REFLEXIVITY — OUR SECRET WEAPON

When someone learns NLP, they learn to think representationally. That was the big secret of NLP and when it was first revealed in 1975, it shook the Psychotherapy world. It represented a major step forward for how to address a great many of the therapy problems that people had and shortly thereafter as it was applied to business problems, it became a big step forward for mankind. Having spent a decade studying therapy, having learned RET (Albert Ellis) and Cognitive Therapy (Aaron Beck, David Burns), when I found NLP in 1986, NLP filled in the gaps of those Cognitive Psychology Models.

But you know all of that. You probably also know how Bateson was utterly surprised at the simplicity and profoundness of creating a model of the mind based on the sensory-systems. He wrote about it in his Preface to The Structure of Magic (1975). And you learned it when you studied the Practitioner course—how to change a mind by changing the representational systems, tracking them over, and using the cinematic features (sub-modalities) of your inner movie.