“NLP is not therapy it’s education for your brain” Richard Bandler
Today I was having breakfast with a bunch of people and I was asked, “What’s all this NLP stuff then? Is it tree hugging?”
And the answer is no, NLP in and of itself is a bunch of learning’s and understandings about how we as human beings process, make meaning and interpret the world around us and by understanding these processes and applying techniques or ways of thinking we can develop ourselves and others. My focus within NLP has been to show people how they’re own processes are just that, processes and as with any process there are sequential elements to it. Often there is a therapeutic element/side effect of any NLP intervention and so the misunderstanding is reasonable.
Another reason why some people consider it therapy may be due to the fact that in it’s origins, excellent communicators and agents of change such as Milton H Erickson and Virginia Satir (and many others) were modeled* in order to find out what they were doing at an unconscious as well as conscious level. As Milton put it in this description about the amazing book known as Patterns 1,
“Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H Erickson, M.D. By Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I’ve done without knowing about them” – Milton H Erickson M.D.
*NLP modeling is the name of the process used to learn how people do what they do at an unconscious as well as conscious level, this methodology includes a set of beliefs called presuppositions, pre supposing statements or ideas that assist in the successful replication of one persons behavior. This ‘model’ or system has been applied to many areas since the 1970’s from business, communication, parenting skills and therapeutic settings in fact anything that someone excels can be modeled and taught to someone else and here is where the real skill is, creating a ‘model’ that is transferable/teachable to any human being.
Hence we have top sales, negation, managing and communication skills (and a whole bunch more) specialists within the NLP community, but at it’s core is the modeling ability, Whatever one human being can do it can be modeled and taught to someone else. In the case of Olympic athletes there is a bunch of physical skills and refinements that can take time to acquire and using the modeling process you can reduce the time to learn a skill significantly, and that’s the key.
Of course many people who learn NLP are or do become therapists of various flavors and use NLP as a ‘bolt on’ to an existing or developing skill set.
When it comes to working in a therapeutic context often the ‘process’ of how someone is able to have an undesired behavior once made explicit can have massive effects in changing future behavior patterns – You can’t know what you don’t know yet, you can become curious about how you manage to keep a problem in place.
Questions like, ” How do you know when to have X” can be useful in determining a trigger for a behavior, “What’s the first thing that lets you know you’re ……”
For different people and different behaviors the start point is likely to be different.
“I just say to myself…..”
“I get this feeling…..”
“I see myself …….”
“I know that they will….”
Are all typical of the responses to these two questions and tell the experienced practitioner much about the internal processing that is going on, once the process has been uncovered fully for example,
“I imagine people all looking at me and I say to myself, ‘this wont work, I’ll look silly’ and I get the feeling that lets me know it’s going to turn out bad”
In NLP terms the following structure would be given the statement above,
Internal Visual, Internal Auditory, Internal Kinesthetic.
and by asking the right type of questions or using a techniques the internal V A K pattern can be interrupted or even broken or reformulated. If the pattern can’t run the way it used to then a new behavior will replace it, what new behavior I hear you cry! That is why the well formed out comes questions are so important so an overall structure for change is:
1. Establish and maintain rapport
2. Set a direction, define desired outcome
3. Uncover the process/structure of behavior to be changed/modified or adopted
4. Do some stuff ! (that’s the technical term for technique)
5. ‘Test’ new behavior and repeat until desired outcome is achieved
With that in mind, this process will be broken down into chunks over the next 5 weeks and I’ll be looking at ways in which you can apply the process to any area of life, want to develop a new skill or behavior?
What might that be?
Enjoy
Andy
