2) When you come to exercises, “thought” experiments, and laboratories – don’t cheat yourself. Stop. Do the exercise. Involve others in your study. Several of the exercises involve up to five people, although you can go through most exercises with just two people.
3) Build your own indexing system between parts of the Manual. This will reinforce your learning of NLP, the components in the domain, and give you practice in moving around inside the Manual.
4) We have included Key Sentences and Concepts in text boxes. Upon request, you may purchase Overhead Mats for you to create training overheads that parallel the text boxes. These will enable the NLP Trainer to align their training with the student’s Manual.
Introduction
The Story Of “Magic” In Human Neuro-Linguistics
“NLP is an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques.”
Richard Bandler
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) represents a relatively new discipline dating back only to the mid-70s. Behind NLP stands a respectable body of knowledge. NLP originated from several different intellectual disciplines as organized by two co-founders—Richard Bandler and John Grinder.
It happened once upon a time when Dr. Grinder served as a professor of linguistics at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Bandler came there as a student to study mathematics and computers. Dr. Grinder, in fact, had already published several books in the field of linguistics known as Transformational Grammar.
Bandler discovered that he had a “natural” gift for modeling and hearing patterns. He discovered he could detect and replicate patterns in Gestalt Therapy from minimum exposure. He became an editor for several of Fritz Perls’ books in Gestalt Therapy. Being familiar with Perls’ work, Bandler began to study Perls’ techniques. As he discovered that he could model Perls’ therapeutic procedures, he began experimenting with clients using the techniques.
After enjoying immediate and powerful results from that modeling, Richard discovered that he could model others. With the encouragement of Grinder, Bandler got the opportunity to model the world’s foremost family therapist, Virginia Satir. Richard quickly identified the “seven patterns” that Virginia used. As he and John began to apply those patterns, they discovered they could replicate her therapies and obtain similar results.
As a computer programmer, Richard knew that to program the simplest “mind” in the world (a computer with off-and-on switches) you break down the behavior into component pieces and provide clear and unambiguous signals to the system. To this basic metaphor, John added his extensive knowledge of transformational grammar. From transformational grammar we borrow the concepts of deep and surface structure statements that transform meaning/knowledge in the human brain. From this they began to put together their model of how humans get “programmed,” so to speak.
Thereafter, world-renowned anthropologist Gregory Bateson introduced Bandler and Grinder to Milton Erickson, MD. Erickson developed the model of communication that we know as “Ericksonian hypnosis”. Since 1958, the American Medical Association has recognized hypnosis as a useful healing tool during surgery. As Bandler and Grinder modeled Erickson, they discovered they could obtain similar results. Today many of the NLP techniques result from modeling Ericksonian processes.
From these experiences and their research into the unifying factors and principles, Bandler and Grinder devised their first model. It essentially functioned as a model of communication that provided a theoretic understanding of how we get “programmed” by languages (sensory-based and linguistic-based) so that we develop regular and systematic behaviors, responses, psychosomatic effects, etc. This model went further. It also specified ways for using the components of subjectivity for creating psychological (mental-emotional) improvement and change.
From that point, NLP expanded. The model expanded by incorporating materials from other disciplines: cybernetics (communication within complex systems both mechanical and living), philosophy, cognitive psychology, studies of the “unconscious” mind, and neurology. Today, NLP has institutes worldwide and numerous authors have applied NLP to medicine and health, therapy and psychological well-being, business, education, athletics, law, Christian ministry, etc.
The Study Of Excellence
NLP primarily focuses on studying excellence. In the 1983 book, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Volume I, the authors subtitled NLP, “The Study of the Structure of Subjectivity.” The subjectivity that most NLP theorists, developers, and presenters have focused on involves those highest and most excellent facets of human experience—high level experiences of creativity, excellence, genius, etc. Co-developer Robert Dilts has especially focused on this area, writing a series of books and numerous journal articles on “The Strategies of Genius.”
NLP offers a model for learning how to recognize excellence and how to emulate it.
Teachers who want to improve model the best teachers. NLP offers a model for learning how to recognize excellence and to emulate it. NLP focuses on recognizing excellence and how to specifically chunk it down into the component elements and the syntax (or order) for installing it in others.
In this step-by-step fashion, the NLP model instructs us how to achieve excellence. Do you wish to improve your ability to communicate? NLP provides a model for communication excellence. Would you like to know how to build and maintain rapport? NLP chunks these skills into teachable formats. Does your child have difficulty spelling? NLP has identified the structure of excellent spellers and the process for training them to become champion spellers. Would you like to conduct successful negotiations in committee meetings? NLP offers a high quality performance model for negotiating with others around difficult issues.
Counselors usually experience a great thrill when they help to bring about positive change in people. NLP offers not only a state-of-the-art theoretical foundation for such, but also the techniques for bringing about personal change.
