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.

In his two books on Six Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas announces that it is all about scope and category. He says that it is about how we create categories in our mind to understand things as well as how we bite off various sizes of information to deal with— how big or small the scope of our focus. So far, so good, but then he uses these distinctions to mostly rephrase NLP. What we call sensory awareness of the VAK, he calls “scope.” Then for the higher level frames, the logical levels, and the meta-states, he calls them “category.”

What does that mean? It means that when you read Six Blind Elephants, you are reading about logical levels or meta-states and the meta-stating process. Yet the author does not acknowledge this nor does he seem to be even very much aware of it. Yet it is the meta-stating process that is presented over and over in the books.

Now a meta-state is a higher logical level phenomenon created by how we step back from whatever we are experiencing at the primary state level of sensory-based experience (scope) and rise up, transcend the immediate, and then include the immediate inside of a higher frame, context, or category. So when Andreas deals with “categories” of the mind, he is referring to the same subjective experience that I do when I speak about meta-states even if he has yet to acknowledge such. While this is obvious over and over in the book, you would never know it from reading these books.

Meta-Stating Problems
Steve writes:

“When solving a problem it makes a huge difference whether we think of wrestling with it or dancing with it, attacking it or thinking of it as challenging. Categorizing [e.g., meta-stating] it one way can make any process difficult, unpleasant, and arduous, while another description can make it an exciting adventure.” (Volume II, p. 84)

Here “categorizing,” puts the primary state of “solving a problem” into one of these four categories. This is the very same process when we meta-state the problem-solving state with one of these four mental-emotional states. Andreas speaks as if this is some new thing in NLP when actually it has been a part of the NLP Meta-States Model since 1994 when it was recognized by the International Association of NLP Trainers. What Andreas seems to not know is that when you meta-state, you set up a new category.

Meta-Stating using Cognitive Qualifiers
Andreas speaks of John McWhirter as having provided —

“. . . a fascinating and subtle example of how our minds can be pre-set to respond in a particular way, that sadly, others have not previously noticed. A ‘cognitive qualifier’ is a ‘commentary’ adverb appearing at the beginning of a sentence or phrase that refers to an emotional or cognitive state, such as the words ‘happily’ or ‘sadly’ in the previous sentence.” (Vol. II, p. 84, italics added)

Did Andreas just say that a cognitive qualifier “refers to an emotional … state?” That’s amazing! Yet that is as close as he will admit that categorizing is the same as meta-stating. The cognitive qualifiers are at a higher level and “refer to an emotional state.” And that is how I have defined a meta-state. Though Andreas has sadly not noticed it before (years and years of Anchor Point and NLP World articles about Meta-States) this is precisely part of the description of a meta-state—a higher state about a lower state.

“Cognitive qualifiers direct your mind to think of an experience in a way that is specified by the kind of qualifier used.” (II, p. 85)

That sounds like what I wrote years ago in an article on Texturing States describing how we qualify a state via the meta-stating process. Noting that the words “sadly, luckily, and happily” refer to “emotional states, and most emotions are evaluative” he also writes.

“An attitude of interest or fascination is an excellent positive resource state for learning and change, because it redirects attention from the evaluation of the problem to interest and curiosity about how the problem works, a shift to a more specific logical level of categorization. (II, p. 86)

If Andreas had done his homework in studying the Meta-States Model, he would have known that we define a meta-state as an “attitude” and that, as such, it sets an evaluative frame at a higher level and redirects our focus. Content wise, I think we are saying the same thing although we are using different words and drawing different conclusions.

In his fourth chapter Modes of Operating (Volume II), he uses Venn diagrams to illustrate how one of the motivation or option modal operator states relate to another, sometimes embedding one inside of the other. He has Impossibility as the largest level, then Possibility and inside of Possibility there is Necessity, Choice, and Desire states. When we do this in Meta-States, we talk about one state embedded inside of another. I began doing that in 1996.

Andreas even begins playing with state upon state, having to choose, choosing to need, etc.

“When you are totally congruent, it is possible to, you want to, you choose to, and paradoxically, you also have to, because you really couldn’t do anything else!” (II, p. 108)

His fifth chapter, Self-Reference deals with Circularity.

“Self-reference inevitably occurs whenever we think about ourselves and how our minds work.” (II, p. 111)

Ah, here we again have a meta-state. When we say something about ourselves, the thoughts we generated are “both made by the self and describe the self, so they refer to themselves, in a circular process.”

“Whenever the criteria for a higher logical level are the same as the criteria for the members of the included logical levels, it will be self-referential.” (II, p. 114)
“In order for a statement to be self-referential, it has to either:
a. refer to itself directly, or
b. refer to itself indirectly, by including itself as a member of a more general category that it describes, and
c. the description must apply to all members of the category.
To discover self-reference, the key question to ask is, ‘Is this communication an example of what the communication describes?’” (II, p. 116)

Now Andreas writes as if this is a brand new discovery. Actually, it was— back in 1994—12 years earlier! In fact, in 1995 I put together a book on negative meta-states (“dragons”) like worrying about worrying (anxiety) and I described the looping and downward spiraling when one brings a negative state against oneself.

“In worrying, the process may continue to occupy your mind for some time, as you recursively think of one possible scenario after another. However, if you find yourself in an unsatisfactory loop, and the results of the future event are very important to you, you may find that the loop escalates at every step, creating what has often been called a ‘vicious circle’ of increasing anxiety.” (II, p. 125)

From the first edition of Meta-States (1995), I described paradoxes as a result of meta-stating. When you deliberately do what you typically experience as a spontaneous symptom you have a counter-intuitive way to interrupt the escalating loop which usually results in reducing the symptoms. Why is this? Because, as Andreas notes, it reverses the direction of the escalating loop (II, p. 127).

“By deliberately creating fear, you can find out exactly how you do it—what kind of images you make, what you say to yourself, etc. — and this can transform what you previously experienced as involuntary into something voluntary.” (II, p. 128)

In Meta-States, I also noted the meta-state structure in Virginia Satir’s question, “How do you feel about feeling depressed?” I quoted this in the book, showed how that this is a meta-stating process which Richard Bandler and John Grinder missed. Now Andreas quotes it and comments:

“Since they are already attending to their feelings, this is a good match for their experience, it asks them to categorize [meta-state] their feeling response at a more general logical level, instead of cycling back to their depressing thoughts, changing the loop. … Although occasionally a client might reply, ‘I feel depressed about being depressed,’ usually they will respond with a different feeling. ‘Well, I feel sad about feeling depressed.” . . . These new feelings will take them out of the old loop, and they can be utilized as a starting point for making future changes. If you get stuck, you can always ask the recursive feeling question again at any time. ‘How do you feel about feeling depressed about feeling depressed?” (II, p. 130)

Interesting enough, that is exactly what we have been doing in Meta-States for more than a decade. It offers an excellent way to gain control over a negative spiraling state. When we use this process in Meta-States, we acknowledge that it is the dynamic of multi-ordinality that Alfred Korzybski identified and described (Science and Sanity, 1933, pp. 440-1).

“Often people don’t enjoy learning to do something new, because the early stages of learning are often confusing and awkward, and they naturally would like to avoid this unpleasantness, and the unpleasant evaluative feelings about their confusion and awkwardness. It is one thing to realize that the beginning stages of learning are often inevitably difficult and uncomfortable. It is quite another to use that discomfort as a reason not to learn anything new.” (II, p. 131)

“Self-contradiction exists at the logical level of categorization, and at that level there truly is no solution. In order to escape from a contradiction, you have to shift logical levels. You can either go to a more general level, or to a more specific level.” (II, p. 150)

(“‘Feel free) to (restrict yourself) to the information that is relevant to the problem’ nests restriction inside freedom. … (‘Take as much time) as you need to (quickly review) those past events in order to come to a new conclusion about their relevance to your present life situation,’ gracefully nesting speed inside slowness.” (II, p. 157)

When George Bernard Shaw wrote, “I’m an atheist, and I thank God for it.” he put his identity (being an “atheist”) within the frame of “things to thank-God for.”

Andreas’ Basic Mistake
About self-reference Steve Andreas goes wrong from the beginning when he attempts to define self-reference. What he presents is not only simply wrong, but he forgets a back NLP principle and Meta-Model distinction, namely, The Lost Performative. His fallacious definition is this: “A category can be shown to include itself as a member.”

Now Andreas does admit that this goes against such intellectual giants as Bertrand Russell and Gregory Bateson. “I realize that this violates Bertrand Russell’s famous ‘Theory of Types.’” (II, p. 113). Yet even that doesn’t stop him. He wants to define self-reference as always involving a word or idea that “is both the categorizer and an example of the category” (II, p. 111).

“‘I respect you,’ is both a categorization of the relationship as respectful, and also an example of one of the behaviors described by the word ‘respect.’” (II, p. 111)

It is here that Andreas violated the Meta-Model distinction of Lost Performative. After all, who is doing the categorizing here? He says this “is both a categorization and … an example”—in other words, an identification. He writes as if it “is” that way and no human being is involved in making it so, which of course, is non-sense. He says “the sentence refers to itself.” Well, I’m sorry Steve, but sentences don’t do anything, a person uses a sentence to refer to things.

“When a statement refers to itself by including itself in a more general category of events, the statement must also be an absolute statement…” (II, pp. 114-115)

This is called the Lost Performative because someone is mapping out an understanding and the speaker has left out the performer of the map. Later he regains his sanity when he tells a story of a young woman and her mother. As he speaks about “how she categorizes,” he comments, “Her statement could have been a description that in her mind did not include itself.” (II, p. 171). Yes, of course! It is always a person who does the categorizing, the “sentence” is not the cause or source —the person is. Later Andreas writes something that he should equally apply to self-reference. If he had, he would not have made his error:

“Negation is either at a lower or higher logical level than existence, depending on how we think about it.” (II, p. 173, italics added)

To support this he declares that Bateson is also wrong (II, pp. 164,165). And once again he declares that “the statement categorizes.” “‘I love you’ categorizes the relationship at the same time that it is an example of the category of behaviors called ‘love.’” But that is not true. The truth is that it all depends on how we think about something. Do we include a category within the category? Or do we keep them separate? Here he creates confusion by making both category and member the same. The category of cats is not a cat, it is a category— a conceptual framework for talking about cats. And Steve knows this.

“… the name of the category is different from the group of experiences named…” (II, p. 113)

The problem is his invention of “heritability” which is the non-sense that he perpetuates.

“Whenever a category can be shown to include itself as a member, the criteria for the category apply not only to the members of the category, but also to the category itself, by the property of heritability. I realize this violates Bertrand Russell’s famous ‘Theory of Types.’” (II, p.113)

We see his lack of critical thinking when he thereafter declares this:

“If I say,’Ideas are insubstantial,’ that statement is also an idea, so it applies to itself, and is therefore insubstantial.”

But “that statement is an idea, so it applies to itself…” is his categorizing it as such. It does not have to be so categorize. I can treat the category, “Insubstantial ideas” as different from the ideas that I put into that category. “Insubstantial ideas” is a name. This is where Andreas goes wrong. Human beings are the persons who are doing the referring and categorizing. We can’t blame the sentences! That’s why we have to ask the person, “Are you making a distinction between class and member of the class? Are you applying the classification as a member of itself?”

If a person is doing that, then that statement from that person is self-referential and then many of the things Andreas writes about applies. But it is not the case that it always is that way. “I always say stupid things.” Ask, is that a stupid thing that you have said? “I never learn anything!” How did you learn that? Yes, self-reference statements do create paradox and when they do, two logical levels are confused: class and member of class. That’s the whole point from Russell and Bateson.

Conclusion
In the books Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas has renamed basic NLP realities using “scope” and “category.” From there he has offered new insights on various subjective experiences— much of it highly valuable and practical. For that I acknowledge Steve and his many contributions. Yet because Andreas has apparently not read extensively in the field of NLP, and doesn’t seem willing to know study the models I’ve introduced, specifically the Meta-States Model, he does not seem to know that his term and use of “category” corresponds with a meta-state, that is, a meta-level experience. In criticizing Robert Dilts and myself about logical levels, and mis-representing what both of us have said and written, he fights a Straw Man, does a wonderful job of devastating the Straw Man, but of course, doesn’t even address the real issue.

In Blind Elephants there are meta-states and meta-stating processes everywhere. But don’t ask Steve Andreas about that, he seems oblivious to that fact. I have attempted to point that out in these two articles. My wish and hope is that Steve will re-consider his position, read with an open mind, and not read to confirm his current beliefs.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., psychologist, author, and modeler with over 25 modeling projects, founder of Neuro-Semantics, developer of the Meta-States Model, and other models and patterns in NLP.

References:

Andreas, Steve. (2006). Six Blind Elephants, Volume I, Fundamental principles of scope and category. Moab, UT: Real People Press.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Meta-States: Managing the Higher Levels of Your Mind’s Reflexivity. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, Michael. (2001). NLP: Going Meta—Advance Modeling Using Meta-Levels. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob G. (2005). Sub-Modalities: Going Meta. Formerly, “The Structure of Excellence.” Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Secrets of personal mastery: Advanced techniques for accessing your higher levels of consciousness. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

During the past year I engaged in an extended discussion with Steve Andreas about the term meta. You can read that discussion on either the Neuro-Semantic website or Andreas’ website. It’s all there for your pursual. You will probably noticed that in the discussion, we both seemed to talk past each other and as a result we did not come to a meeting of minds. And while I pretty much anticipated that, I really do not understand why we could not get on the same page. Steve claims that I did not answer his questions. In my view, I fully answered his questions. I feel that he did not really seek to understand the multiple meanings that are entailed in the term meta.

In reflecting on this, I suspect that a possible reason is that some people simply do not see the wonder and the “magic” of meta is that they do not recognize that the term meta is both a multi-ordinal term and a systems term that requires the acceptance of numerous system principles.

To explain this, I will first describe multi-ordinality and then the “magic” of meta within a system and as a systems dynamic. That will then allow me to specify how linearly thinking is the problem in preventing a person from seeing the richness of the term meta.

