THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
AND THE FOUNDER’S SELF-PROMOTIONS

Last week both John Grinder and Richard Bandler held a joint web-presentation celebrating the 50th Anniversary of NLP. But that’s a bit deceptive. They did not actually get together and hold the celebration of 50 years. Instead each of them separately recorded a 30 minute presentation in which they were asked a few questions. Supposedly they were to answer questions that the audience asked, but in the end all of the questions were softball questions. Actually, extremely softball questions! None were challenging in the least. The questions, in fact, were such that the questions allowed each one to boast and glory in himself. I had submitted two questions that would have been challenging, but they were obviously not mentioned as were many others that I knew about.

If you listen to the presentations what you will learn is that each man thinks that what he did was absolutely spectator. And both of them think they created the NLP model completely between themselves! They had no help and needed no help. They congratulate each other, but no one else! They seem to have totally forgotten the role of Frank Pucelik and the way Robert Dilts formulated nearly all of the original NLP model. John seems now to dismiss the role of Frank saying he only imitates(!), a very different story from his book that introduced Frank as “The Third Man.”

They also had amnesia about the many different Gestalt and Meta Groups which in The Structure of Magic they described as “therapists groups.” What a complete forgetting! It was as if none of them existed and none of them were co-founders. I addressed this in the book, NLP Secrets: Untold Stories (2018). And still, 50 years later, the stories are still untold … at least by Richard and John.

Richard tried to emphasize that he gave credit to others, but only to the obvious— Virginal Satir, Milton Erickson, Noam Chomsky, somehow he forgot Fritz! He also magically forgot to mention Frank, Robert, Leslie, Judith, or many other key people who actually turned the first discoveries into what became known as the NLP Communication Model.

He also engaged in a good bit of “change personal history” inasmuch as what he is saying now does not correspond to what he has said over the years in books and videos. He now claims that he got things from various people even though there is no historical record of those people. An example he now credits Dorothy Kimura for eye accessing cue although she was never mentioned in any previous NLP book. Neither Richard nor John ever mentioned her regarding eye accessing cues! Paul Bach-y-Rita was mentioned once, but only a brief reference. Not exactly a big source for NLP. Moshe Feldenkrais was also only briefly mentioned a few times. He was primarily referred to in a training Richard did in London in 1990 Neuro-Dynamics (a training that I transcribed at Richard’s request and turned into a book—a book which has not been published).

The biggest elephant in the room from this 50th year anniversary is that they did not speak at all about their lawsuits with each other, with the divisions they created in the field, or with the $90,000,000 lawsuit that essentially destroyed NLP in the United States. Nothing at all about that! Another nice thing to be amnesic about.

Not a word was said about the fact that neither has supported the field in recommending any of the leaders who have arisen who have made NLP what it is. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Dilts and Steve Andreas. If it were not for Robert and Steve and Connaire, NLP would have never achieved its recognition in the 1970s and 1980s that it did. They did far more than Richard or John in those years to formalize and promote NLP. If not for them, there very well could be no NLP.

Over the years, neither John or Richard ever came to any of the NLP Conferences around the world to support the field. They never wrote articles for the many Journals that we had in the 1980s and 1990s (except when someone wrote an article about them). Instead each worked to keep his ‘camp’ going and refused to acknowledge each other or anyone else. That’s not exactly what we think of leaders.

Given that, I would say that they were only founders, but not leaders. They never groomed others to step up to lead the field. They never gave credit to people making contributions to the field. When I took my training with Richard, there were no patterns from Dilts or Grinder—none. I walked out of Master Practitioner never hearing one word about what they offered to NLP.

Over the years many of us tried to get both of the founders to participate. We asked them in 1997 to come to the Visionary Leadership Conference. Neither did. Although Richard sent his lawyer (!) who met some of us out on “the green grass.” They following day John showed up on “the green grass” to present his side of the 90 million dollar lawsuit. We asked them to show up at the Millennial Project (2000), neither did. We asked them to come to the 40th Anniversary; they did not. Richard sent a two minute video. What’s amazing to me is that while we asked them to be leaders—and they refused.

Then last year (2024) some years after Frank Pucelik and I started the NLP Leadership Summit (2011), we held the Summit in Santa Cruz California where John still lives. Did he show up? No, of course not. But Judith DeLozier did. Then she and Robert gave the group of 70 plus NLP leaders a tour of Kresge College and the University of Southern California.

My view? The founders are bold in taking credit for what they partially founded, something which they did not grow. They contributed a lot of the first intellectual structures, but were unable to contribute any kind of true leadership over the decades. NLP Leadership fell to those who created the Conferences, the Associations, the Journals, the Research Conference, who developed new models, new patterns, and new communities (as indicated in Innovations in NLP, 2012).

References
I wrote NLP Secrets: The Untold Stories as a journalistic investigation researching it via reading countless books on the origins of NLP, collecting sources, cross-referencing, and relying on numerous personal experiences with those who were there. There I emphasized that NLP’s origins were the result of a community effort. It was not accomplished by any one or two individuals. To create NLP, it took Robert Spitzer introducing Perls’ works and to Satir herself. It took Bateson send them to Erickson. It took all of the individuals in the original groups for the collective contribution they made including David Gordon, Stephen Gilligan, Terry McClendon, and many, many more. https://legacy.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/7/

TOO OLD TO REMEMBER OR TOO MUCH
“CHANGE PERSONAL HISTORY”?

