Understanding NLP E-Book

Peter Young

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 483

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Understanding NLP opens a doorway into a more imaginative and coherent way of understanding and using NLP. This completely revised edition unites the many strands of NLP using an elegant paradigm which Peter Young calls the Six Perceptual Positions model. The book provides numerous examples of the paradigm in practice.

Leseprobe

Understanding NLP

Principles and Practice

Peter Young

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One Understanding NLP

Chapter Two Patterns of Change

Chapter Three How Change Happens

Chapter Four Definitions of NLP

Chapter Five The Philosophy and Presuppositions of NLP

Chapter Six Rapport

Chapter Seven Rapport and the Four Realities

Chapter Eight Setting Outcomes

Chapter Nine Asking Questions

Chapter Ten Working with Parts and Roles

Chapter Eleven Perceptual Positions

Chapter Twelve Exploring the Metamirror

Chapter Thirteen Conclusion

Appendix A Four-fold Patterns

Appendix B Doing NLP Exercises

About the Author

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgments

I would like to dedicate this book to Alison Lang, in appreciation of her support and her continuing ability to present me with the problems and challenges that I need for sorting out my own thinking. My thanks also go to my brother John for his comments, and to the staff of Crown House Publishing for their help in this project.

Preface

Changing NLP

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) works by changing the way people perceive and make meaning of the world they live in, how they understand their experience, so that they may intervene effectively. Although NLP is renowned for its rapid and dramatic changes, it also creates subtle changes over the longer term, on all levels of Body, Mind and Spirit.

When it first appeared, NLP offered a radical shake-up of traditional therapy and change techniques. Although some rejected its ground-breaking approach, there were many who welcomed NLP’s innovative way of working, and over the last three decades NLP has expanded greatly. New techniques and therapeutic procedures are constantly being developed; the number of training courses and books grows all the time.

Although NLP works well when used by skilled practitioners, there is always room for improvement. The body of knowledge known as NLP has accumulated such a huge amount of material that there is now a need for this to be consolidated. This can be done by generalising, sorting, finding similarities, noticing patterns, and so on. The aim is to find a model or set of principles for change. Generally speaking, the simpler the working principles, the easier it is to apply them in practice. NLP needs a unifying model if it is going to advance, if it is going to be more than the sum total of what a whole host of different practitioners are currently doing. And, therefore, it needs a paradigm or theoretical basis that will streamline it, and enable it to evolve to the next stage. Understanding NLP is my attempt to provide such a paradigm for NLP. I present this model in its basic theoretical form in Chapter Two, and provide numerous examples of it in practice throughout the book. This paradigm will enable NLP to reinvent itself and move forward with a clearer structure, and with increased power to meet its own future requirements. The challenge for NLP practitioners to reframe and reorganise their current understanding, to rethink their own practice, and to become part of the next phase of NLP’s development.

NLP is surprising

When someone else seeks your help as a skilled practitioner, and tells you that they are experiencing a limitation in a part of their life, you already know that they have tried to change consciously and have failed. They are requesting that you intervene because you can offer a different point of view, and may therefore see what is hidden from them. To ‘intervene’ is to deliberately choose to act in a way that will produce a difference, that will assist someone in changing themselves. In a therapeutic context this means with their permission and willing co-operation. Because your intervention gets them to do something they have not thought of doing themselves, it will therefore be unexpected. NLP interventions surprise the other person into perceiving their world differently! Surprise effectively overcomes resistance to change. (The fact is that some people do resist change, because their anticipated discomfort outweighs the possible benefits of actually changing. Change does have its consequences.) If the person does not know what to expect, they cannot resist or defend themselves against it.

When you first do a particular NLP exercise and it delivers a desired change, it is often a profound learning experience. However, with repeated use, the surprise factor may wear off and that particular exercise becomes run-of-the-mill—the so-called Law of Diminishing Returns. Those NLP processes will still work in surprising ways for naive persons, but as the techniques become better known, they are likely to lose some of their potency. From time to time therefore, NLP Practitioners need to update the way in which they think about and use the techniques. And that includes keeping up with the latest ideas, not only in NLP but in other relevant fields.

Being aware of this need for innovation, NLP practitioners can use their creativity to find new ways of surprising people or of reframing their understanding, by developing new techniques or customising existing ones. Otherwise, you could find yourself being outwitted by the ever-smarter people who appear in front of you. The test of how well you understand and can utilise the generative power of NLP thinking is to continue to come up with alternative ways of perceiving reality and novel ways of creating change.

To meet this need, Understanding NLP: Principles and Practice will enable you to enrich your understanding of the basic patterns discernable in NLP. This will take you into big chunk generalisations, recognising paradigms which run throughout our civilisation’s endeavours to explain what it means to be a human being. This book is a complete revision of the first edition of Understanding NLP: Metaphors and Patterns of Change. Since the first edition was published in 2001 my own thinking has moved on, and I have extended and refined many of the ideas which that book explored. This revised edition is more specifically for those people who wish to re-examine their existing knowledge of NLP and enhance their understanding of it. It also offers suggestions of ways forward in developing their own style of doing NLP.

