Yes they mis-named it! And what a tragedy that mis-naming has created. Yet as with most things human, they undoubtedly were doing their best and simply didn’t imagine, didn’t think, didn’t project themselves into the future to consider what consequences that name would have.
How could they have known that 35 years later people with just a month of training in this field would use the title, “Master Practitioner,” stress the Master part, and consider that they have arrived, they know-it-all, they don’t need to study anymore, they have arrived at Guru-dom?!
The history of NLP “Practitioner” and “Master Practitioner” is itself an interesting one. Since 1978 when Leslie Cameron Bandler put together the first “Practitioner” that was some 36 days long, the Prac. course of NLP was designed to introduce the basic NLP models and give people the essential competencies to use the models and patterns and to begin to think in terms of these models.
And that means what? That means understanding the basic Communication Model of NLP. That’s why NLP is— a model of how human beings communicate, first to themselves (also called “thinking,” “awareness,” “being conscious”) and then to others (also called “talking”). Modeled from three experts in communication, three “world-class professional communicators” NLP presented itself as being able to identify the essential structure of communication verbally and non-verbally.
The verbal part predominated at first. Using the dominating linguistic model at that time, Transformational Grammar (TG), Grinder introduced the majority of the jargon of NLP by sticking in all of the TG language: transderivational search to your referential index, selective restriction violation, nominalizations, etc. In The Structure of Magic, the language part was recognized as the “meta-representational system.”
None of that was new, nor was the sensory representational systems (seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling, tasting). That had been around for a hundred years in the field of Psychology, from the very beginning of Psychology as a field separate from Philosophy. But there was something new, and radical— Using the sensory representational systems as the languages of the mind. That was new. And Bateson noted this in his Preface to The Structure of Magic commenting that he and his colleagues had been search for that for decades.
So first came the Meta-Model, then the Representational Systems, which includes calibrating to a person for recognizing representational systems (eye accessing cues and the like), then the TOTE model for Strategies, the Milton Model (and reversing the Meta-Model to use it for trance), the Sub-Modality distinctions, and the basic Time-Line model, and with these models, lots of patterns, processes, and exercises. And at first Prac. took a long, long time. But eventually, the process was streamlined to 21 days of 8 hours or so of training each day, and this still remains that in many places. We increase the hours to 12 hour days, require extensive reading and preparation ahead of time and can get through the content in a minimum of 7 days when we really push it. And what accelerates the learning of NLP in Neuro-Semantics is half a day on Meta-States since that’s what explains the “magic” of NLP.
Then there’s Master Prac. It really has nothing to do with mastery, it is mostly more stuff.More of the NLP model: Meta-Programs, Advance Modeling, Extensive Reframing using the old “sleight of mouth” patterns (or Mind-Lines), Meta-States, Advanced Trance, Advanced Time-Lines, and again, lots and lots patterns, processes, and applications to personal development, therapy, business, selling, leadership, etc.
Many years ago I asked Wyatt Woodsmall,
“Why was Meta-Programs put in Master Prac. rather than in Prac.? After all, a person really needs to know about meta-programs from the beginning?”
His answer was simple and succinct: “Because they were not invented when Prac. was invented!” “Oh, so that’s why!” (Of course, the story of their invention is in Figuring Out People, 2007).
When I first began training Master Prac. I tossed some things in about “mastery,” what it is, how long it takes (the “ten year rule”), the attitude required, etc. and we ended Master Prac. With a “pathway to mastery” celebration. Today I think that’s a mistake. While the 15 to 24 days of Master Prac. does take basic NLP further, and provides a more indepth understanding, if we’re honest, it really has nothing to do with mastery and it actually is perpetuating the “get rich quick,” “get smart quick,” “get instant expertise” myth that’s clings to NLP like a leach sucking its blood.
No one is a “master” of NLP after a two or three week intensive course or after a year if you stretch it out to 6 or 8 weekends.
That’s not how mastery works. Even I knew that after my first experience of Master Prac. At my first Master Prac. I wrote the notes that is now the book, The Spirit of NLP (1996). And in that book, the idea of the spirit of NLP is the idea of continuous learning, an unending, ongoing attitude of exploring, discovering, and ferocious curiosity.
In an interview in Moscow recently, I was asked about Master Practitioners/ Trainers who consider that they have arrived, who segregate themselves from everybody else and present themselves as having reached the pinnacle of the field. “What about them? What would you say to them?”
“I’d say that ‘You have missed the whole point! You do not understand the basics of NLP if that’s your attitude! Your license to train ought to be revoked and you ought to go study it afresh and learn to develop the spirit of NLP. Your journey to mastery has hardly begun— there are many new developments in the field and unless you are staying involved, collaborating with those who are doing things in this field, every day you are falling further and further behind!’”
This Week’s Neuro-Semantic News
We are wrapping up the completion of NSTT (Trainers’ Training ) in Hong Kong and the graduation is this Thursday.
Then NSTT Colorado Begins June 19.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Littleton Colorado: school massacre, outrageous
violence, hatred, alienation, rejection, despair, bullied
by jocks, outcast kids, pipe bombs built in basements,
subcultures, black trench coats, Hitler’s birthday,
propane-tank bombs, Harris and Klebold, etc.
If You Don’t Know the Meanings & Frames
that Drive the States–
You’ll Never Understand the Behaviors
or the People who Produced Them
- Why did it happen?
- What were the causes, contributing factors, influences, and triggering events that brought it about?
- Who is to blame for it?
- What constructive, effective action can we take to prevent it from repeating?
- What does it all mean?
What happened in the Colorado school on April 20, 1999 was no fluke. Nor was it “senseless.” Actually, when we think about it from the perspective of those who initiated it, it made plenty of sense. To Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, what they did made all the sense in the world, that is, in their world.
In writing this, I do not by any means validate or approve of their horrendous behaviors or of the havoc they generated. I do not write any of this validate their hatred, despair, stupidity, or cruel violence. Not at all.
I write instead to highlight the ultimate role that meaning (our human neuro-semantics) plays in our lives. The boys had given themselves to a way of thinking and therefore a way of emoting, valuing, believing, speaking, and acting that accorded to the violence that eventually erupted. The Frames they played with in their head inevitably lead to the Games of Violence that they played out in their behaviors at Columbine that dread day in April.
Playing With “Neuro-Semantic Fire”
Even to this day, most people seemly continue to take language and ideas and concepts for granted.
- “It’s just language.”
- “It’s just ideas, that’s all.”
- “Let them read what they want, it’s just literature.”
This cavalier and disdainful way of treating symbolism thereby prevents us from really understanding the dangers that confront us in “mere” words and ideas. On the surface, the newspapers we use to feed our mind, the movies we watch, the novels we read, the conversations we engage in seem like neutral and passive things in our lives. They are not.
