Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

For example, you all know very, very little about how you are able to generate language. Somehow or other as you speak you are able to create complex pieces of syntax, and I know that you don't make any conscious decisions. You don't go "Well, I'm going to speak, and first I'll put a noun in the sentence, then I'll throw an adjective in, then a verb, and maybe a little adverb at the end, you know, just to color it up a little bit." Yet you speak a language that has grammar and syntax— rules that are as mathematical and as explicit as any calculus. There's a group of people called transformational linguists who have managed to take large amounts of tax dollars and academic space and figure out what those rules are. They haven't figured out anything to do with that yet, but transformational grammarians are unconcerned with that. They are not interested in the real world, and having lived in it I can sometimes understand why.

When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages. If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same. There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not. Our job as modelers is to do a similar task for other things that are more practical. Our job is to figure out what it is that effective therapists do intuitively or unconsciously, and to make up some rules that can be taught to someone else.

Now, what typically happens when you go to a seminar is that the leader will say "All you really need to do, in order to do what I do as a great communicator, is to pay attention to your guts." And that's true, if you happen to have the things in your guts that that leader does. My guess is you probably don't. You can have them there at the unconscious level, but I think that if you want to have the same intuitions as somebody like Erickson or Satir or Perls, you need to go through a training period to learn to have similar intuitions. Once you go through a conscious training period, you can have therapeutic intuitions that are as unconscious and systematic as your intuitions about language.

If you watch and listen to Virginia Satir work you are confronted with an overwhelming mass of information—the way she moves, her voice tone, the way she touches, who she turns to next, what sensory cues she is using to orient herself to which member of the family, etc. It's a really overwhelming task to attempt to keep track of all the things that she is using as cues, the responses that she is making to those cues, and the responses she elicits from others.

Now, we don't know what Virginia Satir really does with families. However, we can describe her behavior in such a way that we can come to any one of you and say "Here. Take this. Do these things in this sequence. Practice until it becomes a systematic part of your unconscious behavior, and you will end up being able to elicit the same responses that Virginia elicits." We do not test the description we arrive at for accuracy, or how it fits with neurological data, or statistics about what should be going on. All we do in order to understand whether our description is an adequate model for what we are doing is to find out whether it works or not: are you able to exhibit effectively in your behavior the same patterns that Virginia exhibits in hers, and get the same results? We will be making statements up here which may have no relationship to the "truth," to what's "really going on." We do know, however, that the model that we have made up of her behavior has been effective. After being exposed to it and practicing the patterns and the descriptions that we have offered, people's behavior changes in ways that make them effective in the same way that Satir is, yet each person's style is unique. If you learn to speak French, you will still express yourself in your own way.

You can use your consciousness to decide to gain a certain skill which you think would be useful in the context of your professional and personal work. Using our models you can practice that skill. Having practiced that consciously for some period of time you can allow that skill to function unconsciously. You all had to consciously practice all the skills involved in driving a car. Now you can drive a long distance and not be conscious of any of it, unless there's some unique situation that requires your attention.

One of the systematic things that Erickson and Satir and a lot of other effective therapists do is to notice unconsciously how the person they are talking to thinks, and make use of that information in lots and lots of different ways. For example, if I'm a client of Virginia's I might