I show how it is possible to bring all the pieces of NLP together using a new paradigm which I call the Six Perceptual Positions model. After the groundwork has been laid, this is made explicit in Chapter Eleven. In the process of arriving there, the book takes a critical look at many of the original ideas of NLP, their later modifications, and considers the appropriateness of the models and metaphors used to explain them. It also provides numerous examples of the new paradigm in action. There are guidelines on how to do NLP with a client from the practitioner’s or therapist’s point of view. As a result, you will be able to gather useful insights about someone else’s model of the world, and about how best to intervene in order to help them change in a surprising way.

Because there is now so much NLP material, there is a limit to how much can be included in one book. Therefore a further volume Understanding NLP: Language and Change is planned. This continues the exploration of helping people change by explaining the linguistic aspects of NLP, guiding you through using the NLP model of language (the ‘Meta-model’) and demonstrating how different kinds of language are appropriate in different contexts. It also considers the art of using metaphors and telling stories.

Peter Young Exeter, May 2004

Chapter One

Understanding NLP

A story is a doorway through which the imagination enters another reality. Every book or film offers the reader or viewer an opportunity to visit a different world, to see what is familiar from an alternative point of view.

Some children’s books and films show this transition quite explicitly. For example, Alice finds her way to Wonderland down the rabbit hole; the Bastable children discover Narnia through the back of a wardrobe. I can remember a story I once read as a child, in which a travelling theatre arrives at a town. The protagonist of this story, whose name I have long forgotten, is initially entranced by the performance, despite the crudely painted scenery, the tawdry costumes, and so on. At the end of the show our principle character decides to explore this theatrical world, climbs up on to the stage and discovers the false nature of the cardboard cut-out trees and bushes. However, by going deeper into the recesses of this particular stage, it transpires that there is no back wall to this theatre so that this imaginary world goes on forever. As it does so the scenery becomes increasingly realistic and transforms into a reality somewhat different from the one in front of the curtain. Somehow our hero has made a transition into an alternative universe.

My interest in drama sometimes means I find myself performing on stage in a theatre. I feel at home with the technology of that magical space, the mechanics of illusion. The fabricated plywood flats, the shabby drapes, the painted scenery—nothing is quite what it seems to the eyes of the audience. Scenery is frequently reused, repainted, repositioned. I prefer minimalistic sets: a platform, a ramp, a flight of stairs. If the setting has been constructed in a neutral way it can represent whatever the director of the play wants it to be, and in this way the actors and the audience have to do the work in providing meaning. A trapdoor can lead to a dungeon, a nightclub or an air-raid shelter. A flight of steps can lead to a throne, to a tower or to the top of a mountain. In this way you create your own world in which the story can unfold.

As a way of exploring some of the complexities of human understanding, remember a time when you had just finished seeing a play or movie, or reading a book that you enjoyed, and a friend asked you, “What was it about?” What happens in your mind as you seek to answer that question? It seems straightforward, and yet it may lead your thinking not forward but off in all directions or around in circles. My guess is that you engage in a frantic search for anything that will allow you to formulate an appropriate answer. Finding such an understanding often takes a little time, and it may seem remarkable that you can do it at all. Think about what you have to do. You are confronted by a complex assemblage of words, pictures, sounds, which were probably worked on, refined, transformed into the finished book or film for a year or more. You have to extract the essence of this so that you can arrive at a succinct yet relevant description, and all in a sentence or two.

Of course, the quest may be easier if you have some way of directing your thoughts. How well you do this will be helped by your existing understanding of how books, films or, indeed, human life works. This will be influenced by your previous experience of similar stories, the level to which you can see beyond or beneath the surface details of the experience and identify some kind of pattern, theme or familiar plot that enables you to classify this story according to some kind of criteria. If you are not used to thinking this way, such a task could be well nigh impossible.

The story of NLP

Now turn your attention to another complex accumulation of information about how people change themselves and their behaviour in order to improve their ability to achieve the results they want: NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Historically, the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, noticed that some therapists were achieving outstanding results and so they inquired into what they were actually doing that produced significant change in their clients. Having found contemporary theories and explanations somewhat lacking, they began asking questions that no-one had asked before. As a result, they formulated a series of principles, working practices, models for change, and so on, which they called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Since the advent of NLP in the 1970s, it has been expanded to include a vast amount of knowledge about the different ways in which people perceive their reality and how they change. However, all this accumulated information about NLP currently appears more as just a collection of ideas rather than having any obvious unifying theoretical model or paradigm. So what is NLP about? Is it possible to organise it into a recognisable story? Understanding NLP seeks to answer these questions by taking you on a journey through the realms of NLP, using a set of guidelines that will enable you to interpret your experience in a new way.

The puzzle

Imagine NLP as a jigsaw puzzle. You open the box and tip the pieces out onto a table. You look at the jumbled heap and contemplate your strategy for arranging them into some kind of meaningful whole. Some pieces show bits of a picture, whilst others are face down and show nothing at all. Even with the picture on the box, it is not always possible to unerringly fit each fragment into the whole.

Now NLP is far more complex than that. With a jigsaw puzzle you know ahead of time that there is actually a way of putting the pieces together. However, with NLP, you do not have this certainty. And what would the picture on the box be? Perhaps some kind of impressionistic image, a sketch or a diagram rather than a finished composition. Maybe there is no coherent picture at all! Nevertheless, you set yourself the goal of understanding how NLP works; you are going to put the puzzle together as best you can. It would make the job easier if you could devise some general principles for sorting and connecting the pieces. For example, you could find pieces with similar themes—whatever similar means in this context. Once you have clarified that, you could, by joining similar areas together, create small sections with a broader meaning. Eventually, you have enough of these sections to give you an idea of the big picture. Having a preliminary sketch enables you to test your ideas against it, and to modify the picture accordingly. Once you find a pattern, it immediately tells you how to incorporate other sections and to fit new material into that design.