I recently watched a current 2024 video of Richard Bandler. For some unknown and unexpressed reason, Tony Robbins invited Richard to speak to a training that Tony was conducting in Florida. I got the impression that Richard was already in the area, so Tony invited him over, but that was not made clear. Anyway Tony thought he might be good to have him speak to a group of 40 people. So Richard did. You can see the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_GCNlk05jY

The video is about 110 minutes and Richard simply sat in a chair and “talked” to the group. Three times he invited someone to the stage to do a process—once a hypnotic state and the other resolving troubling thoughts of the past, and once to get someone to get himself to do what he wanted to do. But what he mostly did was tell stories. And to his credit, he has always been a good story-teller, not necessarily accurate or truthful, but engaging stories. And if you’ve never been to a training or watched videos, I’m sure you will be fascinated by the stories. But if you have, then the stories are the same old stories and, sadly, they were not told as effectively as he once was able to tell them.

Critique
There’s a problem in these Bandler stories—they are usually exaggerated and told using all-or-nothing language. Sometimes to the point of being ridiculous, and sometimes they are just blantonly false. At the beginning he says he “remembers Eisenhower’s presidency and how he ran against Adlai Ewing Stevenson II. Hmmm, just how old is he anyway? Now true enough, he does look old, and he does talk about himself being old. But he’s not that old! Eisenhower was President in the 1950s. That reference was 1955-6, so Richard would have been 5 years old! Now how much does a five-year-old remember about political debates?!

He then speaks about “a psychiatrist’s” house (i.e., Dr. Robert Spitzer, publisher of Science & Behavior Books) that he stayed in and says, “it was the 1960s.” Well no, actually it was 1971 when he just turned 21. He says that he read 100 books in Spitzer’s library and “not one of them said anything about what to do about problems except take drugs.” Well, no. In that library would have been Fritz’s books on Gestalt and Virginia Satir’s books, including People Making. So there would have been lots of things suggested to solve problems. That’s the kind of exaggeration you can expect to hear from him. And if you have any knowledge about these things, it significantly undermines his credibility.

He said that he was playing in a band, a friend went to his medicine cabinet and found some drugs … the picture is that of a young adult Bandler, but he dates it in the 1960’s, so he would have been 16 or 17. Another statement meant to mis-represent things. Next he says “I was an information science major.” Well, from transcripts of the colleges he attended, that just was not so. He took some classes on computer science, but that was it. His degree was not “information science.” It was general psychology, BA from University of California, Santa Cruz, and a MA from Lone Mountain College in San Francisco. He never earned a Ph.D. He took some mathematic classes, but taking some classes does not sudden make one “A Mathematician.”

Again, describing the 1960s, he said that’s when he met Virginia. But not so. That did not happen until 1974. He then tells a story of meeting a psychiatrist … but that story occurred later when he and John were applying the Meta-Model, somewhere around 1976-7 or later. I suspect that this is the effect of too much “Change Personal History.”

Talking about Virginia and her statement, “I know it intuitively” he says that means “it is not learnable.” He asserts that he “made them up”—namely, “deletion, generalization, and distortion.” Ah yes, more claims to intellectual ownership! Actually, these come from Transformational Grammar which is what Grinder contributed to NLP. Richard did not “make them up.” This is a case of not giving credit where credit is due.

Richard then tells a new story about “the origin of the phobia cure.” In other videos from the 1980s he said that he met a person who said “I used to have a phobia.” He then asked how he got over it and wrote down the steps. In this story, he says he was working with a group of 6 psychiatrists. He asked each of them to bring him one person who got over a phobia. They asked, “How would we know someone got over a phobia?” If there’s any question that strikes me as silly, that is it. So he put add in the paper offer $100 for someone who got over a phobia. Then he gave them a lie detector test; “90 percent” of those who responded. Again, all this seems pretty preposterous!

Next he claims to be a “Physicist.” and with that he declares, “When psychatrists speak about reality, they as a group know nothing about reality.” Sadly, when talking about his own books, he says that his books “are not a repeat of anything” (24:30 min). But they are! In fact that’s one of the disappointing things, he has hardly presented anything new for decades.

Another new story emerges here about eye access cues. Here he claims to have read an article in 1972 of an experiment that suggested eye accessing cues. Then he went to his class at the university that had 300 students (!). In saying this, he implies he was the teacher (he was not) and that they had classes that large at Kresge (they did not). He asserts, “That’s where accessing cues came from.” Well, the previous story which he told for years and years is that the discovery occurred in a night club where he was playing a guitar. And another story, which is recorded in Grinder’s book, John discovered it in a liquor store!

Again, speaking about the 1970s, he tells the story of Andy the Schizophrenic. The problem is that that story occurred in the mid-1980s in Denver with Steve Andreas. There’s a two-part video from NLP Comprehensive about that. “He walked into the room, I grabbed his hand and put him in a trance.” Well, not exactly. The video shows it beginning as they sat in chairs and began talking.

