For many people, intuition is a wonderful, mysterious, and near-magical phenomena.  Yet, what is intuition?  What do we refer to when we use this term?  And how do we use our intuition in our work as we coaches, consultants, trainers, therapists work with people?

NLP began by modeling the intuition of three world-class communicators.  You will find this statement and this language in the early books of NLP, especially The Structure of Magic, Volumes I and II (1975, 1976).  Richard and John modeled the intuition that Virginia had about people, communicating with them, deciding on what to do as an intervention.  They did the same with Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson.  What resulted from their modeling?  NLP.  That is, the models of NLP and the patterns derived from those models.  And more specifically:

• The Meta-Model of Language in therapy: asking the questions of specificity.
• The Strategy Model using representation systems and the TOTE process.
• The Representational Model of how people think, encode “thoughts,” and manifest via neurology.
• The Milton Model of Language for inviting a person to go inside (“downtime”) and access resourceful states.

Modeling Virginia’s Intuitions

In the original NLP books, The Structure of Magic, Bandler and Grinder talked about the intuitions of Perls and Virginia and said that what they modeled were their intuitions.  That how they worked with people, how they chose what to say or do, were the result of their whole lifetime of experiences which had now become habitual and automatic.  They noted, “Virginia took a lifetime to learn her intuitions.”  Yet we do not have to replicate her life experiences, today we can model those intuitions to make explicit what she does “by intuition.”  And doing that, we can then transfer her intuitions to ourselves and others.  And that’s what NLP is about (or should be about).

Intuition comes from Latin and refers to “in-knowing”—to what a person “knows” “inside.”  And where do people get that inside knowledge?  They were not born with it.  Nobody is born “knowing” anything.  Unlike the animals who “know” what to eat, how to build a nest, who is a predator, etc., we humans are born without content information instincts.  Our “instincts” are without content information and because of this gap— we have tremendous room inside for learning— and learning we do!  We learn everything.  Yes, we have dispositions and latent “talents” that can be developed.  Yet without learning, the dispositions and talents do not develop.  You may have a disposition for mathematics, or linguistics, or visual-spatial distinctions, or many other things, yet if you are not exposed to such areas and given a chance to develop, the “talent” will lie dormant.  It will not develop.

Intuitions are learned. Whatever intuition you have about anything, you learned that intuition.  You were exposed to an area of learning and you developed it, consciously or unconsciously.  How you made it an “in-knowing” is through exposure, experience, repetition, and learning.  You now have an intuition about how to drive a car because of your original exposure to driving and to your experience of driving.  Today your learning (in-knowing) is your intuitive sense of driving and is unconscious unless you teach driver’s education.  The conscious learnings, understandings, concepts, etc. have “dropped out of conscious awareness into your unconscious awareness.”  Now you “know” how to do things and don’t know how you know.  You just know— we call that “intuition.”

Intuitions are also subject to the errors and inaccuracy that all learnings are subject to. And given that, then intuitions are not infallible.  They are not god-like.  They are fallible, human, and subject to all of the fallibilities that all other learnings are— to cognitive distortions, to fallacious thinking patterns, to biases, prejudices, etc.  Your intuitions can be very, very wrong and mis-lead you.  This suggests that we should never blindly trust our intuitions.  Just as you would not blindly or absolutely trust your thinking, believing, understanding, perceiving — it is not wise to do so with your intuitions.

This fact provides a significant challenge to modeling.  When modeling the intuitions of an expert, we have to be cautious about the intuitions that we are modeling.  We could model an error in the expert’s knowledge (in-knowing).  So we have to test what we are modeling and have to test whether we are modeling an actual knowledge that is accurate and useful.

How do we model an expert’s intuition? This is where the NLP models for modeling offer some very powerful tools.  We model intuition by reverse engineering.  First we look at the excellence.  In the case of Perls and Satir, the ability to communicate in a therapy context with clients and via the therapeutic context to enable a client to change his or her mental models (maps) of the world so that they have more understanding and choice in how to respond to the challenges that they experience in the world.  Then we ask, What is the expert actually doing?  Here we get a sensory-based (empirical) description of how they are talking, gesturing, relating, etc.

From there we follow the sequence of actions (behavioral and linguistic) from beginning of the conversation to the end.  This gives us a “strategy” —a strategic set of actions.  As we interview the expert we can get the inside information about the distinctions the person is making about what to do, when to do it, how to do it with the person, and why (which gives us their thinking, believing, assumptions, etc.) for their decisions and choice points.  (See NLP: Volume I, 1980, Robert Dilts).

But we’re not done yet.  Next we go meta.  That is, we look for where the expert reflexively thought-and-felt something else about their previous thought-or-feeling and so layered their thinking with one or more additional frames.  Human “strategies” do not work in a simple linear  way.  As we are processing through anything, we have frames of meaning in the back of our mind that govern our experiencing, and we also are constantly stepping back to reflect on our experience.  (See NLP Going Meta, 2005).