Multi-Ordinality
Alfred Korzybski describe terms that have an overgeneralized meaning and whose meaning changes according to its level. He termed these infinite-valued terms multi-ordinal. This means that at all of its levels (“multi-”) the term is reflexive—it can be used on itself. You can fear fear. You can love love. Linguists say that such terms are polysemous, that is, “marked by multiplicity of meanings.” Korzybski writes (Science and Sanity, 1933/ 1994):

“‘Mankind, science, mathematics, man, education, ethics, politics, religion, sanity, insanity, iron, wood, apple, object, etc.’ We use them not as one-valued terms for constants of some sort, but as terms with inherently infinite-valued or variable referents.” (pp. 138–9, 433)

Korzybski argued that his Theory of Multi-Ordinality and Reflexivity solved the problems created when we confuse map and territory. They fail to distinguish the levels of abstraction (logical levels). For this reason I added multi-ordinality to the extended Meta- Model (Communication Magic, 2001).

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. … If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyse languages by linguistic means. This self-reflexiveness of languages introduces serious complexities, which can only be solved by the theory of multi-ordinality. The disregard of these complexities is tragically disastrous in daily life and science.” (p. 58, italics added)

The term meta has multiple meanings precisely because it is a multi-ordinal term. Can you go meta (step back to a higher perspective) to the process of meta (stepping back)? Yes, of course and you can do that level upon level. Yet if you are using linear thinking to understand this, you will not and cannot understand this. Korzybski stated that the “Theory of Multi-Ordinality” (i.e., General Semantics) addresses map/territory confusion. The linguistic distinction of multi-ordinality explains why any word used multi-ordinally means something different at every level. And that’s why we have to ask, “At what level are you using that term?”

Multi-ordinality means that the term takes on a different meaning at each ordinal level (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). That’s why we have to ask, “At what level are you using the term?” So fear at the first level refers to something “out there” in the territory that is dangerous. But can you fear your state of fear? What is fear2 of fear1? We could say that the second-level of fear (fear2) is paranoia. Could you fear3 your fear-of-fear?1

The term meta at the first level simply means “above, beyond, or about.” Context then determines what is put at a higher level to the first level. You can have an emotion about an emotion; a thought about a thought. When you talk about the way you talk, your language is meta-language. When you use a metaphor to make a comparison, you are meta-stating with that metaphor. A metaphor is literally meta and phorein (to bring, to carry over). As you create a metaphor, you bring one image, thought, idea, reference, etc. to another so that it becomes the frame which formats a structure for the first. When you do this, you think about one thing in terms of another. Andreas uses the word “scope” for the primary level and “category” for the meta-level (Six Blind Elephants, I, p. 26)

The Strangeness of Systems “Magic”
When you put one state in a meta-relationship to another, you are likely to create which seems like magic. This “magic” is not literal, it rather describes an effect— how meta-relationship can strike us as magical because the result is often surprising, unexpected, and amazing. Here is the meta-stating process whereby one element interacts with another element and out of the mixture, something new and different and unexpected arises. Since a gestalt refers to something that is more than and different from the sum of the parts, multiple meta-stating gives rise to gestalt states.

What this means is that if you add up all of the parts, elements, or components together, you cannot explain the resulting experience. What we call “learning” becomes a very different experience when you bring joy to learning. “Joyful learning”— here the quality of the learning changed, but the experience itself hardly seems like learning at all. It seems like fun. People in the meta-state of joyful learning seem to be very happy and passionate. Looking at them and evaluating what they are experiencing, you could say all sort sof things such as—they are “in the zone,” they are in a state of pleasure, they are just enjoying themselves, etc. Yes, you could also put “joyful learning” as one member of the class of “learning” as Steve does. Yet that does not deny or prevent “learning” within the category of “joy.”

This is the way it is with systems. In systems, when various components interact with other components, new emergent properties arise that cannot be explained by adding the elements together. A new quality arises. Bring respect, calmness, and kindness to your primary state of anger— “I’m angry because you snub me and didn’t give me a referral” and you have a very different experience. Calm respectfully kind anger is hardly felt or experienced as “anger” at all by the one receiving it. The person giving it is firm but the calmness and kindness gives it an unique quality as the respect tempers the person’s words and confrontation so that it is quite acceptable. It doesn’t seem like anger, it seems that the person is simply being direct and open. Andreas’ mindset seems to make the “anger” category his primary referent than “going meta” to that category.

Consider the person who has forbidden himself from feeling anger because he considers that it means being “out-of-control.” Here we have multiple levels. (Believing anger means out-of-control) (I forbid myself) from (experiencing anger). So when anger is experienced, because it is forbidden, that taboo could create one of several different gestalts— inability to recognize anger, blindness to one’s anger, anger transmuting into stress (or frustration or fear or some other emotion). If you calibrate to that person’s state, would you even recognize that he is angry? Maybe not.

Consider the person who hates selling because to him it means “taking advantage of people for monetary gain.” What is the primary state? Presenting a product. Suppose it is the state of wanting to present or offer a product, a product he believes “is good value for money,” and “useful.” But the belief frame “selling takes advantage of people,” which the person hates, now holds him back. What is the feeling? The person feels stuck. The person feels conflicted inside. “I know it is a good product, but I don’t want to be aggressive or controlling.” The gestalt state here is being stuck. This emerges from the inter-relationship between the thinking-feeling components in the person’s mind. Yes, “hating selling” can be treated as a member of the class of anger (Andreas’ position). We can also see “selling” in the higher category of “hate” (my position). It is not an either/or choice. Both are legitimate.

In Neuro-Semantics, we talk about this layering of multiple elements (the meta-stating process) as texturing the state’s quality. How do you want your learning state textured? How do you want your loving state textured? If the quality of your life depends on the quality of your state, then the quality of your state depends on the quality of your meta-state. The state that you put at a meta level to your first state — qualifies it, textures it, and sets up the “magic” of the emergence of new properties. This is the point that Andreas has not (or will not) concede.

Consider the primary state of acting sequentially in a step-by-step way (the procedure meta-program). Let’s call that—being “disciplined” because the person is following a procedure. Now ask, “What do you think and/or feel about being disciplined?” (i.e., acting sequentially). Imagine that a person says, “I think that I’m losing my spontaneity and that I have no freedom.” That now becomes the higher category. What will be the effect of that belief (a category and meta level state) about the primary state? Probably stuck and unable to act. “I can’t do that.” If we again ask for an explanation, she might say, “without freedom I have less opportunities and won’t grow, I’ll be dying inside.”

This is another example of tabooing a primary state. The person stops herself from “acting sequentially, one step after another” because at the meta level category she attributes the meaning of having no spontaneity, choice, freedom, growth, etc. The meaning at these meta-levels over-loads the primary state (the scope) and shuts the person down.

“Magic,” in the sense of something being surprising, unexpected, and amazing, arises from the emergent properties (qualities) when we bring one or more thoughts or feelings to another. It is the interplay of these elements that systemically give rise to experiences that can’t be explain by mere addition.

When a gestalt occurs from combining multiple elements what happens is that we cannot anticipate the results. Add commitment to a goal, responsibility and passion to the primary state of fear and out of the mixture will sometimes come “courage.” Courage, as the gestalt of those components, is something “more than” and “different from” adding those elements together. A reductionistic analysis of “courage” will not find those pieces or how they intermingle. This is the “magic” (the wonder and surprise) of creating a gestalt of multiple meta-level components.

Consider making a mistake. At the primary level, this is something we all do on a daily basis. But “making a mistake” does not stand alone. You think and feel something about it. But what? What category do you put it in? Do you (fear) (making a mistake)? Do you (judge yourself as a person) for (making a mistake)? Those are different states/ categories. And they are radically from (learning) from (making a mistake). What if you bring (appreciation) (learning) (wondrous curiosity) and (playfulness) to (making a mistake)? What gestalt experience would that generate?

Part of the “magic” of meta-stating various resourceful elements to a primary state consists of the surprise and wonder of the emergent properties and their qualities. What if you were (fascinated) and (joyful) about (embarrassment)? You might experience something like the outrageous physical humor that Jim Carey is known for. What if you had (gracious) and (playful) (persistence)?

All of this suggests a process that we use with the Meta-States Model. We write various “states” on pieces of paper and then pick up 4 or 5 of them and try them on in our imagination. What would (outrageous) (optimism) and (passion) along with (joyful exaggeration) do for a trainer? Could that turn out a Anthony Robbins?

Take any primary state experience — whether you focus on behavior, emotion, or thought— and then playfully layer on top of it various resourceful states and consider what could arise as an emergent property.

• (Accepting) (loving) (gentle) compassion.
• (Relaxed) (dedicated) (persistent) engagement.
• (Thoughtful) (calmness) (proactive) decision-making.

When you “go meta” to the next higher level and layer on yet another state of thinking-feeling, you then put a twist on the primary experience because you are putting it into a higher category. It textures that experience. It adds another quality to it. The mixture of multiple resources sets up a systemic complexity that operates as a catalyst for a new and unpredictable emergent property.

When you “go meta” you are doing what Ken Wilbur described as “transcending and including.” It is not either you are transcending or you are including, you are doing both simultaneously. Yes you transcend from the primary level to a meta-level and you are including that primary experience inside of a new meta-level that becomes its frame. This generates all sorts of new possibilities.

The Problem is Linear Thinking
If meta is a multi-ordinal and systems term, then what stops full appreciation of it is linear thinking. And surprisingly this is a very common problem for many in the field of NLP. This, in spite of the fact that there were many system influences in the founding of NLP (Satir Family Systems, Perls Gestalt, Korzybski’s General Semantics as a non-Aristotelian system, Bateson’s cybernetic systems, etc.).

When you have have a complex adaptive system that involves large number of parts (elements, components) and which interact with each other, then you have a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous non-linear interactions. Given this, the sum is not a simple sum of the behavior of the parts. And why? Because as the elements interact and as the aggregate behavior of the whole occurs, all of these are fed back to the individual components. What in linear thinking is viewed as the effect then becomes the next level cause. And around and around it goes.

The key then lies in the interfaces that occur when one meta-level or phenomenon interacts with another. The following comes from Meta-States (2012) and is included in the training manual.

1) Reduce painful primary states: Calm about anger.
2) Intensify or magnify primary states: Worry about worry, anxious about anxiety.
3) Exaggerate and distort states: turn psychological energies against oneself: fear of anger: anger at one’s fear.
4) Negate or neutralize a state: In doubt about doubt, I feel more sure.
5) Interrupt states: Humorous about serious, intentionally panicking.
6) Confuse States: Ridiculous about serious.
7) Contradict levels to create paradox: hence “paradoxical intention,” the “be spontaneous now” paradox. Try really hard to relax, “never say never”
8) Dissociate from strong feelings: observing a remembered trauma.
9) Seed a new process to create response potential: courage to have courage, playful uncertainty.
10) Grab Attention: appreciative about anger, lovingly gentle about anger.
11) Entrance or hypnotize: Rebel against thinking about just how comfortable you can feel if you don’t close your eyes before you’re ready to relax deeper than you ever have before, now. I wonder if you’re going to fail to succeed at not going into trance at exactly your own speed or whether you won’t.
12) Generate gestalt states: Suppress excitement—>anxiety.
13) Jar consciousness for humor: An accomplished liar, flexible compulsiveness.
14) Qualify, temper, texture an experiences: Joyful learning, ruthless compassion.
15) Solidify a atate: Believe or value in X, take pride in X.
16) Loosen states: Doubt X, question X, be playful about X.

Summary
The meta process is a very dynamic one. Further, if used in an open system, then it never reaches an end-point, it never achieves its goals and “arrives,” it keep evolving, growing, and developing— becomes increasingly complex. This is why many do not see the dynamic nature of meta and why it takes on new properties and meanings at different levels.

• At the primary level, meta just means “above, beyond, or about.”
• Meta then establishes a relationships that is hierarchical as it establishes levels.
• As meta is used in relationship to something else, it takes on the meaning of “including and transcending
• ” which speaks of a system of inter-related components.
• As a system and systemic in nature, meta enables various emergent properties to emerge that cannot be explained by adding them together. It is non-linear, non-additive.

Do I use the term meta in several different ways as Steve Andreas suggests? Yes I do! That’s because the term is multi-ordinal and systemic. That’s also why and how the Meta-States Model can help us model complex, long-term system experiences.

Post Script
Interesting enough, Steve Andreas, quoting his wife Connirae’s work in Core Transformation, actually describes how the meta-stating process works. He uses the word “category” where I use “meta-state.” After starting with a primary level limitation, you ask—

“‘Having this outcome (X), what do you want, through having X, that’s even more important?’ This question is asked repeatedly, each time substituting the previous outcome, creating a series of outcomes in a hierarchy of importance. Each successive outcome is a more general category of experience, with increasingly larger scope and importance.” (2006, Vol. I, p. 89)

Then he says, “the description usually falls into one of several categories: ‘being,’ ‘inner peace,’ ‘love,’ ‘Okness,’ or ‘oneness.’” These vague terms are meta-states and/or meta-level understandings or beliefs.

References:
Polysemy refers to a word which has many different meanings. Mentioned in Six Blind Elephants, I, p. 59.

Review of Steve Andreas’s
Ongoing Misunderstandings of Meta-States

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Written 2006, updated 2018

At least he’s honest! I have to give him that. In his new book on Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category that he titled, Six Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas at least acknowledges that he just does not understand the Meta-States Model. Of course, he makes that admission as he is criticizing and arguing against it!

“I admit to being dizzy and confused. What on earth could it mean…?” Steve Andreas (Six Blind Elephants, 2006, p. 116)

His Straw Man Fallacy Argument
At first, I hoped he would provide a solid critique wherein he might point out some weakness or some area that needs more refinement. But no. What he argued against, and critiqued, was only a “straw man” presentation of the Meta-States Model. So I felt disappointed in his criticism. It reads more like Don Juan fighting vigorously against the windmills because he imagined that they were knights. Against the straw man that he created I could have given him even more arguments. I would have equally disputed what he argued against as unworthy and inadequate.