Finally, Richard says—quickly and briefly—that he “certified” Tony Robbins as a trainer. Well excuse me, if that’s true, why did you sue Tony for Six Million Dollars in 1989? And why did Tony settle out of court, paying you $500,000 and signing the trainer’s contract in 1990 when I was with you at your home in San Francisco? At that time, I asked, “What stops Tony from changing the name?” you said to me, “I grabbed him by the balls and he would not dare.” Of course, tony did dare— Neural Associative Conditioning. Now if Richard is “thinking” he signed the contract and that serves as me “certifying” him … it is a major piece of mis-communication!”
https://www.bing.com/search?q=Richard+BAndler+lawsuit+against+Anthony+Robbins&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&ghc=1&lq=0&pq=richard+bandler+lawsuit+against+anthony+robbins&sc=0-47&sk=&cvid=AAD8CD466A14412089301D2E0506CB5D&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl=

Some Good Stuff
In spite of the exaggerations, distortions and sillinesses, there is some good stuff on the video. Here’s the best stuff you will find on the video that stands out as really valuable. Namely, the two times when he said: “If you don’t have control over your thoughts, you won’t have control over your feelings.” (20 min.) Therefore, be sure to “take control of your thoughts.” Later, “If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer.” If you ask yourself, Do I want to go to the gym? The answer is “No.” If you ask yourself, “Do I want to live long and healthy?” the answer is yes. Planning enables you to be connected to your desires. Desire is what leads us to move forward. The Meta-Model is designed to solve problems. It helps you focus on the right thing.

With a co-founder like Richard Bandler, no wonder the field of NLP has struggled to attain a respectable reputation and credibility. For years, I had hoped that he would have matured as he aged, but no. His original genius gave the world a wonderful communication/ thinking model and he could have produced so much more than it has.

NLP’S FAILURE
With NLP Ideally, You Learn to Think

Earlier this year (2024), I completed the book, Thinking for Humans: The Art of Being Mindful. In it I addressed a problem in the field of NLP—something that to this day the field has still not recognized:
“While a great many people in NLP don’t know this, NLP is essentially about thinking. NLP begins with representational thinking (the VAK, sensory-awareness), it then goes to associative thinking (anchoring, cause-effect linkages), linguistic thinking (language, the Meta-Model), evaluative thinking (values, beliefs, meta-programs), and finally integrative thinking (state, embodiment, mind-to-muscle). In learning NLP, you learn to think. Or at least you should if you learned it well. Yet because most trainers and educators in NLP don’t know this, they do not emphasize this. This book is designed, in part, to change that.”

Previous to this book on thinking, I wrote Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018). I wrote that, in part, because in the field of Critical Thinking I could not find a single book anywhere that even mentioned NLP or the Meta-Model of Language. I realized that after reading 80 books on the subject of critical thinking. Imagine that! Not a single one even mentioned NLP, let alone presented the Meta-Model as a great tool for critical thinking. I found that shocking!

Why? Because, in my opinion, the Meta-Model is the greatest tool that’s ever been presented for clear, precise, accurate, and creative thinking. So in writing Executive Thinking one of my objectives was to get the Meta-Model known in that field. Another objective was to introduce, or perhaps re-introduce, the Meta-Model to the field of NLP as a tremendous tool for critical thinking. And that’s because, as noted above, ideally when you learn NLP, you learn how to think. But, of course, ideally implies that ‘actually’ many people do not.

Astonishing, isn’t it? While NLP is a model of thinking and learning NLP, you should be learning how to think, many do not. I venture to suggest that most do not. How can that be? What’s going on that in the teaching and training of NLP that people are not getting a deeper learning—learning how to think. Anyone can teach you what to think. That’s what our schools primarily do which is why most young people graduating from High School do not know how to think. Again, why is this? What explains this? Here’s my guesses.

#1: Thinking is not made the focus of the training. Instead, NLP to presented solely as a Communication Model or it is presented in terms of one of its applications—sales, personal development, therapy, coaching, consulting, hypnosis, etc. There are also many trainers who are mostly enthralled by the “techniques,” and so all they present are the quick, easy, and/or sensational patterns. So people learn the techniques without learning the thinking behind them which makes them work as they do.

#2: The NLP trainer him or herself has not learned how to train the Meta-Model. This is a really sad one. From my experience in meeting lots and lots of NLP trainers, most of them do not even teach the Meta-Model in their trainings or if they do so, they devote a few hours to half a day at best. And why not? Because that’s how they were taught! Obviously, if you were not effectively taught how to think about the Meta-Model and how to train it, you won’t be able to teach it well yourself. Worse, if you think of it as grammar and linguistics, your mis-understanding of it will cause you to downplay it.

#3: The NLP trainer him or herself has not learned how to think using NLP. I think this is a big one. Having not become enthralled with the power and beauty of the Meta-Model and having really no idea how pervasive it is in NLP, a great many trainers and leaders in the field of NLP have never applied the critical thinking skills of the Meta-Model to themselves. This is obvious from reading some of the NLP books that have been written. This is obvious from reading the articles and promotional pieces on NLP websites. Sometimes when I do so I wonder, “Didn’t you ever learn the Meta-Model?” “Who taught you the Meta-Model?” That’s why in a lot of NLP communications on the internet and elsewhere you will find uncontrolled generalizations, distortions, and deletions. You will find mind-reading statements about people; unfounded cause-effect beliefs, ridiculous complex equivalences, and on and on.

