What first attracted you to Millionaire Paul Daniels?

A Classic line from the Mrs Merton comedy chat show – where Caroline Ahern poses as elderly chat show host interviewing suspecting B listed celebrities. So Debbie McGee was caught in her web unable to escape from the presupposition that is loaded to the hilt.

Similar to the question; When did you stop beating your wife? or Would you prefer to go out with me to the cinema or for a meal? Some of these are hardly subtle but in a sequence and with a number of pre-suppositions building your choices can start to become limited.

How do you see yourself contributing to this valuable project? I know you have played an important part before.

Internalisation of……

The internalisation of experience is a key question in NLP and DBM

Internalisation of Pain
Internalisation of Success
Internalisation of Trauma
Internalisation of Significant events
Internalisation of Injury
Internalisation Spiritually

The subjectification of experience is a whole book in itself. NLP makes some attempt to model this through the use of submodalities and internal strategies. THis only covers a part of the process and does not explain the reasons as to why some humans internalise and others keep the experience objective (outside of themselves).

The experience can be something as simple as a theme tune or a personal calendar. To others it can be a personal trauma or significant event of meaning. The little girl who is congratulated by a teacher in such a way she can go searching for similar experiences for the rest of her life.

A rape victim can feel sullied by an experience and unable to connect again intimately with a lover.

We spend a great deal of lives as learners and students trying to internalise certain key leanings, even on occasions getting assistance from teachers (useful and less so ) to internalise various pieces of learning. Then there is a difference between basic information and pure experience.

So how do we internalise more usefully rather than take on the shit and discard the great stuff?

One key aspect is awareness and being sensitive to the internal impact of experience. How does it manifect, how often, how imposing, how useful, how much learning have I taken from this?

Is the internal representation a balanced example of the experience.
Positive, Negative, Neutral, Neutral.

What is the predominant aspect of the experience itself and the structure of that experience? It it a replay, a characature, a cartoon, a photo, continuous play etc.

What do you notice in terms of your feelings and evaluation of the experience?

Im dreaming of a Binge Christmas!

Judging by talking to various people in the preparation for Xmas it is really easy to overeat, overbuy and overdo it generally. So what might help in terms of a strategy for control the binge in Christmas spending. The pressure and contagion that surrounds this period is really easy to get caught up in.

So using a DBM model (Developmental Behaviourial Modelling- a mouthful I know) here is a simple process to curb the festive indulgence:-

1. Do I like …………………?
2. Do I want………………..?
3. Do I need ……………..?
4. Do I really need ………?
5. How do you know you really need it?

And

1. Do they like …………………?
2. Do they want………………..?
3. Do they need ……………..?
4. Do they really need ………?
5. How do you know they really need it?

The sequence is important, the reverse pattern is for using in a sales pitch to chain the customer from a need to a like. Try it see how much you save !

Modelling Richard Bandler 2

So what else was present in Richards modelling on that day

1) He paid close attention (acuity) towards the gestures of the subject.Evidenced in the feedback and reference to it.

2) All information provided was useful in terms of modelling and noticing patterns, not just the immediate skill set that is being modelled.

3) Richard was switched on to patterns in terms of the structure oh how Bobby Davro presented about what he really wanted to do with his life.

4) Richard switched into the level of congruence of the subject, notice for meaning and what matters. Richard makes connections between the language used and physiology.

5) Richard not caught up in personal content of Bobby but more around the structure and patterns

6) Fast distillation of modelling content. Rapid output from Richard with the minimum amount of detail to support but valid evidence nonetheless.

7) Richard working within the modelled subject and I would hypothesize alongside the subject

Modelling Richard Bandler

About 9 years ago on a NLP modelling course near Tottenham Court Road in London. Richard Bandler, Paul Mckenna et all presented a NLP course on modelling. A lot of it was standard NLP however at one stage there was some modelling of Bobby Davro the comedian. McKenna and Breen were supposedly doing the official modelling and nothing remarkable was detailled by them.

However the next day Richard Bandler came on stage and gave a full download of what he had noticed. I wont give all the details here but one key point was that Richard had subjectively taken the position of Davro the previous evening. Davro had talked about the audiences perspective, Richard had followed him and paced each move. He had tested what was true for him in detail. It is technique for shortcutting to quick information about a subject. Matching position and physiology.

Real Life NLP

One of the issues with NLP is dealing with Real Life and the day to day issues including those in the public eye. Whilst politics is generally a personal thing, the dynamics and workings of politicians is useful territory to model. When you can watch an interview thats not rehearsed or with patsy questions then theres the feedback that can be used to develop and test your NLP skills.

