NLP Training, Techniques & Products for learning NLP

Ever wonder how some people who have gone through real hardships can be happy, while other people who have had a relatively even ride through life can define their life in negative terms and feel it has been full of unhappiness?. In this video renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. Kahneman is famous for co-inventing behavioral economics, the study of human irrationality as it applies to economics and how we make decisions.

As NLPers it has lots of useful insights for us as to how anyone can experience ongoing happiness. Go watch it below - whether you are a coach, therapist or unofficial people helper this video will give you many ideas on how to help yourself and your clients experience more happiness right now.

Making it practical:

So Daniel covered a lot in his presentation - couple of the high points of note were:

"We don't choose between experiences but between memories (and anticipated memories) experiences"

Next time you find yourself feeling an emotion that you describe as unpleasant, especially if you have wanted to shift it but are struggling remember that chances are you won't remember it most likely a few hours or days from now. So let is move through you and fizzle into the abyss.

As Marcus Aurelius Augustus, a former Roman Emperor put it:

"Reflect on the rapidity with which all that exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and its activities are ever changing, and its causes infinite in their variations, and hardly anything at all stands still: and ever on our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future, in which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who, in the midst of all this, is puffed up with pride, or tormented, or bewails his lot as though his trouble would endure for a great while?"

A great saying and a great example of elegant language usage. Fact is .. whether we are dealing with ourselves or with a client, all we have is the current experienced moment - which Kahneman defines as 3 seconds or so long, with everything else that is going on being a choice we make between memories (which the brain "makes up" and re-presents to us) or anticipated memories.

This brings home another important point - whether you are happy when you think back about your life, the last year or even last month has a lot to do with what and how you are comparing stuff. If you want to help yourself or a client feel better about their life .. then help practice changing 1) what you are comparing yourself, your life to and 2) how you are running that comparison at a representational level.

Become like your very own Michelangelo of your mind. Paint the stuff you would like to feel better about with richer and more intense colors making it truly compelling and satisfying and the stuff you had been comparing yourself to as that of a scene of a non important, nondescript event. The exact coding of this will vary for person to person, so figure out what works well for you. (And if you don't know how to do this, feel free to leave a question below and I'm happy to give you some suggestions.)

"Being happy in your life and being happy about your life, are two very different concepts…"

As NLPers this points first and foremost to our awareness of the affect of language… and being conscious of what presuppositions you are using in your speech when you are communicating with someone. Asking someone "are you happy in your life?" vs. "do you feel happy right now?", vs. "are you happy about your life?" - are all very different questions. Knowing what the likely effect you will create when you ask a question is very important - especially since every question you ask anyone will have the function of directing their consciousness in one way or another and evoke all kinds of associations and with them states.

Kahneman statement also points us to notice how we are accessing our sense of "happiness". Wellbeing and happiness are two different concepts. And if you feel unhappy about something, go in search of some other references you can draw on. Intentionally direct your consciousness.

This process helps illuminate beneath the surface of the statement - "In life, (some) pain is necessary but suffering is optional". As strange as that may sound, even in apparent hardship you can have moment by moment happiness.

Three things influence how the Remembering Self remembers: changes, significant moments and endings

We can think of these things are the markers the "remembering self" uses to track and index what we remember of the millions of moments that we have in a decade.

Embedded in all of that I think there are a couple of other filters that drive what gets remembered - such as first and foremost does the said change affect you? In order to define something as a significant moment, someone had to first label it as "significant" relative to some comparison (perhaps the other events in ones life). As story tellers, anytime we can tell a story that the listener can directly relate to  or see themselves in it, the effect of that story will be much greater than if a person has no connection to it (conscious or otherwise).

The third marker, endings, influence how the Remembering self remembers. This also plays an important role in many contexts from persuasion to creating change to leaving a lasting impression etc. If you want someone else to remember you or some key learning point, then make sure that you do something that is

1) a noticeable change in the status quo that captures the other person's attention

2) significantly changes their state or a long held view on something (ideally for the positive - if you want them to have a positive association to you)

3) had some form of specific instruction or frame of reference included in it that you would like the person to take on board

4) is linked to some form of environmental trigger that you know the person will see/be in the presence of at a later point (so that it triggers them to re-call back or remember that situation with you and everything that went with it)

Learning NLP has always been focused in the doing rather that the theory so have fun applying whatever resonates most for you from this post. If you put into practice the one habit of connecting more consciously with the "experieicnign self" and being more aware and intentional about what gets called back on by the "remembered self" you can literally transcend hardship and experience much greater happiness and moment by moment joy.

