5.10.0.22 13. The one who sets the frame for the communication controls the communicating
We all live within a frame of reference. Even a simple act of looking at a picture presupposes various frames of references. What do we focus on—its overall configuration or some detail? Do we do one and then the other? Do we see it in terms of its beauty, in terms of what it took to create it, in terms of its value financially, in terms of its usefulness, etc.? We learn a great many of our frames from within the culture of our maturation. Afterwards, we live within those frames as unconsciously as a fish lives in water.
The frame governs perception, meaning, emotion, behavior and values.
Yet the frame governs perception, meaning, emotion, behavior and values. To live within a frame means to use some paradigm that gives meaning to things. To get out of that frame, or to set a new frame, thereby reframes and invites a whole new world of meaning.
Therefore, in relating and communicating—he who sets the frame truly governs the interpersonal field that results. The power of setting a frame lies, in part, in that whoever sets the frame essentially does so apart from consciousness. Consequently, people lack awareness of it and therefore cannot bring their conscious values to bear upon it. In communication, people frequently set Win/Lose frames or Win/Win frames; Dignity Preserving frames/Dignity Denying frames, etc.
5.10.0.23 14. “There is no failure, only feedback”
What would not happen if you receive ‘failures’ as feedback? What would happen if you did not receive such as feedback? What would not happen if you did not receive such as feedback? It seems to us that if everyone received everything that happened to them as feedback, they would all become ferocious learning machines.
It seems to us that if you, and ourselves, received everything that happened to us as feedback, we would all become ferocious learning machines.
If you communicate with someone and fail to get the response you want, what do you do? You alter your communication—the stimuli that you present —until you get the response you want. In this way, you turn failure into feedback. Feedback, not Wheaties, comprises the breakfast of champions.
Living life by this presupposition changes all areas of life, but especially those areas that demand persistence and the wisdom of learning from “what doesn’t work.” People tend to give up too easily. Many marriages would not end in divorce if the couples considered communication as feedback rather than failure. Thomas Edison’s 10,000 experiments (some say 1,000 experiments) in search for a filament to work in his light bulb illustrates this principle. When asked, “It must be hard to have failed 10,000 times!” Edison replied, “I didn’t have 10,000 failures. I just found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” No failure—only feedback!
How many relationships end because people “fail” to get what they want immediately? How much business ceases because people take “failures” as a reason to quit or back off?
5.10.0.24 15. The person with the most flexibility exercises the most influence in the system
In any system, the one with the most flexibility over their own behavior (not that of others) will exercise more choices and therefore will exercise more influence in the system. Accordingly, the more choices you have in your communication toolbox, the less chance you will get stuck. For instance, should you become angry, you lose flexibility and you also lose control of the processes of communication. We recommend learning to use the NLP toolbox so that you radically increase your choices. Known as the Law of Requisite Variety, this belief as it applies to NLP encourages us to dissociate from our emotions so as to maintain choice in our communicating.
5.10.0.25 16. Resistance indicates the lack of rapport
We often read “insult” or “resistance” as trouble, failure, difficulty—and throw up our hands. We just give up on the person. We speak with people one time, get resistance, and never return; and so, we lose the joy and rewards of the relationship we could have had with them.
I (BB) hold this belief: “I don’t have resistant clients. I just lose rapport and I will re-establish it.”
Why? In addition to using that as a trigger for “feeling bad,” we simply lack the skills necessary for working with and overcoming the resistance. Consider the power of this presupposition about resistance. It shifts responsibility to us—in how we handle it. Believing this empowers us to re-establish rapport even with the grouchy—the grumpy, the out-of-sorts, the hurting. This belief also enables one to continue communicating even in the face of anger and sarcasm without taking it personally. It keeps us matching their internal reality by “saying words that agree with their internal model of the world.”
The NLP model teaches us how we can overcome resistance. We can overcome resistance even with irate people. Obviously, establishing and maintaining such rapport plays an essential role in communication and therapy.
Rapport moves us into a more harmonious state with another. When two people adopt the “same mind” about something—they enter into rapport. Detecting resistance from someone signals to us that we have lost rapport.
5.11 Learning—Choice—Change Presuppositions
5.11.0.26 17. People have the internal resources they need to succeed
NLP looks upon people as having an inherent ability for coping, and for creating the resourcefulness that they need to attain their definition of success. In saying people have the resources within, NLP takes an educational approach. Educare literally refers to “calling or leading out” (e-ducare, “to bring out” as something latent). Bandler has said repeatedly, “People work perfectly well, they just run very poor programs (depression, procrastination, defensiveness, etc.) very well!”