For instance languaging, sensory acuity, calibration, personal strategies etc. So take Tony Blair being interviewed by Fern Britton today, not Paxman but then again he may be more easily caught offguard with a softer interviewing approach.

Here is an example of man who has shifted his ground and continues to shift to justify his position. He disassociates from the decision he took, “when you” rather than “when I”.

He is haunted by his decisions and seems he is using religion as a comfort and as a means to find some personal succour. He is sustained by his faith but then decides his faith will not help with the day to day decisions. He talks about frailty,humanity,feebleness as means of gaining strength. This presupposes he is searching for strength but is likely to feel weakened by going to war on the sketchiest of justifications.

Catholicism has become his natural home – he goes to access kinaesthetically – to deal with his feelings. An inference maybe that his faith as a structure was the basis of going into the Iraq War rather than reasoned judgement. He now promotes faith through his foundation, something he did whilst he was in power. You can argue misused power. He argues that society should be directed by its spiritual core?

God is also masculine in his model. Just watch Tony as he is questioned about the death of David Kelly -stunned and shocked!

Modelling Modelling

NLP was created out of a technology to model “Excellence”, that was the theory. Richard Bandler and John Grinder modelled some of the most skilled therapists they could find including Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Frank Farrelly, Gregory Bateson and others.

Much of the processes that were used remain unknown. Why? They did not have a complete technology and methodology to model their own approach. Having attended a number of the earlier NLP Master Practitioners it is clear that the modelling projects given were not supported with an integrated model to create a new model. Also the field of NLP has more or less stood still for the last 20 years with very few revisions. THe field is still reliant on those original developers to take it forward.

So for instance the thinking that created the various techniques and tools such as submodalities has not really been captured. The practise of sensory acuity on its own is not enough so what else is required?

In Your Face NLP VS Natural NLP

The other day and my friend asked me a question about NLP. He was concerned that a lot of practitioners or people who had trained at the practitioner training were very crude in their application of the material.

He said he had experience of the meta monsters and an “in your face” style of NLP people wanting to show off just how much they knew. He said this had put him off attending a training and did I know whether it was possible to train and practice NLP without a sense of arrogance.

I thought about this and wondered why it was so common for the feedback from non-NLPrs to have this experience.

I think there are a number of reasons; firstly some of the patterns are made explicit by the trainer out during the training, by utilising volume and inflection and also operating with an attitude. Secondly a good deal of NLP training uses power metaphors, these are sometimes translated as power over others rather than power over oneself. Thirdly some of the training is contextualised within the training room itself rather than some other natural applications beyond the training itself.

Some NLP students access state changes during the training that connect to the other material learned on the course.

I would contrast to that of the two cells of training is in-your-face NLP and naturalistic NLP.

In-your-face NLP	Natural NLP
Challenging style	Pacing the other persons model of the world
Going for the position of domination and impact	Going for affiliation and effectiveness
Demonstrates information rather than knowledge	Deeper understanding
Dictating	Communication
Crude	Complexity applied simply
Sorting by self rather than the other person	Neutral sorting preferences
Power over others	Power through oneself
Ill fitting with the environment	Best fit NLP tools to the circumstances
Fragmented knowledge	Integrated with one’s own naturalistic patterns

The question therefore arises how can a training be designed so it is more likely to produce and naturalistic style of NLP rather than that of it being in-your-face.

Firstly there is no substitute for a thorough knowledge of the material and extensive practice. Recently there has been a fashion to reduce the number of training hours and the training requirements which means although NLP has become mainstream, the overall standard has fallen, due to numbers and lack of “flying time” .

Another key requirement would be to integrate any of the NLP patterns into the practitioner’s everyday environment.

The use of metaphors adopted by the training organisations likely to attract or repel certain people, the power metaphor certainly does not help. It seems strange that a field that has been developed to improve individual’s communication skills sometimes produces the opposite and simply delivers someone even more irritating than they were before.

One area of NLP that should enhance the communication between practitioner and client, or practitioner and public is the rapport model. Some trainers seem to teach this mechanistically rather than starting with the principles that underpin it. So if the practitioner is barking repeatedly at someone else is hardly surprising they failed to communicate unless they are dealing with an angry German Shepherd, and even then.

So we should have some fun when we are training but not just at other’s expense.

Curiosity and experimentation are key aspects to the attitude that goes with the good practitioner.

As Richard Bandler always says,” you go first” which means the practitioner applies the material to himself.