To think of the media in all of its forms as “just for fun,” as “just entertainment,” as having no real influence over our minds-and-emotions is to forget what class of life we are. It indicates that we don’t know or have forgotten that we are, by our nature, a semantic class of life ( Korzybski, 1994). Forgetting this leads us to fail to reckon with these subtly powerful influences. As a semantic class of life, we live on symbols. We fight for symbols. We go to war for symbols. We marry, divorce, sue, risk life and limb, invest, etc. for symbols.
Symbols are that important to us. Even our very consciousness is a result of the symbols that we feed it. That’s why humans in different cultures, learning to value different experiences, feel very different emotions about things. What excites one, disgusts another. What rattles one person’s cage and incites him to go into an outrage, evokes a sly smile in another.
We are a class of life that incorporates ideas into our neurology. That’s what we mean by “neuro-semantics.” And when concepts get into our muscles, they activate our motor programs and responses in the real world. And when you know that, you have some clues about what drove Harris and Klebold in their reign of terror on their high school.
The Power of Meaning
Would it be extreme to say that most people under-estimate the power of ideas in our lives? I don’t think so.
As a psychologist, I worked for years in the field of psychotherapy and I was constantly surprised by how little people seemed pay attention to the things they fed their minds. I would listen to a client talkthe way they talked (and hence thought) with their ongoing life problems. and, given the things I heard streaming forth from their mouth, I could easily see why they felt as they did, what was causing them pain and distress, etc. And yet many (if not most) of the folks never connected up
On many occasions I would ask,
“Do you hear what you’re saying?”
“When you talk that way; use those kinds of words– does that make your life any better?”
Not only did a great many people lack the intra-psychic awareness of their own automatic self-talk, but typically most of them didn’t seem to appreciate that if they made a constant diet of the evening news, or horror movies, or violence and gore, or whatever– they it might affect their states, their feelings, their physical wellness, etc. Dah!
Eventually I got into the habit of asking people to give me a fuller account of the kinds, numbers, and quality of their mental diet in terms of novels, movies, conversations, web sites, etc. Frequently, the biggest part of my prescription for their mental hygiene was to stop feeding their brain the unbalanced diet they had been using.
Why?
Because the quality of the things we feed our minds cannot but help affect our emotions and behaviors. Go on a constant diet of romance novels and guess what emotional states that will induce in you. Go on a constant diet of violent action movies, horror flicks, etc.
Of course, there is a difference between our stomachs and our brains. Our stomachs can vomit. When you feed on garbage, the stomach at least has the sense to throw it back up. The brain isn’t so smart. It just processes and “digests” whatever we feed it. If there’s going to be any quality control in the things you think, feel, and experience– you have to take charge of Quality Controlling the content of what we feed our eyes, ears, senses, etc.
If ideas were not ideo-dynamic in nature, inducing us into states (of mind and body), sending signals and commands to our autonomic and central nervous systems– then hypnosis would not work, nor would suggestions, marketing, selling, advertising, education, training, workshops, books, etc. Neuro-Linguistics (NLP) began with this simple idea from Cognitive Psychology.
How we represent things programs our mind and body and installs an internal mental map about the world.
This represents no new idea or philosophy. Dr. Albert Ellis founded Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) in the 1960s on the very premise that our minds control and govern our emotions and subsequently, our behaviors.
“Human thinking and emoting are not radically different processes; but at points significantly overlap. Emotions almost always stem directly from ideas, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs … and can usually be radically changed by modifying the thinking processes that keep creating them.”
And much further back than that, Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome and a philosopher in the second century AD put it succinctly in his writings.
“If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you– but your judgment about it.” (The Meditations, 121-180 A.D.)
David Burns (The New Mood Therapy, 1980) has formulated these ideas as the basic principles of Cognitive Therapy.
“The first principle of Cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your cognitions or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things, your perceptions, mental attitudes and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things, what you say about something or someone to yourself. You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment.” (pp. 11-12)
And even further back, an old Hebrew proverb asserted that “as a man thinks in his heart (soul), so he is…” (Proverbs 23:7). That asserts that we participate in creating our experienced ontology (sense of Being and beingness). As we represent, conceptualize, and set frames of reference (the meaning-making processes), so those ideas then begin to make us in their image.
The Structure of both White and Black “Magic”
NLP began with the book, The Structure of Magic (1975). This book articulated the fact that there is “structure” to the “magic” of saying some words and creating powerful and lasting change in the lives of other people. The marvelous magic of Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson arose from the form and use of certain expressions.
The opposite is also true. There’s structure to the magic of inducing negative trances, hate, prejudice, stupidity, powerlessness, hexes, etc.
In spite of this knowledge, our culture generally seems to not recognize the programming power of ideas in the form of literature, movies, slogans, labels, music, videos, etc. Perhaps we discount them and not believe that they can matter that much because ideas and words do not operate externally as in utterances of Abracadabra.
In the weeks that have followed the Columbine massacre, we’ve heard a multitude of voices arguing that the music, the video-games, and the ideology of hatred could not have made Harris and Klebold do what they did. Those Frames could not have created those Games! “No way.” Voices have said that to think that would be an assault on the first amendment of free speech.
And indeed it may. I don’t know. Nor would I want to squelch anyone’s first amendment right.
And yet, given the ideas and the frames-of-references that filled the minds of those boys and that governed their feelings and actions, what they ultimately did makes perfect sense given their Model of the World. So while their behavior, at the surface level, seems totally irrational and psychotic, the expression of personality disordering and “mental illness,” if we look a little deeper, they simply acted out their beliefs. They acted congruently and in alignment with their states and their meta-states. That they planned the massacre for over a year indicates they the frame of mind that they had gotten into and feed and nurtured was a mind-set that they chose.
In April of 1999, Harris and Klebold simply played out the last scene of a Game at Columbine. They had been playing the Game for a long time.
- “We are such victims. We’re not among the jocks or the cool kids.”
- “Aryan Supremacy means we’re superior to you.”
- “Violence is the way to solve differences; Blow them away.”
- Etc.
Intoxicated on Violence
The disastrous shoot-out at the high school struck many people as a great mystery. Yet to those informed about the neuro-linguistic nature of mind, it all made perfect sense. When you indulge yourself on hate literature, violence games, taking offense from the unresourcefulness of others, interpreting oneself as “being on the outside,” “weird,” and “not cool” as a major offense to the ego, a belief in revenge, giving way to acting out a Rambo like retaliation, etc. __it makes perfect sense that as the mind feeds on poison, so the behaviors will act out that sickness.