My intention in this book is to demonstrate one way of transforming the jumble of pieces into a coherent and structured pattern. This will give you not so much a picture on the box but rather a plan or set of guidelines to help you make your own picture. Although this might seem rather vague, it will serve you well enough, and, importantly, it will help you deal with the continuing growth of NLP. Unlike a real jigsaw puzzle, even as you are fitting existing parts of NLP together, other people are adding new pieces, developing new areas outside of the original frame. This puzzle is forever changing its size and shape. Fortunately, you are well-practised in creating order out of chaos.

Understanding

When things are going well, you have the feeling that you understand what is happening, that you are somehow on top of events, or in control of your life. Understanding is more an emotional response that lets you know that your interpretation of events—the story—makes sense, and that, for the moment at least, issues are being resolved satisfactorily. However, just because a story is reassuring, there is no guarantee that it has greater applicability to life in general. Think of all the obsolete notions of how the world works that have been abandoned over the centuries. All of our stories and theories about human existence are only ever our best attempts so far. At some point they will be challenged and possibly improved.

However, if you have a set of procedures or processes that consistently deliver results, there is no urgent need to change them. It is when you become dissatisfied, believe there has to be a better way, want to enhance your expertise, find new ways of intervening to create change, and so on, that you will need a greater depth of understanding in how things work. Understanding is more an ongoing process of interpreting and reinterpreting your experience, rather than a once and for all ‘truth’. Therefore, understanding is paradoxical in that instead of moving towards an ultimate truth, you are developing the mental flexibility to entertain multiple, sometimes contradictory views about the nature of your reality.

Understanding NLP not only means you will be able to enhance your own competence and achieve excellence in those areas of life that you choose to develop, it also means that you will gain a sense of many alternative worldviews and beliefs about the nature of human existence. You will be able to intervene more appropriately and effectively in helping other people deal with the problems and issues in their lives. To do that, you first need to be sufficiently in rapport with them so that you may gather information about their model of the world and about how they are stuck. Your flexibility of thought will then suggest ways for them to move beyond their current limitations, so that they have further options and opportunities for action.

Metaphors

People use metaphors for making meaning of experience. You compare what you know about the everyday experiences of life and apply that way of thinking to the new material you want to comprehend. Metaphors are useful in that they draw attention to what two disparate domains of experience have in common by focusing on certain similarities. For example, the jigsaw puzzle metaphor offers a way of perceiving NLP as a jumbled collection of pieces, but little else about it. Every metaphor has its limitations.

Exercise 1.1: A Metaphor for NLP

• Think about how you would describe your current understanding of NLP. What kind of metaphor would you use to describe your present thinking?

• Consider how your thinking and behaviour have changed as a result of learning about NLP. What metaphor would best describe the changes you have made?

• What does NLP mean to you now? Again, find an appropriate metaphor.

Make a note of your answers, so that you can refer back to them from time to time and notice how your ideas change. When these metaphors seem no longer appropriate, what other metaphors would you use instead?

Metaphors are easily changed, revised or updated. However, when you find a metaphor which really does its job, then there is always the danger that it takes on a more permanent quality, and you forget that it was made up, or that it only deals with a particular aspect of that experience. For example, it has become a cliché that people “fight cancer” or that the immune system “guards against alien invasion forces”. These military metaphors may not actually work in the person’s best interests. Many of the metaphors used in NLP have acquired this taken-for-granted quality. Therefore, it will be worth checking them to see if they are still communicating what was intended, and are in line with advances in thinking.

You will notice the preponderance of visual metaphors. For example, you are going to be seeing things from many different points of view as you adopt different perceptual frames and focus on a variety of aspects of your experience. The visual sense is very important to most people (even blind people), and we use visual metaphors to talk about our views and to illuminate a kaleidoscope of subjects. When you understand, you say “I see what you mean”. The key metaphors used in this book are those of seeing things from various points of view, adopting perceptual positions or ways of perceiving things.

Although this book contains much ‘how-to’ material, it could be seen as more of a ‘how-else’ book. It is intended to take you to the next stage of your search for meaning by presenting some alternative ways of perceiving what you already know. It presents metaphors, paradigms and models that will provoke you into seeing things from other points of view. Now a point of view is just a point of view. No point of view is more true or valid than any other. What makes certain points of view special is what they enable you to do in a particular way. The Six Perceptual Positions model (see Chapter Eleven) will enable you to enhance your personal excellence in using NLP.

Aims and challenges

Given the huge amount of material subsumed under the label of ‘NLP’, elucidating its underlying patterns and structures might seem a daunting task. However, NLP does not exist in isolation from other attempts by human beings to understand themselves. Those attempts are part of our history, and show how many individuals have debated and described human nature over thousands of years. Drawing on their wisdom and observations, my aim is to seek patterns and regularities in NLP by finding what its operating principles have in common with other explanations of human nature. If we can see the similarities, this will enable us to fit the pieces together, find a unifying paradigm—and could even indicate the kind of picture we have on the box.

