Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

I said change it to "eu" and her shoulders rolled forward, her head tipped back, and she winced. There was a change in her feelings right here at the mid-line of the torso. No matter what language we've operated in, what country we've been to, no matter what the language is, good spellers have exactly that same formal strategy. They see an eidetic, remembered image of the word they want to spell, and they know whether or not it's an accurate spelling by a kinesthetic check at the mid-line. All the people who tell us they are bad spellers don't have that strategy. Some bad spellers make eidetic images, but then they check them auditorily. Others make constructed visual images and spell creatively.

Knowing this, a question we could then ask is "Well, how is it that some children learn to spell visually with a kinesthetic check, and other children learn to spell in other ways?" But to me that's not nearly as interesting a question as "How do you take the child who is a bad speller and teach him to use the same strategy that a good speller uses?" When you do that, you will never need to teach children to spell. They will learn automatically if you teach them an appropriate process, instead of content.

Man: How about adults? Can you teach adults?

No, it's hopeless. (laughter) Sure you can. Let me address that question in a slightly different way. How many here now see clearly that they are visually oriented people? How many people see that? How many people here feel that they are really kinesthetically oriented people in their process? Who tell themselves that they are auditory? Actually all of you are doing all of the things we're talking about, all the time. The only question is, which portion of the complex internal process do you bring into awareness? All channels are processing information all the time, but only part of that will be in consciousness.

At seminars like this, people always go out at lunch time and try to figure out what they "are," as if they are only one thing, thereby stabilizing everything pathologically. People try to figure out what they "are" instead of using that information to realize that they have other choices. People will come up to me and say "I'm really confused about this representational stuff because I really see myself as being a very feeling person." That's a profound utterance, if you think about it. I've heard that maybe a hundred and fifty times. How many people have heard something like that already this morning? Rather than thinking of yourself as being visually oriented, kinesthetically oriented, or auditorily oriented, take what you do best as a statement about which system you already have well-developed and refined. Realize that you might put some time and energy into developing the other systems with the same refinement and the same fluidity and creativity that you already have in your most developed system. Labels are traps, and one way that you can stabilize a piece of behavior in an unuseful way is to label it. Instead, you can take the fact that you notice most of your behavior falls into category X, to let yourself begin to develop your skills in Y and Z.

Now, I'd like to caution you about another thing. In psychotherapy one of the major things that Freud made fashionable, and that has continued unconsciously as a presupposition of most therapists' behavior, is the phenomenon known as introspection. Introspection is when you learn something about behavior, you apply it to yourself. I would like to caution you not to do this with most of the material we are presenting you, because you will simply go into a loop. For example: How many people here who can visualize easily know what they would look like if they weren't visualizing? ...

If you do that, you get a spinning sensation. How many of you during the exercise were paying attention to the feeling of your own eyes moving up and down? That's an example of introspection and it is not useful to do it to yourself in this context. These tools are mostly for extrospection, sensory experience. They are things to detect in other people. If you use it on yourself, all you will do is confuse yourself.

Man: How well does this pattern of accessing cues hold up in other cultures?

There is only one group that we know of that is characteristically organized differently: the Basques in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. They have a lot of unusual patterns, and that seems to be genetic rather than cultural. Everywhere else we've been—the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa—the same pattern exists in most of the population. It may be a neurological bias that is built into our nervous system as a species.

Woman: Do people who are ambidextrous have any different patterns?

They will have more variation from the generalization that we have offered you. For example, some ambidextrous people have the visualization reversed and not the auditory and the kinesthetic, or vice versa.