In the end, Harris and Klebold simply programmed themselves to do what they did. The torment they received from the school bullies, the insult they took from not being in the in-crowd, the reinforcement of violence and revenge they practiced in the video-games, along with the higher frames of Nazi propaganda that validated their own supposed “superiority,” all of these things programmed their thinking and emoting so that the resulting behaviors perfectly congruent and aligned with their highest frames.
These frames supported and defined the Games that they had to play. And, like any frames, once set, they take on a life of their own and become “self-organizing.” Once set, we see the world through our frames as if perceptual filters and so we become increasingly convinced of their validity. We constantly receive more and more validation for them.
The problem at Columbine was the sick frames that the boys gave themselves to. Once the Game got started, once the Game was reinforced, it became more and more difficult to interrupt it or stop it. The longer the game, the more secretive they became.
And so it is with all of us. Our speech and behavior– our two public expressions of our neuro-linguistic powers arise from and are nurtured by our thinking and emoting. These are our States or our Games. And those states are supported by yet higher states of mind-and-emotion, our Frames. These give definition, structure, meaning, etc. to the games.
“The Victims Will Never Get Over This Tragedy”
If you’ve followed the news reports and the in depth news magazines from 20/20 to Primetime, Fox News, to CNN, etc., then you’ve heard counselors, psychologists, “violence” experts, “trauma” experts, and “victims” of other tragedies present over and over another toxic idea, namely, that “once a victim of such an event, always a victim.”
That’s just another Frame Game that people play.
They speak as if those who saw the blood, the shootings, or whatever traumatic event has to represent such over and over just the way it happened forever and ever. And, of course, if they did– they would effectively reinforce their representations and run their neuro-pathways and brain so as to make it stronger and stronger. And typically, the person who would do such would also reinforce the generalizations (in the form of beliefs, understandings, etc.) they make about the events. And that’s what does the damage.
The truth is, as every practitioner of NLP and Neuro-Semanticist knows, that the trauma can be effectively and completely reframed, re-represented, and dealt with so that it does not have to bother those involved in it. The traumatic event was one thing. It is not now occurring. If it occurs inside of someone’s mind by how that person is coding it, then that mental action is what is continuing the sense and feeling of trauma. This separates the Event from the Map that we construct about the event. And once we make that distinction, we can take control of whether we create the feelings of trauma.
New Frames for New Games
What we think in that inner theater of our minds does make a difference. How we represent our thoughts also make a difference. So does the meanings that we give to our representations– and the frames that we set.
When you know this– you have the key to emotional liberation, to mental and emotional sanity, and the ability to exercise executive choice and control over your own life. Then you can “drive our own bus.”
We can only play a new and more resourceful Game in life when we change our Frames– the meanings (semantics) that we attribute to events. And that’s something we have total control over. May you use your symbols to set the kind of frames that will support resourceful games.
Author: L. Michael Hall, Psychologist, Colorado LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor), International NLP Trainer, Co-Developer of Neuro-Semantics.
The Debate Between the “Minds”
Conscious or Unconscious
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D.Min.
What kind of press does the conscious mind and the unconscious mind get within the NLP community? Which “mind” gets the biggest billing? Why?
As Bob and I have thought about this, and noticed it in terms of training advertisements, it strikes us that the conscious mind actually doesn’t get very good press. In fact, sometimes the conscious mind gets treated as “the problem” in human experiences. When we read some of the advertisements for trainings, the ads seem to imply that the conscious mind makes people less effective and give them more problems. In other ads, you get the impression that if the conscious mind doesn’t actually mess people up, it’s not worth bothering with in terms of “real” learning or “accelerated” learning.
“We teach directly to the pattern maker — the unconscious mind”
“The royal road of learning is through the unconscious…”
“Unconscious installation was the soul of Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir’s work”
“If you learn consciously — you merely understand; you can’t do.”
“In Bandler, McKenna, Breen trainings sitting there with a pen and notebook is virtually useless as a learning strategy as it guarantees you’ll be placing your attention in the wrong place”
Following up on what we wrote in Dealing With the Downside of NLP: Restoring Integrity to NLP (Anchor Point, May 1997), we would like to offer some balance to this tendency of over-rating the unconscious mind and downplaying the conscious mind. We would further like to propose that in NLP training we offer a healthy balance so that we treat and train both facets of “mind” — the conscious part and those other-than-conscious parts.
Defining the Conscious/ Unconscious facets of Mind
Bandler and Grinder (1979) wrote (as edited by Steve Andreas) the following in Frogs Into Princes:
“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.’ (p. 37).
In thinking about these terms and using them to help us to effectively navigate the territory of human awareness, being “conscious” provides the more focused definition while “unconsciousness” conveys a very broad labeling. Here it stands for “everything else!” Accordingly, we need to distinguish between various kinds of unconscious awareness. Thus, minimally we have at least the following facets of the unconscious mind:
1) Consciousness that has become unconscious
2) The autonomic nervous system that remains “out of conscious awareness”
3) Subconscious Information — below the threshold level for consciousness
4) The Forgotten Mind
5) The Repressed Mind
6) The Meta-Levels of Awareness
1) When Consciousness Goes Unconscious
George Miller (1956) wrote his classic paper, “The magic Number 7 + or – 2″, at the beginning of the Cognitive Psychology Movement. This distinction enables us to recognize our cognitive information processing in terms of “chunking.”
Thus we say that we order and structure information in terms of 5-to-9 “chunks” of information at a time. We all did this when we first learned the alphabet. We went to school and saw the “A a” on the blackboard as a “chunk” of information that the teacher wanted us to learn. When we got that one down, in terms of visual and auditory recognition, and had progressed to kinesthetic reproduction (actually writing it) — a major task in those days!, then we went on to “B b.” Eventually we got numerous “chunks” represented and stored … and as this habituated, it became less and less at the front of consciousness. In other words, it became more and more in the back of the mind. And as it did, it became increasingly less-conscious.
As we keep learning the alphabet, we kept adding “chunks.” Eventually we got up to the 5-to-9 “chunks” of information limit (i.e. A/a to I/i). But then another process kicked in. As our “chunks” habituated — they began to “clunk” (another technical term?!) together so that “A/a, B/b, C/c” became a “chunk.” Then, “E/e, F/f, G/g” became a chunk, etc. Eventually, the entire list of 26-letters became one chunk. And after that all of those learnings themselves (i.e. clunking, chunking, and how to chunk!) became one unconscious chunk.
In other words, “chunks” grow. They clunk together to form larger and larger self-contained sequences of anchored, or linked-together, pieces of information that then function as single units. In this way we move through the conscious/unconscious levels of learning:
1) Unconscious incompetence — Incompetent and ignorant of it!
2) Conscious incompetence — intelligent enough to recognize our incompetence!
3) Conscious competence — learnings that develops more and more skill and understanding.
