Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

Woman: It stops being a word.

It stops being a word. How do you know that it stops being a word? What experience do you have?

Woman: It makes the whole rest of the word fall apart in my visual—

The letters literally drop off and fall?

Woman: Yeah, they sort of fuzz out and disappear.

There are two steps to spelling. One is being able to visualize the word, and the other is having a system by which to check the accuracy. Try something for me. Can you see the word "caught"? OK, go ahead and leave it up there and change the "au" to "eu" and tell me what happens.

Woman: It became "cute," and it's changed its spelling. Did anybody who was near her notice what her response was? What did she do?

Woman: She winced.

I said change it to "eu" and her shoulders rolled forward, her head tipped back, and she winced. There was a change in her feelings right here at the mid-line of the torso. No matter what language we've operated in, what country we've been to, no matter what the language is, good spellers have exactly that same formal strategy. They see an eidetic, remembered image of the word they want to spell, and they know whether or not it's an accurate spelling by a kinesthetic check at the mid-line. All the people who tell us they are bad spellers don't have that strategy. Some bad spellers make eidetic images, but then they check them auditorily. Others make constructed visual images and spell creatively.

Knowing this, a question we could then ask is "Well, how is it that some children learn to spell visually with a kinesthetic check, and other children learn to spell in other ways?" But to me that's not nearly as interesting a question as "How do you take the child who is a bad speller and teach him to use the same strategy that a good speller uses?" When you do that, you will never need to teach children to spell. They will learn automatically if you teach them an appropriate process, instead of content.

Man: How about adults? Can you teach adults?

No, it's hopeless. (laughter) Sure you can. Let me address that question in a slightly different way. How many here now see clearly that they are visually oriented people? How many people see that? How many people here feel that they are really kinesthetically oriented people in their process? Who tell themselves that they are auditory? Actually all of you are doing all of the things we're talking about, all the time. The only question is, which portion of the complex internal process do you bring into awareness? All channels are processing information all the time, but only part of that will be in consciousness.

At seminars like this, people always go out at lunch time and try to figure out what they "are," as if they are only one thing, thereby stabilizing everything pathologically. People try to figure out what they "are" instead of using that information to realize that they have other choices. People will come up to me and say "I'm really confused about this representational stuff because I really see myself as being a very feeling person." That's a profound utterance, if you think about it. I've heard that maybe a hundred and fifty times. How many people have heard something like that already this morning? Rather than thinking of yourself as being visually oriented, kinesthetically oriented, or auditorily oriented, take what you do best as a statement about which system you already have well-developed and refined. Realize that you might put some time and energy into developing the other systems with the same refinement and the same fluidity and creativity that you already have in your most developed system. Labels are traps, and one way that you can stabilize a piece of behavior in an unuseful way is to label it. Instead, you can take the fact that you notice most of your behavior falls into category X, to let yourself begin to develop your skills in Y and Z.

Now, I'd like to caution you about another thing. In psychotherapy one of the major things that Freud made fashionable, and that has continued unconsciously as a presupposition of most therapists' behavior, is the phenomenon known as introspection. Introspection is when you learn something about behavior, you apply it to yourself. I would like to caution you not to do this with most of the material we are presenting you, because you will simply go into a loop. For example: How many people here who can visualize easily know what they would look like if they weren't visualizing? ...

If you do that, you get a spinning sensation. How many of you during the exercise were paying attention to the feeling of your own eyes moving up and down? That's an example of introspection and it is not useful to do it to yourself in this context. These tools are mostly for extrospection, sensory experience. They are things to detect in other people. If you use it on yourself, all you will do is confuse yourself.

Man: How well does this pattern of accessing cues hold up in other cultures?

There is only one group that we know of that is characteristically organized differently: the Basques in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. They have a lot of unusual patterns, and that seems to be genetic rather than cultural. Everywhere else we've been—the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa—the same pattern exists in most of the population. It may be a neurological bias that is built into our nervous system as a species.

Woman: Do people who are ambidextrous have any different patterns?

They will have more variation from the generalization that we have offered you. For example, some ambidextrous people have the visualization reversed and not the auditory and the kinesthetic, or vice versa.

It's really interesting to me that the percentage of left-handed and ambidextrous people in the "genius" category in our culture is much higher than the percentage in the general population. A person with a different cerebral organization than most of the population is automatically going to have outputs which are novel and different for the rest of the population. Since they have a different cerebral organization, they have natural capabilities that "normally organized" right-handers don't automatically have.

Woman: You talked earlier about children who spelled badly because they did it auditorily, and that you could teach them how to do it visually. And now you just talked about the auditory or ambidextrous person having something different that makes him unique. I'm wondering if it's worth the energy it takes to make those kids be able to do what other people do more easily if it's taking away from other things that they can do?

If I teach a child how to spell easily, I'm not taking anything away. Choices are not mutually exclusive. Many people close their eyes in order to be in touch with their feelings, but that's just a statement about how they organize themselves. There's no necessity to that. I can have all the feelings that I want with my eyes open. Similarly, if I have an ambidextrous or left-handed person with a different cerebral organization, I don't have to destroy any choices they presently have to add to that. And that's our whole function as modelers. We assume since you all managed to scrape up whatever amount of money it cost you to come here, that you are competent, that you already are succeeding to some degree. We respect all those choices and abilities. We're saying "Good, let's add other choices to those choices you already have, so that you have a wider repertoire" just as a good mechanic has a full tool box.

