Although he's not one of the three men I admire the most, George C. Wallace (or one of his advisers) came up with the powerful slogan, "Send them a message." The phrase left voters free to define "them" and to fill in the message they wanted to send. (See E. J. Dionne's column for 23 August 2010 in The Washington Post, "Why won't the GOP say 'no' to extremism?" for the source of my idea for this blog.) If you have read the past several of my blogs, you recognize the "Metamodel violations" and the Milton model hypnotic language pattern used in Wallace's phrase. If you haven't, you can now be aware of how the phrase encourages you to want to send someone your own message. It is easy—and almost automatic—to fill in the blanks, isn't it....

Also be aware how the phrase presupposes an "us" and a "them," with "us" being those who need and want to send "them" a message. It also presupposes that the person saying, "Send them a message," is one of "us." Less obvious is the presupposition that "we" (the speaker and the "us") are good, and they ("them") have been bad in some way. This is the language of what Steve Karpman called "the Drama Triangle" (see Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication, by Bowman and Basham, pp. 182-184). The Rescuer encourages the Victim to send a message to the Persecutor. The way to do that, of course, is to vote for the Rescuer (or his or her political party). In words that Walt Kelly doubtless had Pogo say at one time or another, "That'ill show 'em."

We know, however, that the roles on the Drama Triangle are revolving. Victims become Persecutors become Rescuers become Victims. "Sending them a message" provides the illusion of change without actually producing any real change. On the Drama Triangle, the faces may change, but the roles remain the same. And the slogans can be recycled because there's always an "us" and a "them." I am reminded of the guy who asked, "Which is the no-peeing end of the pool?" You can't escape the pee by moving to the other end of the pool, as once it is introduced into the system, the pee goes everywhere. One of the rules of relationships—whether interpersonal, familial, or business—is that manipulation produces countermanipulation. You've doubtless heard the phrase, "Don't get mad; get even." That is basically saying that if you're feeling like a Victim, the best recourse is to become a Persecutor. In that game, even if you win, you eventually lose. What goes around, comes around....

So ... the question is, how do you get out of that game and into a better one? The only escape is to get completely off the Drama Triangle by moving up to the Cognitive Triangle (see Healing with Language, pp. 185-187). As the name implies, life on the Cognitive Triangle is more thoughtful than dramatic, with greater reliance on knowledge and less fear and blaming "them" for what has happened to "us." The more you know, the less you fear.... As a strategy for getting off the Drama Triangle, use Metamodel questions (see my blog for 5 August) to check what others are saying for deletions, distortions, and unwarranted generalizations. Almost always you'll discover that those who want you to be afraid have something to gain by your fear. They want you to be afraid so that you'll feel like a Victim, which presupposes your need for a Rescuer.

Another powerful statement by a politician of a different stripe is Franklin D. Roosevelt's, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." While it isn't absolutely true, it certainly is relatively true. Some things in life are inherently risky. One of the rules for walking in the woods, for example, is "Never put your hand where your eye can't see." Snakes and spiders may bite when their territory is invaded. As long as you exercise reasonable care, however, you have no reason to fear either snakes or spiders. Intelligent caution is a better guarantee of safety than fear. Most of life is like that. Reasonable precautions are all you need to feel safe. You may be tempted to be afraid of those who tell you to be afraid, but intelligent caution is all you need to be safe.

Remember the common saying: "Follow the money." Who gains if you are persuaded to act based on fear? Although they aren't the only ads that encourage viewers and listeners to be afraid, pay special attention to ads for prescription drugs and for political candidates. That's where the appeals to fear are the most obvious. (You may feel safe now, but the risk never goes away.) Also observe the way some of the shows based on interviews with politicians and party spokespersons attempt to increase ratings and emotional involvement by appeals to fear. Does "fear" sell? Unfortunately, it does, especially to those who are entrenched in the roles of the Drama Triangle.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum doesn't make much difference in terms of the way fear appeals will be used to influence your beliefs and behavior. The ads will do their best to make you believe that you are a Victim being persecuted by the other political party and that you can be saved only by electing a Rescuer from the party being promoted. This is not, of course, to say that the country (the U.S. or whatever country you are from) doesn't have real problems that need addressing. We have all sorts of problems, but being fearful is not the best way to address them. What we need for a better future is less fear and more knowledge. The more you know, the less you fear.