Wishing you much happiness in all you do.

The Internet is an awesome resource, but if you think of it as millions of ongoing conversations, happening all at the same time, then it is easy for ‘Chinese whispers’ and misinformation to spread around.

Take for example the other day I was on Yahoo Answers and came across two articles talking about body language and read the following statements:

Tyra:

"Whenever a man messes with his belt buckle he wants to have sex and whenever someone you have sexual tension with bite their lower lip they wanna kiss you"

Or Tueur: "This is how to detect someone lie." followed by some commentary about using traditional eye accessing ques information.

or

RM: "when a person talks fast, it means they have a confidence issue"

Do you think these are ‘true’?

To be fair, even highly trained NLPers will talk about someone being a "visual person" or he is a totally "kinesthetic person" etc, an not be aware of the generalization they are making.

In most cases, where we have ‘X behaviour only and must mean that’ kind of statement we have nothing more than a form of projection going on, which becomes a filter we now sort all future similar actions through.

Test it for yourself.

If you are someone who speaks fast, did you know that you MUST suffer from a confidence issue?, or that you MUST be nervous?

Why? Because so and so says so and it must be real because it is on the Internet.

Gentleman, did you know that ALL women think you want to have sex when you touch your belt buckle. Best be VERY careful around the office, especially when you pop out from the bathroom …

Ladies did you know that anytime a man looks up and to the right he MUST be lying. Or that if he uses words like see, clear, quick he is ONLY a visual person.

Of course, I've been deliberately amplifying the implications proposed by each of the above worldviews. Making such broad generalizations with no other conditions or contextual information is usually wildly inaccurate. Yet that doesn't stop people from thinking that it is so .. and therefore the inferred conclusion is there can only be ONE meaning to any given expression is unfortunately widespread.

But making statements about body language, without any contextual indicators of substance to support why X must mean Y isn’t so much the problem as the implications of such conclusions. When you think the ONLY conclusion for X behaviour is it means Y, then without realizing you take on that presumed bit of projection/information as a fact and then act as if it were most certainly the case. And that can get you in to all kinds of hot water.

A girl smiles at a boy in the office and he thinks, “she MUST like me”. A wife sees that her husband gets a text, which upon opening she notices he smiles, giggles but he won’t show it to her and says it’s a work thing, so she instantly worries he is cheating on her.

A boss asks you into the office for an 8:30AM meeting unexpectedly and you instantly think “I’m going to get fired!” and you then you can’t sleep that night. Mis-reading social ques, body language and other people’s behaviour can land one in all kinds of problems.

But it can be reduced when you understand a couple of key things.

Making It Practical:

If you want to be good with body language, or if you'd like to be able to detect and notice emotions as they are happening, to be able to read state changes easily then the first step is to spend some time taking the wool from ones eyes by asking yourself "how do I know X body gesture means such and such?" … "Am I projecting here?" .. "What else in terms of behavior, if it was present would invalidate my assumption about what I thought was going on?"

Challenge yourself and your worldviews on a regular basis. Sometimes your gut instinct will be right yet other times it will be clouded by misperceptions and specific ways you are filtering the world (most of which without challenging you will be never aware of).

If you ask yourself these three questions you will become far better at staying awake from the cultural mass hypnosis about what specific body language means. You will be much sharper at noticing what is really going and detecting behavioral patterns in others, which can be very useful to a skilled communicator, but that is for another post.

Remember in NLP we hold the perspective that people communicate in multiple channels at once .. so you will have lots of other indicators that indicate state change and what is really going on … such as change in skin colour, voice tone, inflection, body posture etc. Stay alert, challenge your own assumptions and be wary when you see only ONE way of interpreting what is going on, without first challenging your thought processes.