Paradigms

‘Paradigm’ is a rather loose term which refers to a way of understanding the world, to a framework that gives meaning to experience, to a distinctive way of perceiving a set of phenomena. A paradigm offers an explanation often in the form of a narrative or story. Any paradigm is a best attempt so far at accounting for how something happens. What matters is whether the paradigm is useful: does it explain what happens, does it predict what will happen, and does it suggest an appropriate course of action to take? A paradigm does not claim to be some kind of ultimate truth, because our understanding depends upon the language and metaphors we are using. To create a paradigm we need to generalise from our experience and find underlying patterns and regularities in the world. The art lies in learning to see beyond the superficial evidence of the senses, and to notice abstract patterns which organise experience in a meaningful way.

Systems of thought change over time. New paradigms are introduced because they offer greater utility and also suggest further avenues to explore. Historically, we have noted such milestone events; they mark the boundaries of epochs. Scientific explanations have shifted because of developments in astronomy, geology, quantum physics, genetics, technology and so on. Artistic movements such as Polyphony, Jazz, Impressionism, Art Deco and Postmodernism have all affected the way we perceive, enjoy and make meaning of our experience.

When new ideas or information arrive which do not fit the old pattern, the old ways of thinking are overthrown—or get revised. Any evolving body of knowledge benefits from a periodic shakedown in which its principles and paradigms are assessed and updated. Thomas Kuhn (1970) called this kind of restructuring a “paradigm shift”. When Bandler and Grinder originally introduced NLP to the world, this paradigm shift offered a better model for understanding therapy and personal change.

So, given the jumbled state of NLP, we need some organising principles or a new paradigm for clarifying what currently lies within its extensive territory. Such a paradigm would show how all the various sections and pieces can be brought together. In practical terms it would offer an understanding of where other people are coming from—their models of the world—and would empower practitioners to become more proficient in creating effective interventions that would respect those worldviews when implementing change.

What is NLP for?

If all systems of thinking exist in order to meet a need then it seems reasonable to assume that NLP meets some deep need of humanity. Therefore, it is in order to ask what this need is. There are several ways of asking this question: What is …

… the problem to be solved?

… the issue to be addressed?

… the conflict to be resolved?

… the block to be overcome?

… the outcome to be achieved?

… the mystery to be revealed?

Even though they cover a range of attitudes, I shall treat these questions as more or less equivalent, as they indicate how people refer to aspects of life which they would like to be different somehow. They each suggest an intention to intervene in the world in order to create a change. You intervene in order to break a pattern or habit; your intended result is a change in behaviour. NLP’s aim is to increase choice of behaviours. If your “programming” (your collection of acquired habits) is not giving you what you want, then you need ways of creating alternatives. When people do not know how to change, they often describe this situation as “being stuck”. It is when people get stuck that you need to have some general paradigms or principles that suggest ways of getting moving again.

NLP techniques are primarily concerned with process—what peopledo: “How do you do that?” For example: How do people consistently achieve their outcomes? How do people ‘unstick’ themselves? How do they establish and maintain good relationships? Finding out how means firstly identifying someone who already does whatever it is effectively and then paying sufficient attention to what they do so that you may copy them successfully. By systematically studying their actions and intentions, patterns emerge, from which you can devise the principles of “what works”. One thing you will discover is that effective people are often breaking existing patterns and ‘doing something different’. Therefore, the kind of paradigm we seek will take this need for surprise into consideration, and will suggest unexpected ways of creating change or getting things moving again.

NLP addresses the question—not a new question by any means—how is it possible for two people to engage, interact, communicate in such a way that one is able to help the other one change their understanding and, therefore, the meaning of their experience?

Essentially, we tell ourselves and each other stories. We learn to intervene in the world using the strategies and stories we have acquired through our own experience and the strategies and stories we have learned from others.

Stories and understanding

Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

Learning involves reflecting on the past and noticing where you can make improvements. The purpose of examining what you know about NLP is to challenge your beliefs in order that you may revise any which are no longer serving you. A second aim is to provide you with practice in those two qualities so prized by NLP developers: curiosity and flexibility, and in particular, a greater flexibility in perceiving your reality from different points of view.

Change results in different behaviour, but does not necessarily produce insight. Insight is the “Aha!” phenomenon which produces a feeling of understanding when things ‘fall into place’—you have structured your ideas about the world into a story which makes sense to you. The film-director David Mamet (1991: 60) neatly sums up this storytelling ability: “It is the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into a story, because we need to make the world make sense.”

You have spent a great deal of your life learning to anticipate what other people will do, and how they are likely to respond to the events in their lives. You are continuously, and often unconsciously, monitoring patterns of behaviour, noticing preferences, making generalisations and checking your predictions against what actually happens. There are few circumstances where you have no expectations. Although people’s lives are full of unique details and idiosyncrasies, there are commonalities and regularities in what they do, and these can be described in terms of stories. Such stories help you imagine possible futures, anticipate “what happens next”. Given the state of things now, you know how stories are likely to turn out in the future.

Stories are the basic units of understanding and tell us how things happen. They are a product of hindsight. Because lives are messy—many things happen unintentionally or simultaneously—you look back and interpret your experience by organising your perceptions of what happened into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. In putting together a story (sometimes called a schema—plural schemata—by philosophers and psychologists), anything that appears irrelevant to the final outcome (where you are right now) is disregarded, at least for that particular story. In describing your personal history of learning NLP, information about what you had for breakfast or how you got to the training venue is probably irrelevant.

