An Aikido Exercise with Two Twists

I'll summarize an old NLP Practitioner exercise used to illustrate state management. Then, I'll modify it twice with increasingly surprising results, and show how the new versions can be re- purposed to teach modeling.

An Aikido Exercise

During my NLP Practitioner training about thirty five years ago, Barbara Greig demonstrated the power of state management with what she called the Aikido exercise. At that time, the pre-meta- states era, trainers drew a simple pie chart to describe a person’s internal and external behavior. It had three sections, labeled: internal state, internal computation (e.g., thinking), and external behavior. Barbara wanted to demonstrate that your internal state could affect your external behavior. She asked for a volunteer. A woman raised her hand and Barbara asked her to come to the front of the room and face the class. Here is an abbreviated version of how the exchange probably went (after all, it was a very long time ago):

Barbara: Is one of your arms weaker than the other?

Woman: My left arm.