The Experiential Nature Of NLP
As you read and use this NLP Training Manual, you will discover the experiential nature of NLP. What does that mean? It refers to the emphasis in NLP on modeling, experimenting, and testing in contradiction to theorizing and hypothesizing. When people ask in our trainings, “Does NLP ‘work’?”, we get them to put it to the test, right then and there to see if a particular pattern “works” for them. Expect this hands-on immediate testing of the model.
This suggests that the best way to understand NLP involves experiencing it. Let us do this as we begin. The following mental exercise (a “mind” experiment) will introduce you to NLP. As you read the instructions, take time to follow the directions. This will enable you to become more attuned to what a unique creation you have in your mind-and-body and nervous system. We will work with the natural processes of your mind. By doing this, you will discover many of the mechanisms by which you can learn to take control of these processes. In the following paragraphs, the three dots … mean “pause, experience, notice, feel, think,” etc.
NLP provides the methods and technology for the “how to” of the managing of our thoughts.
To the extent that these processes and mechanisms lie outside our awareness—to that extent they control us. As you develop familiarity with these unconscious processes, you learn to manage them. In doing so, you will find these processes worth learning. NLP provides the methods and technology for the “how to” of the managing of our thoughts.
Experiment #1
Recall some pleasant experience from your past. Various things will pop into your mind. Whatever pops up in your mind, allow yourself to go with that memory for now. If you don’t seem to find such a memory, then allow yourself to simply imagine a pleasant experience. For some people, closing the eyes helps in this process. Once you have this pleasant experience, permit it to remain in your awareness.
Now that you have this pleasant thought in mind—just notice its visual aspects. As you recall the experience, what specifically do you see? Notice the
picture of the memory. If you do not visualize well, then imagine what the pleasant experience feels like. Or, allow yourself to just listen to some pleasant sounds—words or music—enjoy that kind of an internal pleasant experience.
Now that you have the picture of the memory, make the picture larger. Let it double in size… and then let that picture double… Notice what happens. When you make the picture bigger, what happens? Do the feelings intensify?
Now shrink the picture. Make it smaller and smaller. Allow it to become so small you can hardly see it… Stay with that a moment… Does the intensity of the feelings decrease? Experiment now with making the picture bigger and then smaller. When you make it smaller, do your feelings decrease? And when you make it larger, do your feelings increase? If so, then running the pictures (sounds, feelings) in your awareness in this way functions as it does for most people. However, you may have a different experience. Did you? No big deal. We all code our experiences in our minds uniquely and individually. Now, put your picture of that pleasant experience back in a format where you find it most comfortable and acceptable.
Maintaining the same picture now, move the picture closer to you. Just imagine that the picture begins to move closer and closer to you, and notice that it will. What happens to your feelings as it does? … Move the picture farther away. What happens when you move the picture farther away? Do your feelings intensify when you move the picture closer? Do your feelings decrease when you move the picture farther away? Most people find this true for the way their consciousness/neurology works. When you moved the picture farther away, the feeling probably decreased. Notice that as you change the mental representation in your mind of the experience, your feelings change. This, by the way, describes how we can “distance” ourselves from experiences, does it not?
Suppose you experiment with the color of the picture? As you look at your pictures, do you see them in color or black-and-white? If your pictures have color, make them black-and-white, and vice versa if you have them coded as black-and-white… When you change the color, do your feelings change?
Consider the focus of your images: in focus or out of focus? Do you see an image of yourself in the picture or do you experience the scene as if looking out of your own eyes? What about the quality of your image: in three dimensional (3D) form or flat (2D)? Does it have a frame around it or do you experience it as panoramic? Experiment by changing how you represent the experience. Change the location of the picture. If you have it coded as on your right, then move it to your left.
Debriefing The Experience
NLP works primarily with mental processes rather than content.
Did it ever occur to you that you could change your feelings by changing how you internally represent an experience? The strength of NLP lies in these very kinds of processes of the mind. NLP works primarily with mental processes rather than with content. Here you have changed how you feel about an experience by changing the quality and structure of your images, not their content. Thus, you made the changes at the mental process level while leaving the content the same.
Question: What would happen to a person if they made all their unpleasant pictures big, bright and up close? What would happen if they made all their pleasant experiences small, dim, and far away? … The person would become an expert at feeling depressed, miserable and unresourceful, would he not?
On the other hand, consider what would happen if a person coded their pleasant experiences as big, bright, and up close… will it not create a more positive outlook on life? And, what if they made their unpleasant experiences small, dim and far away? The negative would have less influence on their life.
NLP has taught us to appreciate with a new freshness the depth and meaning of the old proverb, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…”i Consequently, much of what we do in NLP occurs as a result of these natural processes that describe how we humans process information in our minds. NLP directs us how to change the process by changing the mental codings. What you just experienced, we call submodality codings and shifting in NLP.
