Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Ask them to have the experience. Ask them about the last time they had the experience, or what would happen if they were to have it right here, or if they remember the last time it happened. Any of those questions will elicit the same unconscious responses we've been showing you here. Whenever I ask a question or make a statement about something to someone here in the group, if you are alert the response will already be made non-verbally much earlier and more completely than the person will consciously be able to verbalize the answer explicitly.

"How do you know when you are being phobic, as opposed to when you are not being phobic?" "How do you know?" questions usually will take you to just about everything. People have a tendency to demonstrate it, rather than bring it into consciousness.

Our book The Structure of Magic, I is devoted to what we call the "meta-model." It's a verbal model, a way of listening to the form of verbalization as opposed to content. One of the distinctions is called "unspecified verb." If I'm your client and I say to you "My father scares me," do you have an understanding of what I'm talking about? No, of course not. "My father X's me" would be as meaningful. Because for one person "Father scares me" may mean that his father put a loaded .38 to his head. And for someone else it may simply mean that his father walked through the living room and didn't say anything! So the sentence "My father scares me" has very little content. It simply describes that there is some process—at this point unspecified. The pattern, of course, is to be able to listen to language and know when a person has adequately specified some experience with a verbal description.

One of the things we teach with the meta-model is that when you get a sentence like "My father scares me" to ask for a specification of the process that the person is referring to called "scare." "How specifically does your father scare you?". "How specifically do you know you are depressed, or guilty, or phobic?" "Know" is another word like scare. It doesn't specify the process. So if I say to you "Well, I think that I have a problem" that doesn't tell you anything about the process. If you say "How do you think it?" initially people will go "What?!" But after they get over the initial shock of being asked such a peculiar question, they will begin to demonstrate the process to you, at first non-verbally. They'll go "Well, I just think it." (eyes and head moving up and to his left) Or they'll go "Ah, I don't know. I just, you know, it's just a thought I have." (eyes and head moving down and to his left) The combination of the unspecified verbs that the person is using and the quite elegant non-verbal specification by eye movements and body shifts will give you the answer to the question, whether they ever become conscious of it or not.

If you keep asking questions, usually people will become conscious of their process and explain it to you. Usually people do it with disdain, because they assume that everybody thinks the same way they do, with the same kind of processes. One well-known therapist told us seriously one day "Every intelligent, adult human being always thinks in pictures." Now, that's a statement about him. That's the way he organizes a great deal of his conscious activity. It has very little to do with about half the population we have encountered in this country.

Quite often at seminars like this, people ask questions in the following way. They go "What do you do with someone who's depressed?" (pointing at himself) The word "someone" isn't specified, verbally. We say it's a word with no referential index. It doesn't refer to something specific in the world of experience. However, the nonverbal communication was very specific in that case, and people do the same thing with other non-verbal processes. If you are able to identify things like accessing cues and other non-verbal cues, you can be pretty clear about how something works. People will come in and say "Well, I have a problem" and their non-verbal behavior has already given you the sequence that produces it.

So a "How specifically?" question or a "How do you know?" question will usually give you a complete non-verbal specification of the process that the person goes through. Magic I has a very complete specification of how to ask appropriate questions using the meta-model.

One of our students taught the meta-model to a hospital nursing staff. So if a patient said "I'm sure I'm going to get worse" or "I can't get up yet," the nurse would ask "How do you know that?" The nurse would then follow that up with other meta-model questions, to help the patient realize the limitations of his world model. The result was that the average hospital stay was reduced from 14 days to 12.2 days.