4) Unconscious competence — the learnings clunk together and drop from the front of the mind, go to the back of the mind, and then “out” of conscious awareness.
5) Conscious competence of Unconscious competence — the trainers (or expert) state of mind that allows him or her to teach and train others in a skill.
This developmental process from unconsciousness to consciousness describes the stages of the learning process. It indicates that when we learn something consciously, and over-learn it so that it habituates in our neurology, it becomes “installed” in what we call an “unconscious part of the mind.” At this point, we truly and deeply “know” our stuff! When our learnings reach this stage, they comprise our in-tuitions. This term literally describes our “in” – “knowings.” We have an intuitive knowing about the subject. For instance, we intuitively know how to drive, how to skate, how to read, how to do mathematics, how to play the guitar, etc. As an aside, Daniel Dennett (1991) says that we better describe the “unconscious driving” phenomenon as “a case of rolling consciousness with swift memory loss” (p. 137).
This also illustrates one “royal road” to the unconscious — conscious learning. We can put things into our unconscious mind via learning and over-learning.
2) The “Unconscious Mind” of the Autonomic Nervous System
One facet of “the unconscious mind” (or facet of “mind”) involves the “mind” (intelligence) of our autonomic nervous system. This “mind” keeps our heart beating, regulates our neuro-transmitters, hormones, neurological bio-chemistry, governs our breathing, internal organs of digestion, endocrine and immune systems, etc. This “mind” obviously receives input from outside the body about temperature, pressure, oxygen, smells, gravity, balance (the vestibular system), etc. In response to such “messages” (information), it processes that information in terms of its internal own needs and wants. Then it acts upon that information in its outputs in neurological responses and behaviors. It does all of this apart from any of the human symbolic systems (whether of propositional or non-propositional language, music, mathematics, etc.).
In the 1970s, researchers began to recognize the power of bio-feedback mechanisms that allow us to gain conscious control or management over our autonomic processes. Prior to that, theorists assumed that we could not effect this part of “mind.” But now we know that we can. Via bio-feedback processes, we effect our blood pressure, temperature, brain waves, etc.
And yet, while we have begun to learn some of the mechanisms that allow us entry into this more “hard-wired” part of human neurology and experience, this world runs primarily in an unconscious way. Or we could say, our “unconscious mind” runs it.
We now know that by directing and activating the right hemisphere of the brain to vividly experienced and felt images, scenarios, and metaphors, we “hypnotically” produce such an inwardly focused concentration that it activates autonomic nervous system processes. From this we can control blood pressure, the experience of pain, heart rate, etc.
We also have a “genetic mind” as Noam Chomsky pointed out in his classic research in linguistics that defeated the Behaviorist Model of Skinner. We do not and cannot learn language as merely a stimulus-response, associative conditioning. Rather we have some kind of a language generator and language acquisition mechanism within that comes as part of our species heritage. This allows us to unconsciously produce word-strings and to understand word-strings — even those that we have never heard before.
3) The Subconscious “Mind”
Another facet of our unconscious consciousness involves that information that exists below the threshold level, and therefore prior to consciousness. The signal value of this information occurs below a level that we can “sense” consciously. Robert Dilts (1983) described such facets in Roots of NLP. Here occurs such subconscious elements as light outside the ultraviolet electromagnetic range that our eyes can see, sounds/vibrations beyond what our ears can hear, etc.
The existence of a “mind” within our Mind that can over-hear (so to speak) data from the outside and which does not emerge into consciousness — speaks about a second “royal road” to the unconscious part of mind. Namely, it speaks about apart-from-consciousness learning. Many things seem to get into this part of “mind” without going through consciousness. We pick up tidbits of information, and little side-pieces of data. Such information gets in “at unawares.” Here we learn but don’t know that we learn — let alone what we learn.
What kind of information specifically gets in via this manner? We believe that information structured as embedded commands, tonal shifts, connotations, suggestions, presuppositions, meta-level framing, etc., gets in.
Such “learning” seem to operate as a spill-over effect from being alive. That is, we pick up on things, but don’t “know” (consciously) that we do. We especially recognize this in our dreams. Frequently we will incorporate the sound of water, an alarm clock, someone speaking, a dog barking, etc. from the outside — but continue dreaming all the while making that stimulus a part of the dream. Once, while lost in thought while rocking in a chair — I suddenly “woke up” from the reverie to notice that I had somehow unconsciously synchronized my rocking with some background music.
In NLP, the idea of overloading consciousness has received a lot of press. Some have taken this idea of overloading and used it in their trainings. They even advertise their approach as such. “We overload consciousness so that once you get to over-load, everything else just slides right into the unconscious mind — immediately giving you unconscious competence.”
For us, this idea has some problematic features. If overloading works that well and in that way — why don’t we set up elementary, middle, and high schools so that the kids go for 12 hour days? Why don’t we have the teacher lecture at them for 4 hours without a break, get them to overload — then everything afterwards will “just slide right in” and they’ll “have it”? Why don’t we do that? Does it work for you to get overloaded — do you suddenly become a “mean-green learning machine?”
It just doesn’t work like that, does it? The assumption driving that idea just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Typically, the majority of learning goes through the conscious mind that does the work of incorporating, implementing, applying, relating, etc. What we have here involves some empty hype that does not serve NLP well.
Apparently “the spill-over effect” does not send lots of data into the human system nor even the best data. How much of these bits and pieces get it? And how do we then process it in ways that serve us well?
4) The Forgotten “Mind”
We call unconscious the “mind” within us where we store all of our memories and prior experiences. In the 1950s, Penfield and other researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of various parts of the brain triggered automatic recall of long forgotten experiences. These “recalls” did not merely involve the “data” in a pure or cold form, but a seeming re-experiencing of the information. At that time, they concluded that everything we ever experience gets recorded and lies inside somewhere.
Later research studies, however, questioned this universal quantifer. Theorists eventually concluded that while much of what we experience does get recorded, everything does not. We do not record in “memory” what we do not attend or pay attention to. Our “not-knowing” of that information does not mean that “it is unconscious.” It may mean that we didn’t not encode it in the first place. Thus just because someone has a “dark area” on his or her time-lines does not necessarily mean that they have experienced some trauma. They may have just not encoded anything of significance during that period. Or they may have lost interest in it so that it slipped away.
Further, we can and do forget things. We can lose memory of previous learnings, experiences, conversations, etc. Just go through old boxes of reports and notes that you wrote when you attended school twenty or thirty years. Or read journal writings of everyday conversations, experiences, and happenings from five years ago — and experience the surprise of not even recognizing much of it. Not only has it become unconscious, it has become unconscious and un-accessible.
I (MH) did this recently with old notes I came across that I I made from some calculus, trigonometry, and advanced mathematics classes. Not only had I forgotten that I had taken such notes — I couldn’t even recall the learnings in a way that could make sense of the information. “What in the world do these formulas mean?” AI can’t believe that I once knew this stuff!”
