“SLEIGHT OF MOUTH” A Book Review

When I learned NLP in the late 1980s, reframing patterns were known as “Sleight of Mouth” patterns which I learned from Christine Hall. I put them all in the book, The Spirit of NLP in 1990. Bandler and Dilts were the ones who framed these ways of countering and changing belief statements in this way. Using the metaphor of “sleight of hand” used by magicians, they ran with it naming these patterns sleight of mouth. Later, when Bob Bodenhamer suggested that we take a new look at the Sleight of Mouth patterns using the Meta-States Model in 1996, one of the first things we did was to abandon that metaphor and invent a new one. For both of us the metaphor was a poor one and problematic because in its entailments which carried ideas of deceiving, tricking, and not being open and honest. So we looked around for another metaphor.