NLP PATTERNS: MODELS FOR THINKING

While I had studied numerous psychologies for many years, it was not until I learned NLP that I was exposed to the idea of patterns and running patterns. Nor was it that other psychotherapies didn’t have specific processes to use and to follow. They did. It was more the case that those processes were looser in form, more general in approach, entailing a larger overview of this process. NLP patterns were different. They offer a protocol for how to achieve a specific goal.

Learning NLP, in fact, is to a great extent, learning patterns. It is learning the precise steps of the pattern, the purpose of each pattern, the elicitation question for each given pattern, the processes of the pattern, and how to think about a pattern. When you learn NLP, you learn the Circle of Excellence, the Swish pattern, Six-Step Reframing, Setting Anchors, Collapsing Anchors, and on and on. Each pattern has a specific set of steps similar to a recipe.

Further, each pattern is generally a strategy for how to do a specific thing and sometimes the name of the pattern names that specific thing— Decision Destroyer, Change Personal History, Movie Rewind. And most of the patterns arose from getting the strategy for doing a particular thing from one or more persons who were already skillfully competent.

Ten years after I learned NLP, I had the audacity to gather all of the NLP patterns that I could find in all of the books and manuals which I had read. I then put 77 of them into a single source, The Sourcebook of Magic, Volume I (1997). That was the first book of its kind. In doing so, I separated out the most basic NLP patterns like getting rapport, anchoring, state accessing, ecology check, etc. since these processes are used inside of every pattern.

What are these patterns? They are essentially thinking patterns. If you follow the strategy steps in a pattern you will essentially learn to think in a specific way to achieve a specific outcome. You will think in a way that will create a specific resource or solve a specific problem. I didn’t know it at the time, but each pattern gave me a new or different way to thinking about a given subject or experience. That’s actually pretty amazing! In learning NLP, you learn to think more precisely and accurately.

Consider what happens when you learn the sensory representation systems. You learn that you think visually, auditorially, and kinesthetically, and also using your sense of smell and taste. For the majority of people, this is both obvious and a moment of self-discovery. It was for me. I knew I thought visually, but had no idea that my primary rep. system was kinesthetic. For me, that explained a lot. Later, when I discovered that I actually could think auditorially—and that opened up a whole new world for me. Previously (well, 16 years earlier) a music teacher told me I was tone deaf; as it turned out, I was not. It was the case that I had not learned to use my auditory system. That’s all.

Consider what happens when you follow the steps of the Movie Rewind pattern. If you follow the steps, you learn to use your thinking potentials and skills in such a way that you recode the way you think. Now your old thinking code no longer forces you to re-experience a traumatic experience. You learn to think objectively—and just witnesses fact without your old interpretations inducing a re-traumatization. In this way, you take the emotional charge out of the way you remember things. Now that’s quite a learning! And all you have to do is to follow the steps of the pattern. Do it enough times until this new way of thinking starts to habituate giving you another choice.

Perceived in this way, NLP is most essentially a thinking and a re-thinking model. It works its “magic” psychologically by recoding your thinking. This is especially obvious with the Meta-Model. Here you learn to recognize a linguistic cue (a word or phrase) that is ill-formed and immediately transforms it into a well-formed one. If a word or statement programs you to feel miserable, you catch it before it performs that kind of an induction. You transform it at the linguistic level.

Yes NLP is a Communication Model. That’s how we have thought about it from the beginning —a model about how communication works. Within NLP is the “Meta-Model of Language in Therapy.” That’s what it was originally called. Also within it is the Milton Model of Hypnotic Language. And yes, deeper still to communication is thinking. Thinking that communicates with precision and specificity as well as thinking that induces trance states for all sorts of personal resources.

Now you know why we in Neuro-Semantics have been deepening the essential core of NLP, the core that is within and behind all of the models, all of the patterns, and all of the transformational tools. You know why we have established all three of The Brain Camps.

• Brain Camp I: Thinking for Humans.
• Brain Camp II: Learning Excellence
• Brain Camp III: Wise Executive Decisions

You also now know why I have been writing numerous books about thinking:

• Executive Thinking (2018)
• Thinking as a Modeler (2018)
• Executive Learning (2018)
• Executive Learning (2019)
• Humorous Thinking (2021)
• Metaphorical Thinking (2022)
• Executive Decisions (2022)
• Executive Wisdom (2022)
• Predictive Thinking (2022)

Amazingly, the entire field of Critical Thinking does not know that NLP is a thinking model let alone the best critical thinking tool anywhere. That’s why I wrote Executive Thinking (2018)—to introduce the Meta-Model as the best tool for critical thinking. But there’s more. NLP is so much more— which will be the subject of the next Neurons article.