#4: Thinking itself is devalued as ‘a given,’ and so little thought is given to it. Unless you have spent some time thinking about “thinking,” the cultural norm that we all grow up in is to take it for granted. “Yeah, thinking, so what?” We consider it natural, inevitable, and sometime everyone can do. No wonder we do not think of it as a skill— and a skill we need to learn. No wonder we put all “thinking” into that one category and don’t realize that there are dozens and dozens, scores of different kinds of thinking as well as levels of thinking skills.

#5: Some NLP trainers have been deluded into thinking that thinking is conscious and the really important stuff is unconscious. I’m now describing the two camps that have moved away from the mainline NLP field, the Bandler group and the Grinder group. What a paradox! Once Ericksonian hypnosis was modeled, both Bandler and Grinder decided to stop addressing what they called “the conscious mind” and focus almost exclusively on “the unconscious mind.” (Of course, there is only one mind—some content in conscious awareness and most of it outside-of-conscious awareness.) But thinking itself is a dynamic that involves all aspects of our brain-body and mind and so fluctuates in and out of conscious awareness. If you dichotomize this, then you set up an Either/Or limited way of thinking and dismiss “thinking” as only the conscious stuff.

Recommendation
Let’s get back to NLP as a thinking model and train it or use it to enable people to do more critical and creative thinking. If the world needs anything beyond love, it needs people who can actually think, and think clearly, precisely, and accurately. If we don’t have that, we will lose our civilization, our science, our well-being, and our sanity.

They should have known because from the beginning the founders said things like the following:
“The whole idea of the meta-model is to give you systematic control over language. It teaches you how to listen not only to other people, but to yourself. The meta-model is really simplistic, but it’s still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will be do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those who don’t, are people who have no control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do.” (70).

WHAT NLP REALLY IS

NLP, as a Communication model, is not a therapy model. It is not a version of psychotherapy. Nor is it a modeling model, a hypnosis model, or even a model for personal development (self-actualization). So what is NLP? Amazing enough, that is one of the perennial questions that has plagued the field of NLP. This is the question to ask if you want to torture an NLP trainer!

Yes, NLP speaks to, addresses, and provides lots of guidance in each of these disciplines. These are actually the most essential applications of NLP. There are many more—parenting, leadership, managements, coaching, consulting, education, health, fitness, etc. These are so much the essential applications that they are commonly, even to this day, confused with what NLP really is. That’s why some say NLP is Modeling, some say it is Psychotherapy, some say it is Hypnosis, and others say it is Self-Actualization. NLP certain is each of these in terms of applications. But what is it at its core? Can we determine that?

NLP is actually much deeper than any of these. Thinking about it as a communication model, then at its heart, it is about how we communicate to ourselves and others to create our experiences (states, skills, knowledge). As NLP identified how these communications work and the basic communication processes (mechanism), we found that it gave us the inner hidden structure of experience itself. And when you know the structure of an experience, you can model and replicate that experience.

Yet unbeknown to most NLP trainers, writers, researchers, and teachers, NLP is actually deeper than just a Communication Model. Nor is this something new that I’m adding to NLP, it has been deeper since the beginning, but hardly anyone noticed. I did not. And I researched it for decades and delved into the NLP models going back to the original sources. Perhaps that’s because it is easier and makes more sense to simply say that it is a Communication Model. People understand that. What else would you call it?

When Bob and I packaged NLP for the two volumes of User’s Manual of the Brain, we said that it is most essentially a Communication Model. Evidence of that goes to the fact that the first NLP model is “the Meta-Model of Language in Therapy” and the second model was the Representational Model that comprises our communications (including Sub-Modalities or the cinematic features of our inner movies). The third model, the Strategies Model about how the communications generates and “programs” an experience. Fourth, the Milton Model of hypnotic communication patterns and how trance states work. Fifth, the Meta-Programs model about how people think in their communications. That’s a lot of evidence that NLP is a Communication Model. Yet could it be something deeper? If so, what would we call it?

Could we call it a thinking model? What if, deeper than all of the uses and applications of NLP is thinking? Yet there’s a problem with that. Namely, what is a thinking model? How do you model thinking? Thinking itself seems so primary and irreducible, what would be its components? Perhaps that’s why none of us saw that NLP could be defined as a thinking model. But let’s go with it for a moment. Suppose we called NLP a thinking model? After all, take each of the communication models and let’s ask, What lies within and underneath each model? The answer is Thinking.

Meta-Model of Language Linguistic distinctions encoding how we think.
Representational Model Sensory representations encoding sensory VAK thinking.
Sub-Modality Model Cinematic features framing how one is thinking.
Strategy Model Representational steps in how a thinking format is structured.
Milton Model Hypnotic linguistic distinctions that invite a person to construct thinking about possibilities and in terms of metaphors (metaphorical thinking).
Meta-Programs Model Thinking patterns that govern ways of perceiving.
Perceptual Positions Model Thinking patterns from different perceptual positions.
Reframing Model Thinking patterns for framing different ways of interpreting a word, experience, or person, thinking about meaning in different way.
Meta-States Model Reflexive thinking patterns that layer thought upon thought to generate more complex states.

One thing this perceptive highlights is that all ‘thinking’ is not the same. There are many different kinds and dimensions of thinking. It also puts a spotlight on the driving force inside of communication—the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your communicating. As thinking can go wrong, make mistakes, be fallacious—so can everything that thinking generates. No wonder change, and transformation of persons and organizations, require new thinking in new and different ways.

