Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

There is always a slippage between primary and secondary representation. There's a difference between experience and the ways of representing experience to yourself. One of the least immediate ways of representing experiences is with words. If I say to you "This particular table right here has a glass of water partially filled sitting on top of it," I have offered you a string of words, arbitrary symbols. We can both agree or disagree about the statement because I'm appealing directly to your sensory experience.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

Your experience will overlap with mine to the degree that we share a culture, that we share certain kinds of backgrounds. Words have to be relativized to the world model of the person you are talking to. The word "rapport" for a ghetto person, "rapport" for a white middle-class person, and "rapport" for someone in the top one hundred families in this country, are very, very different phenomena. There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences— which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

There's a slippage between the word and the experience, and there's also a slippage between my corresponding experience for a word and your corresponding experience for the same word. I think it's extremely useful for you to behave so that your clients come to have the illusion that you understand what they are saying verbally. I caution you against accepting the illusion for yourself.

Many of you probably have intuitions about your clients when you first meet them. There may be a certain type of client that comes into your office and even before they speak you look up and you know that one's going to be hard, that one's going to be really difficult. It's going to be a rather tedious and long-range project for you to assist that person in getting the choices they want, even though you don't know what those are yet. At other times, before a new client even speaks, you know it will be interesting, it will be a delight. There will be a spark there, there will be a sense of excitement and adventure as you lead this person to some new behavior patterns to get what it is that they came for. How many of you have intuitions like that? Let me have a volunteer. Do you know when you have the intuition that you are having it?

Woman: Umhm.

What is that experience?...

We'll help you. Start by listening to the question. The question I'm asking you is one that I'd like to train you all to ask. The question is " Howdo you know when you are having an intuition?" (She looks up and to her left.) Yes, that's how you know.

She didn't say anything; that is the interesting thing. She just went through a process non-verbally in responding to the question that I asked her. That process is a replica of the process she actually goes through when she has the intuition, and it was the answer to the question.

If you take nothing else away from this workshop, take away the following: You will always get answers to your questions insofar as you have the sensory apparatus to notice the responses. And rarely will the verbal or conscious part of the response be relevant.

Now let's go back and demonstrate again. How do you know when you are having an intuition?

Woman: Well, let me take it back to the dialogue here earlier… I was trying to put that into some form. And what it was for me was the symbol of—

What kind of a symbol? Is this something you saw, heard, or felt?

I saw it in my head as just—

Yes. You saw it in your head. It was a picture.

Now, all the information that she just offered us verbally is wholly redundant if you were in a position to be able to watch her non-verbal response to the initial question. Everything that she just presented verbally was presented in a much more refined way non-verbally. If you clean up your sensory channels and attend to sensory experience, when you make a statement or ask a human being a question they will always give you the answer non-verbally, whether or not they are able to consciously express what it is.

The information about representational systems comes through in lots and lots of different ways. The easiest way to begin to train your senses is this: people make movements with their eyes which will indicate to you which representational system they are using. When somebody walks into your office, they are planning what they are going to do. They are either visualizing, or they are telling themselves what they are going to say, or they are paying attention to the feelings that they want to describe to you. When they do that, they go inside and they access that information, and they make typical gestures that every one of you knows about unconsciously, and yet through the whole history of psychology no one has ever explicitly described.

For example, I'll name a standard one. You ask somebody a question. They say "Hm, let's see," and they look up and to their left, and tilt their head in the same direction. When people look up, they are making pictures internally.

Do you believe that? It's a lie, you know. Everything we're going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies. Since we have no claim on truth or accuracy, we will be lying to you consistently throughout this seminar. There are only two differences between us and other teachers: One is that we announce at the beginning of our seminars that everything we say will be a lie, and other teachers do not. Most of them believe their lies. They don't realize that they are made up. The other difference is that most of our lies will work out really well if you act as ifthey are true.