And if your curious to learn more and would like to accelerate your ability to track and notice sensory differences and really get a grip on body language, then check out our new 90 minute training called 'Enhanced Sensory Acuity' here.

Got a question or comment?

Enter it below and when I can I'll answer it.

If the technology of NLP is known for one thing, it is known for being able to create change for people quickly.

And we have many ways of creating change quickly, as indeed several other fields do .. but one of the coolest things about NLP is when your very skilled with it you can do it conversationally. You don't need to stop and tap someone on the head (although that is both fun and can be cool too!), rather you can simply have a conversation and change minds … with only your words …. and the more you do it the more addictive it can become that you naturally find yourself helping others overthrow self-imposed limitations, disabling beliefs and just crazy stuff that is sucking joy and happiness out of their life.

But what is the key to creating change?

Rather than focus on a specific technique lets focus on three behaviours.

These are

- Being Tenacious
- Being Attentive
- Being Adaptable

All three are a must.

If you treat people as "broken" or as a "machine" then in my experience you have already put yourself in a poor position because you are looking for what is "not working" rather than focusing on what is .. and more important how X behavior is the right thing, the only thing that should show up given the unique patterns of thought, feeling and behavior is driving the result you have the client describing.

If you project stuff onto the person you are trying to help without being aware that you are doing it .. you might just be screwing yourself over. For example a client comes to you telling you of fear and you instantly think "technique and phobia removal pattern" you will find many times when it just work … and you will also have hamstrung yourself … because you are most likely MISSING what is exactly going on. Not all fears are phobias and not all behaviors can be changed with canned NLP techniques and box 1, box 2, box 3 NLP patterns. (And for the record this doesn't at all mean that the patterns don't work, rather not all patterns work for everything or everyone)

One of the questions I asked Richard Bandler when I did the MTM interview series was "What are some of the habitual questions you have asked … throughout the years that allowed you to be the genius that you are to have created so many innovative technologies?" to which he replied":

"A big question that I ask all the time is what the f*** is going on? "

And that really is an AWESOME question to ask yourself any time you are trying to help someone.

Richard went on to say "The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival it’s to make things familiar."

So when something happens all of us try to filter what we see through the experience of WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW (if you let it) .. and sometimes that can screw things right up. You label something as X when really it is not. In a social situation perhaps you think that look means he/she is annoyed in you, interested in you .. in a work context you think that the lack of feedback means your going to get fired etc etc .. and soon the habitual mental processes of your mind start spinning in high gear.

The best service you can do for yourself and the people you are trying to assist is first start from a place of not knowing .. of asking yourself "What the f*** is going on?" and then stay in uptime and notice what is present, what does show up. If you want to spot a pattern don't chunk down, chunk upward and out .. and notice what is the thing that is driving this behavior-thought-feeling and identify where exactly is the leverage point that you can tap to create a big change for that person.

Tenacity … is the third thing you will want to have in spades … if something shows up and you have never seen this type of thing before .. or don't have a clue how to create a change .. that's when you should be playful … stick with it and drive forward doing whatever it takes to get to results. And most importantly … if you are one of the people who hear a voice inside your head that claims "I can't do this" … " I don't know how to" .. tell that voice to shut the heck up! Yes, it may be right, yes you might not be able to get the person all the ways to the desired result but the fact is you aren't going to become any more skilled and certainly not going to help the person IF you accept some idle natter inside your head before you start.

Making It Practical:

Information and theories are nice but results are better. So today when you are around friends and family notice as new stuff happens and ask yourself that question "what the f*** is happening?" and notice at a sensory level what you can detect .. what you see, hear and externally feel and then notice the narratives and stories yourself and other put on the stuff that has arisen .. is that really what is going on or is it something yourself or someone else has now projected onto a situation?

When your working with a client or trying to help a friend again, ask yourself "what the f*** is happening?" and look to track the patterns that are present .. that one could point to and then once you have figured out what is really the structure that is driving the so called "problematic" behavior be tenacious, attentive and adaptable as you help transform that behavior.

As always if you have a question or comment feel free to post it below. Also if you are someone who has a negative semantic response to using or saying the work f*** then change it to heck or something that works for you.