5) The Repressed “Mind”
While Sigmund Freud did not invent or initiate the idea of the unconscious mind, he certainly popularized it. And as he did, he made it a part of Twentieth Century knowledge and parlance. Accordingly, he spoke about the pre-conscious, the conscious, and the sub-conscious. By the latter, he referred to the part of “mind” that we push-down and repress. He theorized that as we use various defense mechanisms we build barriers against consciousness. We do not want to know. We fear knowing (this structure operates as a meta-state). So as our “ego” (the “reality principle” as he called it) can’t handle certain information, it suppresses, represses, denies, projects, etc. It develops an attitude (has an agenda) against knowing.
Freud looked upon this less-than-healthy facet of the unconscious a the place of repressed negative emotions, rampant and tabooed sexual fantasies, and deep-genetically oriented urges or “instincts” like his postulated “the death instinct.”
To Freud’s genius, he developed numerous methods for recovering the repressed unconscious material.
1) Free floating associative thinking: lie quietly and just notice whatever intrudes into consciousness, let it come, don’t push it away or down, let it come and say so.
2) Dream welcoming, recording, and analyzing: notice the images and presentations that your unconscious mind offers you in dreams. Commit yourself to recording the dreams, then later pull apart the dream manifest content and latent content.
3) Catch and notice “Freudian Slips.” Catch the unconscious mis-statements that arise which frequently indicate thoughts and awareness in the other-than-conscious mind. Then inquire whether it indicates any “agenda” against some knowledge.
With regard to this facet of unconsciousness, Milton Erickson (1976) said, “Your patients will be your patients because they are out of rapport with their unconscious mind.” (p. 276). This suggests that true mental health involves a good balance and rapport between the conscious and the unconscious “parts” of Mind. We develop what we call “unconscious parts,” “bitter roots,” and other internal incongruencies because in some way, one part of the mind has gotten out of harmony with another part. The Mind no longer operates whole and integrated.
6) Meta-levels of Awareness
Another facet of Mind that becomes unconscious and that then exhibits the power and nature of unconsciousness occur in the meta-levels of consciousness. This refers to those frames-of-reference that we construct as we move through life — those frames that we then use as our meta-level referencing system. This includes such subjective mental-emotional phenomena as beliefs, values, criteria, “rules,” domains of knowledge, conceptual understandings, etc.
As we learn things, they not only become unconscious but many begin to operate at a meta level to regular everyday primary level consciousness. These become our meta-programs, our meta-states, our meta-level domains of knowledge. We can certainly bring these meaning (semantic) structures into consciousness — but typically they operate as simply the frames-of-reference within which we live and function — as our presuppositional reality.
A conscious thought thus involves not only an awareness of something — but also a higher level awareness: awareness of the awareness of something. I can drive with awareness of streets, people, traffic signals, etc., but unless I have awareness of that awareness, it seems (and so we say), that we’re driving unconsciously. Rosenthal (1990, “Why Are Verbally Expressed Thoughts Conscious?” as quoted in Dennett, 1991) says that what distinguishes a conscious state from a non-conscious state involves the straightforward property of having “a higher-order accompanying thought that is about the state in question.”
Splitting Mind Against Itself
Trainings that Endanger Mind
What happens when we over-emphasize the unconscious mind to the neglect of the conscious mind? Consider how this inevitably splits Mind — thereby creating a schizophrenic division between a holistic phenomena, namely, Mind. This will not serve us well. This puts mind at odds with mind — and turns our psychic energies against our own selves.
Attempting to provide training that only uses and addresses the unconscious “mind” and doesn’t utilize the conscious “mind” inevitably (by definition) creates an imbalance and conflicted Mind. Obviously, when we use hypnotic language patterns of embedded commands, isomorphic metaphors, etc., we use some powerful technology. We also use powerful “unconscious” teaching by the use of such processes as anchoring, reframing, sleight of mouth patterns (alias, the word magic of Mind-Lines), etc. But to do such, and to not also teach the conscious “mind” the principles and processes creates individuals who won’t know why a pattern or process works. And without knowing some of the theory and understanding behind the processes, we leave people unable to evolve the model and technology. They can run the processes as a clinician (Woodsmall’s Modeling I) — but they won’t understand why it works and so won’t be able to move to Modeling II.
Some processes obviously evoke the other-than-conscious mind and can be put to very valuable use. We can present a training by giving information in a way that may seem haphazard and without reason. We may do this in order to let each person’s unconscious “mind” organize and re-organize it for themselves and to do so in ways they will find individually useful and compelling. We may use sentence fragments to not finish statements and to not close loops. Again, we may intentionally provide this as an opportunity for a listener do so for him or herself. So with the use of post hypnotic suggestions, embedded commands, and therapeutic metaphors. (Of course, the lazy and incompetent use the same so it seems fitting that we distinguish ourselves from that.)
Given this use of using unconscious processes seems to us a very different matter from intentionally conducting our trainings to only (or primarily) activate the unconscious “mind.” Or worse, to denigrate and insult the conscious “mind” as undeserving of training. (By way of illustration, a few years ago Richard Bandler got onto this diatribe and repeatedly describe the conscious mind as a “dick head.” “That’s just all it is!” Sure he did that for the shock effect it created, to create humor, and to be entertaining. Yet it seems to us that the insults and put-downs about all of the limitations of the conscious mind does more damage than good.
Questions
Here we ask what we consider some very important questions:
1) How useful should we evaluate a training if the conscious “mind” does not have access to it? How ecological? How respectful of the person?
2) Do we want to turn out practitioners who can “pull off” various NLP processes and techniques (perhaps) without understanding them? Without the ability to question them?
3) Do we really want to create learners who become that dependent on a trainer?
4) Should we only “trust” the unconscious part of the mind and not the conscious mind? To what extend do we trust the various facets of the unconscious mind?
Trusting Mind
Given that we have numerous facets of Mind, which mind should we “trust?” As mind-as-a-whole has numerous facets, which part can we appropriately “trust,” to what degree, for what, and in what way?
Generally, we will not do ourselves any harm if we trust our autonomic nervous system “mind.” This represents “the wisdom of the body” in its purest forms. We do, however, need to qualify this a little. After all, the autonomic nervous system can, and does, make mistakes. We see this, and have to deal with these mistakes, in such phenomena as allergies, cancer, and other medical problems,
Also, generally, we can trust our unconscious mind regarding our learned patterns. We can trust that part of “mind” for enabling us to walk, talk, read, write, drive a car, ski, skate, etc. Of course, if we learned errors in our original learnings — then those errors will by now have become unconscious — and we can trust that we will regularly, methodically, and systematically will make those same errors again, and again, and again! This facet of our unconscious mind simply runs programs. And it does so exquisitely! So even here we need to operate with some caution and not over-trust this facet of the unconscious mind.
