really do need to understand the concept of modelling. People who just take NLP as its techniques find that those techniques work some of the time. By modelling the problem first, you’ll find that the techniques work first time, every time.

If we take the fast phobia cure as an example, if you use it with ten people who have a phobia, you might find it works with half of them. This doesn’t mean that the technique is only effective 50% of the time – it means that half of the people you used it with did not have a phobia. A common example is ‘fear of flying’. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that no-one is afraid of flying. Not a single person in the whole world is afraid of flying. There are, however, a lot of people who are afraid of crashing. There is no point doing a fast phobia cure on something like this because it is not a phobic response. A fear of crashing takes a great deal of imagination, and so the first step is to find out how the problem works by modelling it so that you can choose or create an appropriate technique.

In the world of electronics, there are good engineers and there are average engineers. The average engineers will fix a problem by replacing all the components until they find the one that was causing the problem. A good engineer will locate the problem first before changing the faulty component.

Good engineers observe behaviour closely. They know how a piece of equipment behaves when it is working normally, so they know where to start looking when it does not behave normally. Average engineers do not observe behaviour in the same way.

When I was an engineer, I learned to observe behaviour, because it was the only way to fix complex problems. If you don’t know what the equipment does when it’s working properly, how can you know what is wrong with it when it isn’t working properly?

I find that this simple diagnostic approach is what is missing for the majority of therapists, consultants and coaches.

Psychologists study mental illnesses so that they can learn more about them. Unless you also study people without the illnesses, that information is useless. Schizophrenics, for example, can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined (whatever reality is). Unless we figure out how average people can tell the difference, we can’t help the schizophrenics.

Far too many coaches are being taught prescriptive, off the shelf processes which do not benefit clients, because the client is not in the exact situation that the coaching tools were designed for.

If you want to improve the performance of a sales team, it’s no use focusing on the under-performers. We need to figure out what the over-performers are doing first. NLP modelling is automatically systemic and ecological. By modelling a successful sales person, we can understand the mindset that works for that team, in that company, in that market, with those products and those customers. Therefore, by teaching that mindset to other sales people in the same team, we have an instantly workable process.

You are an expert. Anything that you can do really well without having to think about it is a talent. Maybe you’ve had the experience of watching someone do something amazing and asking them, “how did you do that?” to which they reply, “erm…I just did it. Doesn’t everyone do it?”

Many people assume that this means the behavioural knowledge required to perform a complex task is locked away and is irretrievable. We get a glimpse of the knowledge through observing behaviour, but there is no way to extract the knowledge itself. Other people went on to guess at the behavioural programming, based on their observations. They made one key mistake - they tried to guess ‘why’ the individual behaved that way instead of asking ‘how’. ‘Why’ is irrelevant. If I want to copy your talent for writing music, or sticking to a diet, or remember people’s names at a party, I don’t need to know why you do it. I just need to know how, so I can learn to do it.

Traditional ‘body language’ is an example of this, where a particular movement ‘means’ something specific such as arrogance or fear. Body movement is not a language in itself, it’s a component of communication. The effects of ‘body language’ training are still with us today, lingering on in presentation skills courses that teach people how to stand so that they look confident. Isn’t it better just to be confident, and let your body naturally communicate that?

The originators of NLP, John Grinder and Richard Bandler, decided that the behavioural psychologists were missing something important. Traditional therapy involved the students of a particular technique copying everything that its originator did. When they failed to get the same results as the guru, the obvious explanation was that there was something wrong with the client, or that the client was not ready to change.

This attitude to modelling – that to achieve the same result as someone else, you must copy everything they do – still lives on today in many ways. Good sales people become sales trainers, passing their wisdom onto new generations. Unfortunately, they often only teach what worked for them, with different customers in the past.

What Bandler and Grinder wanted to find out was the ‘difference that makes the difference’. In modelling the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, they wanted to discover what he did that achieved consistent results, and those techniques in turn provided an insight into the workings of the human mind.

Bandler and Grinder were first interested in excellent communicators in the field of personal change, so they went to talk to some of the most outstanding therapists at the time. They found that these people had certain things in common to do with they way that they communicated. By exploring these similarities, a model was developed of the way these people used language to influence patterns of thought and behaviour.

So, techniques such as anchoring and reframing are NLP applied. They are not strictly NLP itself. NLP is the process by which we extracted those techniques from the minds of real people.

Modelling is as much a mindset of curiosity as an explicit set of tools that you must use as prescribed. This mindset will help you to learn interesting things from experts, from people you admire and from yourself.

You probably already know about learning styles. What are you? Have you done one of those online tests that tell you how you learn? Well, I suspect you already know how you learn. As Harry Hill said, “you can tell a lot about people from what they’re like”.

As with all ‘personality tests’, they’re not true. They represent a way of thinking about and categorising a certain type of behaviour. If there were four learning types, you would see people everywhere fitting neatly into the four types. If there were eight, you would see… well you get the idea. Personality types are a filter through which you can view the people of the world. They are not true, in and of themselves because there are only two types of people in the world - those who think that there are two types of people in the world and those who don’t.

