BANDLER FINALLY WISES UP

My first thought was that maybe he’s spying on Neuro-Semantics to find out what we’re doing, so that he would then be able to be the inventor. But that’s far too paranoid of an assumption, so I rejected that one. Maybe he has secretly been reading the Neuro- Semantics website. Anyway, what he has been doing most recently is following very much the same line of thought and focus that I have been doing since 2016, namely, talking about thinking. In 2016 I began writing about “The Next Big Thing” in NLP and Neuro-Semantics, namely, critical thinking. Two years later, I published, Executive Thinking (2018). That then led to the whole series on thinking—now going on 14 books.

1) Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018).

2) Thinking as a Modeler (2019).

3) Thinking Hypnotically (2020).

4) Hypnotic Conversations for Unleashing Potentials (2020)

5) Humorous Thinking (2020)

6) Executive Decisions: Deciding Wisely (2020)

7) Thinking Metaphorically: Becoming a Skilled Metaphorian (2021)

8) Executive Learning: Learning How to Learn (2021)

9) Executive Wisdom: Being One of the Wise Ones (2022)

10) Inside Out: Empowered from Within (2022).

11) The Meta-Place: A Model of the Mind and Thinking Landmarks (2023)

12) Thinking for Humans: (2024)

13) Strategic Thinking (2025)

14) Unconscious Thinking (proposed for 2025)

I found out what Bandler has been up to when I recently purchased Patterns for Problem Solving (2023). Here Bandler devotes the first 161 pages to reproducing his 1975 The Structure of Magic and adding in a few (very few) comments. The book actually begins on page 162. After that he focuses on thinking. And in doing so, he says that the Meta- Model was designed for problem-solving. To that end, he frames things in terms of thinking: “What the most successful therapists did ... they got people to engage in new thinking. If you change the way you think, it changes the way you feel and therefore changes what you’re capable of doing.” (iv) “The Meta-Model is full of terrific questions that help us to think differently.” (171) “Our model enables us to effectively and decisively challenge the various biases that originate in people’s thinking when they make decisions.” (178). “Most of this is about getting people to think on purpose.” (181). “The Meta-Model provides us a way of gaining insight as to how people are thinking and what is missing or distorted in their model of the world.” (192). “The mindset for solving problems involves thinking through the right questions to ask.” (200) “The Meta-Model is designed to enable you to help people to think differently about their problems and uncover solutions they couldn’t see before. (211) (italics added).

What Richard and Owen present however, is only representational thinking. That’s all —the VAK. And in doing that, he makes the same mistake that NLP has made from the beginning, namely, assuming that all thinking is sensory-based thinking. So with beliefs and decisions, he assumes these are pictures and self-talk which people have in their heads. That’s where he got the mistaken idea that you can change beliefs by changing the cinematic features (sub-modalities). But you can’t. Give that assumption there is also not a single consideration for logical or meta levels at all. For him, the problem in beliefs and decisions are the pictures and the self-talk. That’s all.

Now inasmuch as he refers to a 2019 book, Thinking on Purpose, I bought it and, again, the only kind of thinking that is addressed there is representational thinking. That’s it. Nothing else. As if there is no additional kind of thinking! Now true enough, in 1975 when NLP was first introduced, the idea that we think in pictures, sounds, sensations, and words was revolutionary and led to many processes that can quickly resolve therapeutic and personal development issues. But that’s only the beginning.

Without an awareness of the whole meta place of the mind, and the unique meta-level structures of the thinking landmarks there (beliefs, values, memories, anticipations, identities, metaphors, intentions, etc.), you can only update and improve the quality of thinking at the representative level and not at the meta-levels.

Overall, I’m delighted that one of the founders of NLP is slowly coming back to the true nature of NLP and the Meta-Model— it is actually a thinking model. I began suspecting that when Bob and I wrote Figuring Out People (1997) when we detailed the thinking patterns which we call meta-programs. So at least Bandler is moving in the right direction. And who knows, maybe he will stumble on the idea of the self-reflexive thinking that’s within meta-states and then realize that there are many, many other kinds of thinking.

As a footnote: He and Owen also quoted much of what I wrote in Communication Magic (1997/ 2001) about the linguistic wars after Chomsky, but of course, not giving any credit (50-51). Another distinction to make; he always speaks about the “brain” and never the mind, and makes no distinction between them. Another thing he will need to learn.