Our claim is that you are using all systems all the time. In a particular context you will be aware of one system more than another. I assume that when you play athletics or make love,you have a lot of kinesthetic sensitivity. When you are reading or watching a movie, you have a lot of visual consciousness. You can shift from one to the other. There are contextual markers that allow you to shift from one strategy to another and use different sequences. There's nothing forced about that.

There are even strategies to be creative, given different forms of creativity. We work as consultants for an ad agency where we psychologically "clone" their best creative people. We determined the strategy that one creative person used to create a commercial, and we taught other people in that agency to use the same structure at the unconscious level. The commercials they came up with were then creative in the same way, but the content was totally unique. As we were doing the process, one of the people there even made a change in the strategy that made it better.

Most people don't have a large number of strategies to do anything. They use the same kind of strategy to do everything and what happens is that they are good at some things and not good at others. We have found that most people have only three or four basic strategies. A really flexible person may have a dozen. You can calculate that even if you restrict a strategy to four steps there are well over a thousand possibilities!

We make a very strong claim. We claim that if any human can do anything, so can you. All you need is the intervention of a modeler who has the requisite sensory experience to observe what the talented person actually does—not their report—and then package it so that you can learn it.

Man: It occurs to me that in your work, the therapeutic goal of bringing clients to awareness is being replaced by giving the client a new pattern of response that they may choose to use.

If you include unconscious choice, I agree with you. There are several presuppositions in our work and one of them is relevant in responding to you: that choice is better than non-choice. And by choice I mean unconscious as well as conscious choice. Everybody knows what conscious choice is, I guess. Unconscious choice is equivalent to variability in my behavior, such that all of the variations get me the outcome I'm after. If I'm presented with the same real world situation a number of times, and I notice that my response varies but that each response gets the outcome I'm after, I have unconscious choice.

However, if each time you go into a similar context you find yourself responding in the same way and you dislike the response, you probably do not have choice. The important question to me is what structure— and there are lots of different ones—produces the state in which you don't have choice? And then what steps can you take to alter that structure? We're going to give you lots of different ways to go about that.

We're offering you classes of information which are universal for us as a species, but which are unconscious for other people. You need those as tools in your repertoire, because it's the unconscious processes and parts of the person you've got to work with effectively in order to bring about change in an efficient way. The conscious parts of the person have already done the best they can. They are sort of useful to have around to pay the bill, but what you need to work with are the other parts of the person.

Don't get caught by the words "conscious" and "unconscious."They are not real. They are just a way of describing events that is useful in the context called therapeutic change. "Conscious" is defined as whatever you are aware of at a moment in time. "Unconscious" is everything else.

You can make finer distinctions, of course. There are certain kinds of unconscious data which are immediately available. I say "How's your left ear?" Until you heard that sentence, you probably had no consciousness of your left ear. When you hear me say that, you can shift your consciousness to the kinesthetics of your left ear. That is easily accessible from unconscious to conscious. If I say "What color shoes did your kindergarten teacher wear on the first day that you went to school?" that's also represented somewhere. However, getting at it will take a lot more time and energy. So there are degrees of accessibility of unconscious material.

Typically a person arrives in your office and says "Help! I want to make a change here. I'm in pain. I'm in difficulty. I want to be different than I am presently." You can assume that they have already tried to change with all the resources they can get to consciously, and they have failed utterly. Therefore, one of the prerequisites of your being effective is to have patterns of communication which make good rapport with their unconscious resources to assist them in making those changes. To restrict yourself to the conscious resources of the person who comes to you will guarantee a long, tedious, and probably very ineffective process.

By the way, here in this seminar there is no way that you will be able to consciously keep up with the rapid pace of verbalization that will be going on. That is a systematic and deliberate attempt on our part to overload your conscious resources. We understand that learning and change take place at the unconscious level, so that's the part of you we want to talk to anyway. The part of your functioning which is responsible for about ninety-five percent of your learning and skill is called your unconscious mind. It's everything that's outside of your awareness at a point in time. I want to appeal directly to that part of you to make a complete and useful record of anything that happens here, especially the things we don't comment on explicitly, which it believes would be useful for you to understand further and perhaps employ as a skill in your work as a professional communicator— leaving you free at the conscious level to relax and enjoy your experience here.

The point we're at now is "So what?" You have all had some experience identifying accessing cues and representational systems. What do you use it for?

One way I can use this information is to communicate to you at the unconscious level without any awareness on your part. I can use unspecified words like "understand" and "believe" and indicate to you non-verbally in which sensory channel I want you to "understand." For example, I could say to you "I want to make sure you understand (gesturing down and to the audience's left) what we've done so far." My gesture indicates to you unconsciously that I want you to understand auditorily.

You can also use this information to interrupt a person's accessing. All of you make a visual image, and see what happens when I do this. (He waves both arms over his head in a wide arc.) My gesture knocks all your pictures out of the air, right?

Thousands of times in your life you said something or asked a question of someone and they said "Hm, let's see," and they went inside to create a visual image. When they go inside like that, they cant simultaneously pay attention to input from outside. Now let's say that you and I are on opposite sides about some issue at a conference or a corporate meeting. I begin to talk, and I'm forceful in presenting my material and my system in the hope that you will understand it. After I've offered you a certain amount of information, at some point you will begin to access your internal understanding of what's going on. You'll look up and begin to visualize, or look down and begin to talk to yourself or pay attention to how you feel. Whichever internal state you go into, it's important that I pause and give you time to process that information. If my tempo is too rapid and if I continue to talk at that point, I'll just confuse and irritate you.