When you watch your colleagues, clients, managers and friends, you will notice that they do certain things in a certain order. You will be able to watch the process by which they individually behave in order to achieve their goals.

There are a number of hallmarks of a talent that seem to be consistent:

The person is able to get consistent results without having to think about the process or even being aware of it

When asked, the person is a little surprised that the skill is worth modelling. They will often deny they are good at the task and will be surprised that everyone doesn’t do it.

When you first ask, “how do you do it?” they answer, “I don’t know - I just do it”

There are many ways you can approach the modelling process itself, so here are a few ideas that you can use.

[edit] General hints

You’ll find that the majority of valuable information that you get from your modelling subject will come when you’re paying the least attention to them. It’s a very good idea to record the conversation and listen to it several times to glean every last piece of content.

Many people have said that the most valuable information came out after the interview had finished and they were ‘just chatting’, so that should tell you something about the style of interview that gets the most response from the subject!

You should aim to interview your subject somewhere that they feel comfortable, and preferably somewhere they would naturally use the skill that you’re modelling so that they have easy access to it.

You may want to use the technique that Michael Parkinson uses when he interviews guests on TV. If you watch, you’ll notice that he gets his guest fully associated into a past memory before he starts asking questions, and in doing so he gets a greater depth of emotional response than other interviewers.

Just remember to spend a few moments getting your subject into a state where they are fully associated with the skill you want to model. You’ll find that the whole process is then much easier.

And finally, remember to thank your subject and to share the results with them afterwards.

[edit] NLP modelling

Strictly speaking, NLP modelling follows a particular format. The first step is “unconscious uptake” in which the modeller emulates everything that the role model does. At this stage, the modeller does not reject any behaviour, no matter how seemingly irrelevant. The test of this is that the modeller can get the same or similar results to the role model when in the same context.

The second step is the to code the behaviour and to remove redundant elements so that what is left is a simple process that can be taught and reproduced at will.

In practice, most people today would begin filtering the information to be assimilated at the uptake stage, for example ignoring the role model’s nail biting or poor dress sense. In the strictest application of NLP modelling, we don’t know if those are relevant or not, so we copy everything that can be observed.

[edit] Success Factor Modelling

Robert Dilts is probably the most well known and prolific modeller, having modelled people such as Walt Disney and Albert Einstein and produced models of generic skills such as leadership and creativity. His approach is not NLP modelling as it’s very hard to emulate someone who is dead. However, the work he produces does give us some fascinating insights into complex behaviours and is a useful complement to NLP modelling.

Dilts’ Success Factor Modelling approach requires that you find a number of people who appear to share a common skill or talent. The whole modelling process is as follows:

Interview the individual
Interview the people they work with or relate to
Watch them in their normal environment to confirm the model
Check the model against their peers to benchmark their performance
Check the model against your own peers to check current research or thinking
Check the model against the individual or organisation’s vision - their stated future direction
Check the model against the individual or organisation’s past - their legacy or habits
From all of these separate models you can then refine a model of the specific skill that can be used by anyone to achieve the same results.

[edit] Strategy elicitation and the TOTE model

A strategy is a specific sequence of steps that are necessary to perform a particular task. Simply, you take your subject through the skill, step by step, until you have built up a detailed map of the behaviour. For example, a skill for goal setting might break down into:

1. Visual construct of desired outcome 2. Kinaesthetic check for congruence of outcome 3. Visual recall of current situation 4. Visual construct of steps required to reach outcome 5. Kinaesthetic check for congruence of outcome

In other words, the person imagines what they would like to have, feels good about it, imagines the steps they need to take and, if it feels right, they do it.

The TOTE model adds an extra layer of formality to the basic strategy in that it adds criteria for starting the strategy and ending it. TOTE stands for Test Operate Test Exit, so to the above example it adds “how do you know when you want something?” and “how do you know when you’ve got it?”

You may also find that your subject has very specific criteria for the Test and Exit stages, for example someone who is scared of public speaking may know to get scared if there are more than 3 people in the audience. If there are fewer than 3, it doesn’t count as a presentation so the ‘get scared’ strategy doesn’t run (the Operate part). This can be a very useful change tool - shifting the criteria so that the problem strategy no longer runs.

[edit] The logical levels approach

Simply use a logical levels hierarchy as a structure for asking questions, so that you guide your interviewee through a sequence of thoughts and experiences. This approach works well for skills that are very broad such as ‘leadership’ or ‘conflict resolution’ as you can start at a very abstract level and gradually work down until you get to the specific strategies that drive the ability.

Environment: Where and when do you do this?; What is your state when you do this?
Behaviours: What specifically do you do?; How could you teach me to do this?; Do you set any specific outcomes when you do this?; How do you know when you’ve achieved them?
Capabilities: What skills do you have that enable you to do this?; How did you learn how to do this?
Beliefs: What do you believe about yourself when you do this?; How do you know that you’re good at this?
Identity: Do you have a mission or vision when you’re doing this?; What are you trying to achieve when you do this?; Who are you when you do this?