Thinking in stories

A story starts with an inciting incident or precipitating event: something happens to interrupt your habitual way of doing things or to disturb the status quo in some way. The middle of the story explores attempts to resolve the issue, often with several set-backs or complications. The ending marks the return to equilibrium: the goal is achieved, the problem has been solved. You know it is the end because the tension of unfulfilled expectations disappears. There are no loose ends and you have a feeling of closure. For example:

You lose your job, are made redundant. You apply for other jobs, attend several interviews and eventually get another job. You meet someone and fall in love with them. You do whatever it takes to build the relationship. Depending on how well you get on together, you either part or move in with them. Traditionally, such stories end with “they lived happily ever after”.

The story of NLP starts with that observation that some therapists were achieving consistently good results with clients, and the questions: “What are they doing that is different?” “Is it possible to learn to do that, too?” NLP expands as answers are obtained by those people whose curiosity impels them to seek out and observe best practice in many different areas of life, especially where people are dealing successfully with problems, or are maintaining a balance in their lives. Looking at the history of NLP, we can see various lines of inquiry materialising, techniques being recorded, adapted and generalised. Gradually, some of these change processes became the major cornerstones of NLP. Each process describes a story: from upset to resolution. You might wonder: “How many different stories of change are there? Are most problems variations on a theme? How many different techniques do we need to have?” If we can identify the common patterns of change, then maybe our task will be easier.

Because life is uncertain, people become very adept at revising their personal beliefs and stories in order to make sense of the unexpected happenings in their lives. As you learn, you amend your stories. In this way, nothing stays the same for ever. When your stories fail you, or you do not get the results you expected, then you need to examine their validity. The job of the NLP practitioner or therapist is to assist clients in making changes through rewriting those strategies or stories which do not work. If you are going to influence other people effectively, then you need to know something of the stories they are using to explain their experience and for anticipating their future. Because they are not often expressed as such, it is useful to identify the underlying stories as they offer essential clues about that person’s model of the world. In recognising the patterns in someone else’s behaviour, you know where they are coming from, and you can then adjust your communication style to influence them appropriately. Frequently, your intervention will get them to change or revise the story of “what happens next”, especially if that anticipated future is limiting them in some way or preventing them from acting now.

By making the person’s stories explicit, you can assess how well the elements of their story are related or connected. Very often, to your eyes, the connections will be tenuous or nonexistent, and you fail to see how they arrived at a particular meaning for those experiences. However, it is important to remember that it makes sense to them, or did once. The Linguistic aspect of NLP offers a systematic way of challenging the meaning and saliency of those explanations and stories. Your task is to help the person find ways to re-frame, edit or re-write their own stories so that the meaning changes, and so that they have greater flexibility in how they perceive their reality, and more choices in the way they may intervene to achieve their desires.

The story of NLP itself is not finished, and will probably never be complete. It will remain an enigma because it arises from a sense of curiosity. It has the whole of human nature in its scope, and that has already kept us busy for millennia. Although we seek truths, we also know that the truths we find are ephemeral.

Unfinished stories

Many of the events in your life which have been satisfactorily resolved have become part of your “life-story”. However, not every story reaches a conclusion. You may wait to see what happens in the end, or you could ignore those issues until such time as you feel competent to deal with them. Or you may never know. Having ‘unfinished business’—stories as yet unresolved—creates a mental tension which sustains your desire to end them. Unresolved issues stay potent, cause you to worry, and this can affect your everyday functioning. In academic psychology this is known as the Zeigarnick effect. Briefly, when people are interrupted in a task, or when a story is not completed, they tend to remember it better because closure has been denied and they are mentally aroused. Delaying the ending is a frequent plot-device in storytelling; you want to know how it turns out, but are denied resolution. Closure is frustrated by a cliff-hanger: will the hero survive, will the couple get together? Uncertainty holds your interest until the story is satisfactorily completed.

When a story ends, and makes sense, you feel satisfied, and you stop being curious because the tension disappears and the puzzle is complete. However, this says nothing about the story’s validity as a generalisation. Throughout your life you acquire a great number of stories which have varying degrees of meaning, utility, and logic. Although those found wanting get updated or replaced, others, such as “It is possible to communicate with those who have died”, are difficult to test and tend to linger. What matters is that you act as if your stories are true. When the validity of a belief is questionable, when a particular story becomes irrelevant, or limits your options, it can be changed. NLP is the art of changing such stories so that they serve you more effectively.

If you are stuck, then it helps to make your stories, beliefs, assumptions and expectations explicit. Once you can see the pieces in front of you, it is much easier to see the pattern and then edit or rearrange them. Often though, you may need someone else to help you who can see what you are not seeing. This could be a friend, a mentor, a personal coach or an NLP practitioner—someone who can spot alternatives to your habitual way of doing things. Then, as you shift your perception, you alter the way you do things. This kind of change often requires skilled help because you have to be surprised out of what has become deeply ingrained in your sense of who you are—that bundle of habits which you think of as ‘me’. And then you will possibly need ongoing support to maintain the new you—until that too becomes habitual.

How NLP helps

NLP has produced a vast number of techniques and processes designed to help people move from being stuck. These techniques can be applied in various contexts to help people achieve what they want. If someone is unclear about what they want, then NLP offers ways of clarifying their needs and outcomes. Knowing which technique to use comes from recognising general patterns. However, NLP is often presented in terms of a recipe book: in this situation, technique X or process Y is the one to use. Therefore, having a general model or paradigm will enable you to think beyond that, and find new examples based on the general principles of change. Your interventions will continue to be effective because you can focus on the essence of change, which is to surprise the client into going where they have not gone before.