We can, and should, generally trust our conscious mind. Nathan Brandon (1969) describes this by using the term self-efficacy. By this term he refers to our power or ability to operate efficiently using our mind to input and process information. It is our central mechanism for coping and adapting to reality, the “ego” or reality-principle of Freud. Ego-strength thus describes our ability to face reality for what it is, to come to terms with it, and to develop effective adaptations to it.
What other alternative do we have? If we abdicate our right and responsibility to do our own thinking, and submit to another person (“Oh please, tell me what to think, to believe, to value, to do…!”), then we fail to take responsibility for our own brain. How then can we ever learn to “run our own brain?”
Of course, we have very fallible brains. So we should not over-trust our conscious mind or treat it as if it could operate in a flawless way. It does not; it cannot. It exists as a very fallible and vulnerable mechanism. And yet it exists as our primary survival and adaption mechanism.
On the other hand, we should beware of trusting our subconscious “mind,” our repressed “mind.” In fact, we especially should not trust that “mind!” Trusting our repressions and denials will not lead us anywhere useful at all. That “mind” and the so-called “wisdom” there will make life a living hell for us since it operates by toxic beliefs, erroneous mapping, and inappropriate thinking patterns.
Further, it seems unwise to “trust” any facet of mind absolutely and implicitly. No facet of mind exists or operates in an infallible or god-like way.
Which is “The Boss?”
Sometimes we hear in NLP circles that the “unconscious mind is the boss.” But given the fact that we refer to several different phenomena by the phrase, “the unconscious mind,” we now ask — which unconscious mind do we think functions as “the boss?” Continuing this meta-modeling process, we also ask,
“Boss” of what?
“Boss” in what way, under what conditions, with regard to what?
What is the boss of the autonomic processes?
What is the boss with regard to our memory banks?
What is the boss of attention, intention, content, and direction?
If Installed Unconsciously — How Re-access?
If a person picks up information unconsciously (i.e. apart from conscious awareness), then what process do we use (or offer to another person) in order to re-access the state in which we made those learnings?
Generally, we have to take into account state-dependency of learning anyway. But this becomes even more crucial when we use a special unconscious neuro-linguistic state. Given that all learning occurs in some neurological, mental-emotional “state,” that learnings function state-dependently, then contextif we want conscious access to it. To reclaim the learnings, or to even discover those learnings, we frequently have to get back to the state in which we made them. So learnings that “go in” which bypass the conscious mind will not be available automatically to the conscious mind. inevitably plays a crucial role in both encoding and recovering the learnings later. It does
Conclusion
What should we conclude from all this?
First, in exploring the phrase the unconscious mind (or the term the unconscious), we have discovered it multiordinality. This means it functions as a multiordinal term. Korzybski used these words to refer to words that we can use at many different levels of abstracting. Accordingly, it represents a very special case of nominalizations, ambiguous nominalizations that mean nothing specifically until we specify the level at which we use it (see Hall, 1998, The Secrets of Magic).
How do we use the term the unconscious mind? We use it to reference numerous subjective phenomena –
1) Habitually used information that has become unconscious
2) The autonomic nervous system that remains “out of conscious awareness.”
3) Subconscious Information — below the threshold level for consciousness.
4) The Forgotten Mind.
5) The Repressed Mind.
6) Meta-levels of Awareness
This should restrain us from vaguely using the concept of unconsciousness as a catch-all idea or as a god-substitute. It should motivate us to speak more specifically and precisely about what part of consciousness we have reference to. It should hold us back from over-trusting any facet of human consciousness. It should motivate us to provide trainings that provide a good holistic balance so that we train both the conscious and unconscious mind. This seems to be the more ecological choice.
References
Bandler, Richard and Grinder, John. (1979). Frogs into princes: Neuro-linguistic programming. UT: Real people press.
Branden, Nathaniel. (1969). The psychology of self-esteem: A new concept of man’s psychological nature. New York: Bantam.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Dilts, Robert B. (1983). Roots of neuro-linguistic programming. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.
Erickson, Milton, Rossi, Ernest; and Rossi, Sheila. (1976). Hypnotic realities. NY: Irvington Publishers.
Hall, L. Michael. (1995). Meta-states: Self-Reflexivity in human states of consciousness. Grand Jct. CO. E.T. Publications.
Hall, L. Michael . (1998). The secrets of magic: Communication excellence for the 21st. century. Carmarthen, Wales, UK: Anglo-American Book Co.
Miller, George (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity to process information. Psychological review: 63:81-97.
Penfield, Wilder. (1975). The mystery of the mind: A critical study of the consciousness and the human brain. Boston, MA: Princeton University Press.
“WHICH BOOK SHOULD I READ FIRST?”
If you’re clicking through these web pages and asking yourself which book should you read first, then here’s our recommendations:
1) MovieMind — NLP without the Jargon. (click here visit book page)
This book will introduce you to the wild and wonderful and magical fields of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. If you want a book without the jargon of NLP, this is it. Discover that “thinking” is ultimately the creation of sensory representations that make up the movies that we play in the cinema of our mind. Discover also how that by directing those movies you can access the very best and most resourceful states.
2) Secrets of Personal Mastery — Discover your higher level states. (click here visit book page)
Next is this easy to read book on using Meta-States to handle not only the movies of your mind but all of the frames that you have “in the back of your mind” about your movies. This takes NLP to the next level and to a higher level as it presents the basic patterns that we use in the “Accessing Personal Genius” trainings (APG).
3) Winning the Inner Game — For Persuasion Elegance with yourself and others. (click here visit book page)
This book translates the Meta-States Model into everyday language—into the language of frames (as in “frame of reference,” frame of mind, the frameworks of your personality) and games. When you think of all of our actions and interactions as “games”—the games you play at work, home, with your health, in exercise, in eating, in creating wealth, etc. then its obvious that somewhere in your mind there are Rules for those Games—your frames. Change those frames, and the game changes. Invent new frames and new games are possible.
From there — we have themes in the books:
1) NLP Books — books about the NLP model. User’s Manual of the Brain, Volumes I and II present the Practitioner and Master Practitioner courses.
2) Meta-State Books — books about the Meta-States model, a meta-level model about self-reflexive consciousness and a model that unites all of the meta-models of NLP, thereby explaining the “magic.”
3) Self-Actualization Books — books about the psychology of Coaching and about the psychology that launched NLP originally as it grew out of the Human Potential Movement and Neuro-Semantics.
4) Coaching Books — books about the practice of Coaching, about Meta-Coaching, a completely systematic approach to this new emerging field.