Remember to check you have a good level of rapport before you start - you may find it useful to frame the meeting with a statement such as, “When I’ve modelled successful people in the past, I’ve found the questions I’m about to ask really useful - if they don’t make sense, that’s fine - just use them as a guide to say what comes into your mind. If I ask similar sounding questions, it’s to give you a chance to build on what you’ve said already”

[edit] The curious approach

This one’s easy, yet less structured than the other examples. You simply adopt a highly curious state and ask questions like, “Wow! That’s amazing, how do you so that?” or, “Can you teach me how to do that?” Just explore the talent or skill freely and copy what your subject does, asking them to help coach you into the right state.

This approach also incorporates behavioural modelling in which you allow yourself to copy someone else’s behaviour without consciously processing it. It’s an excellent way to learn physical activities such as dance steps or martial arts moves.

You actually have a part of your brain that has the job of behavioural modelling. If you take a moment to get into rapport with the person you want to model, just imagine that your body is under their remote control. Don’t look at specific movements, just defocus slightly and take in their whole body at once. You’ll be able to copy the moves very successfully very quickly but if someone asks you how to do it, you might say, “I don’t know, I just do it!”

Overall, modelling with NLP is an extremely valuable skill to develop. Often, when helping someone change something or solve a problem, just modelling the undesired behaviour will change it for the better. Perhaps this is as a result of bringing unconscious aspects of the behaviour to their conscious attention, perhaps it’s as a result of reframing the behaviour as a talent rather than a problem. All I can say for certain is that it is a vital part of any coaching process that I undertake with a client.

Another important application of NLP modelling in business is talent management, or the replicating of talents within a team or organisation.

Most teams and organisations have a handful of ‘star performers’ who effortlessly excel – in sales, customer service, design, management, leadership or any area of a business where intuitive skills rather than business processes play an important part in an individual’s performance. In other words, that applies to every area of every business!

By modelling your star performers, you can find out how they are able to achieve the results that they get. You can then help them to refine their own talent and you can also teach it to everyone else as a behavioural model for excellence.

By using this NLP modelling approach, you take a fundamental behavioural model that is already working in your organisation with your customers and your staff and you share it with everyone in that team. Perhaps you even share it between teams, for example transferring a model for customer service from your technical support team to your sales team.

Your organisation is already a proving ground for excellence, and you currently measure it through sales management, appraisals and pay rises. By adding the essential tools and principles of NLP modelling to this, you can accelerate the rate at which intuitive best practice develops in your business and benefits your customers.

[edit] The presuppositions of NLP

When Bandler and Grinder first modelled people like Erickson and Satir, they found that they had certain beliefs about their clients – beliefs that seemed to make it easier for the client to change.

In the context of NLP training, some trainers, regard the presuppositions as the ‘rules’ of NLP that you must learn by heart. My view is that they are like any other belief – useful, if they help you to achieve an outcome more easily. Therefore, think of the presuppositions as ‘useful concepts to believe if you want to help someone to change easily’.

As usual, don’t presume everyone wants to change.

The original language of the presuppositions was devised about 30 years ago in California, so it seems a little strange today, to say the least. Although you might see other versions and even other presuppositions elsewhere, these are the original ones as they were originally worded by Bandler and Grinder.

I’ll translate each one into something that may be easier to understand, and I’ve given examples where I can of the impact that each belief can have. My translations are neither true not complete, they’re just my translations. You might add your own to make them more complete for you.

The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality.

It’s easier and more useful to change your perception of the world than it is to change the world – especially when the problem is something that has already happened.

The meaning of the communication is the response you get.

Judge the effectiveness of your communication by what other people do, rather than what you think you say.

All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behaviour can be usefully represented through the visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses.

Everything that is in your head has a picture, sound, feeling, smell and taste – including abstract things like ‘happiness’, ‘professionalism’ and ‘work’.

The resources an individual needs in order to effect a change are already within them.

You already have everything that you need to get everything that you want, so the job of the NLP Practitioner is to help you access those resources easily.

The map is not the territory.

The representation that you hold of the ‘real world’ is a map, not the world itself, where any experience is deleted, distorted and generalised differently than other people’s. Disagreements show us that we are looking at different maps of the same territory.

The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal and/or external behaviour is questioned.

Your value as a human being cannot be determined by your behaviour, which only represents part of your rich and varied capabilities applied in a variety of contexts.

There is a positive intention motivating every behaviour, and a context in which every behaviour has value.

Your behaviour is motivated by your desire to have or get something useful for you, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any behaviour, there’s just a time and a place for it.

Feedback vs. Failure - All results and behaviours are achievements, whether they are desired outcomes for a given task/context, or not.

Some people translate this into ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. In fact, I would add that there is no success either. Failure and success are judgements made against an imagined outcome. The important thing is that you take action and notice what happens.