As modelers, we're not interested in whether what we offer you is true or not, whether it's accurate or whether it can be neurologically proven to be accurate, an actual representation of the world. We're only interested in what works.

Let me have three volunteers to come up here….

What I'm going to do next is to ask Fran and Harvey and Susan up here some questions. All I want you out there to do is to clear your sensory apparatus. You could sit there and make images about what something is reminding you of, or you could talk to yourself about such things, or you could have feelings about what's going on.

This is what I am proposing you adopt as a learning strategy for the next few minutes: simply clear all your internal experience. Quiet the internal dialogue, check and make sure that your body is in a comfortable position so that you can leave it there for a while, and don't make internal images. Simply notice with your sensory apparatus what relationship you can discover between the questions I'm going to ask of these three people and the responses they make non-verbally. I would like you to pay particularly close attention to the movements and changes in their eyes. There are lots of other things going on which will be useful for us to talk about at some other time. At this time we simply want you to pay attention to that part of their nonverbal response.

I'll just ask the three of you up here some questions. I'd like you to find the answers to those questions, but don't verbalize the answers. When you are satisfied that you know what the answer is, or you've decided after searching that you don't know what the answer is, stop. You don't have to give me any verbal output; you keep the answers to yourself.

In the United States there's an interesting phenomenon called "traffic lights." Is the red or the green at the top of the traffic light?... When you came here today, how many traffic lights did you pass between where you started your trip and arriving here at the hotel?...What color are your mother's eyes?. ..How many different colored carpets did you have in the last place you lived? (Fran stares straight ahead in response to each question; Harvey looks up and to his left; Susan looks up and to her right, or sometimes straight ahead.)

Now, have you noticed any movements in their eyes? Do you see systematic shifts there? OK. Store that information for a moment. These are complex human beings, and they are giving more than one response. However, notice what is common about the responses they gave to that set of questions.

I'm going to shift the questions a little bit and I want you to notice if there is a systematic difference in the way they respond.

Think of your favorite piece of music.... What is the letter in the alphabet just before R?... Can you hear your mother's voice? (Fran and Harvey look down and to their left as they access information after each question; Susan looks down and to her right.)

Now, there was a difference between the last set of responses and the previous set.

Now I'm going to shift my questions again.

Do you know the feeling of water swirling around your body when you swim?... What happens in winter when you are in a nice, warm, cozy house, and you walk out into the cold air outside?... (Fran and Harvey look down and to their right while accessing the answer to each question; Susan looks down and to her left.)

Can you make a connection between the classes of questions I was asking and the kind of movements that you were seeing? What did you actually see in your sensory experience when I asked the questions?

Man: I noticed especially that when it seemed like Susan was picturing something, she would look up. And then there were times when she would look straight ahead.

OK. I agree with you. How do you know when she was picturing something? That's an assumption on your part. What were the questions that I was asking that those movements were responses to?

Man: The color of eyes. How many lights—like she was picturing the intersections.

So the questions I was asking demanded visual information by presupposition. And the responses you noticed were a lot of up movements. Did you notice any preference as to side?

Woman: Susan looked to her right. She looked to her right because she is left-handed.

Because she's left-handed Susan looks to her right? She doesn't always look to her right. Watch this.

Susan, do you know what you would look like with long flaming red hair?. ..Do you know what you would looklike if you had a beard?... Do you know what you look like sitting right here? ...(Her eyes move up and to her left.) Which way did her eyes go that time? Distinguish left and right with respect to her. You said that she typically went up to her right in answering the previous visually-oriented questions. What movement did you see with her eyes just now, in response to the last questions? This time her eyes dilated and moved up to her left and back. So she doesn't always look up and to her right. She sometimes looks up and to her left. There's a systematic difference between the kind of questions I asked just now, and the kind of visual questions I was asking before. Can you describe the difference?

Woman: The first questions had to do with experiences she was remembering, and the second group she had not experienced and was trying to visualize.