Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

So your eyelids dropped a little bit. Is there anything else that you could detect either from what you felt your eyes doing or from remembering what Fran was doing?...

Have you ever had the experience in a conversation that the other person's eyes are still resting on your face but somehow suddenly you are all by yourself? You are all alone? That's what was going on here. In both of these cases the pupils dilated and the facial muscles relaxed.

If you have trouble seeing pupil dilation, I believe that's not a statement about pupil dilation; it's a statement about your own perceptual programs. And I'm not talking about whether you have 20/20 vision or 20/2000 vision with corrective lenses. Your ability to perceive is something that is learned and you can learn to do it better. Most people act as if their senses are simply passive receptacles into which the world dumps vast amounts of information. There is a vast amount of information, so vast that you can only represent a tiny fraction of it. You learn to actively select in useful ways.

So what we’ll ask you to do in a few minutes is to change your perceptual programs to determine (1) whether the patterns we're talking about exist, and (2) whether they can be useful. We're going to proceed in that step-wise fashion. We're going to rely on whatever rapport we have with you to get you to do an exercise in which you discover for yourself, using your own sensory apparatus, whether in fact these things we're talking about are there. Then we'll talk about how to use them because that's the really important thing. The ultimate question is whether this is worth knowing about.

Let me reassure you that if you have patterns of communication that work for you now in therapy or education or business, those skills will still be available to you when we finish this seminar. I guarantee you that much. We're not going to do anything to take choices away. We would like you to consider a new approach. My guess is that some of you are quite effective and competent communicators therapeutically. You get results and you're pleased with them, and it's a challenge, and you like your job, at least some of the time. But even in the cases where you do very, very well indeed, you get bored from time to time. There's a tendency for you to repeat some set of interventions that you've made in the past which were successful, hoping for success again in the present. I think one of the most dangerous experiences human beings can have is success—especially if you have success early in your career—because you tend to become quite superstitious and repetitious. It's the old five-dollar bill at the end of the maze.

For example, say you once had somebody talk to an empty chair and visualize their mother in that chair and they dramatically changed. You might decide that every therapist in the country ought to do that, when in fact that's only one of a myriad ways of going about accomplishing the same result.

For those of you who are doubtful, and those who have skeptical parts, we would like to ask you—and this is true for all of the lies we are going to tell you—to do the following: accept our lie for a limited period of time, namely during the exercise that follows our description of the pattern we claim exists. In this way you can use your own sensory experience—not the crazy verbalizations we offer you—to decide whether in fact the things we describe can be observed in the behavior of the person you're communicating with.

We're making the claim right now that you've missed something that was totally obvious. We're claiming that you have been speaking to people your whole life and they've been going "Well, the way it looks to me..." (looks up and to his left), "I tell myself..." (looks down and to his left), "I just feel..."(looks down and to his right)—and you haven't consciously noticed that. People have been doing this systematically through a hundred years of modern psychology and communication theory and you've all been the victims of a set of cultural patterns which didn't allow you to notice and respond directly and effectively to those cues.

Accessing Cues Exercise:

Find someone you don't know, or you know minimally. One of you is going to be A and one of you is going to be B. A will begin asking questions. Make the task of learning this relatively simple for yourself by organizing your questions into sets the way I did. Start out by asking visual eidetic questions: What color are the carpets in your car? What color are your mother's eyes? What shape are the letters on the sign on the outside of this building? All of those are questions about things that people here have seen before.

Then ask questions about things that the person has not seen and will have to construct: How would you look from my point of view? How would you look with purple hair?