Certainty is not necessarily an indicator of knowledge. At one time, most people on the planet were absolutely certain that the sun (and everything else) revolved around the Earth. Saying otherwise was heresy (just ask Galileo and Copernicus). It took a while, but geocentrism eventually proved false. It was a matter of what Richard Bandler calls "confidence without competence." His antidote is the question, "Are you sure enough to be unsure?" Especially question any belief that creates fear when you think about the possibilities of change.

Whatever scary changes may be looming for us now, they pale in comparison with the change in belief systems that occurred in the sixteenth century with the increasing recognition that the Earth was not at the center of God's universe. In the nineteenth century, Mathew Arnold summed up the consequences of the change in belief in the poem, "Dover Beach":

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
    [Stanza 4]

In spite of the change from a Geocentric to a Heliocentric view of the universe, life went on, and people adjusted. Of course, some people adjusted more quickly and easily than others. They were the ones who recognized that knowing more reduces fear. You can be sure enough to be unsure knowing that the more you know, the less you will fear.

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com

Richard Bandler often says that hypnosis isn't the exception, it's the rule. When you think about what you think about hypnosis, the chances are that you won't really be sure what you're thinking about. You've probably seen TV or "stage" hypnotists who specialized in having people do silly things. Most of that isn't really hypnosis—it's actually a show business trance. Hypnosis isn't something someone else does to you, it is something you do to yourself. You may decide to cooperate with a stage hypnotist as part of a show and choose to squawk like a chicken or bark like a dog, but you will know exactly what you are doing and why.

In The Hypnotic Language Patterns of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., Vol. 1 (1975) Richard Bandler and John Grinder identified the principal language patterns used by Milton Erickson, considered the "father" of modern American hypnotherapy. Erickson took advantage of the natural human tendency to complete ideas based on limited information. If I say, "The dog was running down the street," at some level—although you may not be consciously aware of it—you will create a mental image combining a dog, running, and a street. The running dog and street in your head, however, will probably not be the same as the running dog and street in my head. You will have filled in the details based on your own experience with running dogs and streets.

In 1933, a guy named Alfred Korzybski published a book titled, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. It wasn't a big hit, as many readers had difficulty reading and understanding the title. When they first began working together, however, Richard Bandler and John Grinder found Korzybski's ideas helpful and selected the most useful of his concepts for their first model (hence the meta model) of language patterns.

We have received a number of requests to reformat our blog entries from the NLP workshop in Orlando with Richard Bandler and John La Valle to put the entries in chronological order and to provide more “review-type” commentary. We think that’s worth doing, so here it is:

Bottom Line Stuff

We (Debra and Joel, who is responsible for posting this on the SCS Blog) have been certified Meta Master Practitioners and Licensed Trainers of NLP for quite a while now, and we have taken every workshop Richard and John have offered, usually at the rate of one a year. This workshop, however, showed us that we still have a lot to learn. This is a good thing. We would have been disappointed had we gone and discovered that we already knew everything.

We opted to retake the Practitioner/Master Practitioner course in part because licensed trainers were offered a 50 percent discount. Richard and John believe that they—and NLP—are better off when trainers stay current with their skills, and we agree. We also believe that NLP Practitioners (and Master Practitioners) do well to keep their skills current, which is why we offer what we call “Perpetual Tuition,” which allows those who have completed a workshop with us to retake the workshop for a mere $25 a day.

Richard, John, Kathleen La Valle, and The Society of NLP offer well-organized, high-quality training. Their programs aren’t cheap, but they are a bargain in terms of quality and efficiency. In addition to the principal presenters, a number of assistants help ensure that questions that arise during exercises are answered quickly. Most of the facilitators have been assisting Richard and John for a number of years and are well-versed in the concepts being presented.

Much of the following day-by-day description of the workshop was presented here previously in a less comprehensive way. This review is better organized and more complete. While you may actually learn a lot about NLP from reading it, we strongly recommend your taking a training or two—from our perspective, Practitioner and Master Practitioner with us and then Trainers Training and other programs with Richard and John so that you will learn all you can....

Richard Bandler started the session on Thursday, 15 July, by discussing the differences between repairing and optimizing, providing several examples of physical items, such as automobiles, that can be repaired when broken, but would be much better if their mechanics and appearance were optimized. The same concept also applies to the strategies people use to do everything they do. Most people (and you may be one of them) have strategies that are either inefficient or don't actually help you accomplish your goals. Some people (and you may be one of them) would do well to reverse the steps in your strategy so that you begin with happiness instead of making that the goal or result of the strategy.