Andreas says that neither I nor Robert Dilts will “provide a clear operational definition of how we determine logical levels.” That’s not exactly true. I have repeatedly sent him that information and, for that matter, he could find that on the Neuro-Semantic website if he so chose. There’s plenty of articles there, free articles, about Meta-States and Logical Levels. As far as I can tell, he has not even read Meta-States, Secrets of Personal Mastery, Dragon Slaying, Frame Games, or Meta-State Magic to understand the Meta-States Model. The one and only book he even references in his bibliography is the first edition of The Matrix Model. So, given that, I’ll give him a break that what he has written is just the lack of study and information about Meta-States. Yet isn’t that funny that he wrote his review before he did his research? Not exactly professional.

In his book he quotes me, “Meta-States necessitates a different kind of thinking” than linear thinking. But then he tries to put the Meta-States Model on a procrustean bed to fit the linear thinking of his ideas of category and scope. It makes for an interesting, yet very inadequate critique. Generally, when scholars offer a critique, they will put that which they critique in context and evaluate it on its own merits and up against the contexts in which it has been designed. Andreas did not do this.

What Steve Andreas doesn’t seem to understand is that when it comes to human thinking-and-feeling as a dynamic, non-linear system, we do not follow the rules of Socrates and Aristotle’s rules of logic as we create our mental categories. Instead, as Alfred Korzybski noted, we are not logical, but psycho-logical beings. When it comes to the way we categorize things (since Andreas’ book is about categories and categorization (most of which is a pretty good description of how meta-states work), in human experiencing and meaning-making through thinking-and-feeling, we can categorize just about anything as a member of any category.

Playfully Serious
Andreas quotes me about “playful seriousness” and “playfully and compassionately kind in our seriousness,” but then he declares (as if this is absolute and divine truth) that playful as the modifier is a sub-category of seriousness (2006, p. 115). Really!

Yet is it that? That’s the question. What if we thought about the state and quality of being serious (which Steve seems to be well practiced in) and brought some playfulness to it? What if we brought some kind compassion to it? What if we brought some win/win thinking to it? Those are the qualities I typically frame (or meta-state) seriousness. I know it’s not logical, but what if we did it anyway? What if we did that just for the fun of it?

Steve does not even consider this possibility. He seems to only have one direction for sending his brain and that is in the direction of smaller and smaller categories. So for him, “playful” is a sub-category. And yes a person can perceive it that way. Yet there are other ways to perceive it. That is not the only choice for how to perceive it or frame it.

If we applied playful to serious we would embed serious inside of the larger context of play. That would make “seriousness” a member of the category of playfulness. Yes, I know, it is completely psycho-logical. Doing this would reduce the scope (extent) of seriousness making it a smaller thing to playfulness (which would be the larger category). Simultaneously it would extend the scope of playfulness, making playful the bigger thing.

Blinded by the Flawed Sub-Modality Model
Reading Blind Elephants makes me think that Steve has been completely blinded by the old sub-modality model. (Actually there’s a number of NLP people blinded by it.) The old so-called “sub-modality” model thought that because sub is in the title of sub-modalities that the features and variables that are called “sub” are “smaller”and “finer” distinctions. Description has been treated as territory. If we use that name, they must be below and sub- to the basic representation systems.

My hallucination is that he has taken the size or scope of things (smaller to bigger) to be equivalent to the construct of any and every “logical level.” And if that’s what has blinded the elephant, then no wonder he cannot understand Meta-States! This could be his chemistry background getting in his way. Steve Andreas has “atoms” and “molecules” on his mind and so sees things via the chemistry model. [“If we think of a scope as an ‘atom’ of meaning, a category is a simple ‘molecule’ composed of a group of scopes.” I, p. 237.]

On the Disliking of Words
Andreas also does not like lots of words. He states that “state” is “an ambiguous term” (I, p. 203). He does not like “reframing” and he seems to especially not like “meta” (and meta-position) because he thinks it is too vague. His solution? Get rid of these words!

“The easiest solution is to simply not use these terms at all.” (I, p. 154)

That’s right. If you don’t understand something, if you don’t like the way someone else is using a term, kill it! Murder it in its sleep! Yes I guess that would be easier to than reading the books and articles on Meta-States. So what does Steve Andreas know about the Meta-States Model and/or the process of meta-stating? What he writes about it is pure fiction. It is certainly not what I have written about a meta-states, and I should know a bit about that.

“When someone applies one vague and general ‘state’ to another ‘state’ to create a ‘meta-state,’ that compounds the ambiguity and uncertainty about what is actually happening. If this ‘meta-state’ is further ‘meta-stated,’ the confusion deepens exponentially.” (I, p. 188)

Hmmmm. So I wonder if Steve meets someone who says he is afraid of his fear (or anger, excitement, confidence, etc.), if instead of dealing with the fear of some other state, he will first make the fear of that other state more clear and precise? Of course, that generally will increase and amplify the fear and so set a more intense frame of fear about the first state and make things much worse for the person.

Interesting enough, on the next page in the book (I, p. 189), he writes, “What is important is the quality or appropriateness of the resource state to the problem” Hmmm. If he had read what I wrote, he would have recognized that as the process of meta-stating. Bringing a vague and general “resource state” of quality or appropriateness to the problem state? That is precisely what we do in Meta-States.

This is the elephant’s blindness (Steve’s), he is meta-stating and does not even know it!
“‘Meta-stating’ applies one poorly defined state to another, compounding the ambiguity and confusion in the term ‘state.’” (I, p. 203)

Yes, Steve, I would also complain and criticize if that’s what I meant by meta-stating or what I presented anywhere about meta-stating. Thank God it is not. In fact, in Meta-State trainings (Accessing Personal Genius, APG) I focus entirely on accessing very precise states (not poorly defined ones) to very precise contexts and situations in order to create richer and more robust states like resilience, self-esteem, ownership of one’s response-powers, the “flow” state of mastery and scores more.

Categorizing — also Known as Meta-Stating
The kind of categorizing we do in meta-stating creates new and more effective frames of mind, frames of reference, frames of meaning for a new psycho-logics. Obviously doing so does not fit Andrea’s definitions of category and scope, and involves our psycho-logics which given what he wrote, he does not like. Given I had hoped he would have taken some time to do some research on the Meta-States Model, and he did not, I here announce an open invitation to Steve Andreas—you can attend any Accessing Personal Genius training that I do anywhere in the world at no cost.

[By the way, I still have a standing invitation also to John Grinder given that he also has written that he does not understand “the proliferation of meta-states.”]

Paradoxically, Steve uses the meta-stating process throughout his entire book and doesn’t seem to know it. In his Introduction he writes,

“If someone says to you, ‘That’s an interesting way to do that,’ and you categorize [meta-state] that statement as a ‘criticism,’ you will tend to feel bad, and then think of other unpleasant experiences in that category, and feel even worse. But if you categorize [meta-state] that statement as a ‘compliment,’ you will feel pleased, and then tend to think of it in the context of other compliments, and feel even more pleased.” (I, p. x)

Actually, meta-stating involves setting a context about some other experience. You can meta-state a statement as meaning either criticism or compliment. You can bring the state of criticism or compliment to your first state of receiving those words. In doing so, you frame it, set a context, and create a meaning. Steve calls this a category and categorizing. I call it a meta-state and meta-stating. Strange that he has to misrepresent my model and put it down as he attempts to put forward his model —in critical thinking, we call that the Straw Man Fallacy.

In Meta-State Trainings, a Neuro-Semantic Trainer will talk about the power of a simple adjective to qualify one state with another state. That’s why “joyful learning” is a meta-state, so is playful seriousness, etc. Steve writes this:

“Soon after learning about cognitive qualifiers, I had a depressed client who began almost every sentence with ‘sadly,’ or ‘regrettably.’ [Say Steve, aren’t these vague and poorly defined terms?] As a first step, I asked him to start every sentence with ‘happily’ or ‘fortunately.’ This felt very strange and inappropriate to him, but it stabilized him to the powerful impact that his words had on him, and it began to restore some balance.” (I, p. 271)

To explain how the higher frame governs the lower, Andreas invents a word, “inheritability” (I, p. 267). Well, of course. You meta-stated him with new modifying states —happiness and fortune. This means that it is possible to be using the structure of meta-states and not even know it. Come to think of it, the “strange and inappropriate” feelings that the client experienced was probably that his mind had been invited to create some new psycho-logics and went around in a few loops and got dizzy from the strangeness of that experience.

Since Andreas doesn’t know this, when we apply one state to another and create a meta-relationship so that the second state stands at a higher position to the first, it sets a frame, it establishes the mental context, a category, and it thereby generates a construct of meaning. To use his words, it sets a new category, it re-categorizes, it expands scope, it contracts scope, and it can even nest categories so that they overlap. All of that is fully entailed in the Meta-States Model.

Andreas recommends asking, “What kind of X would you like?” (i.e., general, divorce, etc. p. 264) to match the current category and nest yet another one inside it. In Meta-States, we ask, “What is the quality of your X?” “What is the quality of your anger? Your grief? Your confidence? Your learning? Does it have the kind and quality that you want?” On second thought, maybe he has been reading Meta-States and is just using my materials with his new term “category.” Is that what you’ve been doing Steve? No? I didn’t think so.

He uses this book to present the NLP reframing models (and gives no indication that he has ever even read or researched Mind-Lines, 1997/2005). There he presents frame (context and category are his words) after frame as a higher frame— same as out-framing in Mind-Lines, the meta-stating of our frames with yet higher frames. He also uses many of the NLP presuppositions as frames that one could use.

In addition to still being under the illusion that the cinematic features by which we can edit our internal movies are “sub”-modalities and at a lower logical level, Andreas is also tricked and blinded by imposing the idea of “control” upon hierarchies. He argues for a “heterarchy” because the meta-program of preference (people, things, time, activities, location, and information) is not a hierarchy of control or importance (210ff). This is convoluted reasoning. After all, who has ever said that the meta-program of preferences is a control hierarchy so that those items that are most important govern those that are less? I have not (e.g., Figuring Out People, 1997/2007), and I don’t know anyone who has. This seems to be another straw man argument that Andreas then effectively demolishes. He did a good job except that he wasted his time on something that I also don’t agree with!

When Steve quoted me describing the non-linear nature of meta-stating, the nature of human reflexivity which sends our brains round and round, turning it over, upside down and at first generating confusion and dizziness, he wrote,

“Many years ago, someone said, ‘All writing is either biography or autobiography.” In this case, I think it is definitely autobiography.”

While I’m sure it applies to me, it surely applies to him as well. I wonder if he is really dizzy and confused or if he just does not want to understand the Meta-States Model in the first place?

Summary
If you want to understand the Meta-States Model which models the workings and processes of our self-reflexive consciousness, do not depend on Steve Andreas to accurately describe it. He does not. Actually, he doesn’t have a clue about what it is or how it works. Yet on the other hand, he actually describes the meta-stating process when he talks about establishing a new and higher category.”

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Just how close did William James come to inventing NLP?  When you read his classic work (1892/1961), Psychology: The Briefer Course, he seemed to come very close to many of the formulations that we now recognize as part of the NLP model of human functioning and consciousness.

After all, he described the sensory systems in great detail, de-nominalized vague terms in order to make them more precise and operational, offered narrative descriptions about “states of consiousness,” explored the subjective structure of various experiences, recognized submodalities, played around with reflexivity, made distinctions in the identity realm between “I” and “me,” wrote about memory, language, “programs” (habits), anchoring, “time,” etc.

Actually, James’s The Briefer Course condensed his original two volumes.  In it he emphasized the human senses and the representational systems as the essence of consciousness.  Upon identifying several nominalizations (including the word “emotions” as well as several specific emotions), James de-nominalize them to bring more clarity of thinking into the process.  He provided interesting refinements about the kind of learners–visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. that I think you will find most fascinating.  James further modelled a most engaging writing style in his presentations.

Neuro-linguistic “Habits” (NLH?)

You don’t have to read into James far to realize that he wrote a lot about “habits”– his term for the neuro-linguistic “programs.” A statement frequently quoted from him goes, “Habits are not merely second nature; they are ‘ten times nature.'” (p.9).  And as such, they therefore comprise the structural unit of mental life.  Here he speaks of the interface of habits and neurology.

“Habits are due to pathways through the nerve-centres.  Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.  If practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he would be in a sorry plight.”

“Without habit a man might be occupied all day in dressing and undressing himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his attention and energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its first trial; and he would furthermore, be completely exhausted by his exertions.  Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand.” (p. 5)

“Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.  We all have routine manner of performing daily offices… our higher thought centres know hardly anything about these matters!” (p. 7)

James proposed that the great thing in all education involves making our nervous system our ally rather than our enemy.  To capitalize on the acquisitions of skills, we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, and regarding as many useful actions as we can.  James recommended that we also “guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us” (11).  Sounds like the “Ecology Question and Check” that we use in NLP!

As we work to acquire new habits we should “launch ourselves assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way and make engagements incompatible with the old.”  Doing this gives new beginnings the kind of momentum so that we won’t feel tempted to break down so soon as we otherwise might.  Reading that reminds me of the emphasis Robbins (1991) puts on attaching “massive pain” or “massive pleasure” to the beginning of a new program.  In setting such anchors or programs, James wrote:

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.  Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. (p. 12)

“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspiration communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain. (p. 14)

James warned that without programming ourselves for effectiveness, we might end up as “the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.” (p. 15). To remedy that–we should never suffer ourselves to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way.              “Let the expression be the least thing in the world–speaking genially to one’s grandmother, or giving up one’s seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers–but let it not fail to take place.” (p. 15)

Why?  Because if we let our emotions evaporate, then they will get into the habit of evaporating.  Then, that becomes our “program.”  Conversely, we should keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

“Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.” (p. 16)

States of Consciousness

James invented, or at least introduced and popularized, the term “the stream of consciousness.” Within each personal consciousness, we experience thinking as “sensibly continuous.”  Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits.  It flows.  So we use the metaphors of it flowing like a river or a stream (p. 26).  He noted (1892) that states of mind succeed each other and that every state operates as part of a personal consciousness.  (As an aside, most writers and thinkers in NLP generally utilize this definition of a state of consciousness, not as a static and non-moving “thing,” but as a ongoing flow of consciousness.)

“Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.  There is no giving or bartering between them.  No thought ever comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own.  Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.  It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned.” (p. 20)

In his de-nominalizing of “thoughts” and feelings, James both put the pseudo-noun (“emotions” and “thoughts”) back in verb form (thinking, feeling) and added the Lost Performative (the person thinking-emoting) when he highlighted the fact that feelings and thoughts do not exist… they do not exist apart from a person.  He noted that each person exists as a thinker-feeler.  Hence, “‘I think’ and ‘I feel’” exists, but not detached “thoughts” and “feelings.”  And true to Korzybski’s basic tenet of non-identity, James noted the constant change of consciousness and that “No state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before.” (p. 21).

“Our state of mind is never precisely the same.  Every thought we have of a given fact, is strictly speaking, unique and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact.  When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner.  Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same thing.” (p. 23)

“It is logically impossible that the same thing should be known as the same by two successive copies of the same thought.  The thoughts by which we know what we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thought now substantively, now transitively; now in a direct image, now in one symbol, now in another symbol.” (p. 110)

James also noted the speed of consciousness as Bandler and Grinder did when they created several of the initial NLP patterns that depended upon doing a piece quickly.

“When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts.  Let us call the resting-places the ‘substantive parts,’ and the places of flight the ‘transitive parts,’ of the stream of thought.  It then appears that our thinking tends at all times toward some other substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged.  The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can rest it.” (p. 27, emphasis added)

Today in NLP we recognize “the different pace” of parts of our pictures and sounds when we do contrastive analysis between “fast time” and “slow time.”  Different parts of our represnetations will move at different speeds.  You can detect this by thinking about some time when you zoomed along an interstate and then came off on an off-ramp and creeped along.  The distortion of your sense of “time” almost inevitably involves some facets of your visual representations moving at a different pace than other parts.

James intuitively recognized these things— although he didn’t know what to do about them or how to use them.  As with the “rush of thought” as representations swish off to other places— he didn’t know how to use that very mechanism to continue the swishing!

In his writing James frequently commented on one state namely, the one he designated as the tip-of-the-tongue state.  This state arises when you see someone you know but can’t recall his or her name, or when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but can’t quite get to it.  At such times, we experience “a gap” in our mind,

“…but no mere gap.  It is a gap that is intensely active.  A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term.” (p. 30)

How close to Bandler’s comment that “the tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon involves a kinesthetic feel! As James explored the phenomenology of this experience, he noted that it involves the intention of saying a thing before saying it.  We have an entirely definite intention that comes to our mind, we feel an anticipatory intention, but then can’t quite access it.

“Try to symbolize what goes on in a man who is racking his brains to remember a thought which occurred to him last week.  The associates of the thought are there, many of them at least, but they refuse to awaken the thought itself.  We cannot suppose that they do not irradiate at all into its brain-tract, because his mind quivers on the very edge of its recovery.  Its actual rhythm sounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent point of following, but fail.  Now the only difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and the search after the means to a given end is that the latter have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of our experience.” (p. 138)

At a meta-level, he noted that knowledge about a thing involves knowledge of its relations.  Because mind naturally wonders, it bounces about between referents— it goes places.

“The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things [it swishes to new referents!]; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else.  If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.” (p. 94, emphasis added)

“The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking the restless flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety— all this magical, imponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery.” (p. 120)

“The train of imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sober grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump, darting across the whole field of time and space.  This is revery, or musing; but great segments of the flux of our ideas consist of something very different from this.  They are guided by a distinct purpose or conscious interest; and the course of our ideas is then called voluntary.” (p. 138)

I like to think of these “hops, skips, and jumps” of consciousness as thought-balls that bounce around in consciousness.  Regarding states of consciousness, James also noted the effect that a state can have upon a person’s thinking, emoting, behaving.  He noted what we today call “state dependency.”

“The difficulty is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.  When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us, the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it to come up.” (p. 318)

Conclusion

Yes, he almost stumbled onto the model of neuro-linguistic habits— but not quite.  In the next parts, I’ll reference facets in James’ writings where he spoke about the sensory representational systems, submodalities, meta-programs, “time,” and much more.

Part II
WILLIAM JAMES
Almost NLP Inventor (Part II)

In the first article on William James as an almost inventor of NLP, I highlighted his descriptions of human “programs”— which he called habits and his description of states of consciousness— and how “mind” flows as a stream, every jumping, hopping, and skipping about between referents. He knew that the brain goes places, and noted many of the places that brains typically go— he just didn’t know how to tap into these mental-emotional mechanisms as NLP has taught us.  Now look at his almost discovery of sensory systems, submodalities, self-reflexivity, and identity.

The Sensory Representational Systems

James described the senses as organs of selection and noted that each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity, and ignores the rest. He noted that each of our senses generalizes, deletes, and distorts to create its representations.

“We do far more than emphasize things [distortion], and unite some [generalization], and keep others apart.  We actually ignore [deletion] most of the things before us.” (p. 37)

“Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis [the Territory], our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly.” (p. 38)

So via our senses, we create our represented map of the territory!  Then, as we continue to create our internal representation or “experience,” we do so using our “habits of attention” or what in NLP we call Meta-Programs.

“In a world of objects thus individualized by our mind’s selective industry, what is called our ‘experience,’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention.” (p 39)

In the area of memory, James noted that all improvement of memory consists in the improvement of one’s habitual methods of recording facts (p. 165).  He became highly impressed by the fourfold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand (VAA_tK) as an improved method of memorizing!  Notice just how close he came here to the NLP sense modalities!  He also noted the effect of the sense modalities on the nervous system.

“Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organisms, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone.”

Noting how people differed in visual imagination, he quoted the statistical inquiry that Mr. Galton (1880) collected from one of the first recorded psychological experiments.

“He addressed a circular to large numbers of persons asking them to describe the image in their mind’s eye of their breakfast-table on a given morning. The variations were found to be enormous; and, strange to say, it appeared that eminent scientific men on the average had less visualizing power than younger and more insignificant persons.” (p. 170, from “Inquiries into Human Faculty, by Galton, p. 83-114)

James noted some differences between good and poor visualizer. He said that

“…some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name, and instead of seeing their breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know what was on it. The ‘mind-stuff’ of which this ‘knowing’ is made seems to be verbal images exclusively.” (p. 172)

Regarding the modality of words and language, James noted that “The scheme of relationship and the conclusion” function as the essential things in that kind of thinking.

“Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements we have.”

They provide us a rapidly revivable anchor to the referents, “coffee,” “bacon,” “muffins,” “eggs,” etc.  But both James and Galton drew (what to us in NLP seems like) a very strange conclusion.  They believed that —

“The older men are and the more effective as thinkers [use language], the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power.” (p. 173)

Regarding those who favor the modality of auditory-tonal (A_t), James described those who think by preference in auditory images as audiles (after Galton).  This type “appears to be rarer than the visual.”

“Persons of this type imagine what they think of in the language of sound.” (p. 173)

“It is clear that the pure audile, seeking to develop only a single one of his faculties, may, like the pure visualizer, perform astounding feats of memory— Mozart, for example, noting from memory the Miserere of the Sistine Chapel after two hearings; the deaf Beethoven, composing and inwardly repeating his enormous symphonies.”

For kinesthetic, James talked about people using “images of muscular sensations, a ‘motile’ form of imagination.”

“The movements of articulate speech play a predominant pat of his mental life.  Most peoples on being asked in what sort of terms they imagine words, will say, ‘In terms of hearing.’  It is not until their attention is expressly drawn to the point that they find it difficult to say whether auditory images or motor images connected with the organs of articulation predominate.” (174)

Sub-Modalities

James even anticipated sub-modalities as he talked about the distinguishing differences between things.  In describing the conditions which favor discrimination, he treated several different kinds.

“First… the things to be discriminated must be different either in time, place, or quality.  In other words, and physiologically speaking, they must awaken neural processes which are distinct.  The sensations excited by the differing objects must not fall simultaneously but must fall in immediate succession upon the same organ.

It is one of those transitive feelings or feelings of relation.  When once arouses, its object lingers in the memory along with the substantive terms which precede and follow, and enables our judgments of comparison to be made.” (pp. 112-113)

He also noted that the longer the interval of time between the sensations, the more uncertain would become our discrimination of them.  Regarding differences inferred he said that we must not confound those entirely unlike cases [from direct perceptions of differences] in which we infer that two things must differ because we know enough about each to warrant our classing them under distinct heads.  We constantly compare feelings with those qualities our imagination has no sort of acquaintance at the time–pleasures/ pains for example.

Self-Reflexive Consciousness

With Bateson’s bequeathal of “going meta” and Korzybski’s distinction about abstracting to second and third, etc. levels, we have in NLP the concept of self-reflexive consciousness (Hall, 1995, 1996). James spoke about such in the following words.

“Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the same time it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it … Me and… I. … The self as known, or the me, the empirical ego… [a primary state], and the self as knower or I, the pure ego [a meta-level state of consciousness].” (p. 43)

With his separating these levels into a “Me” and “I,” James specified that “a man’s Me is the sum total of all that he can call his” –body, psychic powers, clothes, house, wife, children, ancestors, friends, reputation, work, lands, horses, yacht, and bank-account.  He divided the constituents of “the Me” into the material me, the social me, and the spiritual me (p. 44).  He spoke of our social me as arising from the recognition that we get from our mates and that we have as many social selves as we have individuals who recognize us. The spiritual me arises when we think of ourselves as thinkers.  For James, self as knower (a meta-state) raises many ontological questions.

“The pure ego is a very much more difficult subject of inquiry than the Me. (62).   What is the thinker?  Is it the passing state of consciousness itself or something deeper and less mutable?  The passing state is the very embodiment of change.  Yet each of us spontaneously considers that by “I,” he means something always the same.  This has led most philosophers to postulate behind the passing state of consciousness a permanent Substance or Agent whose modification or act it is.” (pp. 62-63)

In speaking about states of consciousness, James talked about the process of ‘singling out’ the elements in a compound much the way we pull apart a strategy and identify its component parts in terms of representational systems.

“It is safe to lay it down as a fundamental principle that any total impression made on the mind must be unanalyzable so long as its elements have never been experienced apart or in other combinations elsewhere.” (p. 115)

“Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of its parts.” (117)

James recognized that we use consciousness to both discriminate between things in order to pull associations apart (find and specifying the strategies of experiences) and then we associate things to create new constructions (inductively move up the scale of abstraction to generalize new constructions).  Thus he speaks about deductive and inductive thinking to deal with large chunks and small chunks.

“All advance in knowledge must consist of both operations; objects at first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and objects appearing separately are brought together and appear as new compound wholes to the mind.” (p. 120)

James also distinguished between levels of thought.  At the primary level of thinking about something beyond the nervous system, he noted that such a thought may induce various thoughts, but then when we later think about that thought (a thought-about a thought, a feeling about a feeling) we may experience even more of a state.

“One may even get angrier in thinking over one’s insult than one was in receiving it; and melt more over a mother who is dead than one ever did when she was living.” (p. 240)

Ah, re-induction of a state— and then an amplification of the state recalled!  James noted the innumerable varieties of emotion at various levels.  He designated the primary level as where we experience “the coarser emotions,” in distinction from meta-levels where we experience “the subtler emotions.”

“Anger, fear, love, hate, joy, grief, shame, pride, and their varieties, may be called the coarser emotions, being coupled as they are with relatively strong bodily reverberations.  The subtler emotions are the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic feelings, mere description of the objects, circumstances, and varieties of the different species of emotion may go to any length.  Their internal shadings merge endless into each  other, and have been partly commemorated in language, as, for example, by such synonyms as hatred, antipathy, animosity, resentment, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, revenge, abhorrence, etc.” (p. 241)

The Identity Level

James wrote that the problem with a man “… is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now become.”  As he made this distinction in logical levels (Dilt’s Identity over Behavior), he suggested that we keep a selected ideal uppermost in mind and that to do so operates as a “greater importance than the performance of a specific act.” (p. xv).

From his construct of “Me” and “I” James suggested that as we seek out our truest, strongest, deepest self we review our list of traits and values and pick out the one/s on which we “stake our salvation.”  “All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real.” (p. 53).  From this he developed his strategy for “self-esteem.”

Figure 1

“Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride.  Neither threats nor pleading can move a man unless they touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Find out a person’s strong principle of self-regard.  If a man has given up those things which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to regard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nigh powerless over him.  The Stoic receipt for contentment was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of your own power —then fortune’s shocks might rain down unfelt.”

Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the same time solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable: ‘I must die; well, but must I die groaning too?  I will speak what appears to be right, and if the despot says, ‘Then I will put you to death,’ I will reply, ‘When did I ever tell you that I was immortal?  You will do your part, and I mine; it is yours to kill, and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart untroubled.’

How do we act in a voyage?  We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour.  Afterwards comes a storm.  What have I to care for?  My part is performed.  This matter belongs to the pilot.  But the ship is sinking; what then have it to do?  That which alone I can do–submit to being drowned without fear, without clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that what is born must likewise die.” (p. 55)

In this presentation on James, let me end with what I find a humorous note.  James spoke about the marvel of how we always wake up in our own body with our thoughts intact!

“The I appropriates the Me.  Just such objects are the past experiences which I now call mine.  Other men’s experiences never bear this vivid, this peculiar brand. This is why Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the ‘warm’ ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul.  Each of us when he awakens says, Here’s the same old Me again, just as he says, Here’s the same old bed, the same old room, the same old world. (71)

So thank God that when you woke up this morning, you easily found your own warm thoughts— those that belong to you, to your consciousness!  Imagine the confusion, strangeness, and difficulties that would arise if the thoughts that you found rushing into your mind when you “come to consciousness” as you awaken depended on the proximity of someone who slept close by!