What am I saying here? I’m saying that what NLP is most essentially a Thinking Model. When you really understand NLP, you know that it is a way of thinking, a way of rethinking, and a way to do both critical and creative thinking. With this in mind, then at the core of every change is re-thinking. It is fresh thinking and it is meta-thinking, that is, the ability to think about your thinking so that you can make sure it is accurate, specific, precise, creative, and ecological.

Thinking has been at the core of NLP from the beginning, but we missed it. Perhaps we dismissed “thinking” as too small, too obvious, or not distinctive enough. Perhaps we wanted something more sell-able, something more commercially appealing, something that sounded more sexy— communication, change, reframing, modeling, etc.

Now as a Thinking Model, NLP (including Meta-States) offers us nearly everything we need to build and articulate a model of thinking. And unbeknown to most of the field of NLP, that’s what I’ve been doing in our Brain Camp trainings and in the series of books on thinking. It has been a discovery long time in coming, but it is now coming in a training near you.

From: L. Michael Hall
2023 Neurons #44
October 16, 2023
NLP A Thinking Model #2

IF NLP IS A THINKING MODEL—

I have proposed that deeper than a Communication Model, or a model about modeling, psychology, personal development, etc., NLP is most essentially at its core a Thinking Model (#43). Viewing NLP from this perspective changes several things about NLP. It changes numerous things that we can claim for NLP, how to sell NLP trainings, and perhaps even the future of NLP. Let’s start from the premise of the title, If NLP is a thinking model, then what? What inevitably follows if that is the case?

1st) NLP enables you to think better. Even the very idea of “thinking” suddenly becomes much more specific and actionable. I discovered that when I first studied NLP. Learning about the sensory representational systems, namely, that we think in images (visual), sounds (auditory), sensations (feelings, kinesthetics) along with smells and tastes, I discovered that I had almost completely ignored the auditory channel. Why? That was due to a misbelief I picked up in college, namely, that I was tone-deaf. Having lived with that mis-understanding for 30 years, I simply paid no attention to that system. Now suddenly I discovered a whole new realm for information coding. I was not tone-deaf!

When you know about the VAK sensory systems for representing information, you have many more specific channels for thinking. You have multiple ways of enhancing your internal snapshots and movies about things. There’s scores of cinematic features (sub-modalities) that you can now use to enrich what and how you think. It’s actually quite amazing. It makes actionable the multiple intelligence model of Howard Gardner (see Frames of Mind, 1983).

2nd) NLP enables you to be an effective critical thinker. If the VAK model enriches your internal coding of information so that you can “think” with much more richness, then the Meta-Model of Language empowers you to learn the essence of critical thinking. The discipline of “critical thinking” is about thinking more clearly, precisely, accurately, and rationally. To do that, the Meta-Model specifies 21 linguistic distinctions to pay attention to so that your thinking will be “well-formed” and not suffer from the ill-formedness caused by deletions, generalizations, and distortions.

If that sounds complicated, it really is not. Nearly all of the deletion distinctions are already intuitive in you as a native speaker. When you hear, “He rejected me” you intuitively know that the verb “reject” is not specific. So you naturally ask, “How did he reject you?” The generalizations and distortions are partly intuitive, yet most of them you have to learn to recognize them. When you do recognize the linguistic distinction, then ask a question. That’s what the Meta-Model is—a set of distinctions and questions to get a speaker to be more specific and precise. How important is that for any communicator? For any leader, parent, therapist, coach, teacher, etc.?

When I began doing research in the field of Critical Thinking (yes, there is a whole field!), I discovered that not a single book in that field referenced NLP’s Meta-Model. Not one! So I wrote the first one, Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Potentials (2018). Why? Because the Meta-Model is the most direct and simple way to learn how to be an excellent critical thinker.

3rd) NLP enables you to be an effective creative thinker. As a model, the Meta-Model not only allows you to think and communicate more precisely, it enables you to see the very structure (thinking structure) that formulates an experience. Every experience has a structure and that structure entails how a person thinks. Discovering that structure, which is what the NLP Strategy model does, as well as the Meta-Programs, now we can create and/or model expertise that already exists.

In the history of NLP this happened as an accident. It was not planned. All that the founders intended to do was to find out how Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, two brilliant therapists, were able to achieve tremendous results in psychotherapy. So as they listened to how they talked, they inferred what they must be thinking, then from that they created a whole list of “patterns” for replicating their expertise. Those patterns became the content of NLP training. They reveal how a therapist would lead a client to a new way of thinking and experiencing.

4th) NLP enables you to solve problems at the thinking structural level. From that “accident,” the founders realized that the solutions and cures were not based on the “content” of what a person thought so much as on the process of how the person shifted in thinking. That’s why, they explained, many different approaches and therapies all work. But therapists of those schools are wrong in thinking that it is because of the belief system in the therapy, it’s the shift of thinking underneath or within the content.

