Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

This time B goes into one of the three experiences without identifying it by number. You just pick one of the three and go into it. A sits there, again observing B, saying nothing until s/he finishes that experience. And then A, you tell B which experience it was: "one," "two," or "three." B continues to run through those three experiences in any order other than the original order, until A is capable of correctly naming which experience you are having. If A can't do it the first time through, simply start over again. Don't tell them which one was which, or that what they thought was number one was really number three; just tell them to back up and start over again. It's a way of training your senses to be acute.

Part 4

This time B goes into any one of the three experiences again and A hallucinates and guesses, as specifically as s/he can, what the content of that experience is. And believe me, you can get very specific and very accurate.

In parts 1, 2, and 3 we ask you to stay in sensory experience. In part 4 we're asking you to hallucinate. This is to make a clean distinction between sensory-based experience and hallucination. Hallucination can be a very powerful, positive thing. Anybody who has ever done a workshop with Virginia Satir knows that she uses hallucination in very powerful and creative ways, for instance in her family sculpting. At some point after she has gathered information she'll pause and sort through all the visual images that she has, preparatory to sculpting or making a family stress ballet. She will change the images around until it she puts them on the family by sculpting them. That's a case where hallucination is an integral part of a very creative and effective process. Hallucination isn't good or bad; it's just another choice. But it's important to know what you are doing. OK. Go ahead.

* * * * *

All right. Are there any comments or questions about this last exercise we did? Some of you surprised yourselves by the guesses you made, right? And others of you scored zero.

Whether you did well or not is really irrelevant. Either way, you got important information about what you are able to perceive, and whether or not what you hallucinate has any relationship to what you perceive.

You can take the training we're giving you and you can notice as you are communicating with a client or a loved one that the responses that you are getting are not the ones that you want. If you take that as an indication that what you are doing is not working and change your behavior, something else will happen. If you leave your behavior the same, you will get more of what you are already getting. Now, that sounds utterly simple. But if you can put that into practice, you will have gotten more out of this seminar than people ever get. For some reason, that seems to be the hardest thing in the world to put into practice. The meaning of your communication is the response that you get. If you can notice that you are not getting what you want, change what you're doing. But in order to notice that, you have to clearly distinguish between what you are getting from the outside, and how you are interpreting that material in a complex manner at the unconscious level, contributing to it by your own internal state.

The exercise you just did was essentially limited to one sensory channel. It was a way of assisting you in going through an exercise in which you clean up your visual input channel. You also get some kinesthetic information through holding hands. You can do it auditorily as well, and also kinesthetically. You can generalize that same exercise to the other two systems. If you are going to do it auditorily, A would close his eyes. B would then describe the experience without words, just using sounds. The tonal and tempo patterns will be distinctive and since A's eyes will be closed, all he has is the auditory input.

Or you could just think about the experience and talk about cooking lunch. That's the way couples often do it with one another. He makes a picture of his wife having an affair and then they talk about going camping, right? And he goes (angrily) "Yeah, I'd really like to go with you. I think we'd have a good time. I'm going to bring the ax so I can chop up some firewood."

Another thing couples do is fight in quotes. Do you know about quotes? Quotes is a wonderful pattern. If any of you have clients who work at jobs and have resentment for their bosses or fellow employees, but who can't really express it because it's inappropriate, or they might get fired or something, teach them the pattern of quotes in language. It's marvelous because they can walk up to their employer and say "I was just out on the street and this man walked up to me and said 'You're a stupid jerk.' And I didn't know what to say to him. What would you do if somebody walked up to you and said' You’re a jerk.? Just right out on the street, you know."