So what’s the point of the presuppositions if they’re not rules? Well, they happened to be the beliefs of people who were good at helping others change. So, if you want to help someone change, it is more useful to believe they can than they can’t. Your beliefs shape your behaviour, so if you believe someone can achieve something by themselves, you might offer them support whereas if you don’t think they have got what it takes then you might give them advice or tell them what they’re doing wrong.

I would personally always choose a coach with the right attitude and beliefs over one with all the tools and techniques.

Think back to a time in your life when you were influenced by someone who you learned something from – perhaps a teacher, driving instructor or manager. Think of an example where a person’s confidence in you made it easier for you to be successful, and think of an example where someone’s lack of confidence in you meant you performed less well. You might also think of a time when you succeeded despite what someone else thought because of the belief you had in yourself.

So you can see that what you believe about a situation or a person will greatly influence your outcome. If your outcome is to help them change, the NLP presuppositions will be useful to you. What other outcomes do you often aim for, and what would be useful beliefs?

Let’s take a common example – public speaking – and think about some useful and not so useful beliefs.

First, here are some unhelpful beliefs that are fairly common in business:

I need to be an expert before I can be confident
The audience are judging me as a presenter
Presentations always make me nervous

And here are some more useful versions of those beliefs:

I don’t need to be an expert, I’m simply offering the audience my perspective on the subject
The audience may or may not be judging me, as they are more interested in the subject matter than in me
Presentations raise my energy level, and it’s good to be a little nervous because over-confidence isn’t helpful

Some people think that their beliefs are fixed and can’t be changed at will. In fact, belief change is one of the easiest things to achieve with NLP and is often the best place to start. If you think back to logical levels, it is often easier to start by changing at the belief level than it is to change at the environment or behaviour level.

By helping someone adopt more useful beliefs for public speaking, you don’t need to worry about changing their behaviour or propping them up with scripts or tricks which in the end, only give them even more to worry about.

A simple example is the Managing Director of an event management company who was quite a nervous presenter. It turned out that, when he welcomes the audience at the beginning of the conference, he doesn’t think he has anything useful to tell the audience, so he doubts himself and becomes nervous.

Imagine you have just spent tens of thousands of pounds on a conference or corporate event. When the room goes quiet and the MD of the event company stands up to welcome everyone and outline the day, do you think that’s of no interest to the audience? I think it’s the most important presentation of the whole day! It sets the tone, gets the audience excited and lets the client know that the money was very well spent! Simply by changing that belief, all of the behaviour resolved itself.

I mentioned earlier that it’s often useful to change a problem’s criteria for operating rather than trying to tackle the problem itself, and this is a perfect example. He is still capable of getting nervous, he just doesn’t need to run that behavioural program any more.

What about something like a fear of snakes? Personally, if I was lost in the jungle, I would want someone with me who is scared of snakes! If a snake came within ten feet of us, I would be the first person to know about it. The fear of snakes is not as useful in Birmingham, so there’s no need to run that program there. This in itself is a useful belief. Just last night a friend of mine told me that she has a fear of falling over, and my response was, “great!” because, believe me, you definitely want to avoid falling over if at all possible.

These types of belief change techniques are called reframes, and a reframe is a very powerful conversational belief change tool. Simply by putting the behaviour or problem in a different context, you can change its meaning so it isn’t a problem any more. Reframing works by changing the meaning of an experience. Notice we don’t have to question the experience itself, just adjust how the person interprets it.

For example, if a colleague says “The boss always sends me to get the coffees, he doesn’t like me” then there are a number of ways you can address this.

Firstly, many people will simply challenge the experience head on with, “Don’t be silly, of course he likes you” which has no effect because it is a direct challenge and simply bounces off the listener’s critical filters.

We could use the meta-model, asking questions like, “How do you know the boss doesn’t like you”, “How does asking you to fetch the coffees mean he doesn’t like you” or “The boss always sends you?”

The Meta Model is a very powerful tool, yet in many everyday situations it can be a bit heavy handed. This is where a reframe is very useful:

“Well, while you’re fetching coffee you’re not working!”

“You’re the only person he trusts to get the order right”

“It’s because he wants to talk about you behind your back”

“You’re the only person he trusts to bring the change back!”

So, you can see that reframing is often a more creative and light hearted technique that can bring about significant belief changes very quickly. Since those belief changes translate into behaviour, we don’t have to do any more in order to help the person solve the problem.

Are there any other ways that you can adopt a useful belief for a particular outcome? By now, you should be expecting the answer to be yes… and it is.

First, think about your outcome and decide what it is you want to achieve. Let’s say you want to resolve a dispute with a customer. What would be some useful beliefs for this?

Let’s take a few examples:

We will reach an outcome that we are both happy with
We both have a valid point of view
A bigger perspective will encompass both points of view
I’m in no rush – patience will help me achieve my goal
The customer wants to resolve this as much as I do
I enjoy turning disputes into agreements

Imagine a circle on the floor and place the first belief in it. When you’re ready, step into the circle and allow that belief to flow through you and, just for a few moments, really imagine that you absolutely and totally hold that belief. Imagine the meeting with the customer and notice your own behaviour and how it affects the outcome of the meeting.