5) Application books — books that apply NLP and Meta-States to health and fitness, leadership, relationships, emotional intelligence, mastery, etc.
Glossary Of Terms
Accessing Cues: How we use our physiology and neurology by breathing, posture, gesture, and eye movements to access certain states and ways of thinking. These are observable by others.
As-If Frame: To “pretend.” To presuppose some situation is the case and then act upon it as if it is true. This encourages creative problem-solving by mentally going beyond apparent obstacles to desired solutions.
Analogue: An analogue submodality varies continuously from light to dark; while a digital submodality operates as either off or on, i.e. we see a picture in either an associated or dissociated way.
Analogue Marking: Using voice tone, facial expressions, gestures, or a touch to emphasize certain words non-verbally as you are talking to someone. The marked out words give an additional message.
Anchoring: The process by which any stimulus or representation (external or internal) gets connected to and so triggers a response. Anchors occur naturally and in all representational systems. They can be used intentionally, as in analogue marking or with numerous change techniques, such as Collapse Anchors. The NLP concept of anchoring derives from the Pavlovian stimulus-response reaction, classical conditioning. In Pavlov’s study the tuning fork became the stimulus (anchor) that cued the dog to salivate.
Association: Association contrasts with dissociation. In dissociation, you see yourself “over there.” Generally, dissociation removes emotion from the experience. When we are associated we experience all the information directly and therefore emotionally.
Auditory: The sense of hearing, one of the basic representational systems.
Behavior: Any activity that we engage in, from gross motor activity to thinking.
Beliefs: The generalizations we have made about causality, meaning, self, others, behaviors, identity, etc. Our beliefs are what we take as being “true” at any moment. Beliefs guide us guide us in perceiving and interpreting reality. Beliefs relate closely to values. NLP has several belief change patterns.
Calibration: Becoming tuned-in to another’s state and internal sensory processing operations by reading previously observed noticed nonverbal signals.
Chunking: Changing perception by going up or down levels and/or logical levels. Chunking up refers to going up a level (inducing up, induction). It leads to higher abstractions. Chunking down refers to going a level (deducing, deduction). It leads to more specific examples or cases.
Complex Equivalence: A linguistic distortion pattern where you make meaning of someone else’s behavior from the observable clues, without having direct corroborating evidence from the other person.
Congruence: A state wherein one’s internal representation works in an aligned way. What a person says corresponds with what they do. Both their non-verbal signals and their verbal statements match. A state of unity, fitness, internal harmony, not conflict.
Conscious: Present moment awareness. Awareness of seven ( two chunks of information.
Content: The specifics and details of an event, answers what? And why? Contrasts with process or structure.
Context: The setting, frame or process in which events occur and provide meaning for content.
Cues: Information that provides clues to another’s subjective structures, i.e. eye accessing cues, predicates, breathing, body posture, gestures, voice tone and tonality, etc.
Deletion: The missing portion of an experience either linguistically or representationally.
Digital: Varying between two states, a polarity. For example, a light switch is either on or off. Auditory digital refers to thinking, processing, and communicating using words, rather than in the five senses.
Dissociation: Not “in” an experience, but seeing or hearing it from outside as from a spectator’s point of view, in contrast to association.
Distortion: The modeling process by which we inaccurately represent something in our neurology or linguistics, can occur to create limitations or resources. The process by which we represent the external reality in terms of our neurology. Distortion occurs when we use language to describe, generalize, and theorize about our experience.
Downtime: Not in sensory awareness, but “down” inside one’s own mind seeing, hearing, and feeling thoughts, memories, awarenesses, a light trance state with attention focused inward.
Ecology: Concern for the overall relationships within the self, and between the self and the larger environment or system. Internal ecology: the overall relationship between a person and their thoughts, strategies, behaviors, capabilities, values and beliefs. The dynamic balance of elements in a system.
Elicitation: Evoking a state by word, behavior, gesture or any stimuli. Gathering information by direct observation of non-verbal signals or by asking meta-model questions.
Empowerment: Process of adding vitality, energy, and new powerful resources to a person; vitality at the neurological level, change of habits.
Eye Accessing Cues: Movements of the eyes in certain directions indicating visual, auditory or kinesthetic thinking (processing).
Epistemology: The theory of knowledge, how we know what we know.
First Position: Perceiving the world from your own point of view, associated, one of the three perceptual positions.
Frame: Context, environment, meta-level, a way of perceiving something (as in Outcome Frame, “As If” Frame, Backtrack Frame, etc).
Future Pace: Process of mentally practicing (rehearsing) an event before it happens. One of the key processes for ensuring the permanency of an outcome, a frequent and key ingredient in most NLP interventions.
Generalization: Process by which one specific experience comes to represent a whole class of experiences, one of the three modeling processes in NLP.
Gestalt: A collection of memories connected neurologically based on similar emotions.
Hard Wired: Neurologically based factor, the neural connectors primarily formed during gestation, similar to the hard wiring of a computer.
Incongruence: A state of being “at odds” with oneself, having “parts” in conflict with each other. Evidenced by having reservations, being not totally committed to an outcome, expressing incongruent messages where there is a lack of alignment or matching between verbal and non-verbal parts of the communication.
Installation: Process for putting a new mental strategy (way of doing things) inside mind-body so it operates automatically, often achieved through anchoring, leverage, metaphors, parables, reframing, future pacing, etc.
Internal Representations: Meaningful patterns of information we create and store in our minds, combinations of sights, sounds, sensations, smells and tastes.
In Time: Having a time line that passes through your body: where the past is behind you and the future in front, and ‘now’ is inside your body.
Kinesthetic: Sensations, feelings, tactile sensations on surface of skin, proprioceptive sensations inside the body, includes vestibular system or sense of balance.
Leading: Changing your own behaviors after obtaining rapport so another follows. Being able to lead is a test for having good rapport.
Logical Level: A higher level, a level about a lower level, a meta-level that informs and modulates the lower level.
Loops: A circle, cycle, story, metaphor or representation that goes back to its own beginning, so that it loops back (feeds back) onto itself. An open loop: a story left unfinished. A closed loop: finishing a story. In strategies: loop refers to getting hung up in a set of procedures that have no way out, the strategy fails to exit.
Map of Reality: Model of the world, a unique representation of the world built in each person’s brain by abstracting from experiences, comprised of a neurological and a linguistic map, one’s internal representations (IR). (see Model of the World)
Matching: Adopting characteristics of another person’s outputs (behavior, words, etc.) to enhance rapport.
Meta: Above, beyond, about, at a higher level, a logical level higher.
Meta-levels: Refer to those abstract levels of consciousness we experience internally.
