Tom, Would you be so kind as to drop a few lines regarding you NLP experiences, practical applications and any unexpected side effects, if any?

thanks

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000

Answers

Quick synopsis. You can say where to elaborate.

Impressed by Bandler and Grinder books "Structure of Magic" Vols 1 and 2 while finishing my final year of engineering for my Systems Design degree. Degree was about modelling and these volumes proposed a model of subjective consciousness based around languaging and representational systems.

While in Ottawa took training under NLP Centre from students affiliated with John Grinder. Took Practitioner level and Master Practitioner level training.

NLP as area of study has fractionated, split off into different "schools" as in martial arts. Different lineages have different flavours. My favourite is gent by name of Robert Dilts; seems to treat the entire exercise like a hermeneutic circle - hitting both practice, theory and ethics.

Original intent was to construct a method of readily modelling another's competencies so you could emulate. Original people modelled were Milton Ericson (hypno-therapist in Phoenix), Virginia Satir (family systems therapist) and Fritz Perls (Gestalt therapist). One sentiment expressed was that these people were "change makers" and if you could get "change" you could get whatever else you wanted --- sort of a "wild card" choice of experts to model.

Subsequent modelling efforts have been aimed at healing and language acquisition (i.e. multilingual) but much of public focus remains on techniques modelled from therapy as opposed to techniques of how to model another (without them necessarily being able to explain -- they modelled Finbar O'Sullivan, 7th son of a 7th son, to capture touch healing -- about 60% of Master Practitioners in modelling group were able to do it afterwards).

Tony Robbins is probably most public figure using techniques.

NLP as a whole has had trouble living down its beginnings which were by a pair of iconoclasts (Grinder was a transformational grammar linguist, had Chair at UC Berkeley I believe, and Bandler was mathematics assist prof and Gestalt therapist). Also, have problems using in corporate environments as techniques violate too much of world model. (I ran seminar on rapport skills once in this corp environ and openned too many cans of worms among repressed execs. There's good reasons these people find it dangerous to get in touch with their insides...) Example in point - graduation certificate in Ottawa for Master Practioner was to go into restaurant, order meal, and set anchors so as to have waiter screw up the charge slip so that specifically forgot to put card in machine as was taking imprint. The blank charge slip was your graduation test and certification. The practice had to be foregone when word got out.

So - phobia cures, rapport skills for a techie, how to recognize which representational systems people prefer (making pictures, talking to themselves about something, accessing feelings about something) and how to frame your communications both analogical and linguistic to pace their preferences, ...

You've probably gathered enough of a sense of how I make sense of thinks from the stuff we've exchanged to date. I like stuff that works and I like stuff to make sense and I like to learn new stuff. What sort of specific thing can I say more on? I can proffer web links and give my impressions of the books I've read.

The main thing is that to do it in real time with another person you need to practice. It's again like martial arts -- on the street or in bars is not a good place to practice. "Influencing with Integrity" is one book that provides a good set of practices that you can do at work without raising too many eyebrows when you stumble. Still a "dojo" works best.

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000

Fascinating....

1. How do the techniques, in practice, violate the corporate world model?

2. Is touch-curing effective with mental disorders, psychosomatic disorders and/or physical diseases?

3. Links and book reviews, please.

4. Was your initial intent to emulate great thinkers, or to do a little social engineering, or just improve personal communications?

thanks for the blurb.....

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2000

Also....

What are the paractical, everyday uses? Other than getting a free meal at the best restaurants?

-- Anonymous, March 22, 2000

%^$$##%^& damn computers... I had about 500 words written late last night in one of these "post" fields, and when I went "back" to see your final point it was all lost when I came forward again.

From now on I will do my long compositions off-line and cut and paste them into this field.

I'll rewrite my answers shortly.