Repeat the exercise until you have ‘tried on’ all the useful beliefs that you want to explore.

If you think of a belief as a state, you can use any NLP techniques that work with state to help you access a belief, for example anchoring, submodalities, hypnosis and so on. The end result is a state that is a combination of useful beliefs that will unconsciously shape your behaviour and make it much easier for you to achieve your goal.

[edit] Certification practice sessions

The final day of the NLP Practitioner program comprises a number of coaching practice sessions. The exact number depends on how many delegates there are on the course and it's usually about six.

For each session you'll be told who you are working with and the pairs are drawn up on a random rotation so that everyone has an equal share of being practitioner and client, and everyone works with someone different each time.

In order to give you as much high quality practice as possible, the timing of this last day is very important. The session start times will be displayed on the flipchart in the room and at the start of each session you'll be told when to be back in the room. The trainers will walk round and gently let you know when you have five minutes left so that you can gently close the session.

It's easy to get wrapped up in these sessions and want to carry on all day with one person. If you don't stick to the times given, you are denying yourself the quality practice that you need in order to fully integrate the skills you've learned throughout the course.

It's very common that at the start of the day, delegates have an armful of tools and techniques that they know how to use, but they don't know how to choose. This is one of the key outcomes of the day. As you work through the sessions, you will probably find yourself talking much less and listening much more. Remembering that the client will tell you everything you need to know in the first few sentences, you'll soon find that listening to the client and getting a sense of the structure of the problem or situation will give you all the information you need to choose a tool.

Here is some specific advice to help you get the most out of the sessions:

Client

As a client, you have the opportunity to work on some issues that are really important to you. You may have a fear that you want to tackle or a problem to solve. Many people who come to the Practitioner course are running their own businesses - or thinking about it - and this is an ideal opportunity to do some serious planning with the help of a talented group of coaches.

Therefore, you should spend some time planning the issues or opportunities you are going to explore during the sessions so that you can get the most value from the time. You will learn as much about the process as the client as you will as the Practitioner, so both roles are equally important.

Practitioner

At first, many people find they are so busy thinking about which technique to use that they miss what the client tells them. After a while, they find that spending at least half the time just listening and exploring the issue is time well spent.

As a Practitioner, perhaps your most important job is to maintain an outcome oriented state. You can use all of your rapport skills to lead your client and in many cases, all the Practitioner has to do is sit there and look confident while the client finds their own solution!

Remember that the tools and techniques are each built around a particular structure, so by exploring the structure of the problem, you'll easily be able to choose the most appropriate technique. Here are a few examples of tools and techniques that you can use:

Outcomes: To find out what the client wants!
Six step reframe: For 'big' or repetitive behaviours (e.g. patterns in relationships)
Stalking: For 'big' or repetitive behaviours, or for fast changing behaviours
Swish: For fast changing behaviours (e.g. habits or 'real' phobias)
Timeline: To explore a future decision, set goals or resolve old issues
Anchoring: To capture useful states or integrate states
Pattern interrupt: To interrupt an undesirable state
Trance: To help the client explore in a relaxed way, free from distractions
Rapport: To non-verbally guide the client towards the desired outcome
Meta model: To explore a problem arising from insufficient information
Milton model: To gently influence the client towards their desired outcome
Future pace: Creating the possibility for change
Beliefs: For both you and the client
Modelling: Model the problem, elicit a strategy and change if necessary
Storytelling: Use a simple story to change state or move to the desired outcome
Submodalities: A fundamental part of the client’s experience
Fast phobia cure: For any dissociation situation

It's worth remembering that the technique will be less effective if you concentrate only on the technique. It's best to think about how you'll use the whole time to deliver the technique more elegantly. Here's a simple process you can use if you need to:

State: Choose a resourceful state
Outcomes: Set a direction
Rapport: Get into rapport
Questions: Learn about the problem
Intervention: The technique!
Future pace: Create a future where the problem is solved
Test: Check to make sure the intervention worked

There may be times when you get stuck and don't know where to go next - that's fine. It often happens as a result of the Practitioner thinking too much about the technique.. Here are some ideas for what you can say or ask when you get stuck. Asking a question gives you time to think.

That's right
What would be a good outcome for you in this?
What would you like to do next?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the practice sessions are not a test. There is no right or wrong course of action and what the trainers are looking for is that you are able to help the client move in the general direction they want to go. We don't really care if a technique appears to work or not - they don't always work for us! What we're most interested in seeing is you acting in the interests of your client, maintaining your state and making the most of the opportunity to develop your skills.

[edit] Coaching tips

You’ll know by now that I am somewhat sceptical of coaching models. There’s nothing wrong with them in themselves, my concern is that their creators peddle them as the panacea for coaching or the ‘right’ way to coach. Remember, a model is never the thing it represents, so whenever you look at a coaching model, or any model, you have to remember that all of the important stuff has been missed out in order to give it a snappy acronym.

GROW does not work in itself. NLP techniques do not work in themselves. They need an attitude and a relationship around them, therefore the models and the techniques miss out precisely the elements that make them work!