Meta-Model: A model with a number of linguistic distinctions that identifies language patterns that obscure meaning in a communication through distortion, deletion and generalization. It includes specific challenges or questions by which the “ill-formed” language is reconnected to sensory experience and the deep structure. These meta-model challenges bring a person out of trance. Developed in 1975 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.
Meta-Programs: The mental/perceptual programs for sorting and paying attention to stimuli, perceptual filters that govern attention, sometimes “neuro-sorts,” or meta-processes.
Meta-States: A state about a state, bringing a state of mind-body (fear, anger, joy, learning) to bear upon another state from a higher logical level, generates a gestalt state–a meta-state, developed by Michael Hall.
Mismatching: Offering different patterns of behavior to another, breaking rapport for the purpose of redirecting, interrupting, or terminating a meeting or conversation.
Modal Operators: Linguistic distinctions in the Meta-Model that indicate the “mode” by which a person “operates”: the mode of necessity, possibility, desire, obligation, etc. The predicates (can, can’t, possible, impossible, have to, must, etc) that we utilize for motivation.
Model: A description of how something works, a generalized, deleted or distorted copy of the original; a paradigm.
Modeling: The process of observing and replicating the successful actions and behaviors of others; the process of discerning the sequence of IR and behaviors that enable someone to accomplish a task.
Model of the World: A map of reality, a unique representation of the world which we generalize for our experiences. The total of one person’s operating principles.
Multiple Description: The process of describing the same thing from different perceptual positions.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming: The study of excellence. A model of how people structure their experience; the structures of subjective experience; how the person programs their thinking-emoting and behaving in their neurology, mediated by the language and coding they use to process, store and retrieve information.
Neuro-Semantics: A model of meaning or evaluation utilizing the Meta-states model for articulating and working with higher levels of states and the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model for detailing human processing and experiencing, a model that presents a fuller and richer model offering a way of thinking about and working with the way our nervous system (neurology) and (linguistics) create meaning (semantics).
Nominalization: A linguistic distinction in the Meta-Model, a hypnotic pattern of trance language, a process or verb turned into an (abstract) noun, a process frozen in time.
Outcome: A specific, sensory-based desired result. A well-formed outcome that meets the well-formedness criteria.
Pacing: Gaining and maintaining rapport with another by joining their model of the world by matching their language, beliefs, values, current experience, etc., crucial to rapport building.
Parts: As in “a part of your mind” that generates other frames of reference, these include belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, etc. When we ask, “Does any part of you object to this new way of thinking, feeling, or responding?” we are searching for “internal conflicts” within the facets of our personality and do so to create more alignment and personal congruence. In speaking about “parts,” we speak metaphorically and not literally. The term “parts” functions hypnotically as a “selectional restriction violation” which in essence means we give life to an object that doesn’t have life, as in “the walls speak.” With the term “parts” we are referring to a certain neurology speaking as if it has a “mind” of its own separate from the rest of the nervous system which it does not.
Parts: A metaphor for describing responsibility for our behavior to various aspects of our psyche. These may be seen as sub-personalities that have functions that take on a “life of their own”; when they have different intentions we may experience intra-personal conflict and a sense of incongruity.
Perceptual Filters: Unique ideas, experiences, beliefs, values, meta-programs, decisions, memories and language that shape and influence our model of the world.
Perceptual Position: Our point of view; one of three mental positions: first position-associated in self; second position-from another person’s perspective; Third position-from a position outside the people involved.
Physiological: The physical part of the person.
Predicates: What we assert or predicate about a subject, sensory based words indicating a particular RS (visual predicates, auditory, kinesthetic, unspecified).
Preferred System: The RS that an individual typically uses most in thinking and organizing experience.
Presuppositions: Ideas or assumptions that we take for granted for a communication to make sense.
Primary levels: Refer to our experience of the outside world primarily through our senses.
Primary states: Describe those states of consciousness from our primary level experiences of the outside world.
Rapport: A sense of connection with another, a feeling of mutuality, a sense of trust, created by pacing, mirroring and matching, a state of empathy or second position.
Reframing: Changing the context or frame of reference of an experience so that it has a different meaning.
Representation: An idea, thought, presentation of sensory-based or evaluative based information.
Representational System (RS): How we mentally code information using the sensory systems: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, and Gustatory.
Requisite Variety: Flexibility in thinking, emoting, speaking, behaving; the person with the most flexibility of behavior controls the action; the Law of Requisite Variety.
Resources: Any means we can bring to bear to achieve an outcome: physiology, states, thoughts, strategies, experiences, people, events or possessions.
Resourceful State: The total neurological and physical experience when a person feels resourceful.
Satir Categories: The five body postures and language styles indicating specific ways of communicating: leveler, blamer, placater, computer and distracter, described by Virginia Satir.
Second Position: Point of view; having an awareness of the other person’s sense of reality.
Sensory Acuity: Awareness of the outside world, of the senses, making finer distinctions about the sensory information we get from the world.
Sensory-Based Description: Information directly observable and verifiable by the senses, see-hear-feel language that we can test empirically, in contrast to evaluative descriptions.
State: Holistic phenomenon of mind-body-emotions, mood, emotional condition; the sum total of all neurological and physical processes within an individual at any moment in time.
Strategy: A sequencing of thinking-behaving to obtain an outcome or create an experience, the structure of subjectivity ordered in a linear model of the TOTE.
Submodality: The distinctions we make within each rep system, the qualities of our internal representations.
Synesthesia: A “feeling together” of sensory experience in two or more modalities, an automatic connection of one rep system with another. For example, a V-K synesthesia may involve perceiving words or sounds as colored.
Third Position: Perceiving the world from viewpoint of an observer; you see both yourself and other people.
Time-line: A metaphor for how we store our sights, sounds and sensations of memories and imagination; a way of coding and processing the construct “time.”
Through Time: Having a time line where both past, present and future are in front of you. For example, time is represented spatially as with a year planner.
Unconscious: Everything that is not in conscious awareness in the present moment.
Universal Quantifiers: A generalization from a sample to the whole population – “allness” (every, all, never, none, etc). A statement that allows for no exceptions.
Unspecified Nouns: Nouns that do not specify to whom or to what they refer.
Unspecified Verbs: Verbs that do not describe the specifics of the action¾how they are being performed; the adverb has been deleted. Uptime: State where attention and senses directed outward to immediate environment, all sensory channels open and alert.
Value: What is important to you in a particular context. Your values (criteria) are what motivate you in life. All motivation strategies have a kinesthetic component. This kinesthetic is an unconscious value
Visual: Seeing, imagining, the rep system of sight.
Visualization: The process of seeing images in your mind.
Well-Formedness Condition: The criteria that enable us to specify an outcome in ways that make it achievable and verifiable. A well-formed outcome is a powerful tool for negotiating win/win solutions.