To your increasing mastery.

Tom.

While getting good with NLP involves learning many skills, there is one communication skill you must master. It is called "Response Attentiveness" …

Its something that every good story teller, hypnotist, trainer and communicator can do with ease. Can you? Before I get into that, answer me a question, what time is it there where you are?

Response attentiveness means you get a response when you ask for someones attention. The two questions above, and the second being a specific "do something" action are both examples of asking and hopefully getting for your attention. Did you answer "yes" to my first question or go "don't know, you haven't told me yet what response attentiveness is!" and did you check the clock on your computer, watch or phone or find yourself wondering .. "why is Tom asking me this?".

You see when you are asking and getting someone's attention, when you do it intentionally and with a more useful purpose than than the basic example above, you get to effect what a person will experience and feel. And if you want to be a great story teller, change agent, coach or hypnotist then getting and keeping peoples attention and having them follow your suggestion/invitations/instructions is essential.

Think about it ..

Having your listener follow along and DO what you are asking of them is important to doing effective change, coaching, hypnosis and persuasion work. Yet this is something I've noted many NLPers seem to rush through in the process of "applying a technique". There is no point starting your conversation, doing a "deepener", running someone through a fast phobia technique or decision destroyer IF you don't have their attention and if they are not doing what you are asking of them. So if you find you are telling a narrative or giving an instruction but the person is not following along then DON'T proceed and just continue on, STOP, loop back and get their attention. Do whatever you need to, to have them sync up with your request.

Have you ever heard a trainer at start of a talk ask the audience "how many people here are x?" and if they get little response they will rebuke the audience and say "People, this is yes …  (head nodding up and down) .. and this is no (head moving side to side) .. so let's try that again, how many people here are X?", and then the audience responds actively. That is an example of response attentiveness at work.

Many times something which you think "didn't work", was as a result of you not having your listener's attention rather than the NLP technique etc was ineffective. You can do as many fast phobia routines as you want or have someone change the way they look at a specific memory but if they fail to follow along and do what you say as you guide them through it then it can easily appear that it "didn't work."

So what do you do? Simply test and find out if they have been following along ..

Check this out for yourself. Next time you don't get the result you expected for some use of the technology .. test to see if the person you were relating/working with was following along or were you racing several steps beyond where they were? And so they never went through the change/instruction process with you?

Making it Practical:

Theory is nice, but as Yoga Bear said the difference between theory and practice is in theory there is no difference but in practice there is!

So let's take this simple concept and go apply it in the real world.

First, if you don't know if you are able to get and hold people's attention at will then you need to start tracking that. Pay attention next time BEFORE you speak if you have the person's attention. How do you know? Well you can observe a behavioral indicator that tells you "you have my attention". That could be the person is looking directly at you, head slightly forward or tilted to one side etc .. eyebrows elevated etc saying "your turn" or "I'm listening" …

For example I was at a wedding recently and when the groom got up to deliver his speech and 120 people continued to talk over him as if he wasn't there! It was the first time at a wedding I'd ever seen anything like that happen. Here was the groom, giving the "speech of his life" and half the audience were talking right over him!

Afterward he was confused as to how that happened and assumed that "the audience must of been bored of hearing speeches" But the real answer was because he started talking before he got their attention. You have to have people's attention first before you start having them follow a story, do an action etc.

Another speaker got up, who did know how to pick up the audiences attention and before he started talking he non verbally picked up the attention of the audience by simply stopping at the podium, while everyone was still talking, extended his energy out and quickly picked up the attention of the entire room by moving his eyes over each table, until a noisy post wedding dinner room came to a complete silence …. and THEN he began to talk.

If you already good at gathering people's attention then practice holding that attention for 1, 2, 5, 30 minutes and see if how well you can have others engrossed and actively following what you are saying and have them demonstrate via different responses that you have their complete attention. You can do this by asking them a question, pausing mid sentence and have them do a forced mind reading (where they finish your sentence for you) or watch their eye accessing ques as you have them follow you through a story that has them access different sensory systems. Be creative. And have fun.

The more ways you have of gathering someone's attention and then keeping it the more powerful a communicator you will become.