It was in that way that NLP was recognized as a meta-discipline from the beginning. The “magic” was not in Gestalt, not in Family Systems, not in Hypnosis, or any other model, it was in the internal structure. Unknown to the founders, this corresponded to what Korzybski said, “Structure and structure alone is the essence of knowledge.” Then, out of this discovery, arose the focus on modeling. When we re-code NLP as a Thinking Model, are many benefits result. I’ll speak of more of them in the next Neurons posts.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

When it comes to defining NLP—for decades the most universal and common definition, and the definition given everywhere in the world, is this: NLP is a Communication Model. And it is a Communication Mode for good reason, namely—
∙ It began with the Meta-Model of Language in Therapy
∙ It expanded to the Representation systems including how we code them with cinematic features called sub-modalities.
∙ It expanded to the Hypnotic communication patterns of Erickson.
∙ It expanded to the Strategy Model for how an experience is structured.
∙ It expanded to the thinking/ perceiving patterns which we call Meta-Programs.
∙ And what is any “pattern” but a step by step way of thinking about how to experience something.

It therefore makes good sense to see NLP as a Communication Model. Yet we now know in Neuro-Semantics that there’s something deeper than communication patterns and linguistic patterns—there is thinking. Yes NLP began as the founders became enthralled by how Perls, Satir, and Erickson communicated and how their communications effected tremendous transformations. Yet later another question emerged: How did these experts in therapeutic communications think? What thinking processes enabled them to communicate as they did? It is these questions which take us deeper into something even more profound than communication.

Thinking is a deeper, and far more expansive, phenomena than communication. After all, to become an expert, it is required that you think like an expert. Bandler noted this in Using Your Brain for a Change:
“When I first started modeling, it seemed logical to find out what psychology had already learned about how people think.” (1985, p. 14).

Similarly, Robert Dilts, another NLP founder and developer, wrote in Strategies of Genius:
“The belief system of NLP is that it is the thinking process behind the accomplishment that is the most important element of creating something like genius. … The field of NLP has developed out of the modeling of human thinking skills.” (Volume I, pp. xxiv, xxv)

What is deep NLP? We can define Deep NLP as a study and presentation of thinking and the art of how to think. Let’s run with that idea. What if NLP is more essentially a Thinking Model than a Communication Model? After all, when you learn NLP, if you learn it properly, you learn to think.
∙ You learn to think clearly, accurately, precisely—the Meta-Model.
∙ You learn to thinking in sensory specifics details—the VAK model.
∙ You learn to think hypnotically to induce resourceful states—the Milton Model.
∙ You learn to think strategically about the form/ process of experience for replication—the Strategy Model.
∙ You learn to think reflexively about your thinking—the Meta-States Model.

Now while “thinking” may not be felt as needed or as sexy as communication, the fact remains that you can communication no better than you can think. It’s ill-formed thinking that leads to ill-formed language and therefore to ill-formed communicating, emotions, and behaviors. That’s because as thinking is the central core of everything in communication, it is also the central core of everything human. And because thinking dominates everything about NLP, what if this re-defines NLP. It now strikes me that—
NLP is actually and essentially a Thinking Model, and if it is a thinking model, then what we most fundamentally do is help people to do quality thinking, or at least we should.

Now, have we not said from the beginning that it is not only the content of what you think, but how you think which determines your experience? Yes of course. So, given that, what if we made it our objective to help people do higher quality thinking? What if NLP (and Neuro-Semantics) developed a reputation for teaching critical and creative thinking skills? I’ve made this my focus for the past several years and have written a series of books on thinking as deeper than communication. I began with Executive Thinking (2018), wrote books on specific thinking skills, and then concluded with Thinking for Humans (2024).

The Many Ways You Think
In NLP we have had a problem. To identify the problem, let’s start with the fact that in learning NLP, you actually learn many different ways to think. While this probably was not pointed out to you when you took NLP training, in the end you learned to think in multiple ways as never before. And in each of these different ways to think, your thinking skills were actually expanded and enriched thereby enabling you to generate all sorts of new ideas, responses, and processes. You learn to think critically and creatively.

Consider all of the different kinds of thinking inherent in NLP: There’s sensory thinking (the VAK), linguistic thinking that leads to descriptive thinking, somatic thinking of the body, semantic thinking for our concepts, beliefs, and evaluations. There is perceptual thinking (our meta-programs) and also the perceptual positions by which we can think using various perspectives. There is imaginative thinking (what if thinking and hypnotic thinking), and there is metaphorical thinking. In terms of time, there is future thinking (predictive, anticipatory thinking), past thinking (remembering, reminiscing), and present time (sensory-based thinking). There is creative thinking and strategic thinking for modeling. There is the thinking that goes into framing and reframing. There is holistic and systemic thinking. There is inductive and deductive thinking (as you chunk up and down the scale of specificity and abstraction).

Wow! That’s a lot of thinking. Further, thinking leads to all of the various constructs of the mind—beliefs, decisions, understandings, intentions, memories, imagination, anticipations, expectations, creativity and innovations. Thinking also leads to all of the things we do relationally— promise, contract, relate, coach, lead, manage, parent, and on and on.

Now because thinking is the process regarding how the brain processes information, it is both a conscious and unconscious process. In fact, it mostly occurs outside-of-conscious awareness rather than in it. Now if thinking is a process—then it is a skill. And if a skill —then a capacity, a power, and a potential! And that brings us to the critical question:

Who Teaches Thinking?
Who teaches clear, precise, and accurate thinking? Who teaches creative and innovative thinking? All too often we assume that thinking is natural, inevitable, and good. Then we encounter poor thinking, crazy thinking, dysfunctional thinking, and irrational thinking and realize that thinking—as a skill—can be good or bad, rational or irrational, functional or dysfunctional, childish or adult.