You may be wondering at this point if I can tell you what I think does work, and so I thought I would share some of my top tips with you.

[edit] High involvement, low attachment

A coach should be highly involved and engaged with the client, but not attached to the outcome. The client’s success or failure is not dependent on the coach, and the coach’s success is not dependent on the client’s. They are connected, but not dependent. If you become attached, you’ll start to need the outcome more than the client does.

[edit] There’s no rush!

You don’t have to dive in to quick fixes. You don’t have to do techniques at the client the moment you ‘know what their problem is’. Take it easy.

[edit] If they didn’t ask you to fix it, it isn’t broken

Engineers say that if it isn’t broken then don’t fix it. I say that if the person didn’t specifically ask for your help then they didn’t have a problem, no matter what you or others might think.

[edit] Trust your hunches

Your hunches come from somewhere, and they represent information that you can’t even begin to work out consciously, so don’t bother. Simply trust.

[edit] Focus on what you want first

You need your own outcomes independent of what the client says they want to work on during a session. Whatever the client presents as their outcome for the session is rarely what they end up getting anyway, so if you use that as your only guide, you’ll be dragged all over the place. Your coaching sessions will seem directionless, you’ll run out of time and the client won’t get the value they want. And remember that you’re doing this for your own benefit, no one else’s

[edit] Are you asking that great question for your benefit or for the client’s?

So you have a great new question you want to try out that you read in that newsletter. Does the client need the question, or do you need it more, in which case ask it somewhere else.

[edit] You don’t need the answers

When you ask a question, the answer isn’t for you, it’s for the client.

[edit] The unconscious always knows what it wants

The unconscious mind – both your client’s and your own – always knows what it wants, and always knows what to do, and it will do its best to scream that information at you. All you have to do is pay attention.

[edit] Do you need to say it more that the client needs to hear it?

The same goes for advice as for questions. Are you saying it because you have carefully constructed a linguistic pattern, or a hypnotic embedded command, or perhaps a story or metaphor? Or is there just something you want to get off your chest? Or is it a case of “Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got a better story than that!”. Is it a case of the old therapist’s, “You think you’ve got problems? You wouldn’t believe what happened to me today…”

[edit] We don’t have to fix the problem, only break it

If you’re planning to fix or solve a problem, it means you have already decided what the right solution is. You never know what the right solution was until the client has put it into practice. Never. Therefore, you cannot solve the problem, you can only break the old pattern of behaviour so that the client has to make a new, more useful choice.

[edit] First, watch and listen

You wouldn’t want a plumber to dive straight in and pull your central heating boiler apart without even making some initial diagnostic checks. Similarly, don’t even think about starting coaching until you’ve spent some time watching and listening to establish some benchmarks, notice some state changes, hear some unconscious signals, model the structure of the undesired situation, that kind of thing.

[edit] Everything you need is in the first sentence

When the client first tells you what they want, or what the problem is, they will tell you everything you need to know – in their words, in their non verbal communication, in their metaphors, in their ambiguities, in their pauses, in their hesitations, in their silences. All you have to do is pay attention.

[edit] The client has everything they need to be everything they want

Maybe they have all the resources they need, maybe they don’t. Who knows for sure? But what they aspire to is already within them, otherwise they wouldn’t know how to aspire to it.

[edit] SORT

Your State comes first, then your Outcome. Only then do you establish Rapport and make a connection. And only when you have those three do you even think about Techniques. And of course, your first techniques might be to work on your client’s state and outcome.

[edit] Relationship, Intention, Perspective

I propose to you that a coach is effective, not because of their certificates or fancy coaching models, but because of three simple yet vital factors. A coach has a certain Relationship with the client which implies expertise, change, professionalism and so on. The coach has an Intention which may be to help the client to achieve a goal or make a change. It’s a different intention to the client’s friends and family, who want the client to feel better, or be happy, or stay the way they are. Finally, the coach can see things that the client can’t, not because of any special gift, but because they have Perspective. They’re looking at the situation from a different angle, so they have different information available to them.

[edit] Out of car and body experiences

I was recently talking with a friend about a car crash I had a few years ago. If you’re inclined, you can see the pictures and read the details at www.ciauk.com/nibcc.htm

She picked out a line of text from that page “…there’s no way to tell what damage has been done underneath the skin.”, and asked, “Is that something that still feels right to you?”

I was sore where the seatbelt grabbed me, although I had forgotten that, and after a visit to a chiropractor my back is right again, after my first head on crash - a mirror image of the Volvo crash, oddly - in 1989, and exacerbated by the crash in 2000.

The chiropractor asked me if I had anticipated both crashes, yes I had, ahh she said. She said that my back had tensed in anticipation which had damaged the muscles, the muscles had healed long ago but had retained a ‘memory’ of the crash, so they were tensing and holding a position to prevent injury which they no longer needed to hold. So a couple of pulls and stretches and cracks and all was well. Back in 2003 I went to a Turkish bath in Istanbul and had a large hairy sweaty Turkish man sit on me. It was nice, but it was a generic loosening, not the very specific work of the chiropractor.