PS: Got a question about NLP, a comment or suggestion about a blog topic, simply leave a comment below and I'll do my best to answer it.

Did you know there is a little known but powerful framework that you can use with the Meta Model that can transform the results you can achieve with the technology of NLP?

It's called the Framing Tool and in this post I want to give you a brief overview about this very powerful framework for thinking that takes what you may already know about the Meta Model and gives you the ultimate "Swiss Army Knife" of thinking tools to use in your business and life. The Framing Tool is a fantastic tool to have in your toolset and was developed by Master Trainer Michael Breen.

Let's look at an example of it in action …

The other week I got a phone call from a very successful consultancy company asking me to help them figure out a viable solution to a complex resourcing problem that a large multinational company was having in the city of London. They hadn't won the business yet, they simply were after getting an invite to tender and help them solve the problem, after spending sixty minutes doing a meet an greet about the problem with the client.

I love these kind of challenges, because they require one to demonstrate really good thinking skills and bridge any doubt and trust question that a new client who has never before worked with you, naturally has.

Getting To The Real Frame Of Reference

So I spent ten minutes on the phone talking with the founding consultant of the firm to get his frame of reference on the problem. And at first I wasn't interested in the sensory details of the problem like most of us have been taught the Meta Model … to drill down so if a person says "My girlfriend is angry at me", you say "angry how specifically?" or "angry compared to what?", "who says she is angry?" etc etc. This is what I call "getting a person to describe the water, when they are, more often than not, already drowning!" .. No first I needed to get clear on whether the issue in focus was …

- The right issue
- A solvable one
- Would meet the clients requirements

Getting to grips with the stated and real frame of reference is key to doing effective change, influence, thinking work.

The frame of reference guides and directs a person thinking about a given topic and is the end result, the conclusion, that they will have made (typically  unconsciously) after completing a series of thinking processes.

You see when any of us make a statement or utterance is it the output of a long line of internal processes, the communicator will have had to leave out a vast array of information about the event/experience/topic under discussion.

As any given event occurs, our brains  will  be  going  through  a  series  of  unconscious  processes.  These  include identifying,  labeling,  categorizing,  and  establishing  new  cause  and  effect  relationships  and  meanings,  as  events  occur,  based  on  previous  references  and  conclusions already established. The end result is what we call the surface structure statement. This  statement is a conclusion that the client has reached, as a result of a complex  neurological process.

So the first thing I asked inside my head is "What must be true in order for the lead consultants statement to be the right thing to say?."

This question is at the core of correctly identifying the frame of reference that a client has. Asking this question along with using the Meta Model challenges of presuppositions, mind-reading and cause-effect with the lead consultant on his own thinking, quickly flushed out that he wasn't sure if indeed he had correctly identified the true scope and nature of the clients problem.

But now we had an issue .. the follow up meeting was fast approaching AND he couldn't go back to the client and qualify if indeed they had really identified the clients real problem.

And this is where the framing tool came in so handy ….

In fact all of the steps outlined above were based on using the framing tool. There is a whole series of questions and understandings that the framework has about how thinking works that makes it so powerful.

But before I digress, let's return to the "problem"..

Calculating The Clients Reality

What were we to do … we knew after spending ten minutes or so talking that in fact we only had probably about 25 to 35% of the end clients actual problem but we couldn't go back and get more. So I meet up with the consultancy bid team and lead them through a process of calculating the missing pieces …

Side Comment:

You may not know this but the famous NLP Volume 1 book was actually called "NLP Volume 1, the study of the structure of subjective experience AND what can be calculated from it" … this last bit is missed off the officially released title but it a key area of NLP .. being able to calculate certain things from only a limited set of inputs … and this is what the Framing tool can help you do.

You see Michael's Framing tool focuses on two key aspects of human thinking .. causal modeling … and the process of abstraction and instantiation.

Casual Modeling refers to the process of how we establish a link between one or  more  events,  objects  or  circumstances,  which  suggests  that  one  of  the  events,  objects  or  circumstances  is  produced,  generated  or  created  by  another  of  the  event(s).  In  essence  causal  modeling  describes  how  cause  and  effect  reasoning  underpins our experience of reality. Causal modeling teaches us how we bind our  experiences together.

