Chapter 1 – Sensory Experience

People who produce outstanding results have a talent. That talent has structure. Using
modeling, you can figure out that structure and teach it to others. The objective of modeling
is to create useful descriptions of these patterns of behavior that produce outstanding
results. You determine usefulness by a single criterion: does it work or not? By using the
description, are you able to produce similar results to those produced by the person you
modeled?

Many therapists and other communicators, such as salespeople, aren’t effective because
they communicate using a different representational system than that used by the other
person. For example, their client will describe a problem using auditory words and the
therapist will paraphrase their statement using kinesthetic words – or vice-versa.

Behavioral flexibility is the ability to change and adapt your behavior when your approach
doesn’t produce the results you want. Many people get stuck repeating the same patterns of
behavior even though they don’t produce the result they desire.

The words we use

When you communicate with someone, that person thinks in one of the five representational
systems – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory. Once you start paying
attention to the sensory predicates someone uses in their language, you can present
information to them in the same representational system. This helps to maintain rapport
and understanding.

Each word brings into awareness specific elements of your total experience and leaves other
elements out. Labels are unreliable, and stabilize behavior in sometimes unuseful ways.

Representations of words
There’s a difference between your experience and how you represent it. The words you use
connect to your experiences. The words someone else uses connect to their experiences.
You might use the exact same word as someone else, but that word will connect to a
completely different experience.
When someone looks up, that person is making mental pictures. Right-handed people
generally look and to the left to remember images, and up to the right to imagine new ones.
People are constantly offering information about their mental processes. Their eye
movements are generally systematic for them.
Our senses aren’t just passive receptors of information. With training and attention, we can
learn to focus on additional details. We can notice other distinctions, such as shifts in skin
color and micro-movements of the eyelashes.

Strategies

You might have the exact same representation structure for motivation as you do for
jealousy. For example, you might make a picture of what you want that feels good (visual)
and then tell yourself how to make that picture come true (auditory).

Most learning challenges come from the education system. People who are great at spelling
use the same strategy: when they hear the word to spell (auditory), they see a
remembered picture of the word they want to spell (visual remembered) and they have a
physical feeling that lets them know whether it’s accurate or not (kinesthetic).

Once you figure out someone’s strategy for achieving something, like writing compelling
sentences, you can duplicate it. If your brain is organized differently than your model’s in
relation to that particular task, you will adopt new behaviors.

How to use representational systems

 Unconsciously point someone to a specific sensory channel outside of their
awareness

 Understand the need to pause for someone to process information

 Interrupt someone’s mental process and shift directions

 Present an information package

 Use someone’s existing structure to approach a completely different subject

 Bring in an additional representational system and its resources

 Bridge information from one representational system to another

 Induce trance. If someone doesn’t habitually use their kinesthetic system, getting
them to touch different textures could send them into trance. For those accustomed to
touching frequently, this method will not be nearly as effective.

 If the question you ask involves a particular motor strategy, you can observe which
parts of their body they access in order to process the information.
Psychiatric patients don’t appear to use a strategy to distinguish shared and hallucinated
realities. A hallucination happens by taking information from the outside, mixing it with
information from inside, and believing that it all came from the outside.

Three major patterns of successful communicators.

1. Knowing what outcome they want.

2. Flexibility to generate different behaviors to get different responses

3. The sensory experience to notice when they are getting the responses they want.

If you have the sensory refinements to discover the specific steps in the process the person
uses to create an unuseful response they want to change, it gives you multiple points of
intervention.

Anything that changes the representational system, pattern or sequence will make the
response they are stuck in no longer possible. Once you know the steps, you can reverse
the order, change the content, insert a new piece, or delete a step

Law of requisite variety (see NLP Presuppositions – basic beliefs and assumptions)

The element in the system with the widest range of variability will be the controlling
element. Many professional codes limit behavior. The interesting thing about some things
that are not professional is that they work.

Most mental patients are very good at acting weird and eliciting responses from people.
People in mental institutions can tell you why they are the way they are, where it came
from and how they stay unwell. This doesn’t change the pattern, which is the important
thing.

Chapter 2 – Changing personal history

NLP Rapport

Pacing is about matching another person’s experience, both verbally and non-verbally.
Mirroring is the essence of rapport, i.e. breathing at the same rate and depth.

Once you have paced, you can lead the person into new behavior by changing what you are
doing. Pacing someone gives you rapport and trust and enables you to use their reality to
change it. You don’t need to experience someone’s reality to understand it.

Anchored Responses
About 90% of what goes on in therapy is changing the kinesthetic responses that people
have to auditory and visual stimuli. We don’t want to substitute one rigid stimulus response
circuit for another. Choice is having multiple responses to the same stimulus. Bridging uses
stimulus conditioning – make the trigger i.e. tone of voice access the resource.

Personal history is a myth; therefore, we can use it as a resource instead of a set of

limitations. We can even generate an appropriate personal history through dreams.
Changing personal history is going back into your history and adding resources. Somewhere
in our experience, we have an appropriate resource we can transfer.

We anchor naturally and in all representational systems but aren’t aware. Words, postures
and gestures can anchor us. Buildings and rooms can be anchors.

Couples get into trouble because the response they want from the other is different from
the one they actually get. Instead of creating pleasant anchors through touch when they are
happy, couples usually anchor each other into unpleasant states.

Anyone’s symptomatic behavior is a response to something. It might seem disconnected but

this isn’t so.

A phobia is a one trial learning that was never updated.

Chapter 3 – Finding New Ways

Reframing – contacting the part responsible for a behavior and dealing with the secondary
gain (its outcome).

The conscious mind is the one that knows the least about what’s going on in their behavior.

The Six Step Reframe Technique

 Step 1 – Identify the pattern the person wants to change.

 Step 2 – Establish communication with the part.

 Step 3 – discover the intention of the part responsible for the pattern.

 Step 4 – create some new alternatives to accomplish the intention using the person’s
creative part.

 Step 5 – ask the part if it would be willing to accept try out the new choices for a
certain time
  Step 6 – Check to ensure there are no objections to the new choices. If yes, recycle
to Step 2

You don’t consciously need to know the intention or the new choices of the unconscious
part. Sometimes a part organizes a behavior to do something and forgets why. It gets
caught up in resisting your attempts to stop it. When behavior is disruptive, it is best to use
it rather than try to stop it.

Reframing in this way gives the unconscious more choices or requisite variety. You can even
use this process with physiological symptom.

Alcohol and drugs are anchors. You need to take care of the secondary gain (what you get
from them) or some other thing will replace them. Once you have found effective ways to
get the secondary gain then you anchor something else to take the place of the alcohol or
drug stimulus.

Conflicts

With opposing views, you can reframe the two responses as alternate ways of getting an
agreeable outcome. When both agree, the focus then becomes the most effective efficient
way to get that outcome.

There is no necessary relationship between pain and change.

Any belief system is both a set of resources, and a set of limitations.