Part III
WILLIAM JAMES
Almost Inventor of NLP — Part III

He almost did it— William James almost formulated many of the distinctions that we today find in NLP: sensory-based representational systems, submodalities, meta-programs, states of consciousness, levels (primary and meta) of consciousness, etc.  In this article, I want to continue this exploration of James’ formulations and relate them to NLP today.  Here we will look at his emphasis on will or choice, the plasticity of memory and representation, language, anchoring, “time” and time-lines, learning, and the physiology of thought.

An Empowering Decision

If you read the story of William James and the struggle that he had early in life with depression, then you will remember that classic Jamesian empowerment decision.  This goes back to the moment that he decided to subscribe to the doctrine of freedom.  To that decision, he dated his recover from a depression with which he had struggled.  In other words, he swished himself from a limiting belief to an empowering one.  In this case, he decided to run his own brain!

“I think yesterday was a crisis in my life.  I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will–“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts” –need be the definition of an illusion.  At any rate, I will assume… that it is no illusion.  My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” (p. xix).  From, The thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry, diary, April, 1870.

Yet because James put so much emphasis upon will, choice, decision, etc., he failed to recognize the technology that we have today in NLP, like swishing consciousness to referents so that we don’t have to constantly use “will” power in keeping ourselves oriented according to our values and desired outcomes.

“Volitional effort is effort of attention.  We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given actions comes to prevail stably in the mind. We see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.” (p. 317)

“To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea. (p. 322)

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple.  It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time put forth.

The heroic mind does differently.  To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things.  But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life.  The world thus find sin the heroic man its worthy match and mate.” (p. 326)

“‘Will you or won’t you have it so?‘ is the most probing question we are every asked; we are asked it every hour of the day and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things.”  (p. 327)

This comprised, for James, his decision destroyer process.  He simply ran the meta-level question about his decisions, beliefs, thoughts— “Will you or won’t you have it so?”

Memory as Constructs that Inevitably Change and Grow

James frequently spoke about the very nature of memories and, in fact, made his exploration into memory one of his central themes in his search for understanding consciousness.  In the following quotation, James speaks about the plasticity of memory, of the inherent constructive nature of our representations.  Before Constructivism as a psychological paradigm became known, James assumed it.

“False memories are by no means rare occurrences, and whenever they occur they distort our consciousness of our Me.  The most frequent source of a false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences.  We quote what we should have said or done… and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction.  But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone.  This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony mean to be quite honest.” (p. 73)

Language

James viewed language as part of our conceptual system.  He noted that the letters of words do not typically enter our consciousness separately, as they do when we apprehended them alone.  But rather a sentence flashed at once upon the eye functions as a system relative to its words.  A conceptual system works to elicit in us sensible objects.  In other words, a gestalt arises via words and language system so that while it begins by anchoring sensory-based representations, we then generate higher level concepts about such, and then higher concepts about that, etc.

Thus we bring conceptual understandings to lower level information and when we have disconnected data “with no conception which embraces them together, it is much harder to apprehend several of them at once, and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another.” (p. 86).  In other words, “mind” naturally operates and seeks to operate a meta-mind levels.

Anchoring

Noting the patterns that “mind” takes in its “movements,” James talked about the principles of connection (or association), namely, coexistence, suggestion, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause-and-effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant, etc. (p. 121).

“When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on re-occurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other.” (p. 123, emphasis added)

He also recognized the importance of vividness in an original experience in terms of re-anchoring it later, although James talked in terms of “tracing the course of reproduction between an idea and our mood.”  Here he speaks about one-time learnings that get strongly anchored.

“If we have once witnessed an execution, any subsequent conversation or reading about capital punishment will almost certainly suggest images of that particular scene. Thus it is that events lived through only once, and in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs.” (p. 133)

James knew that our anchored referents not only create the categories for our thinking, he knew that they also control our states.  Today in NLP we recognize that importance of “state” and state dependent learning, memory, communication, perception and behavior.  In the following, we see James noting such, using the old term “temperament” for state.

“The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy.  Nothing is more striking than our ability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits.  Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, perishing, and dread afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs.  And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts.  In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine and images of spring and hope.” (p. 133)

“Time” and Time-Lines

As James explored “time” he noted that it did not exist as an external referent, but an internal one–as a concept.  In the following quotations, he labors to identify the submodality qualify of duration in “time.”

“The sensible present has duration.  Notice, attend to, the present moment of time. Where is it, this present?  It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.  An ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense.   The only fact of our immediate experience is what has been called ‘the specious’ present, a sort of saddle-back of time with a certain length of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” (p. 147)

“The moment we pass beyond a very few seconds our consciousness of duration ceases to be an immediate perception and becomes a construction more or less symbolic.  To realize even an hour, we must count ‘now! now! now! now!’ indefinitely.  Each ‘now’ is the feeling of a separate  bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a clear impression on our mind. The longest bit of duration which we can apprehend at once so as to discriminate it from longer or shorter bits of time would seem to be about 12 seconds.” (p. 148)

“Thus we can no more actually perceive a duration than we can perceive an extension, devoid of all sensible content.  We are inwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness.  Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words, or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat.” (p. 149)

James, in this next quote, writes about the kinesthetic aspect of our “time” representation.

“Empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled.  Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends; but there exists no reason to suppose that empty time’s own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused.”

Next, James reflects on the kinesthetic “feel” of time and relates it to our “time” constructs of past, present, and future.  From this he even talks about a time-line–“a horizontal line” to represent the “time” concept.

“The feeling of past time is a present feeling.  In reflecting on the modus operandi of our consciousness of time, we are at first tempted to suppose it the easiest thing in the world to understand.  Our inner states succeed each other.  They know themselves as they are.  But this philosophy is too crude, for between the minds’ own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world.”

“A succession of feelings, in and of itself, it not a feeling of succession.  And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of time succession is added, this must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation.  If we represent the actual time-stream or of any segment of its length by a horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point.” (p. 152)

“Our intuition or immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a few second backward of the present instant of time.  Remoter dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as ‘last week,’ 1850, or thought of by events when happened in them.”

James recognized and wrote about the hypnotic phenomenon that in NLP we describe as “fast” and “slow” time.

“A time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back.  On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.” (p. 150)

“The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords.  Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back.  Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.” (p. 151)

“The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.  The earlier events get forgotten, the result being that no greater multitude of distinct objects remains in the memory.  A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass ‘ere we know it.’  A day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity [the structure of boredom].  It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself.  Close your eyes and simply wait to hear someone tell you that a minute has elapsed, and the full length of your leisure with it seems incredible.” (p. 151)

Learning and Memory

For James, a good learning strategy involved utilizing all of the resources from all of the sense modalities, as well as setting up associations for linking things together.

“The ‘secret of a good memory’ is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. …The one who thinks over his experiences most, or weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.” (p. 161).

Why? Because he constantly goes over those items in his mind, compares them, and make a series of them.  They will form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system.  This explains why the memory items “stick.”  James then applied this to effective studying versus “cramming.”

“Let a man early in life set himself the ask of verifying such a theory… and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes on their stem.  In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some thought-relation.  The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear.  Things learned in a few hours, on one occasion, for one purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind.  Speedy oblivion is the most inevitable fate of all that’s committed to memory in this way.”

“Whereas the same materials taken in gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various relations, associated with other external incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a system, form such connections with the rest of the mind’s fabric, lie open to many pathways of approach, that they remain permanent possessions.  This is the intellectual reason why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments.” (p. 163)

The Physiology of “Thought”

Among one of those who first recognized the role of physiology and neurology in “thought,” James posited that all consciousness involves motor factors.

“The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli in reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or ‘central’ part of the machine’s operations.  Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not.” (p. 237)

“We may then lay it down for certain that every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind. … We do not first have a sensation or thought, and then have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement.  Every pulse of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is already on its way to instigate a moment.” (p. 293)

Conclusion

As the “father of American Psychology,” William James tremendously impacted the study of psychology.  Into psychology he brought both pragmatism and phenomenology.  His own pragmatic spirit caused him to ask questions of relevance and usefulness (ecology); his phenomenology of subjective experience enabled him to write in a most engaging narrative style.  And, as evident in his writings, he came very close—  amazingly close— to creating many of the distinctions and facets of the NLP model.

Bibliography

James, William (1892/ 1961). Psychology: The briefer Course. (Ed. by Gordon Allport). NY: Harper & Row.

Robbins, Anthony (1991).  Awaken the Giant Within. NY: A Fireside Book, Simon & Schuster.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Suppose we made a correlation between Adlerian Psychology (theory and methods) with the model and technology of NLP.  Suppose further that we explore the psychological jargon of “Individual Psychology” of the 1920s and translate it into the NLP jargon of the 1990s.  Would we find few or many correlations?  Would we find the systems compatible or conflictual?  Would Alfred Adler have liked NLP?  Would he have become a practitioner?  After you think about the following correlations, see what you think.

Though packaged in different language, Adlerian psychology and the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model consist of an impressive number of similarities.  Many of the factors, presuppositions, and orientations within each system highly correlate.  Obviously, the Adlerian model represents a much older theory of personality (1920) and traces its roots to Freudian psychoanalysis.  NLP (1975) traces its immediate roots to Gestalt psychology, Information Processing theories, and Family Systems.  It expresses an outgrowth of Phenomenology, Constructivism, and Humanistic Psychology.

ADLERIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Gilliland, James and Bowman (1989) present the following overview of the general personality theory to whicih Adlerian psychology gave birth.  The following features and characteristics provide some broad strokes about this theory.

• Humanistic —it values the well-being of individual and society over that of organizations.
• Holistic—it views the person as an indivisible entity.
• Phenomenological—it sees each person’s world from his or her viewpoint.
• Teleological—it views the person as pulled by the subjective future rather than pushed by the objective past, as creatively striving for goal attainment rather than reacting automatically to external events.
• Field-theoretical—it considers the individual’s feelings, thoughts, and actions as transactions with the social and physical environment.
• Socially oriented— it views the person as actively responding to and contributing to society.
• Operational— in its methodology (p. 40).

Adlerian psychology became a major “school” of psychology during the 1920s after Alfred Alder left Sigmund Freud.  Adlerian psychology, in fact, represented a major shift from psychoanalysis. Over the years it has continued to manifest a flexible adaptability which has allowed it to become quite eclectic.

Adlerian psychology has also directly and indirectly influenced other “schools” of psychological thought.  It has informed the Existential approach, the person-centered approach, Gestalt, Transactional analysis, Behaviorist, Reality theory, and Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) (Corey, 1991) as well as the whole field of Cognitive Psychology.  Albert Ellis specifically detailed the relationship between Adler and RET (Ellis, 1971).

NLP TRANSLATIONS OF ADLERIAN PSYCHOLOGY

The Adlerian views personhood, as does NLP, from the phenomenological perspective. Both begin with an understanding of the importance of a person’s unique perspective.  In this sense, both systems accept the philosophical point-of-view of constructionism— the people construct their own private version of reality for their own weal or woe.

Consequently, this leads practitioners in both fields to recognize and deal with each person by respecting their unique perceptions.  Adlerians call this, the person’s “private logic,” NLP practitioners describe it as that person’s unique “model of the world.”

For Adlerians, clients develop their own “style of life,” with both fictional and realistic goals.  NLP says that people have their unique strategies and programs for functioning.  Adlerians focus on people “striving for superiority” as they fulfill their “social interest.”  NLP takes a broader perspective, believing that any given person’s drives and values depends on the maps they have constructed about what matters most.

Style of Life

Adler concluded that the most central formative factors to understand in someone concerned their individual “style of life.” In fact, Adler invented the now-commonplace term “lifestyle.”  This facet of lifestyle consisted of two sub-pieces, each that dealt with the person’s early history.  First, their place in the family constellation and second, the nature and quality of the family atmosphere (rejecting, suppressing, over-protecting, disparaging, affirming, etc.).

NLP practitioners talk about “lifestyle” in terms of those component pieces that make up one’s style of life, namely, his or her strategies, states, orientations, beliefs, etc.  Adler’s identification of the contexts out of which a person develops and learns his or her lifestyle describes a facet that NLP has played down and gives less attention.  NLP does not deny that family constellation place and nature/quality of family context plays a crucial role in the formation of personality.  NLP simply focuses on what mental maps a person draws about such.

Adlerians understand the importance of the family constellation and early recollections and so use these system-oriented factors in understanding early decisions, goals, understandings, and life-style.  NLP puts even less stress on the facts of early childhood and more on the client’s decisions and beliefs about those facts.  Using Time-Line therapy, a hypnotic process for age-regression, NLP provides techniques for re-processing those facts and creating more useful “models of the world.”

Private Logic

Adler invented a special phrase for the way children and adults think.  He called it the person’s “private logic.” By “private logic” he meant the individual’s hidden reasons (agendas) in life (their fictional goals), their fictional conceptualizations about how to reach those goals (their life-style), and their understandings about their own identity, and the identity of the world.  In speaking about “private logic” Adler spoke about the irrational ideas, beliefs, goals, life-styles, etc. that arise from it and which cause maladjustment.

Such finds correspondence in NLP as the person’s unique “model of the world.” This contains limiting and enhancing beliefs, strategies, states, resources, etc.  This refers to a person’s individual “model or map of the world” which then creates his or her “frame” (as in, frame-of-reference).

Major Life Tasks

It might surprise some to know that “Individual Psychotherapy” (Adlerian) put a significant emphasis on the social role.  Yet beyond the irony of the name “Individual Psychotherapy,” Alder believed that the goals of belonging, connecting, relating, etc. played centrally to the formation and expression of personality.  Accordingly, he spoke about the importance of the major life tasks of friendship, occupation, loving relations with family, sex and intimacy, self-acceptance, and making a contribution.  How one does in these areas of competence determines one’s adjustment or maladjustment to life.

Adler spoke about the life tasks of work, vocation, friends, family, self, and love.  In NLP we speak about how each person generates a mental map that resourcefully fits one’s station in life in order to function productively.  NLP speaks about modeling excellence in those who already can accomplish behaviors and can generate experiences worth repeating.