So I no longer think of the lasting result as damage, but the learning is certainly still inside. One thing that I still am very aware of is that I’m not afraid of crashing a car. In fact, I think everyone should have a car crash. After you pass your test, they should send you to an old airfield where you have skid pan and safe driving training and get to crash a car. I believe that most people drive too defensively, in fear of what might happen if they crash. Maybe that’s fuelled by TV car crashes which are always more dramatic than real life, evidenced by the stunt driver’s need for ramps and air cannon to throw the car up in the air. Watch the police chase TV programs - cars never crash like that in real life - they make a dull ‘crump’ sound, not the bashing and crashing and exploding of movie car chases.

I learned that a crash is not that bad at all, and is actually quite exhilarating. And I think this approach would give drivers a much clearer sense of where their boundaries are (in all senses) which I believe is a good thing.

If you travel to other parts of the world, such as North Africa, the way people drive can seem terrifying. Yet after a few days there it all made much more sense to me than the British way. It made me wonder how much of our congestion problems are caused by people sticking to the territory marked out by arbitrary white lines, when there is clearly room for 5 lanes across a Motorway as would be the case in Cairo where they ignore the white lines. And also drivers’ fear of bumping into each other wastes a lot of space too. In Cairo, a millimetre is as good as a mile. A miss is a miss. And if you do hit someone, well, who cares? It’s only a machine.

I think they focus on where they want to get to, rather than on the quality of the driving experience. I need heated seats in the winter, and a good stereo, and cruise control. The first time I got a car with electric windows, I used to wind them down before getting to a security barrier because I was embarrassed in case the security guard thought I was being pretentious.

And with drive by wire electronics and sat nav and automatic gearboxes, I think we are in danger of becoming like the little alien in the jeweller’s body in Men in Black, operating by a few little levers and buttons, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes and missing out on the raw joy of driving a battered, rusty old thing, flinging it round corners and occasionally bumping into another with only a few obscene gestures exchanged.

A couple of friends of mine had crashes where they got out of their cars and went to talk to the other drivers involved, who ignored them, looked right through them. And then, the realisation sank in. They both said to themselves, “Oh my God! They can’t see me because I’m dead!”

Both of them described the same experience, of going back to their cars, fully expecting to see their own bodies in there.

And me? After the crash I couldn’t stop asking myself the question “why did I survive?” Of all the logical reasons, the one which my unconscious seemed to settle on as the most reassuring, the most plausible, the one which made most sense, was:

“I didn’t survive. I am dead. My life from the moment of the crash on is an illusion created by my mind to save me from the reality that I am dying and I’ll never see my family again”

And then it got me thinking - if I’m now making all this up, if this is really a hallucination in my dying moments, then why do bad things happen? Why would I do that to myself? So I started only imagining good things happening, and I started expecting only to get what I want. And it’s odd, because for the most part that’s exactly what happens. Not all the time, I guess my mind still wants to stop me getting big headed, even in death.

Some people’s spiritual views hold that from the moment we are born we are dying, and every moment is a gift. Not from anyone in particular, but a gift for the purpose of enjoying, celebrating, loving, giving and using up rather than saving for a special occasion. Life and death no longer become separate – they become both a part of life’s cycle, like the seasons. Winter is the time of rebirth, of preparing the world for the coming spring.

And it makes me wonder, what life would be like if you knew that you are in your dying moments now, and everything that is happening is created to hide that reality from you, and so why would you ever create anything that isn’t the way you want it to be? I mean, it’s your life, what’s left of it, so you may as well imagine whatever you want - literally.

[edit] Useful quotes

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other persons point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. Henry Ford

Let him that would move the world first move himself Socrates

The important thing is not to stop questioning Albert Einstein

The greatest discovery of our age has been that we, by changing the inner aspects of our thinking, can change the outer aspects of our lives William James

Believe you can’t, believe you can. Either way you’re right! Henry Ford

When you put a limit on what you will do, you put a limit on what you can do. Charles Schwab

Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal. The greatest power is often simple patience. E. Joseph Crossman

Chance favours the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur

When you get to the edge, step off…you’ll always land somewhere

If you know which pop star sang this, let me know!

Trying is the first step towards failure. Homer Simpson

Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go higher than you think. Benjamin Disraeli

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. Dale Carnegie

Ideas won’t keep, something must be done about them Alfred North Whitehead

It’s the possibility of our dreams coming true that makes life worth living The Alchemist

Imagination is more important than knowledge Albert Einstein

You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about Willy Wonka

Those are my principles, if you don’t like them I have others Groucho Marx

Be who you are and say what you want, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind Dr Seuss

Life is not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference Virginia Satir