By working through what has to be there, what could be there, what consequences and benefits etc must exist etc as a result of the causes we were able to quickly identify not just what the immediate "scenario" for the client was today but what the causal chain of consequences would look like if left unchecked and the significant benefits that they would enjoy by making certain adjustments.

In fact, by going through this simple but powerful process, I was able to help the bid team identify several hundred thousand pounds of "invisible" but real costs and negative consequences that allowed them to build a powerful business case for implementing a solution we proposed to the client.

We used the same powerful combination of the Framing Tool and Meta Model to create the slide deck, pitch at the presentation which lead the client to say take on board enthusiastically our definition of the real problem and solution to resolve it. Any anyone skilled with these two models can do the same thing in whatever context they want.

The Value Of The Framing Tool:

The Framing Tool, combined with the Meta Model allows you to rapidly get inside your clients model of the world and gives you the keys to being able to create transformative experiences for yourself and others.

You don't have to figure out "which technique" you need to work or try a million different questions to get to result. In fact using these two models for problem solving is just one application. It is just as versatile in any endeavor from persuading your boss for a rise to creating change.

If you are interested in learning more, Michael and I cover this and the many related deep, real world, NLP skills and topics in a lot more detail inside the Platinum Audio News Club. You can sign up for a complete risk free, free trial here today and enjoy $200 of exclusive NLP Times products on us, in the member's area.

Simply click here to find out more.

Making It Practical:

Getting highly skilled with the Meta Model and Framing Tool is covered in depth in the Platinum Audio News Club but if you want to put what you learned here into action right now then start by listening to your friends family and clients and asking yourself these two simple but very powerful questions:

1. What must be so in order for "X thing" to be the RIGHT and only thing to say?
2. What will be/could be consequences or benefits of this statement be?

X thing = the central issue or statement under focus

Keep doing this over and over .. and quickly you will be able to predict things about them and the way their are holding their problem that seem "magical" and then able to use whatever Meta Model challenge that will have the largest impact on the presenting issue.

For those who are more advanced, use the above two questions and loop iteratively forward and backwards .. meaning if the person says "I hate men/women!" you will anticipate the precedents and influences several steps in to the past and the consequences/benefits of such a statement several steps into the future.

Quick quiz for you ..

How many of the ten statements below are true?

The unconscious mind is real

The purpose of the Meta Model is to elicit deep structure and drill down to get to answers

*    The unconscious mind is real
*    The purpose of the Meta Model is to elicit deep structure and drill down to get to answers
*    Anchoring is really just stimulus response conditioning
*    Strategies are real and are how people process experiences and act in the world
*    Meta States are real
*    Modeling is all about replicating human behaviour
*    With NLP, you can fix anyone once you know the right technique to use
*    Human beings have many parts to them .. that is why they have conflicts
*    The field of NLP hasn't changed much in the past 30 years
*    NLP is a science

Ten, nine, seven? What did you guess?

Actually the answer is 0.

That's right zero.

You see all of the above are long standing myths or errors in their presentation but that sound real. In fact most people still teach them as real.

These and many others, are the kind of myths that cause no end of confusion around getting really good with NLP. They did for me. In fact, possibly like you, I've consumed tens of thousands of pages from many NLP authors that said as such.

And what do you think happens when you treat something as REAL?

Well for most of us … it usually means we CAN'T see it another way. Our mental filters become fixed, stuck and unless something comes along and jars it you are not likely to ever notice it as any different. And something worse happens .. you also adopt the limitations of that worldview. And you also, as so many others have done, install in others the same limitation!

So for example by thinking that you only use the Meta Model to drill down to get more sensory specific answers you don't realise that you can use it as an elegant tool for persuasion and installation…

When you adopt the worldview, you take both sides of it .. the limitations and the benefits. And sometimes the limitations can keep you stuck or be less effective with it as you might otherwise be.

I know some members reading this might think that this is heresy.