Similarly, NLP assumes that we learn our models of the world from our social contexts.  As a communication model, in fact, NLP recognizes that meaning itself critically depends on context.  Accordingly, the first applications that people sought for NLP concerned relationships, communications, business relations, therapy, etc.

Adler considered the life task of friendship as probably the best indicator of a person’s “social interest.” Relationships with significant friends expresses one’s general attitude toward society.  Because people can freely enter into friendships, how they enter, to what extent they take that risk, how they adapt themselves to others and create cooperative relationships, whether they put more value on solitude and detachment or alliances and connection–all of these factors provide psychological insight about the person’s “style of life.”

Work provides another important road of insight.  This makes sense when you consider that work consumes the greatest portion of our waking hours.  In like manner, our attitude toward work, how we work, the way we adapt to the work environment and to people in the work environment, etc. again underscores our style of life, level of happiness and adjustment.  NLP speaks to these concerns not by making similar statements, but by addressing specific strategies, states, and resources for more effectively achieving, producing, becoming creative, etc.

Adler defined the life task of loving relationships as concerning family relations and opposite sex relations.  The ability to enter and maintain significant connection powerfully impacts our capacity for intimacy and happiness.

Adler looked upon these life tasks as a meta-communication about a person.  He viewed them as describing the person’s basic adaptation to “reality.”  For him, successful adaptation depends upon striving toward appropriate goals with others, with cooperating, adapting, etc. rather than inappropriate goals, conquering, win over, defeating, being superior, etc.  NLP talks about such things in terms of “the ecology check/question” about whether any particular set of behaviors work and enhance life or not.  Our adaptation to life depends upon the accuracy and usefulness of the maps that we bring to life.

Fictional Goals

Adlerian psychology talks a lot about “fictional goals.” For him this referred to those fictional ideas, beliefs, and understandings that people inappropriately adopt as children and which have no reference in the objective world.  In NLP, we speak about the same as limiting and unproductive maps/models.   Dinkmeyer, Dinkmeyer, and Speery (1987) write,

“Fictions start early in life.  A newborn child enters an environment that is by no means neutral.  That environment is represented by the family constellation.  Through observation, exploration, trial and error, and feedback from this primary environment, the child quickly learns what will and will not work.” (p. 34)

This shows the cognitive nature of both Adlerian psychology and NLP.  Because children strive to “make sense” of their world, they operate in their early home environment as active and passionate “learners.”  They do so by creating mental understandings and perspectives in order to navigate through life.  Yet because their rational skills do not express the best logic or reasoning skills and because their ego-strength has not become well developed, they make many illogical and sometimes stupid judgments about themselves, the world, how to cope, etc. This leads to illogical thinking and erroneous judgments–ill-formed belief statements (NLP).

Both systems see change, transformation, healing in terms of a psycho-educational model.  Both reject the notion that people exist as broken or sick in nature.  Both assume people have become mis-in-formed (how inwardly “formed” by information based on error and mistakes in logic.  Both primarily focus on providing individuals with more accurate or useful information for adjusting themselves to the realities outside their skins.  Adlerians ferret out mistaken goals, fictional objectives, erroneous ideas; NLP meta-models linguistic statements that we evaluate as structurally and semantically ill-formed.

Teleological Orientation

Adlerians speaks about behavior as purposeful and goal oriented.  One’s teleological orientation arises from the existential concerns of “where are we going?” and “what are we striving for?”  Adler called the imagined central goal that guides a person’s behavior “fictional finalism.”  The philosopher Hans Veihinger influenced Adler that people live by fictions (views of how the world should function).  “Only when I am perfect can I be secure.”  “Only when I am important can I be accepted.”

NLP speaks about desired outcomes and have developed a criteria for well-formedness in desired outcomes that enable a person to generate realistic, achievable, measurable, and empowering outcomes.  The well-formedness criteria enable one to update ill-formed and maladaptive goals.

Striving for Significance

Adler further said that the central fictional goal for people involved becoming a “somebody” by striving for significance in the eyes of others.  Ironically, such striving for significance and superiority first arises from a realistic recognition in the child–his or her inferiority as a child.  Adler used the term “superiority” not to mean being superior to others, but rather attaining a greater degree of one’s own potential.  For him, striving for superiority involved a striving from a lower to a higher state.

For moving from some unresourceful present state to some more empowering state (NLP).  Human beings cope with feelings of helplessness by striving for competence and mastery according to Adler.

If striving for superiority, in the sense of attaining a greater degree of one’s own potential and overcoming feelings of inferiority and helplessness, summarizes the Adlerian approach, then NLP speaks about moving from unresourceful present states to more enhancing resourceful and empowering states.

Adlerians address a client’s assets and strengths to encourage them to take risks and develop social interest.  NLPers speak about accessing one’s resources to find the internal empowerment that allows them to experience more excellence in life.  Modeling provides a great source of encouragement in NLP inasmuch as the key to human subjectivity involves the strategy that a person has for achieving various experiences and responses.

Only when a person seeks to become a somebody exclusively “in the eyes of others” does this become the heart of maladjustment.  Dinkmeyer (1987):

“Neurotics vacillate between inferiority and superiority.  They are highly ambitious but lack courage.  Avoidance, displacement, projection, retreat, helplessness, and detouring all describe how they save face when confronted with the ultimate threat— being seen as a failure.” (Ibid. 41)

Here the “other-referent” meta-program of NLP describes someone over-doing a resource.

The Therapeutic Relationship

Adlerians consider a good client/therapist relationship as one between equals based upon cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence, and alignment of goals.  NLP speaks about the same in terms of pacing or matching the client’s model of the world.  NLP teaches pacing as a hypnotic process on both the verbal (linguistic) and non-verbal (neurological) levels.  This enables them to “enter into the client’s world.”

Adlerians “explore the individual’s dynamics by seeking to understand their lifestyle, see how it affects their current functioning in all the tasks of life.”

“They operate on the assumption that it is the interpretation that people develop about themselves, others, the world, and life that governs what they do.  Lifestyle assessment aims at uncovering the private interpretations and private logical of the individual.” (Corey, p.148)

NLP practitioners meta-model and pace clients in order to understand their particular model of the world.  By listening for their language patterns, watching eye-accessing cues, noticing non-verbal analogue responses, etc. they identify the client’s strategies for generating whatever experiences and behaviors that they do.  This then enables them to specify what and how the person can make changes to enrich their lives.

Adler said that to engage in therapeutic interventions, the therapist must first make the client feel comfortable (pace their reality, NLP) since they will undoubtedly use their current inferiority/superiority perceptions to interpret the counseling process itself.  Here Adlerians talk most about “encouragement” as a therapeutic technique to enable the client to face themselves, their goals, their life-style, etc.  NLP speaks about facilitating the client’s resourcefulness.

Because Adler saw discouragement as the basic condition that prevents people from functioning at their best, he recommended the antidote of encouragement.  To “induce a state of encouragement” (NLP) can take many forms: highlighting the client’s strengths and assets, providing more appropriate and useful goals, taking courage to act on one’s dreams, etc.  Again, the process of facilitating resourcefulness!

Coming to understand and identify the client’s beliefs, perceptions, and feelings and the movement and pattern of his/her life then describes task one of therapy.  The counselor “reads” the client by noticing and observing every expression, word, thought, feeling, verbal and non-verbal presented.  (Sounds like noticing various Meta-Programs, NLP).  The counselor uses early memories, birth order, family constellation, family atmosphere, dreams, current life-tasks, priorities, behaviors, style of approach/avoidance, etc. to determine the client’s overall life-pattern.

At the point of therapeutic communication, the Adlerian begins with basic listening and supportive skills (pacing), then moves on to restatements, empathetic listening, reflections, and interpretations.  From there the Adlerian will make meta-comments on non-verbal behaviors, here-and-now experiences, discrepancies between what the clients says and does, confrontation of mistaken beliefs, perspectives, private logic, and destructive behavior.  In their repertoire also reside paradoxical recommendations (prescribing the symptom, NLP), creating images to assist clients in seeing the absurdity their goals or styles (submodality exaggerations! NLP).

Psychopathology

Adler identified several factors that contributed to maladjustment.  He specified the “parenting errors” like abuse and spoiling, mistaken opinions about oneself and the world, over-coping with distorted response styles, etc.  For Adler, the obsessive-compulsive person stands as the prototype of all neurosis.  The obsessive-compulsive person’s indecisiveness and doubt, deprecation of others, godlike strivings, and focus on minutiae represent routine safeguards that exclude him or her from the social mainstream.

Adlerian psychology has little use of personality, aptitude, achievement, interest, or intelligence tests per se.  The most important diagnostic issue involves the client’s life-style (one’s overall pattern that influences and controls thinking, feeling, and behaving).  This lifestyle arises from the person’s private logic and expresses their life-plan of realistic and fictional goals.

Cognitive

Adler (1956) fully accepted what has become the basic tenet of the cognitive psychologies, namely, “Behavior is clearly a function of perception.  We tend to behave according to how things appear to us, and when our perception changes, our behavior changes accordingly.  Thus, perception (“frame” or “map” NLP) of the situation often determines behavior and belief more than the reality of the situation.

“Individual psychology, then, draws its conclusions not from a person’s possessions but from his or her use of those possessions.  These applications and, more important, the manner in which the individual ‘experiences’ them are the bricks and mortar with which an attitude toward life is builtl.” (pp. 250-256)

In writing that, one expects Adler to quote Korzybski’s “map/territory” distinction at any minute and then to suggest the reframing principle that when one changes the frame-of-reference within which an idea, thought, or belief lies, one changes its meanings which then leads to a transformation in our thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Therapy and therapeutic inventions, for Adlerians, focus on ferreting out the client’s goals and fault beliefs about life tasks and providing re-education about the reality of social life, self-concept and definition, life-style goals and methods, etc.  Sounds like NLP, does it not?  First the information gathering about the person’s psychological world, some map-adjustment information, and some shifting of maps to those that allow one to reach their desired outcomes.

Therapeutic Interventions

The therapeutic interventions which seem fairly unique to Adlerian psychology include the following.

1) Asking “The Question,” i.e. “If I can a pill that would make this symptom go away, how would things be different in your life?”  The “as if” frame in NLP.

2) Catching oneself. This involves catching oneself in some irrational behavior and designating it a “mental stop sign” that thereafter will signal the person to “Stop!”  Ah, a Pattern Interrupt!

3) Acting “as if.” The therapist provides instructions for a client to act out the role that they want to learn.  By trying out the role they discover new things and become a different person in the process.

4) Spitting in the Soup. This involves identifying a self-defeating behavior and then spoiling it by making it extremely unpalatable (“spitting in the soup”).  This changes the behavior so that it takes the relish out of it.  Another Pattern Interrupt.

5) Pushing the Button. This involves “having the client alternatively picture pleasant and unpleasant experiences and noting the feelings that accompany the experiences.  By alternating experiences and feelings the clients become aware that they control their emotions, and not vice-versa” (Ibid. p. 53).

6) Encouragement. The primary technique based upon the assumption that clients do not exist as sick individuals, but suffer from feeling discouragement.

7) Midas Technique. This involves exaggerating a client’s neurotic demands based on the King Midas story of giving someone precisely what they wanted and helping them see how it can become a curse!

8) Pleasing Someone. Getting a client to re-enter the social environment by going out and doing something nice for someone.

9) Avoiding the Tar Baby.  The “Tar Baby” refers to the perceptions on life which the client carries into counseling and attempts to fit onto the counselor.  By responding in ways contrary to the expectations, it upsets the system.

10) Early Recollections.  Adler used this as a means for assessing the person’s life-style.

Overall, Adlerian psychology focuses on educating clients about themselves, their style of life, their fictional goals versus their realistic ones, social interest, perceptions, etc.  It operates from the underlying belief is that people can learn better and adopt more healthy and appropriate coping styles.  It does not see people as sick, as victims, or as fated for dysfunction.

Summary

What do you think?  Alfred Adler— a NLPer?  Would he have appreciated the NLP model?  I think so.  My own studies in Adlerian psychology certainly prepared me for, and made me received to, the NLP model.

References:

Adler, Alfred. (1927/ 1954).  Understanding human nature. (Trans. by W. Beran Wolfe).  NY: Fawcett.

Adler, Aflred. (1931/ 1958).  What life should mean to you. NY: Capricorn Books.  Ed. by Alan Porter.

Dinkmeyer, D.D., Dinkmeyer D.C. Jr., & Speery, L. (1987).  Adlerian counseling and psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Chas. E. Merrill.

Dreikurs, Rudolf, R. (1953).  Fundamentals of Adlerian psychology. Chicago: Alfred Adler Institute.

Ellis, Albert. (1971).  The Journal of Individual Psychology.   (May, 1971).

Gilliland, Burl E., James, Richard K., and Bowman, James T. (1998).  Theories and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. (second ed.).  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Orgler, Hertha (1963).  Alfred Adler: The man and his work. New York: New American Library.

Porter, Alan (1958) (Ed.).  Alfred Adler: What life should mean to you.  New York: Capricorn.

Veihinger, Hans. (1924).  The philosophy of ‘as if.’ London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Ltd.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.  Psychologist, researcher, modeler, prolific author.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

What follows here is a basic NLP pattern that was originally created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.  You can find the pattern in its original form in Steve Andreas’ book, Frog to Princes (1979).  I first found this pattern in 1986 and it revolutionized my life.  Literally.

First it completely changed the way I was doing psychotherapy as it changed my Cognitive-Behavioral approach sending me into an entirely new level of structure —the structure of experience and making that primary to content.  Next, as I used the pattern on my own memories and the things that could “push my buttons” to create a lot of negative emotional charge about things, it transformed me as a person.

Then I realized something—every person on this planet should know this pattern!  With this pattern, there should not be a single human being walking around or living with a phobia. There’s no need.  Not any longer.  When you learn this pattern and how to use it, using a simple metaphor like watching a movie, you can take the emotional charge out of any old memory that still pushes your buttons or that throws you into a phobic response state.

