Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

He told me that he just happened to be going to Texas to an NLP workshop. When he saw me walk in the door the next day, he was very pleased that I had taken his advice and decided to come to it ... until I walked up on stage and put on the microphone! What he probably will never appreciate is that the reason I didn't just sit down and say, "I wrote that book," was because I didn't want to deprive myself of the opportunity to learn.

You see, whenever you think that you understand totally, that is the time to go inside and say, "The joke is on me." Because it is in those moments of certainty that you can be sure that the futile learnings have set in, and the fertile ground has not been explored. Obviously there is always a lot more left to learn, and that is the fun part of NLP, and its future.

When you master something so throughly that you can do it perfectly, then it becomes a job, no different than running a staple gun. You could set up a clinic and have people come in and cure phobias, over and over again, all day long. There is no difference between that and any other routine. However, when each of those people comes in, you could also begin to explore how to make it more interesting and more worthwhile than just curing a phobia so that someone isn't terrified of an elevator. Why not make it so someone can enjoy riding in elevators? Why not figure out how phobias are done, and give away phobias of something more worthwhile? There are some things worth having a phobia of! Do you have any compulsive spending habits? —violence habits? —eating habits? —consumption habits? How about a phobia of being stagnant and bored? That might propel you into interesting new places.

Whenever I travel to do a seminar, I always arrive at the hotel the night before. When I went to Philadelphia recently, there were a lot of "advanced" neuro–linguistic programmers staying at the same hotel, and most of them had never met me. When I went down to the bar, one of them had just said to a friend, "I hope this isn't just more of that submodality stuff, because I already know that." So of course I walked up and asked, "What the hell is NLP?" — something I wouldn't miss for the world.

"Well, it's hard to explain."

"Well, you do NLP, right? Do you do it well? Do you understand it?"

"Oh, yes, of course I do."

"Well, I'm a simple person. Since you're an expert, can you tell me about this? Go ahead, I'll buy you another drink and you just tell me all about it."

In his wildest fantasies he had no idea the feeling he would have at 9:30 the next morning when I walked onto the stage at the seminar. He also had no idea that he taught me more in the bar than I taught him in the seminar during the next three days.

I'd like you to consider making everything into an introductory seminar, in the sense that you never learn so much that you miss what else there is to know. All too often, people forget how to not know. They say, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like ..." "This is the same as ... " "Yeah, I learned all that submodality stuff last year. ... " I haven't learned it all yet, so if they learned it all last year I wish they would tell me, so I don't have to work so hard to figure it out!

There is a huge difference between learning some things, and discovering what there is still to learn. That is the difference that makes the difference. There are things I know how to do that they don't even suspect. But the reverse is also true. Since everybody has submodalities, everybody does interesting things with them. They may not consciously know how they do them, but still they are able to do and use unique configurations. When clients come in and you ask, "How are you broken?" they'll actually answer that question. But don't forget that they are "broken" so well they can do their problem the same way over and over again! That can always remind you that it's an achievement, no matter how futile, disgusting or repulsive it may be.

The ability to be fascinated by the complexity of that achievement distinguishes somebody who is working in a generative way from one who is working in a remedial way. Without that sense of curiosity, those things which are futile, repulsive and disgusting will be things that you won't know how to influence. Without that influence, people will continue to fight wars over strange places and over insignificant differences, without being able to find new ways in which everybody can come out ahead. The essence of being generative is to create a world in which everybody gains because there are ways of creating more, rather than having a limited amount to fight over and divide up.