Once we have a “model” —a set of internal and external steps for how the expert produces the excellence, we can test it by trying it out ourselves.  Does it work?  To what extent can we replicate the expertise?  To what extent do we fail to replicate it?  These questions drive us back to revisit the interview and to ask more interviewing questions to find out the distinctions we are missing.  Doing this recursively over a period of time enables us to finally create a workable, actionable, and transferable model of the expert.  And if we do that repeatedly with other experts in the same field, and create a synthesis of the best of each, we can generate a more expansive and rich model for a given expertise.

We model intuitions. So this is one use of the term intuition in NLP and Neuro-Semantics.  There are yet other meanings and we will look at those in the next posts.

Modeling Excellence Series #2

Here’s another way to describe NLP and Neuro-Semantics.  What are these models and what do they do?   They focus on the how of now.  That is, whatever is now-whatever experience, whether an experience of excellence, or just a mediocre experience, or even a hellish experience- whatever the experience is, there is rhyme and reason to it.  It has a structure and therefore an internal form.  There is a how that explains it.  That’s the how of the now.

After all, the person who has the experience has created it.  That person has taken an event, the data of some event, and interpreted those facts in such a way as to generate his or her experience of it.  And if we explore the combination of what happened and how that person has interpreted it (given it meaning, drawn a conclusion, developed a belief, made a decision, etc.) then we could explore the how of now.

Your now experiences also didn’t just drop out of the sky.  It was co-created by you from the event.  Event happened, you interpreted, bingo -experience. And NLP, as you well know, is “the study of the structure of subjective experience.”  Now in what could be considered, the prelude of all NLP books, this is what Fritz Perls said.  It is the book that Richard Bandler edited from the audio-tapes that Robert Spitzer gave him some time after Fritz died and which became the book, The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (1973).  Read it now with an NLP ear!

“In previous centuries, we asked ‘why.’  We tried to find causes, reasons, excuses, rationalizations.  And we thought if we could change the causes, we could change the effect.  In our electronic age, we don’t ask why anymore, we ask how.  We investigate the structure, and when we understand the structure, then we can change the structure.  And a structure in which we are most interested, is the structure of our life script.  The structure of our life script … is mostly taken up with self-torture, futile self-improvement games, achievements, and so on.” (122)

From Why to How

The NLP idea of “Don’t ask why,” as almost all of the original NLP ideas did not come from Bandler, Grinder, or Pucelik, it came from Fritz and Virginia (which by the way they got from Maslow and Rogers).  Here is what Fritz, in the book, The Gestalt Approach, said:

“Asking questions that begin with ‘why’ are of little therapeutic value. “The ‘why’ questions produce only pat answers, defensiveness, rationalizations, excuses, and the delusion that an event can be explained by a single cause.  The why does not discriminate purpose, origin, or background.  Under the mask of inquiry it has contributed perhaps more to human confusion than any other single word.  Not so with the ‘how.’  The how inquires into the structure of an event, and once the structure is clear all the whys are automatically answered.   …

“If we spend our time looking for causes instead of structure we may as well give up the idea of therapy and join the group of worrying grandmothers who attack their prey with such pointless questions as ‘Why did you catch that cold?’  ‘Why have you been so naughty?'” (p. 77)

“The majority of questions the patient asks are seductions of the intellect, related to the notion that verbal explanation are a substitute for understanding.  We want to elicit the structure of the patient’s question, its background; and possibly we can reach the self in this process.” (p. 78).

If you have read The Structure of Magic, Volume I, or nearly any other basic NLP book, then you may have to do a double-take on that paragraph.  You may go, “Hey that sounds like something right out of my basic NLP training.” But it is not.  Before NLP even existed, it came from Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy!  And so now you know where Bandler and Grinder got so much of what is now basic NLP.

This is actually some of the original material that today is the background of the Meta-Model.  And there’s more.  Because Fritz was very challenging and confronting in his style, Bandler picked up on this, mimicked it and from this even came the language that was originally used with regard to the Meta-Model of Language.  When a client says something, “challenge it” with a question.  Again, this comes directly from Fritz!

“The therapist’s primary responsibility is not to let go unchallenged any statement or behavior which is not representative of the self, which is evidence of the patient’s lack of self-responsibility.” (p. 80).

“Responsibility is really response-ability, the ability to choose one’s reactions.” (79)

Fritz also explained that “the patient’s statements are always clues for further questions, and possibly more specific ones.” (p.79).  Now you know the answer to the question when someone asks, “Besides Transformational Grammar, where did the structure of the Meta-Model come from?”

In the How of Now

Today when you work with someone, explore the how of that person’s now so that you can model the how.  This is important.  When you do that, you are thereby able to identify the strategy of the person which will, in turn, enable you to understand them, pace them, and possibly identify the leverage point of change for them.  As you do so, identify the components, the steps, the sequence, the cause-effect structures, the standards or criteria, etc. of their linguistically-created and based reality.  After all, it is their map that has created their experience.

If you are a trainer, consultant, therapist, or coach, don’t engage in any of these processes with another person until you first do some modeling of the how, then, when you know the how of that person’s now, you will be ready to go.  Ask and explore.  If the person says that she is not confident, if he says he’s afraid or worried about having a low profile, or depressed, or whatever-

• What you are doing or experiencing right now?
• How are you doing this?  What are you doing?
• How do you know that you insecure, or afraid, or depressed, and so on?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.