As communicators and therapists we seek to assist people in accessing their own resources—in “equipping” them to develop more skill. People only need some help in discovering and accessing their resources. In saying this, bear in mind that we do not say you have “everything” in place, we say you have all the resources you need to get “everything” in place. As an example, you may need to further your education or to obtain specific training in order for you to have success. In NLP we say you have the resources necessary in order for you to obtain the education and/or training you need to have your success. You have the “wiring” in your neurology to produce that success.
5.11.0.27 18. Humans have the ability to experience one-trial learning
The human body exists as quite a system. Each of us lives as an amazing bio-electro-chemical information processing unit—one that gives us the ability to learn very rapidly!
If a child gets thrown into a pool of water, that child may grow up never forgetting that and always remembering to experience fear (intense and inappropriate fear) at every sight and thought of going into water. Such learnings usually take place when we simultaneously experience an intense or high emotional level. This ability of the human brain to learn quickly provides opportunity for the NLP communicator/therapist to assist clients in rapid change.
5.11.0.28 19. All communication should increase choice
The more choices an individual has, the more wholeness that individual experiences. In NLP we seek to increase choice.
This NLP trainer, as do many other NLP trainers, believes that the more choice an individual has, the more wholeness that individual experiences. Indeed, a great way to break rapport with an individual results when you remove choice. If you box them in, they often get really agitated. Give them choice and they experience happiness.
Speaking therapeutically, most problems we confront in working with people consist of their “stuckness” in some perceived problem. They live at what we call the “effect” of some perceived “cause.” The outcome of the therapy moves in the direction of taking the client from “effect” to “cause” where they experience choice as to how they want to live their lives. The more choice you give a client the more satisfaction they experience from you as their therapist.
NLP outcome therapy moves in the direction o
f taking the client from “effect” to “cause” where they experience choice as to how they want to live their lives.
5.11.0.29 20. People make the best choices open to them when they act
How frequently do we experience high levels of frustration with people because we do not understand the choices they make? How many times do we scratch our heads and say, “Don’t they know better? What’s wrong with them?” Thinking-feeling and saying such indicates our frame of reference: “Others should operate from my model of the world” frame!
This presupposition shifts that. Here we start from the working assumption that people come from their own model of the world and that they make the best choices available to them in that model. This thus answers our question, “No, they do not know better.”
Starting from the assumption that people make the best choices available to them at the time enables us to approach them with compassion, to forgive them. This fosters gentleness, kindness, optimism, and hope.
Does that not hold true for you? Consider some time when you behaved (mis-behaved!) in a manner below your expectations… Didn’t you attempt to do the best you knew? If you had had a better choice for coping, wouldn’t you have opted for that?
Who knowingly makes a choice that will work good-and-well to their own detriment? People make stupid, ugly, sinful, and destructive choices while thinking that somehow it will make things better for them. Realizing this about others and ourselves enables us to treat everyone with more kindness and gentleness about our human fallibility and stupidity.
This realization supports the value and importance of forgiveness. Imagine for a moment what would follow if you held this belief toward the members of your family? What would result if you practiced this presupposition with the people at work? At church? Among your friends? With clients? Doing so will obviously affect the way you communicate with your significant others. They will sense that you believe in them and their abilities! And they will love you for it.
5.11.0.30 21. As response-able persons, we can run our brains & control our results
Mind (Greek: nous) refers to “mind, disposition, practical reason, understanding, thought, judgment.” The majority of people seem to believe and act as if they have no control of their minds. Bandler (1985) wrote:
“Most people don’t actively and deliberately use their own brains. Your brain is like a machine without an “off” switch. If you don’t give it something to do, it just runs on and on until it gets bored. If you put someone in a sensory deprivation tank where there’s no external experience, he’ll start generating internal experience. If your brain is sitting around without anything to do, it’s going to start doing something, and it doesn’t seem to care what it is. You may care, but it doesn’t…
I want you to find out how you can learn to change your own experience, and get some control over what happens in your brain. Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It’s as if they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is driving. I want you to learn how to drive your own bus (my italics). If you don’t give your brain a little direction, either it will just run randomly on its own, or other people will find ways to run it for you—and they may not always have your best interests in mind. Even if they do, they may get it wrong!” (pp. 7-8)
NLP offers neuro-linguistic processes for taking control of our thought processes.
NLP offers neuro-linguistic processes for taking control of our thought processes.