I mentioned earlier that, ideally, when you learn NLP, you learn to think. That’s the ideal. But are NLP trained people better thinkers than most people? Sadly they are not. Reading books, articles, and websites by NLP people, you can see all sorts of Meta-Model violations that encourage sloppy thinking, vague thinking, and poor thinking.

What’s the problem? How is it that someone could learn NLP and not become a better thinker? Perhaps we are assuming that learning the NLP Models will automatically— and without effort or direction— lead people to think effectively. There certainly are people who experience that. But not everyone. Many people who learn NLP fail to use the appropriate thinking for the appropriate model. As a result, they do not learn how to effectively use the models. Accordingly, if you use the wrong thinking when you learn a specific model or application— your learning will be severely inhibited.

Given all of this, I am more convinced than ever that we ought to be teaching people how to think using NLP. This has led me to research thinking and to model some of the best thinkers which I have then put into a whole series of books on thinking.

The Return of Thinking
It seems to me that a big confusion occurred soon after the founding of NLP. The confusion was about thinking. People began confusing “thinking” with conscious thinking, not realizing that most of our thinking occurs outside-of-conscious awareness. Consequently, a false dichotomy arose between the so-called “conscious mind” and the “unconscious mind.” Yet if we think holistically, there is but one mind, one intelligence, some of which is conscious and most of which is outside-of-conscious awareness.

This dichotomy is still alive and well today in the field of NLP and causing lots of problems. Like the dichotomy of “mind” versus “emotions,” or “mind” versus “body,” this dichotomy creates a false tension and conflict. Some draw the false conclusion that the “mind” is totally inadequate for coping with life, for facilitating change, for enriching the quality of life. They default on their own thinking and become quite willing to let someone else “run their brain.” “Just do some NLP on me and fix this problem.”

To this problem of over-emphasizing the so-called “unconscious mind,” it seems to me that there began in the 1980s a return to thinking. Here’s some evidence of that.
∙ Leslie Cameron LaBeau, 1980s, discovered the role of thinking when she recognized that some ways of thinking prevent certain classical NLP patterns from being effective. Out of that discovery, she identified the first Meta-Programs.
∙ Joseph Yeager, 1985, wrote Thinking about Thinking with NLP. “NLP is the science of thinking about thinking” (viii). NLP practitioners “Know exactly how to change your thinking habits, not just talk about them” (4). “Unless one is able to make a breakthrough from absolute thinking to relative thinking, NLP is just so much bafflegab” (9). “In NLP feeling (Kinesthetic) is defined as a cognitive event. That is, feelings are thoughts, too. As expressed colloquially, the experience of intuition is a kinesthetic mode of thinking.” (182)
∙ Wyatt Woodsmall, 1990s: Modeling II went beyond what an expert did (Modeling I) to his or her person. This brought thinking back to NLP as it shifted the focus from modeling behavior to how the expert thought (Dilts’ Strategies of Genius series).
∙ Reframing models (Dilts’ Sleight of Mouth, Hall’s Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds) introduced how to think about the construct of meaning. In reframing you change the way you think about something as you frame it in a new or different way.
∙ Steven Leads and Rachel Hott: “It’s our tendency as human beings to get into fixed habits so that we do not have to think about everything we do. .. People are mostly unconscious. Without awareness, there is no opportunity for change.” NLP: A Changing Perspective.
∙ Robert Dilts: “The strategy for how one thinks about information is as important as the content of the information.” 1994 Strategies of Genius, p. 185. “In this book I will attempt to model the thinking processes of a number of historical individuals, who have been identified as geniuses …” (xxvi) “NLP provides a set of tools and distinctions that allow us to map out cognitive processes underlying the works of creative and exceptional people. … NLP looks for the deeper structures that produced these results.” (xxix).

In these, and many more, ways there’s been a slow recognition of the importance of thinking, and the quality of thinking, in NLP.

A Visual Picture of Deep NLP — The Meta Place
If you could see deep NLP, what would you see? What does that depth look like? To answer that question, I posed another question to myself a few years ago.
“If we could see mind, what does mind look like? What visual image could help us picture mind or consciousness?”

It’s easy to answer that question about “the brain.” Neurologists and neuro-scientists have been able to map out the anatomy of the brain for many decades and with each decade, their mapping has been getting more and more accurate. Pictures and diagrams of the brain are now everywhere and they can help us understand the functioning of the brain. But while the brain somehow produces the mind, the brain is not the mind. The mind is not an empirical see-hear-or-feel entity like the brain. To therefore learn to see the mind, I asked another question:
“What does the mind do? How does the mind function? When the mind is actively operational, what is produced?”

While the answer is simple, it is also profound: The mind thinks. And yet when it thinks, it thinks in a great many ways, in a great many dimensions, and at multiple levels. That’s because not all thinking is the same. Accordingly I began making a list of words indicating “thinking” and after I had more than 100 words, I began inquiring about the major dimensions and/or stages of thinking. I created a thinking continuum so as to get a picture of the range of thinking over all of the dimensions. That led to the next question:
“What are the central or key dimensions of thinking? If we considered these the primary landmarks of the mind—what would they be?”