But before anyone starts flaming, stop and think about what Richard Bandler once shared with me…

He said:

"Be distrustful of feeling right if you can’t alter something quickly and easily … [The most important distinction for NLPers to get about NLP] is to shut up the f*** up inside their head.  That thinking about skills that you’re supposed to perceive is a BIG mistake."

Clearing Up Any Confusion:

Now so we are clear, let me review some of the statements I made earlier so you get where I am coming from…

If the unconscious is "real" then where is it? No one has ever empirically proved there is anything called an unconscious. Yet we accept is as "real". The terms conscious, unconscious and sub-conscious are mental constructs we use to talk about processes that we believe are occurring. And they can be handy metaphors but aren't literally true, to the best of any persons knowledge.

Anchoring is not stimulus response conditioning because it doesn't take into account one time learning experiences which a functional anchor is an example of.

Strategies are a model, a description we (NLPers) use to describe processes that we note to be occurring in others. It doesn't reflect everything that is going on inside of someone when they are .. making a decision, buying, feeling attracted etc .. but it is a very powerful tool we have for doing all kinds of effective work.Yet if you think that "strategies" are inside of people you can quickly start over-focusing on eliciting the strategy and not seeing the human being in front of you!

Meta States - this will be a hot potatoe I suspect, but these aren't real either. Why? Well think about it, a meta state is a linguistic description about a neurological process. The term itself is a consequence of trying to language a neurological process. The body is a whole and integrated system. If I am sad, and you ask me, how do you feel about being sad .. there are lots of things involved .. it presupposes that I have a feeling about my first feeling "sad" and so sends my attention inward to do a TDS and now label a new feeling to my first experience. Bingo, if I follow along I now have a new linguistic description to describe my experience. I might say, well I feel annoyed about being sad and a "meta state" has been formed .. or has it?

One can repeat this process several times and come up with a chain of meta questions "how do you fell about being X, about felling Y, about feeling Z?" and very quickly you have created a whole linguistic world … and specific feelings that come with that line of meta-thinking, but ultimately in the body it is experienced as ONE state.

Personally for me I don't mind what "new inventions" or ideas anyone comes up with but it is important that we keep perspective and our meanings about "what is what" and "what is stuff we make up" clear so we don't trip ourselves into distorted worldviews that have little to do with what is going on "out there". If we don't test our thinking on goingly (and the Meta Model is a great tool for that), we risk getting caught inside our own or someone else's mentally invented worldviews … and suffer the consequences .. and rewards (assumedly the new models were found by some to be better that what they had before).

Change Your Thinking & Be A Practitioner Of The Changes

The field of NLP is constantly changing and updating but only inside the minds and community of those who are constantly challenging their thinking about it and testing the results they can get. There is ALOT more to the elegant use of the Meta Model for example that masters of the field can do today than what Richard and John wrote down in the Structure of Magic. Neither of the founders from what I can see have stopped developing and refining what they are doing with their own take on the technology.

However, after spending years reading, learning, and practicing NLP, I've realised that in the majority we seem to be suffering of over theorisation about NLP and that is why I co-founded the Platinum Audio News Club. To try and approach learning and getting really good with the technology of NLP with minimum theory and have Master Trainer Michael Breen lead the program from someone who has been on the inside track of NLP, part of a small group of "old school" NLPers who are constantly challenging and updating their thinking about the technology for circa twenty five years.

And learning to challenge and update our skills and thinking is something we can all do more of. So I'll leave you with a quote, from Dr. Bandler that inspires me to constantly evaluate and improve my own thinking and skills:

"I’ve learned so much so quickly because I never assume that I understand.  So I always go and ask and then make sure that what they’re telling me actually
works.  And that I have enough of the process that I can do it.

…. It’s like you keep finding out until you can do something.  How do you know when you have enough?  When you actually can do it.  And then you’re sure you
have enough when you can teach somebody else to do it.  And once you understand a limitation you begin to discover that it’s always a double edged
sword.  It does good things but it also does bad things.  So you have to separate them out."

If you'd like to buy the full interview I did with Doctor Bandler, including the full transcript you can get it here.

For people interested in expanding their thinking and skills with NLP, feel free to check out the Platinum Audio News Club here.

Got a question or a comment, feel free to leave your thoughts below.