What can't you do? Or, what is even more common, what do you hesitate doing that you really need to do? If you have things that fall into this category, remember that it probably isn't your fault. Hesitation and the inability to develop and use efficient, effective strategies for doing important things are typically the result of bad hypnotic suggestions by parents and other relatives, teachers, religious leaders, and members of the medical profession. Unless you learned to question authority early in life, you will have received countless bad hypnotic suggestions by the time you are an adult.

Richard also pointed out that if you can do one thing well, you can adapt the strategy you use to do that one thing to everything else you do. When time permits, now think about something you do exquisitely well, whatever that might be, and ask yourself what motivates you to initiate that behavior. What comes next in the sequence? Notice each step that follows and how you get from step to step. How do you know when the strategy is complete and you have achieved your desired outcome? When you have identified all the steps in your strategy for excellence, you can begin to plan a "strategy for strategies" that will allow you to make all your strategies exquisite.

John La Valle took the group for the afternoon session, and we went back to work on Timelines. Because time is a mental construct, it doesn't really exist in the way we think it does. We have memories of what we consider the past, and we have memories for what we think of as our future. Because we have no real language for envisioning time, we use the metaphor of space: the distant past; far in the future.

If you are not already familiar with your timeline, take a minute to think of several things from your past, and think about where you have stored your memories of those things. When you have located the direction of those memories, think about your memories for the future, and locate where you store those. When you talk about things that happened in the past or you expect to happen in the future, where do you gesture? In Western culture, past memories are typically stored on the left or behind the individual, and memories for the future are typically stored on the right or in front of the individual. Your timeline may be different, and that's OK. The most important thing is that you are aware of how you have organized your timeline.

John discussed the ways that timelines can be used to facilitate desired change. Resources and desired states may be anchored to the timeline using tag questions (can't they...). John then demonstrated the use of timelines in a process he called the "Karma Clean," based on a technique Richard Bandler had developed called "The Decision Destroyer." John's "Karma Clean" included both the "Guilt Eradicator" and a "Change Decision" process. Following each of the demonstrations, workshop participants had the opportunity to work through the process. Both processes include steps to ensure that the important learnings from the guilt-producing events and bad decisions are retained and influence future behavior.

We all left with cleaner karmas....

The workshop ended on Sunday, 18 July. The last day began with a truly remarkable trance by John La Valle, which helped set the tone and attitude for the main even of the morning: the test, which was designed to measure how much participants had learned during the course of the seminar. The test required both individual and team performance and covered a wide variety of NLP concepts and terminology. And we all did very well.

After lunch, it was Richard's turn to address the group and to conduct the "graduation" exercise. His principal message for us was to use our skills in Bandler Technologies "to make the world a better place."

It is a goal Debra and I share.

The sessions for the 16th of July were tracked. Debra had selected the track for "NLP and Bodywork," with Drs. Ron and Edie Perry, and I had selected the "Change Work" track with Elvis Lester. The third alternative was "NLP in Business," with John La Valle. As we had already experienced John's business presentation when we took Persuasion Engineering™ the other two seemed better choices for us.

Debra: I attended Patterns of Physical Transformation, with Drs. Ron and Edie Perry. They began with some history: In 1981 Moshé Feldnekrais suggested that Ron meet Richard Bandler and learn NLP. Ron earned Practitioner in 1982 and Master Practitioner in 1983. Ron and Edie met in chiropractic school, and Ron’s work with Edie allowed her to regain physical health (walking). Ron has previously been blind, and he does not see the way others do.

A principal point of the workshop was that your body provides feedback of what is happening in your brain. The more stressed people are, the more obvious the patterns. To illustrate how a person's physiology provides information about what is happening in the brain, Edie offered some generalizations about Obama and McCain during the presidential campaign that illustrated their stress patterns:

     Obama
     Head leans to the right
     Not as well-rested
     Left-brain deficiency
     Big chunk
     No words when off teleprompter

     McCain
     Head leans to the left
     Fresher after a night’s rest
     Right-brain deficiency
     Lost in details
     Monotone

Muscles only do two things: contract or relax. The short side is the side that is stressed and has the most potential for working better. Edie said that Richard [Bandler] will often stress a person so he can see the patterns more clearly.

Assessment: notice which side is contracted so you know which side to work with.

A strong state changes physiology, in a way that is both internally and externally observable. Generate your best state of comfort and then loop it into your hands.