I then found that by treating these categories of thinking as the landmarks of the mind, I could create a rough diagram of consciousness comprised of those landmarks. I titled this mental space or place The Meta Place. Given that all thinking (all thought) is inside our minds and therefore above and about whatever we are thinking about— it is meta to the references, hence, a place meta to the world. It is a map about the territory and not the territory.

Then taking these categories of thinking, I summarized them into three primary dimensions or categories of thinking—essential thinking skills (for grounding), eureka thinking skills (for creating), and executive thinking skills (for governing). Then within them, I identified five of the most significant thinking skills in each of these dimensions. The purpose was not to be rigorously accurate, only to create a beginning diagram, one would enable us to see consciousness or mind in action. And that’s what The Meta Place (2023) provides today—a beginning image for how to conceptualize and picture the mind.

Now with that, a person can make a deep dive into the mind (the Meta Place). It is as simple as recognizing the landmarks of the mind which you then embrace and explore to see what a person has mapped. For more, see the books on the thinking series and especially Executive Thinking and Thinking for Humans. Once you have that, you will be ready for The Deep Dive.

THE NLP LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
2024

We have just completed the 2024 NLP Leadership Summit held in Santa Cruz, California. This was the first time we held it in the USA, every other time was in London England and in Alicante Spain. While we had 84 in attendance in 2020 prior to the Pandemic, we had a smaller group of 41 this time, leaders from 15 or more countries (Greece, Netherlands, France, Germany, UK, Mexico, Spain, USA, Brazil, Australia, Austria, Canada, Egypt, Columbia, Switzerland). Many in England and in Europe did not make the jump across the pond, but we had many more from the Americas this time.

Just as national leaders come together from time to time in a Summit to talk about mutual interests or mutual problems to address, so the leaders from many NLP communities come together in similar to have a conversation about the state of affairs and if we can do anything together. Now the goal of the Summit is very simple: we come together to associate with each other. It is not an Association, but an associating. The Summit has no official status or organization, it is essentially an event that occurs from time to time. And what we have found in the 2-hour Summits in London and the 2 to 3 days Summits in Alicante is that “Yes indeed, there are things we can do together.”

Amazing isn’t it? We have learned that we can collaborate if only we will have the conversations. Conversely, without the conversation, we remain isolated and separated. Then it it is so much more likely that we mis-read each other’s intentions and motivations, and not know each other as persons, only through limited exposure and the gossip that gets around the community. How different to be with someone for 3 days! And especially when there is a guided conversation that enables us to speak about the things we really care about.

That was the purpose of calling Leaders together in a colloquium—“a guided conversation.” So instead of a Conference, instead of a Training, instead of a Retreat, we gather to encounter each other and our shared visions and values. If we had a conference, we would want to have “Speakers”and “Presenters” then there would be the issue of, “Who gets to be on stage?” But with Summit as a colloquium—we are all equals, we are all colleagues, and so there is no one “in charge.” There are only roles. The guided questions we used this time were:
∙ What are you doing as a leader in NLP that’s leading the minds and hearts of people into NLP?
∙ What do you consider essential (or foundational) in NLP that we need to hold on to as we envision the future?
∙ How can we mentor the next generation of leaders so NLP is not over-simplified or watered-down and lose its distinctiveness?
∙ How can we maintain the experiential nature of NLP in this age of zoom?

The role that I took from the beginning, and the role that Heidi and I are now taking, is not to be the speaker or presenter. It is the role of helping/ facilitating everyone to have a voice. Ours is just the organizing of the details so as to make the Summit of Leaders to be as smooth an event as possible. And so we facilitate the others to speak and to be heard. There are other roles—especially leading a committee or being a part of a committee.

This was the 4th extended Summit. Previously we met in Alicante Spain for 2 or 3 days in 2016, 2018, and 2020. And since the beginning we have created a website— www.nlpleadersummit.org and have come to an agreement about what NLP is, its values, ethics, etc. As of today more than150 leaders in the field with more than 15 years experience as a leader have become participants in the Summit. There are also people from 15 NLP Associations. This year in Santa Cruz we experienced a once in a lifetime experience as Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier took us on a trip down memory lane. In a caravan of eight cars, Robert and Judith shared memories as they pointed out places where significant events occurred. They took us up to the Colleges of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to Stevenson College and Kresge College.

Slowly but surely we are coming together, building more trust and respect for each other so that we have more of a unified voice. And this unified voice will allows us to speak with more authority to those who are degrading NLP, cheapening it, and contaminating it and making it less professional. Since the beginning we have created numerous ad hoc committees and several permanent committees—an ethics committee, standards, media response committee, global body, mentoring, health and aging, marginalized communities, trauma, etc.

Worldwide there are many NLP communities, most are National Associations. Some are associations around a particular model or process— Lab Profile group (meta-programs), Mental Imagery group, etc. Via the Summit, we can stay more in touch with what’s going on, who is doing what, and where we since the future developments of NLP.

From the Neuro-Semantic community, we have eight trainers present: Pascal Gambardella, Omar Salom, Mohamed Tarek, Maira Larangeira, Geraldine Hall, Jason Schneider, Francisco Dallmeier, and myself. We have tentatively planned for the next Summit for January 9-11, 2026 and with it possibly being in France or Crete. This will be determined by the Summit participants later this year.