Cheers,

-- Anonymous, March 22, 2000

1. How do the techniques, in practice, violate the corporate world model?

1. A couple of issues arise and at a couple of levels. The idea that other people make sense of the world differently, and that it is a choice to match or mismatch their way of organizing thinking is a stretch for many of them. I don't mean in regard to conceptual organizing schemas so much as whether you make pictures, talk to yourself, have gut feelings,  which representational system do you favour. Most of the engineering types make pictures inside their heads. The concept that you are always simultaneously communicating relationship and content -- they're used to attending to content and ignoring the relationship implications and context set by the content they're producing. The issue of congruence -- both among a group of people and within a single person. This one had implications with respect to whether they were typically aiming for compliance or commitment. Upon analysis the talk was about people committing and the walk was about people complying. ("You will be fired with enthusiasm about this new proposal --- one way or the other.") Guess an example would be useful. One of the exercises I ran had the overt outcome of demonstrating that you could use non-linguistic cues to understand other person's state. (This has obvious uses when concerning yourself with issues of buy-in, confusion, lack of trust, falsehoods, etc.) Exercise consisted of having people form pairs. One member of pair was to embody some state (curiosity, anger, elation, boredom, serenity, etc.) and wander around the room. The other person had was to as literally as possible, follow in their footsteps and match the body analogs (posture, gait, breathing rate, breathing location, limb motions, eye positioning and scanning, etc) until felt ready to name the state, from what state they felt that they were in. So - not a visual recognition, but an assuming of the body analogs and an attending to what internal state this then posited. They would then seek corroboration of the naming with the first member of the pair, and if incorrect would continue process. Once they had a naming acceptable to originator of behavior, they were to swap roles. Well, seemed that most of the women on the course did the naming bit in about 30 seconds flat. I say most because I wasn't able to keep a rigorous accounting, I had a mini executive crisis occurring. For most of the men it was a bit of an epiphany, not having had any acting experience, nor much experience using their own bodies to make sense of what was being offered. Of course the exercise accomplished a lot of "covert" outcomes -- giving participants a context to consider what analog behaviors went with a state, how to explicitly maintain a chosen state, and the plethora of cues that you could choose to mimic while following someone. The crisis was that of an executive who resolutely sat in his chair maintaining that the exercise was impossible. Not that it didn't make sense to him, or that it was difficult, but that it was "impossible". Of course the cognitive dissonance went up several notches as people filtered back to their chairs having accomplished the "impossible". My take was that there were probably longstanding reasons he was not allowing his conscious mind to attend to his internals. Made me wonder about his home life as he was married with 2 kids. The crisis that was developing was because this guy was my hierarchical superior in organization (two levels up). Not a good ecological move to cause serious dissonance in your boss, especially if you can't readily channel it.

2. Is touch-curing effective with mental disorders, psychosomatic disorders and/or physical diseases?

2. John Grinder mentioned the modeling as part of a preamble to another modeling exercise he was leading. As near as I could tell it seemed quite effective on some things (I specifically remember skin diseases) and more intermittently on others. I'm not sure how I'd differentiate a psychosomatic disorder from an incomplete diagnosis -- you're probably aware of the recent developments around the treatment of stomach ulcers that now considers them a function of heliobacteria infection, not a psychosomatic stress related illness. This guy wasn't a doctor, so I'm pretty confident that he didn't have access to the normal diagnostic regimes used by allopaths. There was also an extremely strong social expectation (7th son of 7th son) at work, and I do remember John saying that the villagers would come and have his parents place Finbar's infant hands on the "afflicted" body part and have some salutary effect. Assuming that something Finbar was doing was triggering a placebo response --- what was it? If you are curious I can track down some people that were in on the modeling and link you up (I think he's over in the UK or Ireland but am not really sure) as he should be readily traceable.

3. Links and book reviews, please.

3. Good solid introductory link is: http://www.nlpu.com/, which gives you, access to Robert Dilts. Articles, books, courses, etc.

Book reviews on NLP books can be found at: http://www3.mistral.co.uk/bradburyac/nlpbooks.html#reviews

Another link which provides a caveat to the ecology (or lack of) of certain of the techniques is at: http://www.nlp.com/NLP/random/annegret1.htm

The book reviews will give you a brief on each of the books and I have the bulk of them (when I get into something I go deep and only come up eventually). I can recommend anything that Dilts writes - his style strikes me as sensitive but still has the rigor I need to make sense of an explanation. I previously mentioned Genie Laborde's book "Influencing with Integrity". The drawings and margin notes are a bit loopy, but memorable and the exercises in the book and in the workbook by the same name that she wrote can be done in real time (e.g. practice on your work mates without blowing the relationship or seeming weird). As a sort of textbook that outlines the "theory" that supports it all "NLP Vol 1: The Structure of Subjective Consciousness" is really nice as it provides a sufficient framework but doesn't make demands on an understanding of either therapy or linguistics the way "The Structure of Magic" Vols 1 & 2 does. And, if you want a quick read on the techniques, you can grab Tony Robbin's "Unlimited Power" at just about any used (or new even) bookstore. He explains how to run the techniques. From where I sit up here in Canada he seems the quintessential self-made man type based on pushing the marketing of these techniques to the max. It's always interesting hearing snips of his seminars, even on the radio and hearing him set auditory anchors with finger snaps or mike taps. He's really very good - but definitely does not explicate what he is doing to you (with you) while he is selling you stuff.