During the session, Edie and Ron covered the following techniques:

• Finger magic
• Expanding anchors
• Finding your easy range of motion
• Shoulder painting
• Rotation, lateral flexion, flexion and extension

Joel: With an active clinical practice in Tampa Bay, Florida, and approximately 30 years experience with NLP, Elvis Lester brought a wealth of experience to the session on change work. He has developed a vocabulary for thinking about working with clients that facilitates the client's achieving the desired results. For example, he calls the space between client and therapist the "Mind Zone." His desire is to move from remedial change (fixing what is wrong) to generative change (creating options and possibilities for development), and then to creating ongoing and automatic change that promotes the client's ongoing changes in a positive direction.

Elvis described his process of going from preframing a client session, to the frame of the session itself, to reframing the client's beliefs. It's all information, and he thinks of change work as "directionalizing" the client's beliefs and behavior. He creates an Aversion for the unwanted behavior or belief and an Attraction to the new. He measures the client's "Index of Readiness" by the degree to which the client disidentifies with the old behavior: "That's not me any more."

Communication that most effects change occurs primarily outside of conscious awareness. Elvis uses the expression "conscious crap door" to warn against the belief that conscious communication can produce the desired change. He uses a sequence he calls "The Eight A's":

1. Have the client Access the desired state/resources.
2. Amplify them.
3. Adjust them if necessary.
4. Help the client Associate into them.
5. Anchor them.
6. Add to them. (Stack positive anchors and collapse them with the problem state, making sure to retain the positive intent of the original problem state.)
7. Have the client Apply the new belief or behavior.
8. Help the client Appropriate the behavior as his or her own.

To conclude, Elvis likes to use what he calls the "Zipper Technique," that zips things appropriately into the client's past or future using a color coded zipper to help ensure that the work is complete.

And we'll have more to report tomorrow....

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com

We continued to work on strategies on Day 5 of the NLP workshop, paying particular attention to the modalities of necessity (must, need, have to) and possibility (can, might, will) and metaprograms (especially Toward/Away From, Same/Different). Just for a minute, think about a strategy you use routinely for making relatively simple decisions (such as, purchasing low-cost items, selecting what you want to wear when getting dressed, ordering a meal in a restaurant). At each stage in the strategy you will have a sensory modality (internal or external Visual, Auditory, or Kinesthetic) that will be attached to a modality of necessity or possibility, and one or more metaprograms.

 
Once you have identified the steps in your strategy, switch the linguistic modalities and the metaprograms one at a time to see how the changes influence the strategies. Did changing the order reveal any missing pieces? Did you like any of the changes better than you liked your original strategy? The more conscious you are of your strategies, the better able you will be to make all the adjustments you need to streamline your strategy and maximize its effectiveness.

The other major exercise of the day (this one with Kathleen La Valle, who has been doing more presenting this year than she has done in the previous workshops we've attended) was values elicitation. The exercise was based on the concept of values clarification, which was a common training program in the 1970s and '80s. If you list the 10 or 20 things that are important to you about Life, what's on your list? Once you have your list complete, create a hierarchy by asking the question, "Is this more important than that?" If you have two similar things, such as "relationships" and "friendship," ask whether you can have one without the other:

• Can you have friendship without relationships?
• Can you have relationships without friendship?

Also look to see if your complex equivalence for an item includes something that might not be specifically on your list. You might, for example, have used the word "abundance" or "vitality" in a way that includes "health."

The main thing to note, however, is whether the values you have indicated are most important to you are actually supporting the kind of life you want to have. If not, you'll need to shift your hierarchy so that your values will better support what is really important to you.

As usual, Day 6 began with Richard on stage discussing a variety of common themes for this and many other of his workshops. Along the way, he took time to answer questions submitted by workshop participants and to lead those who submitted them through appropriate interventions. Two of the main questions on Day 6 centered on making good decisions about when to associate and when to dissociate from experience. The individuals who had submitted the questions were dissociating when they needed to be fully associated, and they were associating into bad experiences in a way that led to the perpetuation of those experiences. A good strategy allows a person to associate into good experiences and to dissociate from the unpleasant. Golfers, for example, need to associate into their memories of hitting the ball just right before swinging the club so that the current swing will follow the same pattern.

One of the themes for the day was to stop going where it's not worth going. Examples included both anger and depression. Choosing to go to some other "place" is a decision. We spent the afternoon with John La Valle discussing the way beliefs become values by means of decisions and the way values influence behavioral decisions. Many of those who had Health as one of their important values, for example, were engaging in behaviors that did not contribute to their long-term health and well-being. Because values generate behavior from "the top down," the behavior is a better indicator of an individual's values hierarchy than what he or she says. It is, of course, possible to restructure your values hierarchy to get more of what you want in life.