This notion of examining the stories people use to construct and interpret their reality offers an insight into how NLP works. By looking at the stories that NLP itself has generated, in terms of the processes, techniques, explanations and so on, we find that there are a few basic paradigms and models which apply generally to human thinking. These abstract patterns appear widespread, at least in Western cultures. Because they manifest in a huge variety of ways, it is not always easy to see what they have in common. The next chapter examines three basic paradigms that will improve your ability to notice underlying patterns in many different contexts.

Chapter Two

Patterns of Change

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

Noticing patterns

Imagine that you are walking through a bustling city. At any time this can be an overwhelming experience, but suppose you are seeing it for the first time. There is just no way that you can identify, categorise or make meaning of what you see. You have no way of knowing what is important or what is likely to happen next. For example, there are a great number of coloured lights, but you do not know which ones you need to pay attention to if you are going to remain safe. What is the significance oif the different colours? Ignoring some of these lights could put you in danger—but which ones? Only when you understand your environment can you interact with it appropriately.

Human beings are born pattern-makers. The world is infinitely rich in sensory experiences, but we only have the mental capacity to pay attention to a small portion of it at any one time. Therefore, to maintain a meaningful sense of permanence and continuity we need to simplify our experience. We do that by generalising what we perceive, and by organising it into patterns. We then interpret the world in the light of these patterns. For example, having created the concept of ‘traffic light’ and given meaning to the different colours, then regardless of where we encounter any particular example we know what to do and what we expect others will do. At least, this is the general idea! In some cultures our expectations will not be fulfilled and we will be surprised at what actually happens!

A pattern comes from noticing what disparate things have in common. In what way is this like that? How are they similar? Pattern emerges from these relationships. Pattern allows us to arrange things into categories or groups of the same kind. For example, you mentally arrange your perceptual world into groups (or gestalts) of similar objects, such as a row of paintings on an art gallery wall or a circle of chairs in a training room. You see not only the objects themselves, but appreciate the generic quality (‘pictures’, ‘furniture’) as well as their spatial relationship to each other. Pattern organises a mass of information and enables you to perceive things in terms of identity, type, structure, sequence, organisation, relationship, similarity, intention and so on. Seeing such patterns both reduces your mental load, and provides some stability in a constantly changing world. For example, even if the chairs are replaced by cabbages or kings, the notion of a circle persists.

To generalise, you need only pay attention to those aspects or qualities which appear to stay constant. Ignore any variability in your environment, any superficial or ephemeral details. Ignore your physical relationship to it, that is, the way your perception changes as you move around, in terms of the perceived size, distance, qualities, orientation, perspective and so on. For example, you probably think your room looks ‘the same’ in daylight as in artificial light. You still see the furniture and decor as having the ‘same’ colours that they had in daylight, even though electric light gives them a different spectral appearance. As you move around the room, the table top constantly changes its apparent shape, ranging from a rectangle, to a trapezium or a line, depending upon your point of view. However, to you it is still the same rectangular table. It would be hellish living in a world without continuity, forever reinventing the meaning of everything around you.

Abstracting patterns

Perceiving sameness in behaviours usually means looking beyond superficial appearances. For example, the action of loving can manifest in many different ways. When one person “loves” another, there can be a variety of evidence; such as producing bunches of flowers, kissing, laughing or holding hands. None of those actions is sufficient of itself, but is part of the story you are creating in your mind about that behaviour. You build your model of the world by abstracting such patterns from a mass of experience. However, because it can be quite challenging to work in this abstract way, it is usually helpful to have some pointers or guidelines which direct your attention to certain aspects of what you perceive.

I am going to draw on Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz to demonstrate some of the points I want to make. For example, how would you answer the question raised in Chapter One: “What is it about?” Each description would require varying degrees of abstraction based on the experience of actually watching the movie. You could give the title and author, the director, the actors or characters, and describe the sequence of events. You could explain what the various characters were each trying to achieve. You could classify the film in terms of genre: fantasy, musical, maturation plot. You could describe the theme: an adventure in an unknown land where things happen differently. You could state the moral: “You have within you the power you need to achieve what you want.” And so on. Describing something in terms of a genre or theme, requires that you are familiar with other movies which exhibit a similar pattern.

In describing what NLP is about, we need some patterns which relate to the general ways in which people change. We are looking for similarities across a range of behaviours, seeking generalisations about actions and intentions. Eventually, we arrive at a highly abstract set of principles—a paradigm—that offers a basic model or story of “how things happen”. The paradigms I am exploring in this book are such generalised patterns. However, they are not new. They have been around for thousands of years, presumably ever since people began to reflect on their experience. And these patterns are continually being rediscovered and renamed to meet the changing needs of society. There is no shortage of human experience to be noticed, observed and interpreted. Our culture has a huge collection of recorded observations of its thinking and activities: in books, paintings, sculptures, sound recordings, films, photographs and so on.

Of the many paradigms that can be identified in human behaviour generally, some have a more basic quality. Once you have some idea of what to pay attention to, you improve your ability to see beyond the immediately apparent, to read between the lines, as it were, and notice patterns, affinities, themes and paradigms in what is happening at a deeper level. Once you have noticed a pattern, made a connection, seen the hidden picture in the puzzle, it is almost impossible not to see it thereafter. Your knowledge has increased, you perceive the world differently.

