NLP ON STEROIDS

I’m always surprised when people are surprised to discover that NLP is essentially a communication model. There’s one question that stumps the majority of NLP people. It causes them to either go-blank and enter into an unconscious state of stupidity or to begin a career in stuttering. The question is, “What is NLP?” Ask most NLP trained people and their eyes either go into a state of dread, or a zombie state, or an aggressively hostile state, or initiates a flow of gab that will last for hours. Okay, well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.

The other day someone asked me what NLP is and I answered as I usually do very succinctly, “NLP is a communication model.”

“A communication model? That’s what it is? Are you sure? That’s disappointing; I thought it was something much more powerful and dynamic than that!”

“Yes, I’m sure. And actually that’s what makes is so incredibly powerful! NLP arose from the communication distinctions in Transformational Grammar that John Grinder brought to the language patterns that Richard Bandler, as a young collage student, happened upon in the therapeutic languaging of Fritz Perls and then Virginia Satir.”

“I don’t get it. How is that incredibly powerful? It sounds like you’re talking about therapy or psychology or linguistics or something academic like those topics. What’s so incredibly powerful about NLP if it is just a communication model?”

I then asked, “You really want to know?” and when I was convinced that he did, I began an extensive explanation. I explained that NLP arose as a Communication Model first by identifying the specific language patterns of Fritz and Virginia because when Richard was fooling around and repeating those patterns with a “class” he had put together, and surprisingly, people got better. They made changes in their thinking and feelings and that surprised him. He didn’t expect that.

Once Richard told me that when he first picked up a book on Gestalt therapy and read about people hallucinating their mom in a chair and yelling at her, or becoming the different facets of their dreams, “Okay you dreamed about a yellow cat clawing out her eyes. Become the yellow cat. Be the eyes.” he thought that this was great stand-up comedy stuff. He thought that maybe the books were really joke books.

Yet yelling at invisible people in chairs and becoming the bits of your dreams led people to work with the constructions of their mental maps as “maps” and recognizing that somehow the language patterns were facilitating generative change, Richard asked his linguistics professor about it. “What’s the power or ‘magic’ in these linguistic patterns?” John Grinder didn’t know,

but was also fascinated that the questions and directions that Fritz used could be that powerful. So with his background in the Cognitive psychology model of Transformational Grammar (TG) that Noam Chomsky had created, John related the communication patterns and they eventually (with their group) created “the Meta-Model of language in therapy”—the foundational NLP model.

They created this with a small group of a dozen people (Robert Dilts, Judith DeLozier, Leslie Cameron, David Gordon, Terrance McClindon, Frank Pucelik, Byron Lewis, etc.). Together they began playing around with the verbal and non-verbal facets of communication. Those were the “Wild Days of NLP” as Terry McClindon related that beginning in his small book by that title.

NLP, as a Communication Model, powerfully provides a detailed way to identify the structure of our experiences. Certain premises determined this: There is a structure or form to our experiences. Identifying the dynamic structure enables us to change our experience. Sometimes it is in changing your words that the experience changes— this is what both Fritz and Virginia did a lot. Sometimes it is in changing the non-verbal gestures or tones that changes the experience. This is what Virginia did with her “communication postures” (stances) and family reconstruction exercises.

Another premise within all of this is that the component pieces of our communications are also the component pieces of experience and personality. We create our reality by our inner communications—how we talk to ourselves, make pictures in our mind, step into our mental movies and re-experience them again, use these communications to keep experiences with us, etc. What this meant is that the NLP Communication Model is at the same time a description of human functioning—how we operate, how we construct our reality. Now are you beginning to understand the power in this mere communication model?

Ah, and that was a major contribution to psychology. Actually, NLP didn’t create that, it was already in the air, in fact, it was part and parcel of the Cognitive Psychology Revolution that George Miller and associates and Noam Chomsky had been creating. Dated from 1956 the Cognitive Psychology model was changing everything during the 1960s and 1970s and giving psychology a whole new focus. And NLP was just one expression of it. This explains why the NLP modeling focus relied so heavily on Miller, Pribram, and Gallenter’s 1960 work, Plans and the Structure of Behavior where they got the TOTE model and enriched it with the representational systems.

This led to using the Communication model of how we humans function (think, feel, represent, go into state, create meaning, anchor states, etc.) for modeling experience. The idea was to use the finer distinctions of “thinking” (the representational systems and their cinematic features, the meta-modalities that they mis-labeled as sub-modalities) to find the code for any experience. And along the way they added the meta distinction in the Strategy model, but it was mostly a small little addition and poorly described. Later Robert Dilts mapped it out further when he started thinking about some of the levels that could be meta to a strategy (beliefs, values, identity, mission, spirit).

It wasn’t until 1994 when I was modeling resilience that the full role of the meta-levels became evident (Meta-States, 2008). That’s when I first identified the distinction between a primary state and a meta-state and began mapping out that distinction. This introduced the Meta-States Model to NLP, it introduced Meta-State modeling (in the book, NLP Going Meta) and it modeled the special kind of consciousness that human beings have, self-reflexive consciousness. While NLP had modeled consciousness and especially representational consciousness (what and how we represent information using visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. modalities), NLP had never mapped out the recursive nature of “mind,” our self-reflexivity. Meta-States did that. And in doing so, Meta-States put an already very powerful communication model on steroids.

That’s what a NLP trainer told me several years ago. After reading the book Meta-States, he wrote and told me that “NLP on steroids is the Meta-States Model.” When I asked him about that, he went on: “What Meta-States has done for me is to give me the ability to use NLP mindfully, intentionally, and with awareness of what I’m doing, when I’m doing it. Now I understand how the magic works. Your article about the layers and layers of frames as meta-states in the ‘Phobia cure’ pattern finally explained for me how that pattern releases a person’s phobic states. My internal image is that NLP is a strong and powerful body builder; Meta-States I see as Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Try that one on— Meta-States is NLP on steroids! Knowing and being able to use the meta- stating process regarding how your mind jumps logical levels and sets up layers of thoughts and emotions as your frames-of-reference which then become your higher frames of mind (or beliefs) enables you to see meta-states everywhere. This opens your eyes to how Meta-States describes the “magic” of NLP and especially how it creates transformations in human reality. So for some real power, add Meta-States to NLP, shake well, and then stand back — far back. It’s going to rock your world!