You must be the change you wish to see in the world Mahatma Gandhi

It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid. Q, in Star Trek

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Willy Wonka

[edit] Suggested Reading

Frogs into princes

Richard Bandler & John Grinder

NLP - Skills for Learning

Peter Freeth

Words that change minds

Shelle-Rose Charvet

Structure of Magic 1 & 2

Richard Bandler & John Grinder

Six Questions

Peter Freeth

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

NLP in 21 days

Beryl Heather and Harry Alder

NLP in Business

Peter Freeth

Quantum Psychology

Robert Anton Wilson

Change Magic

Peter Freeth

Tricks of the Mind

Derren Brown

The Unsticker

Peter Freeth

Influence: Science and Practice

Robert Cialdini

How to win friends and influence people

Dale Carnegie

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

Quirkology

Richard Wiseman

Fortean Times (a monthly publication recommended for opening your mind to new possibilities)

[edit] Useful Websites

NLP In Business is a knowledge base of research and information on the applications and business benefits of NLP.

www.nlpinbusiness.com

Excellerate is a business performance consultancy, modelling high performers and running programs in areas such as leadership, sales and communication.

www.excellerate.org

Communications In Action is a specialist publisher of personal and professional development books and CDs.

www.ciauk.com

Change Magic is a complete toolkit for change engineering and organisational problem solving featuring the Brain Fairies and the world famous Unsticker.

www.changemagic.com

LocalNLP is an organisation of NLP training and local practice groups, initially in Warwickshire and growing.

www.localnlp.com

Ascent is the adventure coaching experience that can change your life, combining transformational coaching with outdoor activity, helping you to discover the true path to you dreams.

www.ascent-experience.com

[edit] NLP Practitioner course format

This course is a 10 day Society of NLP certified Practitioner course.

The course is split into two modules, the Foundation and Certification.

The Foundation module is available in a 6 day format, whilst the Certification module is a 4 day format.

The latest course dates can be found on www.localnlp.com and will follow this general schedule:

1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

6 day Foundation

4 day Certification

Full 10 day Practitioner program

Therefore the 6 day Foundation will feed into a single Certification, since not everyone will want to complete the Certification immediately and the format therefore gives you the opportunity to complete Certification at the pace you feel is right for you.

Day

Main Topics (Approximate scheduling)

1

Introduction, communication and world maps State & submodalities

2

Anchoring Outcomes

3

Rapport, Pacing and leading

4

Calibration, strategies and modelling Meta Model

5

Milton Model, modal operators, logical levels Stories, utilisation, Elman induction

6

Swish, squash, reframing, perceptual positions Fast Phobia Cure Timeline and Future Pacing

7

Six Step Reframe,

8

Advanced problem solving techniques Coaching methodology for using NLP

9

Coaching assessment sessions and projects

10

Review and certification

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Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner Manual

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Contents

[edit] NLP Practitioner

[edit] Keep this in mind

[edit] Coming to your senses

[edit] Communication models

[edit] State

[edit] State Physiology

[edit] Submodalities

[edit] Compare submodalities

[edit] Swapping submodalities

[edit] Changing Submodalities

[edit] Anchoring

[edit] Basic anchoring

[edit] More anchors

[edit] Stacking anchors

[edit] Collapsing anchors

[edit] Outcomes

[edit] Well Formed Outcomes

[edit] PURE

[edit] Rapport

[edit] Matching and Mismatching

[edit] State modelling

[edit] Voice matching

[edit] Direct mind reading

[edit] Pacing and leading

[edit] Pattern interrupts

[edit] Calibration and strategies

[edit] Identify sequence 1

[edit] Identify sequence 2

[edit] Eye accessing

[edit] Strategy elicitation and modelling

[edit] Model a decision strategy

[edit] Model a skill or talent

[edit] Model a problem

[edit] Language

[edit] Meta Model

[edit] Simple Meta Model exercise

[edit] First sentence Meta Model

[edit] Unspecified Nouns (Deletion)

[edit] Unspecified Verbs (Deletion)

[edit] Nominalisation (Generalisation)

[edit] Lack of Referential Index (Deletion)

[edit] Simple Deletion (Deletion)

[edit] Comparative Deletions (Deletion)

[edit] Complex equivalence (Generalisation)

[edit] Lost performance (Deletion)

[edit] Mind reading (Distortion)

[edit] Cause and effect (Generalisation)

[edit] Presuppositions (Deletion)

[edit] Universal Quantifiers (Generalisation)

[edit] Modal Operator of Necessity (Deletion)

[edit] Model Operator of Possibility (Deletion)

[edit] Milton Model

[edit] Modal operators

[edit] Logical levels

[edit] Logical Levels – as a coaching structure

[edit] Logical Levels – as a reframing tool

[edit] Stories – Narrative Communication

[edit] State story

[edit] Purposeful storytelling

[edit] Trance

[edit] Cycling representational systems

[edit] Utilisation pattern

[edit] Pattern interrupt

[edit] Hypnosis scripts

[edit] Elman Induction

[edit] Self hypnosis CDs

[edit] Change Techniques

[edit] Swish

[edit] Visual swish

[edit] Squash

[edit] Reframing

[edit] Reframing – an alternative meaning of the same event

[edit] Head on reframing

[edit] Meta model reframing

[edit] State reframing

[edit] Perceptual positions

[edit] Meta Mirror