5.12 Conclusion
Now you know the operational system of beliefs and values that drives the NLP model—a reality frame of presuppositions about how the human mind-body system works. In NLP, we simply start from these assumptions rather than spend lots of time studying, “proving,” deleting, validating, etc., them. This does not mean that such conceptual studies prove useless or worthless; much to the contrary, it only means that in the hands-on, experiential and transformational model of NLP—we make experience and pragmatics change our focus.
In the hands-on, experiential and transformational model of NLP—we make experience and pragmatics change our focus.
5.13 Training Exercises
Write down the 21 Presuppositions of NLP in your own handwriting and keep it with you throughout the week for constant review. (One student of mine [BB] typed out the presuppositions each morning for month when he first entered his office in the mornings.)
Share the NLP Presuppositions with 3 people every day.
Write an explanation about which Presupposition will have the most profound impact on you.
Write an explanation about which Presupposition will have the most pervasive influence on you.
Which Presupposition(s) do you already use in living?
5.14 Thought Questions To Assist Your Learning:
Which Presupposition(s) do you already use in living?
What do we mean in NLP by “The NLP Presuppositions?”
What does “epistemology” mean and how does it relate to NLP?
What epistemology does NLP use and rely on?
If you could adopt and integrate one or two of the Presuppositions that would really transform you life—which two would you choose? Why?
What do we mean by “systems” in NLP?
Define “strategy.”
Many of these Presuppositions imply ethical concerns and issues. Which ones, for you, speak about ethics?
Which one of the Communication Presuppositions do you find the most compelling or insightful?
5.14.0.31 Notes – Chapter 4
5Special thanks to Tommy Belk who assisted in the formulation and outlining of the presuppositions in the pattern given.
6
NLP As As Communication Model: Excellence In Communicating
Modeling Exceptional Communicators
6.1 What you can expect to learn in this Chapter:
The basic factors in the NLP communication model
The NLP “guideline” in communicating
“The Three Qualities of Exceptional Communicators”
How to create a well-formed outcome
The factors that complicate communication
Life thrives on communication. Growing up in the rural mountains of North Carolina, I (BB) saw little value in becoming proficient in English. What good would conjugating verbs and diagramming sentences do me?! What did split infinitives have to do with real life—on a farm? Simple life didn’t need that! Then I left the farm.
As I entered the larger world, my perceptions began to change. After I became a minister, I took a refresher course in English and literature prior to tackling college-level work. What an act of wisdom—for a change! As I spent the next ten years in college and seminary, I served as a pastor the last eight years I was in school. Out of those experiences, I discovered just how much language and communication drive Christian ministry. To an incredible degree we minister by communicating.
To me, a Christian minister, like a salesperson, essentially “sells” the message of the gospel. At that time I read extensively in order to improve my communication skills. I studied Zig Ziglar’s See You At The Top (1984) and Closing The Sale(1984a). I read everything I could put my hands on to aid me in improving my speaking and listening skills. Such became my passion. In witnessing and ministering to people, I desired to enhance my ability to communicate effectively. Though such books assisted me in improving my effectiveness as a communicator, not until I came across the NLP model of communication did I discover the best model of all about how language and non-language messages work. I then discovered the power and grace of the NLP model for equipping a person to become a truly professional communicator!
I (MH) also believe that communication lies at the heart of all human experiences. Our very bodies operate by innate “communication systems” of immense complexity so that our central and autonomic nervous systems interact with each other and the world “outside” our skin in a way that keeps us alive, healthy, and vigorous. Even our cells “communicate�
� with each other! But how a signal races down a neuro-pathway via bio-chemical-electrical processes and transfers and transforms “information” (messages, differences) in that cortical context—well, even the neuro-physiological scientists hardly have a clue.
My discovery of NLP occurred in the context of teaching basic communicative skills (skills for asserting, negotiating, listening, disclosing, conflicting respectfully, etc.) in the context of Christian churches. I found an article in Leadership Journal about NLP. Thereafter I devoured the NLP literature and incorporated much of it into a book on communication skills, Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987).
Almost immediately I discovered the NLP “Ten-minute Phobia Cure” (the “Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation Pattern”). When I ran it with several clients and saw the immediate and dramatic response (in contrast to three to six months of desensitization of phobic responses using relaxation and cognitive-behavioral processes), I became truly excited—and curious. Ultimately, all I did with the person comprised “saying words.” All this person did to experience this tremendous personal transformation involved “listening to those words,” and “thinking about them inside his head.” I communicated to him; he communicated to himself. What literally, actually, and exclusively transformed this person from a reactive phobic person who automatically accessed a state of intense fear to a calm and cool person? Verbal communication alone transformed this person.
The User's Manual for the Brain Volume I Page 12