Because values and behavior are a direct result of decisions made in the past, the homework for the evening was to ask your unconscious what decisions you would have had to make differently in your past for your current values to change in ways that will facilitate your getting what you really want in life.

The process will continue....

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com

The principal subject of the training on the 12th (3d day of the workshop) was strategies. The initial example was a motivation strategy: what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning. On the surface, this would seem to be a simple matter of knowing what you need to do that day, but the strategy itself may be complicated. The basic strategy form is a TOTE, which stands for Test, Operation, Test, Exit. The first T is the stimulus that initiates the strategy. In a social situation, seeing an outstretched hand, for example, will often initiate your strategy for "hand-shaking behavior." The O would be the hand-shaking itself, and—after a certain length of time—lthe operation would be considered complete and pass the T for exiting the behavior.

 
When we started examining people's strategies for getting up in the morning, we discovered that even simple strategies aren't that simple.... Most of the early NLP literature I had read or learned through audio- and videotape presentations, elicited strategies by asking questions: "When do you begin to think about getting up in the morning?" "What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?" "What do you say to yourself?" And so on. It seems simple: Ask the right questions, and others will be able to access and report on their strategies.

What we discovered, however, was that the critical parts of strategies operate below the level of conscious awareness. Verbalization is a conscious process and misses major elements of the strategy. Eye-accessing cues, on the other hand, are unconscious and reveal more about the strategy than can be derived from a verbal self-report. The person working with me observed a visual access that preceded my recognition of the question, "What time is it?" that I thought initiated my getting-up strategy. It is, after all, the unconscious mind that really knows what you are doing. The conscious mind likes to think it's in charge, but that is simply not the case.

Although Debra and I have not made much use of the notation system used to track strategies, we quickly developed an appreciation of using it to track the structure of a person's subjective experience. The notation system is based primarily on the eye-accessing cues: Visual Construct, Visual Recall, Auditory Construct, Auditory Recall, Auditory Digital (Internal Dialog), and Kinesthetic. The eye-accessing cues reveal the sequence a person follows in following a strategy.

Another topic covered was the significance of chunk size. Sometimes people are too close to the trees to see the forest. Other times, they may be too far from the forest to distinguish specific trees. Most of you reading this blog are familiar with the idea of chunking up (more generalization) and chunking down (more detail) and lateral chunking (same size, different type). What we realized in the process of working on the chunking exercise was that the metamodel questions are designed to help people discover what a particular chunking deletes, distorts, or generalizes in an inappropriate way. If you are trained in NLP—or are interested in training—you might want to take a look at chunk size and ask yourself which of the metamodel questions address the problems that may be associated with chunk size.

Another significant learning for us was the recognition that nonverbal gestures often indicate not only time references and the major sensory system being accessed, but also the submodalities (associated, dissociated, size, distance, duration, and so on). This all adds up to the need to pay close attention to what's really happening with your clients and others with whom you engage in communication. Others will show you with their nonverbal behavior exactly what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what they need to be able to change their behavior in desired ways. Pay attention, or you'll miss it.

In the closing session for the day, John La Valle discussed the importance of taking the verbal output of others literally. You may be inclined to think you know what others are going to say and finish sentences for them or give them a word when they are struggling to find one. If you are inclined to do that, you will miss the opportunity to discover what others really think.

The principal "morals" for Day Three were Sensory Acuity and Patience. These are, of course, critical for communication in general and NLP in particular.

Day Four began with chaining anchors to move people from hesitation to having a Go-For-It attitude. As usual, Richard began with a variety of illustrations of the problem state and leading the participants through to the solution. He then demonstrated how we were to implement the process with a subject, and then we repeated the process in groups of three.

In the afternoon, we covered Metaprograms with John La Valle, and then Kathleen La Valle introduced a new (to us) structure for using metamodel questions to movie clients from a "stuck" state through to a solution. We both found this piece extremely valuable and are planning to include it in our upcoming NLP training in August. You will learn to use the metamodel questions in a new way....

We have continued to meet interesting people from around the world. Yesterday, for example, we had lunch at a really good Chinese restaurant with a couple from Thailand. We have also met people from Russia, the Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom, Mexico, a number of countries in South America, and Canada. It is a remarkable gathering of intelligent, talented people, and we are honored to be here with them.

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com