In the field of NLP, this pattern is called the Phobia Cure pattern or the V-K (Visual-Kinesthetic) dissociation pattern.  When I wrote the book MovieMind (2002) and User’s Manual of the Brain, Volume II (2001 with Bob Bodenhamer), I called it The Movie Rewind Pattern because that is the central process used in the pattern— you run your mental movie backwards.  And that’s why you can use it for all kinds of things— phobias, traumatic memories, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), strong over-emotional reactions to things, “buttons,” depression, anxiety, etc.

The Secret Behind being Phobia Free

It’s all about your “thinking.”  There are two ways that you can process information as you think.   You can do so analytically and you can do so experientially. When you think or read something experientially, you feel as if you have entered into the story that you are reading or imagining.  To do that you represent the information an encode the information in a way that you cue yourself to neuro-linguistically experience it.

Conversely, when you think or read something analytically, you hold the material at “arms length” so to speak.  You analyze it, think about it, and you take a spectator’s point of view regarding the information.   In the first instance, you step into the content of the story or information and in the second, you step out of it and take a view from outside it as a spectator.

Each of these ways of looking at things (perceptual styles) has its strengths and its weaknesses.  To step into your representations empowers you to take the first perceptual position.  You see thins from out of your own eyes and ears and feel things as if from out of your own body.  Do this and you enter into a story and will come to “know” it from within.

To step outside of the representations allows you to take the second and third perceptual positions—to see it as someone else might or to see it from a third and neutral position.  And when you do that, you can analyze it in order to learn from it.  Then it will not activate your emotional responses.   If you do too much of the stepping in and associating, you can become an emotional cripple, hysterical, unable to “think,” and reactive with all kinds of emotional reactions.   If you do  gdtoo much of the stepping out and just observing, you may become an intellectual egghead and an emotional incompetent—unable to relate emotionally and personally to yourself or others.  So obviously, the balance of choosing when and where to do each is the secret.

With regard to hurts, traumas, and unpleasant realities, many people can’t even think about such things.  To think is to be re-traumatized.   It activates all sorts of negative emotions—especially fears and phobias.  Typically, such individuals eventually lose their willingness to even entertain painful thoughts; those in helping professions frequently burn-out.  Others develop PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).   Because they cannot even “think” about a subject without going into negative painful emotional state, they experience thinking as distressful and unpleasant.  This robs them of an important resource: the skill of thinking comfortably about unpleasant events. So “reality” pains them.  So they repress, suppress, deny, avoid, etc.

The Phobia Cure Pattern or The Movie-Rewind Pattern offers a marvelous technology for recovering from trauma states and from PTSD.   The pattern enables and empowers a person to learn how to “think” about unpleasant things without re-associating and re-experiencing the situation.  You can stop signaling your body to respond to “thoughts” as if actually in the trauma again.  By stopping the ongoing re-traumatization, you resolve the pain, and can then release the old memories so that you can get on with living your life more abundantly and positively.

The human technology within this pattern works by moving in your mind and understanding (mentally and conceptually) to a different frame-of-reference.  It invites you to move to the “second” perceptual position of another person, then to the “third” perceptual position of seeing things from an observer point of view so that you can see whatever the scene or information is from a position of distance.  This allows you to feel safe as you “think” about it.  It also enables you to stop yourself from stepping back into the memory and associating into the experience because if you did that you would be re-accessing the old negative emotional states.  And that does not help.  Instead, with the new perspectives, you will be able to apply new and more powerful resources to the old memory and thereby change it.

To recapitulate, The Movie-Rewind Pattern (called the Phobia Cure Pattern in NLP) works by enabling you to move to a different frame-of-reference— to a spectator viewpoint.  There you can view the “painful” information from your past comfortably.  Doing this interrupts your “trauma thinking” and prevents you from processing the information in a way whereby you could collapse into a negative emotional state.

This understanding of human subjective experiences identifies that the source of your emotional experience goes back to how you code things in your mind-and-body. As you code information—so you experience.  It’s that simple.  It is also that profound.  Your subjective experiences is created by the coding you use.  So, when you change that coding, you change your experience at the neurological level.  And that leads to a change in your emotions and behaviors.

So with your two categorical ways of “thinking” (by stepping in and stepping out of your representations of an event) you can now develop the flexibility of consciousness to choose which to do when.  You can decide how to code and experience the “”information” about various events that you have been through.  You can do so analytically (that is objectively) and so un-emotionally or you can do so experientially (that is, subjectively) and hence “emotionally.”   You can remember old events as a spectator to those experiences—as if you were a movie goer, just watching it, rather than as an actor in the movie.

When you use this technology, you can effectively managing strong negative “emotions” and then you can learn from your past rather than using your past to feel bad about.  You can use it to “switch off” any scene that you don’t need to play anymore in your inner theater.  If it was a B-rated movie the first time you experienced it, you do not have to keep replaying it.

A final caveat: If you use this pattern on pleasant experiences, you will thereby neutralize them.  This can also work to your detriment.  Doing so will rob you of the feel of being alive and vital. It will eliminate good feelings, motivation, emotional understanding, etc.

The Movie-Rewind Pattern

Here is a step by step description of what to do to “run your brain” in this way and to take out the negative emotional charge of some old memory. Try it with yourself, if you have difficulty, then find a well-trained and qualified NLP practitioner or Neuro-Semanticist who can then facilitate the process with you.

1) Identify a mental representation that bothers you.

What thought activates strong negative emotions in you?  What memory of some unpleasant experience or even traumatic experience puts you, as it were, back in that event?  What idea pushes your buttons?  What triggers you to go into a fight-flight stress response by just thinking about it or considering it?

When you know, identify it in terms of what you see, hear, and sense.  This means, identify the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic features of the movie that you are playing in your mind.  If you are new to this, this will— at first— be strange or challenging.

• What are you aware off visually— what do you see?  Where?  Is it in color or black-and-white?
• What are you aware of auditorially— what sounds, words from others, words around you, words that you are saying inside yourself?
• What are you aware of kinesthetically— what sensations, what temperature (cold, warm, hot), what pressure, movement, etc.   (Kinesthetic refers to internal or external sensations, and are not emotions, just the feelings that make up one aspect of an emotion).

2) Use the Movie Metaphor to create an Internal Representation of this old troublesome Movie.

Now imagine that you have gone to the movies are are setting in a theater, in your mind, and ready to watch this old movie for the last time.  As you imagine yourself sitting in a movie theater, which row would you like to be in so that you can observe comfortably?  I like the tenth row.  You might like row 5 or row 20 or row 200.   Find the row that works best for you.

When you are in the seat that you best like, then on the screen of your mind, put a black-and white picture of the younger you in the situation fifteen minutes or so before the traumatic events occurred.  Oh yes, get out your bag of popcorn or whatever you best like to eat when you go to the movies.

The movie up on the screen is a snap-shot right now.  You have freezed-framed it and it represents something that occurred 15 minutes prior to when something unpleasant happened.   Now sit back to watch it, aware that you have taken a spectator’s position to that younger you.  Notice that you have stepped out of the picture, and have a position from outside.  And in a little bit you will watch this old B-rated movie for the last time.

As you gain this psychological distance from that event, you have begun the process of running your own brain.  So you can feel delighted that you have this ability to step aside from your thoughts.  You are more than your thoughts, you are more than the experiences you have been through.  Those are just the things you have had to deal with and now you can put them behind you.  And shortly you can use those memories for learning— perhaps learning what not to do, but never again for feeling bad.  That’s not useful.

3) Begin to Become the Editor of your own Movies

As you set back and take a spectator’s point of view to that old movie, notice how you have coded the movie.  Doing that will then give you the ability to play around with these codes and to alter them so that they enhance your life and emotions.

• Visually.   Begin with the visual system and just notice whether you have the picture in color or black-and-white?  Is it a movie or snapshot?  Is it bright or dim?  Close or far?  And as you make these distinctions, you can begin to choose which coding would enable you to think comfortably about that memory so that you can stay resourceful and thoughtful in a relaxed and comfortable way.  Just notice the effect that it has for you when you dim the picture of your unpleasant memory.  Now turn down the brightness, further, further, until it doesn’t bother you anymore.  Send the picture off into the distance.
• Auditorially. Next check out the auditory system—the sound track of your memory.  Do you even have a sound track?   What sounds do you hear coming from that movie?  What quality of tones do you hear?  At what volume, pitch, and melody?  Now check out your language system.  What words do you hear from that younger you?  From where do you hear these words coming?  Notice their tone, volume, and location.  As you notice how that younger you feels, what sensations does that person have in his or her body up that on the screen? Where and at what intensity, weight, pressure?  What shifts in these codes enable you to think comfortably about that old memory?  How relaxed do you feel as you make alterations in your coding?  How much of a growing sense of distance and control does this gives you?

4) Float back and up to the Control Booth.

Now as you sit there, still getting ready for the movie to begin, one more thing to do—imagine floating out of your body from the row that you are sitting in and floating back to the Projection Booth.  Float all the way out of your body and into the Control Room until you can feel your hands on the plexi-glass window so that you can look out and see the back of your head facing the screen.

Take a moment to experience and enjoy this very different point-of-view.  It may take just a little bit to fully imagine seeing yourself —today’s you (in whatever row you are sitting in) watching your younger you on the screen before the movie begins to play.  As you note The Adult You sitting in the theater (seeing the back of his or her head) let yourself also see beyond that to the still picture on the screen.

Watching this will be strange and weird the first time but you will get used to it very quickly, and if you feel a bit dizzy at any time, you can put your hands on the plexi-glass again and feel safe and secure in this control booth.  This is the place to remember that you are in control of the movie and can stop it or fast-forward it at any time that you wish.

5) Playing the old memory for the Last time.

Now when you are ready, from the Project Booth, you can turn on the movie and let it move from the initial snapshot.  Let it now play out as a black-and-white movie.  And watch it from a double-perspective— from the audience and from the projection booth.  Watch it from the beginning to the end.

And if at any time, the movie tempts you to step in— feel your hands on the plexi-glass and stay safe and in control in the Control Room. And if at any time, you need to fast-forward the movie, after all, you know what happened, just fast forward it a bit.  Then play it to the end.

When you have let it play out beyond the unpleasant experience, play if a bit further.  Play it to a later time, after the bad scene disappears, and see that Younger You in a time and place of safety and even pleasure.  . . .  Go to a scene of comfort when you were feeling good about yourself and having fun doing something — at a park, on a beach, with a loved one.   ….  This later time does not have to be even close to the time of the trauma, but just some time later when you were enjoying yourself.

Good.  Now when you get to that place of comfort and pleasure, stop the movie and freeze frame the picture again.

6) Step in and Rewind your Movie from the Pleasure backwards.

Now the next step will occur in just a moment— when you are ready— and when it does it will occur very, very quickly.  We are doing to move into super-fast movement as we rewind the movie in fast rewind

So wait until you get all of the instructions about how to do this.   In a moment, rewind this memory movie in fast rewind mode.  As you have seen movies or videos run backwards so you will rewind the movie backwards at a very high speed rewind, so fast that it will only take two seconds—2 seconds!  But — and this is a big but— this time you will be inside the movie when you rewind it.

So imagine that!  Float inside the scene of comfort and pleasure… be there.   See and hear what you would see and hear when there and feel it— feel the comfort and the pleasure.  And now from this vantage point, you will be rewind the movie backwards.  You know the sound of running a movie backward?  Hear that.   And you know the rush and confusion of sights as everything goes backwards, a jumbling of sounds as everything zooms back to the moment 15 minutes prior to the unpleasant movie.  When you experience this fast rewinding, all the people and their actions go backwards.  They walk and talk backwards.  You walk and talk in reverse.  Everything happens in reverse, like rewinding a movie.  So ready?

How much do you feel the comfort and pleasure right now?  When it is at a level of 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, then push the rewind button . . .   and experience it rewinding  . . .  zooooooommmmm.  All the way back to the beginning.  It only takes a second or two to do that fast rewind . . .

And how did that feel . . . rewinding from inside the movie?

7) Repeat this Rewinding Process five times.

When you arrive back to the snapshot at the beginning, clear the screen in your mind.  That is, take a break, open your eyes and look around.  Good.

Now, immediately go to the scene of comfort and pleasure at the end again, and as soon as you step it, feel, see, and hear it fully . . . rewind the movie even faster. As you do this over and over your brain will become more and more proficient and the rewind will go faster and faster until the rewind takes only a second each time.   Zoommmm!

8) Test the results.

Break state from this exercise.  Then after a minute or two, call up the original memory and see if you can get the feelings back.  Try as hard as you can to step into the scene and feel the full weight of the emotions.

Other Editing Tools

From the act of stepping back from experientially thinking about a fearful or hurtful event to watching it as a spectator, to imagine watching it from a projection booth in the control room, you can do all kinds of things.  You can rewind the movie and take the emotional charge out of the experience.  You can also do many other things to change your codings.  Here are some other choices.

1) Associate a resourceful memory.

Recall the memory of a time when you felt creative, confident, powerful, etc. from the past.  See what you saw at that time and turn up the brightness and color on that memory so that invites you into it to fully associate into it and experience it.  Now when you do feel this fully as a resourceful state—bring into it the scene that has been fearful to you.  What is the negative stimulus (e.g., dog, spider) that you fear?  As you now merge these two memories, do so until they integrate so that you can then experience yourself handling the situation using the resources from the more positive memory.

2) Alter your sound track.

Re-process the way you hear yourself and others talk.  How would you want to make your voice different?  Or the voice of someone else?   What qualities would make the memory less intense?  What voice would you like to have heard?  Install an internal voice to help you through this situation.

3) Add tonal qualities to the sound track to make it better.

Take the unpleasant memory and put some nice loud circus music behind it.  Now watch the movie again.  How do you feel when you see the old movie and hear the circus music?

4) Apply your spiritual faith.