Your mind performs six primary representational functions (excluding maintaining internal physical functions such as breathing) in order to “make sense” of the world—it creates representations of pictures, sounds, words, generates feelings, smells and tastes. Through the five senses you gather or input information and store it in like manner. Your mind then retrieves this information in the same code or format that you stored the experience. If you store information visually, you will retrieve it as a picture. If you hear and store a noise, you will retrieve the information as a sound.
By changing the coding (submodalities) of an experience, you can change your feelings and your internal state.
We call this coding or storing of information an internal representation (see Figure 1:1). In experimenting with a pleasant experience, you retrieved the visual part of the internal representation of a pleasant experience. Quite possibly your pleasant experience also had sounds. By changing the coding of an experience, you can change your feelings and your internal state. When the internal state changes, behavior changes.
The brain uses this encoding method to control the messages to our nervous system which then determines/creates our neurological experiences. This brain “software” enables us to make decisions and to respond quickly. Doing this consciously would overwhelm us. As we understand these coding procedures, a practitioner of NLP can then bring about change by simply changing the coding. Depression, trauma, grief, guilt, anxiety, phobias, beliefs, values, all emotions and human states operate according to their own individual structured codings.
As a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, I (BB) use the techniques of NLP on a regular basis to bring about structural change in my clients.
Formal Definition Of NLP
Having experienced NLP, let us now give you a formal definition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Neuro refers to our nervous system/mind and how it processes information and codes it as memory inside our very body/neurology. By neuro we refer to experience as inputted, processed, and ordered by our neurological mechanisms and processes.
Linguistic indicates that the neural processes of the mind come coded, ordered, and given meaning through language, communication systems,and various symbolic systems (grammar, mathematics, music, icons). In NLP we talk about two primary language systems. First, the “mind” processes information in terms of pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells (sensory-based information) via the “representational systems.” Second, the “mind” processes information via the secondary-language system of symbols, words, metaphors, etc.
Taking control of one’s own mind describes the heart of NLP.
Programming refers to our ability to organize these parts (sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, and symbols or words) within our mind-body organism which then enables us to achieve our desired outcomes. These parts comprise the programs we run inside our brain. Taking control of one’s own mind describes the heart of NLP.
NLP has become famous for the techniques it offers to bring about effective and lasting change. For example, NLP has a technique called The Fast Phobia Cure developed by Richard Bandler. Using this technique, we can now cure a phobia in ten to fifteen minutes. We have used the procedure to cure phobias of water, bees, elevators, heights, public speaking, small places, airplanes, etc. Best of all, we have done it in just minutes—with the effect lasting (in some cases) years! The Fast Phobia Cure represents just one of many techniques for such change.
We have used Time-Line Processes to remove traumatic pictures from the minds of traumatized people. Additionally, we have even learned to use the NLP patterns of Reframing, Swishing, Collapsing Anchors, etc, conversationally, which means that we do not have to use these patterns in an overtly “therapeutic” way. We can speak in a way that facilitates a person to think in new ways thereby leaving them feeling more whole and empowered—with “renewed minds.” Language (and languaging) works tha
t powerfully!
“NLP is an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques.”
Richard Bandler
However, NLP involves so much more than just a toolbox of techniques. Richard Bandler says, “NLP is an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques.” The attitude of NLP involves one of intense and excited curiosity. It involves the desire to know what goes on behind the scenes. With this kind of attitude of curiosity, we want to know what makes the human mind work.
Second, NLP involves an attitude of experimentation. With such an experimental attitude, we “try things,” and then try something else, and then something else… always trying, getting results, using the feedback, and experimenting with something else. If something doesn’t work, we try something else, and we keep doing so until we find something that does work. Bandler and Grinder possessed such an attitude of curiosity and experimentation in their original discoveries that brought about NLP.
The methodology of NLP involves modeling. As Bandler and Grinder modeled excellence in Perls, Satir, and Erickson, they produced the original format of NLP. Modeling thus describes the methodology that produced the trail of techniques.
In the book Turtles All The Way Down: Prerequisites To Personal Genius, John Grinder makes a noteworthy comment concerning NLP:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming is an epistemology; it is not allowed to make substantive decisions, to offer the comfort of the “correct path.” It offers the opportunity to explore, it offers a set of pathfinding tools. It is for you to select and explore these paths, whether you find comfort or challenge or hopefully, I would say, the comfort of challenge… (pausing) …. The finest compliment that I ever got from Bateson, was the statement to me that NLP was a set of Learning III tools. Now, if that’s true then it becomes incumbent upon me, Judith, Ann, Richard, Robert…, the co-creators of this technology, to make some statement about context. As you say without that movement to some ethical considerations, we have not done what is considered a socially responsible job … In a fragmented, technical society which doesn’t have that kind of matching between the “emanations from the outside and the emanations from the inside,” it becomes incumbent on the individual to develop their own personal culture in the sense of the ethical frame within which they employ the tool.ii
The User's Manual for the Brain Volume I Page 2
