FROM NLP TO NEURO-SEMANTICS Part I

“Why ‘Neuro-Semantics?’ What does Neuro-Semantics offers that NLP does not? What would you say is the biggest difference?”

These were some of the questions that were asked by quite a number of people of myself and of Colin Cox and Lena Gray when we were all at the NLP Conference in London in November. Nor are these questions uncommon. Typically I am asked one or more of these questions every week. So as we begin a new year, I thought I’d begin with these questions, especially for everyone new to this egroup. For some unknown reason over a hundred people have joined Neurons (this egroup) just in the last month! And the number of people joining seems to be increasing as an exponential rate.

So, Why Neuro-Semantics? Primarily because we believe so much in the value and benefits of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and because we are so displeased with what has generally happened to NLP as a field. What began as a great idea, an idea whose time had really come in the 1970s, has proven very sad and unfortunate. After 35 years, the “field” (if we can even call it that) has no standards, no international body that governs it, no code of ethics, no self-policing, and no one who seems able to pull the field together.

And yet, the idea of modeling the best examples of excellence in human experiences and making those models available to others remains a truly powerful and inspirational idea. It is what originally sold me on NLP. NLP began as a study of “the structure of subjective experience” to quote the subtitle on the book that Robert Dilts put together as the first formal book on the subject (NLP Volume I, 1980).

Now a wonder, and surprising, fact about NLP is that NLP did not start out as a psychology, it started out as a Communication Model. It started out as the language patterns of three world- class communicators— Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erickson. It started out as a study of the structure of language, of how “the talking cure” of psychotherapy as practiced by that original trinity of therapists. There was a sense that there was magic in their words, in the way they listened, created relationship (rapport), and facilitated a remapping within the people with whom they worked.

So the first two NLP books were volumes I and II of The Structure of Magic. The term “magic” undoubtedly came from Gregory Bateson who made the comment that the linguistic symbols of language can work almost magically in that nearly anything can stand for and represent anything else. But unfortunately the word “magic” also conveyed other ideas to people which led some

NLP people to misunderstand that NLP is first and foremost a Communication Model. Last year in a Professional Coaching Journal (published in London) I debated this seemingly simple fact with a person who claims to be a NLP Trainer!

That makes me wonder. How many NLP-ers don’t know that NLP is a Communication Model? And that makes me wonder what are some NLP trainers teaching in NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner? The Meta-Model of Language in Therapy was the first NLP model created. And yet today I meet lots of “practitioners” who were not taught the Meta-Model during Prac.!

I write all of that to say that Neuro-Semantics is also fundamentally a communication model. And we fully teach the Meta-Model as the beginning place, as the foundation for understanding how language works neurologically to create our mental maps about the world. Yes, language involves grammar, but in NLP and Neuro-Semantics our focus is on the neurology of language. That is, our focus is on how we experience language in our bodies via our nervous systems.

What this means practically is that our focus is not on “proper” grammar so much as on what that grammar does inside us. How does it affect you? What states does it create? What emotions? What skills and competencies? What limitations and interferences? For us, our interest is on the neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic effect of grammar. That’s because we communicate from state (our state) to state (to the states of the ones listening).

And the genius of NLP was the discovery of the languages of the mind— that we “make sense” of words by re-presenting them in our minds. Visually we make pictures, auditorially we hear sounds and words, kinesthetically we feel sensations and movements, and so with our “senses” we make sense by presenting to ourselves again (representing) things that we have seen, heard, felt, smelt, and tasted. These are our sensory representational systems. Then there is the meta- representational systems of words and various symbolic systems (the auditory and visual digital systems).

This is where we start here in Neuro-Semantics, but we do not end there. And while the Grinder camp of NLP continues his reductionist approach, giving up more and more of the Meta-Model distinctions, we know that mastery is in the distinctions. And that’s why I added 9 additional distinctions in my book on the Meta-Model— Communication Magic. I found most of them in Alfred Korzybski’s original work, Science and Sanity, distinctions that were not originally brought over into the Meta-Model.

Nor do we stop there. Above the first level of sensory representation and above the second level of meta-representations, the unique kind of brain we have— our self-reflexive consciousness— we can, and do, set layer upon layer of additional levels. And that introduces the systemic nature of our meta-states into the picture—something that those still stuck in traditional NLP do not know about. And yet it is in those higher levels of “communication” (the “communication world” as Bateson called it) that the true magic of NLP occurs. And that’s at the heart of what Neuro-Semantics brings to NLP that takes it to a whole new level of modeling.