Use your spiritual belief system to bring in a Guardian Angel, a loving heavenly Father, or some strong resource.  Now split your screen and see through the eye of your faith, the Guardian Angel hovering over the earthly scene of your memory.  See and  hear your Angel caring and loving you.  Perhaps you hear, “I am with you.”  “I will help you.”  See Jesus touch you with his healing hand.

5) Symbolically code the memory.

You could make all the people transparent in your memory so you see through them.  Or you could color code them according to how you think and feel about them.   You could draw a line around the three-dimensional persons in your memory, make them two dimensional and color them according your evaluation of them.

6) Humorize your memory.

Because laughter provides a great distancing skill, use your humor so that you can laugh the emotional pain off.  How far in the future do you need to transport yourself before you can look back on a memory and laugh at it?  What difference lies between a memory you can laugh at and one that you can’t?  Do you see yourself in one, but not in the other?  Do you have one coded as a snap-shot and the other as a movie?  What difference lies in color, size, brightness?  Imagine the hurtful person talking like Donald Duck?  Turn your opponent into a caricature cartoon character with exaggerated lips, eyes, head, hands, etc.

End Notes:

1.  A caveat about the terminology. I only use the term dissociation here because it is used in the literature of NLP.  Personally, I do not use the term and do not like it.  In psychology, it is used to speak about various personality disorderings.   Further, we humans do not, and cannot, literally step out of our body to avoid experiencing emotions.  So even in “dissociation” a person is using his or her body and all that’s occurring is occurring in the body and that’s generating various somatic sensations and feelings.   More accurately, what’s actually happening is that a person is conceptually stepping aside from his or her emotions and thinking about them from a meta position.  As embodied neuro-linguistic beings, we cannot literally dissociate from our bodies.

How could they have known that 35 years later people with just a month of training in this field would use the title, “Master Practitioner,” stress the Master part, and consider that they have arrived, they know-it-all, they don’t need to study anymore, they have arrived at Guru-dom?!

The history of NLP “Practitioner” and “Master Practitioner” is itself an interesting one. Since 1978 when Leslie Cameron Bandler put together the first “Practitioner” that was some 36 days long, the Prac. course of NLP was designed to introduce the basic NLP models and give people the essential competencies to use the models and patterns and to begin to think in terms of these models.

And that means what? That means understanding the basic Communication Model of NLP. That’s why NLP is— a model of how human beings communicate, first to themselves (also called “thinking,” “awareness,” “being conscious”) and then to others (also called “talking”). Modeled from three experts in communication, three “world-class professional communicators” NLP presented itself as being able to identify the essential structure of communication verbally and non-verbally.

The verbal part predominated at first. Using the dominating linguistic model at that time, Transformational Grammar (TG), Grinder introduced the majority of the jargon of NLP by sticking in all of the TG language: transderivational search to your referential index, selective restriction violation, nominalizations, etc. In The Structure of Magic, the language part was recognized as the “meta-representational system.”

None of that was new, nor was the sensory representational systems (seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling, tasting). That had been around for a hundred years in the field of Psychology, from the very beginning of Psychology as a field separate from Philosophy. But there was something new, and radical— Using the sensory representational systems as the languages of the mind. That was new. And Bateson noted this in his Preface to The Structure of Magic commenting that he and his colleagues had been search for that for decades.

So first came the Meta-Model, then the Representational Systems, which includes calibrating to a person for recognizing representational systems (eye accessing cues and the like), then the TOTE model for Strategies, the Milton Model (and reversing the Meta-Model to use it for trance), the Sub-Modality distinctions, and the basic Time-Line model, and with these models, lots of patterns, processes, and exercises. And at first Prac. took a long, long time. But eventually, the process was streamlined to 21 days of 8 hours or so of training each day, and this still remains that in many places. We increase the hours to 12 hour days, require extensive reading and preparation ahead of time and can get through the content in a minimum of 7 days when we really push it. And what accelerates the learning of NLP in Neuro-Semantics is half a day on Meta-States since that’s what explains the “magic” of NLP.

Then there’s Master Prac. It really has nothing to do with mastery, it is mostly more stuff.More of the NLP model: Meta-Programs, Advance Modeling, Extensive Reframing using the old “sleight of mouth” patterns (or Mind-Lines), Meta-States, Advanced Trance, Advanced Time-Lines, and again, lots and lots patterns, processes, and applications to personal development, therapy, business, selling, leadership, etc.

Many years ago I asked Wyatt Woodsmall,

“Why was Meta-Programs put in Master Prac. rather than in Prac.? After all, a person really needs to know about meta-programs from the beginning?”

His answer was simple and succinct: “Because they were not invented when Prac. was invented!” “Oh, so that’s why!” (Of course, the story of their invention is in Figuring Out People, 2007).

When I first began training Master Prac. I tossed some things in about “mastery,” what it is, how long it takes (the “ten year rule”), the attitude required, etc. and we ended Master Prac. With a “pathway to mastery” celebration. Today I think that’s a mistake. While the 15 to 24 days of Master Prac. does take basic NLP further, and provides a more indepth understanding, if we’re honest, it really has nothing to do with mastery and it actually is perpetuating the “get rich quick,” “get smart quick,” “get instant expertise” myth that’s clings to NLP like a leach sucking its blood.

No one is a “master” of NLP after a two or three week intensive course or after a year if you stretch it out to 6 or 8 weekends.

That’s not how mastery works. Even I knew that after my first experience of Master Prac. At my first Master Prac. I wrote the notes that is now the book, The Spirit of NLP (1996). And in that book, the idea of the spirit of NLP is the idea of continuous learning, an unending, ongoing attitude of exploring, discovering, and ferocious curiosity.

In an interview in Moscow recently, I was asked about Master Practitioners/ Trainers who consider that they have arrived, who segregate themselves from everybody else and present themselves as having reached the pinnacle of the field. “What about them? What would you say to them?”

“I’d say that ‘You have missed the whole point! You do not understand the basics of NLP if that’s your attitude! Your license to train ought to be revoked and you ought to go study it afresh and learn to develop the spirit of NLP. Your journey to mastery has hardly begun— there are many new developments in the field and unless you are staying involved, collaborating with those who are doing things in this field, every day you are falling further and further behind!’”

This Week’s Neuro-Semantic News
We are wrapping up the completion of NSTT (Trainers’ Training ) in Hong Kong and the graduation is this Thursday.
Then NSTT Colorado Begins June 19.

I recently asked a number of NLP trainers in Hong Kong, Egypt, Tokyo, Malaysia, and Australia, “What is the biggest challenge that you face in your NLP practice and business?”  And the answer was not only surprisingly similar, but it highlights a common theme that seems to be echoed around the world by so many people who care about the future of this field, “The low quality of NLP training and practice.”

I then ask about the evidence.  “What is the evidence that there is a low problem of low quality NLP knowledge and skill?”  And that brought a wide range of problems.  Most frequently the trainers spoke about people being certified as practitioners who never study the Meta-Model as a communication model (the first model in this field), who experience no training in strategies or modeling (the very heart of NLP), and who experience various new age practices that may be a lot of fun, but which has nothing to do with NLP and in fact, confuse them about what NLP really is.

My discussions with trainers and leaders also indicate that the low quality of NLP shows up in when people learn NLP from a correspondence course or in distance learning and have no follow up of intense personal supervision that assesses whether the person has any actual competency with such basic skills as state elicitation, anchoring, calibrating, pacing, precision questioning, strategy elicitation, meta-program detection, etc.  This seems to be a growing problem in this field that is inherent experiential in nature.

The low quality of NLP also shows up in other ways.  It shows up in the lack of congruency in the trainers who operate from scarcity and competition rather than abundance and cooperation, who put anyone in the field down who isn’t part of their camp, who presents themselves as the only ones doing “real” NLP, and who don’t live NLP in an authentic way.  It shows up in those who present NLP and who are out-of-touch with the new developments during the past fifteen years, and who fail to give credit to sources.  In this and many other ways, the quality of NLP training seems to be suffering everywhere in the world.

Without an commonly recognized international body governing the field and so without an international set of standards, NLP has been fragmenting over the past three decades and seems to be increasing in the fragmentation rather than decreasing.

The Solution

So what are we to do?  What can we who care about the quality of NLP in NLP practitioners, trainers, and leaders do?

First and foremost, we ourselves can practice and demonstrate higher quality NLP in our trainings and in our lives.

This is first and most critical.  The best way to make all of the low quality NLP redundant is by contrasting it to NLP of high quality.  And what does that mean?  It means, beyond all the talk and hype, actually knowing the models and patterns and being skilled enough to effectively use them.  Two things are required for quality NLP: a knowledge of the field that is both broad and thorough and a competency to be able to carry out the skills.

For the knowledge part, this means that trainers and leaders ought to be continually learning, reading, researching, and taking additional training.  It should strike us as a complete contradiction of terms that a NLP trainer is not still learning and developing.  And that means keeping current with the field, attending Conferences, reading journals, staying up with the books published in this field.  To not do so implies a know-it-all arrogance that contradicts the true spirit of NLP.

In terms of the knowledge of thefield, trainers should know where NLP came from.  They should know that it emerged in the early 1970s from two movements, the Cognitive Psychology movement and the Human Potential movement.  The immediate models of NLP came from George Miller and his associates as they launched the Cognitive Psychology movement, dated 1956.  This includes Noam Chomsky, Karl Pribram, etc.  Out of this came the language model of NLP, the Meta-MOdel as a version of Transformational Grammar, thanks to John Grinder.  Out of this developed the Strategy model from Miller’s TOTE model.

It also developed from the Human Potential movement (HPM) of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers— as Bateson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir worked together at Esalen in the 1960s as key pioneers of the HPM.  They took their revolutionary ideas from Maslow and Rogers — the very ideas that today we call “the NLP Presuppositions.”¹ To not know our history and roots is to not know what we are about and to confuse the true heart and focus of NLP. If we do not know our history, we are doomed to repeat its worst mistakes.

The paradigm shift that Maslow made from “the dark side of human nature” that is sick, unhealthy, distorted, and wounded to the “bright side of human nature” —the side that is healthy, whole, and seeking its highest and best— that paradigm shift lies at the very heart of the HPM and hence NLP.  The “theory” of NLP that Bandler and Grinder kept discounting and pooh-poohing is actually the theoretical foundations of both Cognitive Psychology and Self-Actualization Psychology.  That’s the uniqueness of NLP.

As trainers and practitioners of NLP develop a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of what we have in our hands, the next task is learning to develop the skills that fall out from these models.   Knowing without doing is a form of incompetence.  Knowing can be deceptive.  It can deceive a person into assuming skills he or she does not have.  The test, of course, is reality.  Can you actually do what you know to do?  In this, we have to close the knowing-doing gap with true competence and skill.  And today research has abundantly demonstrated that true competency is a ten-year process.²

Many so-called NLP Trainers and practitioners hate this.  They want everything to be easy and quick.  But everything is not easy and quick.  With skills that have been developed to the level of expertise, this requires discipline and what Ericsson Anders’ calls “deliberate practice.”

Second, to raise the quality of NLP around the world we need to collaboratively practice what we are preaching.

If we believe in abundance, we have to stop practicing scarcity.  If we believe in cooperation, we have to stop practicing competition.  If we believe in positive intentions behind actions, we have to stop cutting others down and criticizing them.  These are but a few of the “thought viruses” among us that we have to address.  And these viruses have created within NLP so much incongruency that no wonder people question our motives and our competence.

As long as making money is the first and biggest, and sometimes only, motive for trainers and leaders— NLP will be seen as manipulative.  We have to raise our motives and intentions above merely making money.  And we have to get our ego out of the way in terms pride.  There’s too many striving to create a guru-kingdom or cult in NLP, building followers after them, instead of freeing people to discover and actualize their highest potentials.

As a child of the Human Potential Movement, NLP is part of “humanistic psychology” and as such we should proudly recognize this as our heritage —raising the awareness and skills of people everywhere so that they can reach their highest values and visions and actualize their best skills.  Unless we do this we will not be able to get away from the current problems of competition and conflict.

Third, the quality of NLP practice and experience requires trainings that can build and measure true competence.

A problem that seems inherent in NLP is the idea of speed.  It’s the idea that we can do things quickly.  And while this is true for some things, it is not true for everything.  It is true of the Phobia Cure pattern that cut the time for healing a phobic response from six months to ten minutes.  But there’s a problem.  The problem is that every “problem” is not like the stimulus-response structure of a phobia.  In fact, the majority of problems are not.  And because they are not, there won’t be “ten minute cures.”

Many NLP trainers and practitioners have jumped to the conclusion that because we have found the structure of one experience that allows us to radically shorten the time, everything in human nature is like this.  This is the fallacious thinking that creates this delusion.  Simple states and experiences that are stimulus–response in structure have be done quickly, but not so the complex states and experiences.  There will never be a “Ten Minute Health Cure,” “Ten Minute Get-Rich-Quick Pattern,” “Ten Minutes to Leadership Competency.”  Complex states and experience require time, learning, practice, deliberate focus over the long-term.

The Bottom Line

Can we raise the quality of NLP around the world?  I believe we can and that we must!  Yet it will not happen quickly or easily.  It will take the concerted effort of a critical mass of NLP practitioners to turn the tide and make the negative P.R. about NLP redundant.  Many are already working to do this —we need many, many more to catch this vision and join in the effort.  Together we can do so much more than apart or alone.

** Announcements

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

NEURO-SEMANTIC CONFERENCE

Beginning in 2011 we plan to launch an annual International Neuro-Semantic Conference and we will begin from Grand Junction Colorado where Dr. Hall conducted his original NLP Training Center and discovered the Meta-States Model.

Dates:              July 1-3, 2011 — Country Inn Conference Center

Theme:            Actualizing Excellence

Content:          15 workshops — two tracks: Personal Excellence — Business Excellence

The Schedule of events and workshops will be sent out in the 4 to 6 weeks as we develop that.  Immediately following the Conference will be a Module III training of Meta-Coaching for the ACMC credentials (July 6-13, 2011).   Mark in your calendar for 2011 and then … Come and enjoy.