Now, I believe it was Thomas Aquinas who said, "Beware the man of one book." so I'd like to add a smidgeon additional references that whilst not NLP are of strong relevance.

One is the writings of Lakoff and Johnson; specifically "Metaphors We Live By", "Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics", "The Body in the Mind : The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason", and "Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought". Whereas NLP talks about the sort of engineering minutiae of techniques, this is more at the scientific level. Their contention is that our understandings are substantially organized as metaphors, not logical classes in any strict Aristotelian sense - and those metaphorical manipulations are what are cognitively occurring when people think. (They also posit that over 95% (??) of the cognitive processing that supports thinking is inaccessible to introspective thinking.) Anyway - if this snippet whets any interest let me know and I can say more.

Finally, there is the following link to a tutorial on autopoiesis and enactivism. If NLP is engineering and Lakoff and Johnson's stuff is science, then this is philosophy/epistemology/metaphysics. The key aspect to this view is that living entities are autonomous in the sense of being "closed" to the world -- the world cannot "inform" such an entity - only perturb its structure. Damn -- I explained all this so much better in the missive I lost last night. Anyway - it offers a nice resolution of the mind-body issue as well as subjectivism and objectivism. Nice, but non-trivial. Anyway link is at: http://www.informatik.umu.se/~rwhit/Tutorial.html and if you access it and find it relevant we can talk more.

These three areas best describe my current making sense of the world -- both for efficacious behavior, an understanding of the larger context the techniques are working in, and the layer outside of that.

4. Was your initial intent to emulate great thinkers, or to do a little social engineering, or just improve personal communications?

4. Initially it was curiosity -- I'm a bit of a magpie with regards to explanations. However I do have a kind of pragmatic criteria about it being effective and useful for something. Once I found it effective then the intent moved strongly in the direction of improving personal communications, but in a sort of elliptical way. As aptly described by Dilbert, engineers, scientists and other technical types are not long on interactional skills. So NLP was a nice explicit entry point (pace breathing with your breathing, test rapport, don't proceed with significant issues if you don't have rapport, ) to developing some of these, as well as an explicatory system as to what was going on. There is another aspect though -- to make sense of some of the stuff, you have to do it. Sort of like martial arts or skiing - an embodied skill that you do in real-time. So a big chunk of doing the training which is more based on going into therapy or sales, was really my way of trying to get good enough to enter into the world proposed by some of the implications. As an example - if you have 95% confidence that you can tell when people are lying to you - how does your world change? If you can make people "go blank" for five seconds and be amnesiac for that interval - now what happens to your world? It's sort of like if you want to be a magician - you don't get to live in a normal world any more because all your senses of possibility change, and then maybe your sense of responsibility.

(5) What are the practical, everyday uses? Other than getting a free meal at the best restaurants?

You've got me there. I use it when I interact with people at a sort of subliminal level in terms of the rapport stuff. One fellow master practitioner was much more interventionist than myself and established resource anchors on all of her staff and associates, a resource anchor being a state cue that triggers positive/useful states like curiosity, patience, cleverness, imagination, etc. Then they were available for "whatever". I use it to help my kids when they're scared or upset or trying to understand or do something. It's not a strongly explicit practice for me -- more a schema for making sense of things, but a schema I have some confidence in because I can apply it. I have the sense that there's a lot more that I could be doing with it, but I don't feel the pull the same way as when I was "into" it in a big way. Sort of like my swimming skills - I used to be a lifeguard and swimming instructor, and the skills are still there and I'm using them with my kids, but its not the branch that I'm busy growing now ("a life is a tree").

-- Anonymous, March 22, 2000

Okay - didn't want the thread to die.

I picked up robbins "Unlimited Power" over the week end, and will go through it asap. I'd like to know a little bit about the topic before thinking I could have an opinion......

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2000