To understand how NLP works, it appears that we need only three paradigms which when combined generate a model of the basic change process. This model can be represented in its simplest form by the following diagram (Figure 2.1 and on the front cover):

Figure 2.1 The Six Zones

This model divides human experience into three major zones: Body, Mind and Spirit. The central zone, Mind, which is about perception and cognition, has been further divided into four boxes. A major part of this book explores these four essentially distinct modes of thinking, the ways people perceive reality. I will explain the four abbreviations in a moment.

Although the diagram might seem rather stark at first, it will become more relevant as you cover these bare bones with the flesh of your wide knowledge and experience, with your existing expertise in the art of successful change, with those aspects of life that you find important, and with your ever-extending network of associations and ideas. As you allow your imagination to play with this paradigm, you will go beyond this “cardboard cutout” model which is on stage as the curtain rises. It will start triggering ideas in your mind and enable you to venture into the rich backstage world of your own imagination, further and deeper into a familiar yet unknown territory.

The model will gradually take on a life of its own to such an extent that you will begin to notice the pattern in many different and surprising places, and that it is somehow there in the background, guiding change processes, not only in NLP and therapy, but in management theory and in Hollywood movies! Eventually it will seem so obvious to you that you’ll wonder why you never noticed it before.

Once we have examined the three basic paradigms, we can then find out what emerges when they are brought together.

Paradigm #1: The Three Levels

The first paradigm illustrates how we categorise reality into different kinds or levels. We are used to organising things, concepts and ideas into hierarchies. For example, a familiar distinction is: Body—Mind—Spirit (Figure 2.2).

SpiritLevel IIIwhat you aspire to, the meaning of your life MindLevel IIwhat you think, your perceptions, intentions and actions BodyLevel Iwhat you are in a physical or physiological sense

Figure 2.2 The Three Levels

All three levels are aspects of what it means to be human. We have a physical body, the bones, nervous system, organs and so on. We also are thinking creatures, able to manipulate our environment and influence others; and we have some awareness of the meaning of our lives in a much wider sense.

We use the hierarchy metaphor as a way of understanding the world. NLP uses the terms ‘chunking up’ and ‘chunking down’ to refer to the process of describing things with greater or less generality (see also Chapter Eight). One kind of hierarchy is based on the idea that we attribute greater weight to certain notions because they have wider application, because they are more complex or encompass a wider domain. The Body—Mind—Spirit hierarchy is of this kind. There are also hierarchies based on the notion that each level ‘transcends and includes’ the levels below it. It is also possible to create hierarchies based on personal value systems or according to the number of connections each item has across a network. As with many of the concepts we will explore in this book, there are alternative definitions according to your particular point of view.

Paradigm #2: The Two Pulls

The central zone, Mind on Level II, consists of a four-box diagram, which represents four different kinds of thinking. In order to understand how this four-box model has been created, we first need to explore the simplest kind of discrimination that we can make: that based on opposites or polarity.

Think of a line stretched between two mutually exclusive or opposing ideas, such as Light and Dark. It’s possible to experience total darkness in a deep cave. As you approach the outside daylight, the illumination gradually increases from Stygian gloom to dazzlingly bright in the midday sun. Between the two extremes there are places along the continuum which represent different light levels. Apart from using this kind of description for physical qualities, we can also think of a gradual transition between any two states or attitudes, such as curiosity and apathy, or dominant and submissive. We can then indicate the degree to which we feel able and motivated to find out more. When we come to decide on a course of action, we may feel drawn more to one direction than to another. For example, looking at the programme of what’s on at the local cinema, we might prefer to see a thriller rather than a love story. Some movies can be classified somewhere in between. For example, Casablanca could be described as being both a thriller and a love story to some extent.

We can think of this basic paradigm as relating to what we move towards and what we move away from. The two ends of the continuum can be perceived as opposing pulls or attractors. For example, one important human dilemma is how we balance the pull for stability with the pull for change. We want to live in a world which is consistent and predictable. To a large extent we want things to stay the same. If we can ‘take something for granted’ then we only need to pay attention to variations; it is the deviations from the norm that make life interesting. Because living in a steady, unchanging environment would soon become utterly boring we also need and enjoy novelty and stimulation. We demonstrate a frequent desire to be creative and do things we have never done before, to perturb the system to see what happens. We engage in challenging physical activities, show great interest in other people’s stories (real or fictional) and constantly seek to improve our personal performance in many of the things we do.

Imagine a line stretching off towards infinity, a continuum (Figure 2.3). At one end is the pull towards closure. It urges us to reduce all options and arrive at a definite description of the world. It offers certainty and permanence. At the other end of the continuum there is a pull towards openness. This attracts us to explore the infinite variety of existence. It offers novelty and excitement. Life is the continual dynamic of trying to balance these two opposing pulls. This polarity influences everything we do; the only escape from it is to stop living!

Figure 2.3 The Two Attractors

Somewhere along this continuum there is a place which represents your position of relative comfort between these conflicting attractions, a moveable spot that oscillates between greater closure and greater openness.

Life in the balance

Somewhere between the two extremes of total chaos and total certainty you find a place where you can cope satisfactorily with this polarity, where you feel more or less at ease. However, should life become too comfortable, you may deliberately tilt the balance and seek new experiences, for example, going white-water rafting, moving to a new country, starting your own business, or going on a training course that promises to change your lifestyle.

This polarity pattern permeates all of our mythologies. In Egyptian mythology, Horus, the god of light (depicted as a man with the head of a falcon), eventually vanquishes Seth (depicted as a man with a head rather like an aardvark with upstanding ears and a curving snout), the evil god of chaos—the lack of structure and order. This eternal conflict between order and chaos lives on in our current mythology. It is depicted in popular movies such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and so on. These stories depict the battles between the forces of light (order) and the forces of darkness (chaos). The struggle continues forever, because it is unresolvable, because this is how we create the meaning of life. We are always somewhere between the two—in all our endeavours—engaged in a balancing act. It is only when it veers too much towards one extreme that we feel we must do something about it.

Wherever we look at human endeavour we see these two forces being played off against each other. For example, you may want a safe, economical and reliable car for driving along roads which are smooth and clear, and at other times you may want to go as fast as possible, to test your car at the extreme end of its performance capability, and to drive it off-road to places where no vehicle has gone before.

Balancing your life is like walking: you are perpetually off-balance because you are on only one leg, moving, and temporarily unstable. But then you change the configuration and become unstable on the other leg. By maintaining a forward momentum you manage to achieve a ‘dynamic equilibrium’; as long as you keep moving the system stays more or less stable.

Noticing preferences

Given these two pulls, you can notice, in any situation, whether someone is attempting to narrow things down, define or specify terms and conditions, reduce uncertainty, get down to brass tacks; or wanting to open things up, to find creative solutions, alternatives, engage in blue-sky thinking. In many situations you will be using each pull in turn. For example, if you are designing a new garden layout or a new company logo, you start with creative, divergent thinking and explore a range of ideas. Completing your project means using convergent thinking as you finalise the design and specify precisely how it will be.

To be able to predict something about other people, it helps to know something of their preference: to what extent do they want to control things; how open are they to alternatives? There are very definite biases here, and we have several descriptions for different ‘types’ of people (Figure 2.4).

ConvergentDivergentTowards closure:Towards openness:“Procedures”—Sequential“Options”—SimultaneousNormativeCreativeLimitingExpandingControllingLaissez-faire

Figure 2.4 Polarity Typology

Exercise 2.1: Your personal preference

You have probably been thinking about your own preference here, where you would locate yourself between the two extremes. Indicate your preferred place on the line below.

Closure/Convergent | | | | | | | Openness/Divergent

This may vary according to the context. You might be very strong-minded or authoritarian at work, and more liberal and easy-going at home with your friends or family.

Using polarity thinking

Although this polarity is vital in understanding people and change, it is only one of a huge number of distinctions that we make every day. Indeed, all of our measures and assessments of personality—both formal and informal—are based on “Does X exhibit a certain quality, tendency to act in a particular way, have a certain set of beliefs … or not?” NLP calls these kinds of distinctions ‘metaprograms’, and has assembled a number of useful descriptive patterns which indicate how people are likely to behave (see, for example, James & Woodsmall, 1988; Bodenhamer & Hall, 1996).

Establishing polarities, or category-thinking, is one way of defining the world. For example, “Do you tend towards Options or towards Procedures?” How do you rate according to John Gray’s popular psychology book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1993)? Most of the time this works reasonably well. However there are many instances where it is not at all clear how to make the decision. For example, “Are you a winner or a loser?” “Are you a good husband/wife, parent, lover …?” Thinking in terms of polarities does not provide a particularly deep psychological understanding, and may lead to simplistic thinking, such as: “If you’re not with us, you are against us”, and so forth.

There is an ancient debate concerning whether or not human beings have free will. However, this tends to force the issue and pushes people to the ends of a polarity by insisting that this is about being either ‘true’ or ‘false’. This is a limiting way of understanding the world and is ultimately frustrating as it creates conflict, generating heat rather than light. You do not have to believe in free will or that you live in a deterministic reality. Think of these positions as points of view, each of which provides a way of understanding the world. There will be times when it is appropriate to use a deterministic approach; at other times you are going to be expressing your personal freedom to create your reality the way you want it.

Thinking in polarities is useful at times, but can be rather limiting when it comes to describing the richness of human types and behavioural preferences. Therefore, we need something with more distinctions. There are already a great many ways of classifying people, depending on what you want the information for. Do you want to know if they will be good at a job, or if they will make a good partner in a relationship? Do you want to know how they will vote in the next political election, or whether they will do well at school? It is always challenging to define which aspects or measurable qualities might lead to reasonably accurate predictions. However, for our purposes, these multi-faceted analytical tools are too complex. We want a simple enough pattern that will give us information useful for understanding people’s worldviews, but not have so many distinctions that we cannot use the categorisations in a practical sense. This brings us to the widely used four-box model. Such models define four types of people, four styles of behaving, four modes of making decisions, four ways of understanding experience.

Paradigm #3: The Four Realities Model

We create a four-box model by combining two separate polarity dimensions. This gives us four spaces or domains to which we can allocate things or people which exhibit the four combinations of qualities. For example, if you are interested in people who are Optimistic/Pessimistic and how they rate according to Rich/Poor, then you can sort each individual according to the four types: Optimistic and Rich; Optimistic and Poor; Pessimistic and Rich; Pessimistic and Poor, and then look for significance in the relative distribution.