Shlomo Vaknin's Blog, page 9

NLP Today

“If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner Much of NLP training and writing today resembles the early formulation of NLP. Over time, patterns and ideas have been added, but this is mostly window dressing when compared to the core of NLP that first developed.Read more

Therapy and Interventions – Content Vs. Content Free

Another secret that would work well for you as an active practitioner is to avoid working with content as much as possible. As an NLP practitioner, your job is not to provide your client a setting in which he or she can vent out their troubles and miseries. That’s what good friends are for, andRead more

Secrets Of Successful NLP Interventions

There are many reasons for why a change-work session succeeds. NLP has the reputation of a “one time therapy,” which usually means that a client will only have to see you (and pay) once for resolving a specific issue. From my experience in private practice, the most important success factor is your client’s cooperation. IfRead more

Research on NLP

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” – Albert Einstein The anarchic nature of NLP does not lend it to research, and there is no substantial body of research that tests the effectiveness of NLP. However, there are studies that look at aspects of NLP.Read more

A Brief History of NLP, 40 Years of Modeling: Who, What, When, Where

“Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.” – Edward R. Murrow  Lack of a Proper Definition NLP is difficult to define, because it takes on different forms, depending upon how you are exposed to it. This article will help you understand NLP by providing a brief history that puts the main ideas into context. AlthoughRead more

Let’s talk about your experience

Let’s talk about your experience of current reality. Think about what you are passionate about. It might be family, friends, a significant other, a pet, an upcoming vacation, or what you might have for dinner. Different people are passionate about different things. Ask yourself: Why are you passionate about those things? What makes you passionate about them? 

You experience the world, and life in general, through your senses. You see, hear, feel, smell and taste. 

The world sends an incredible amount of information to your physical sensory modalities (eyes, ears, skin, tongue and nose). Not all of that information is accepted, because each one of our senses has human limitations. For example, there are at least 500 million bits of visual information coming your way, every single second. However, only about 500 get through and are processed by your central nervous system. This discrimination process is essential to our survival. Our ancestors had to quickly respond to threats, predators and signals around them. They had no time to observe the beauty of the blue skies, while a hungry lion was lurking in the bushes. 

Take a rapid look around you, for 3 or 4 seconds, and quickly write down what you notice, visually.

Take a look around again, and write down quickly what you missed on, visually, the first time.

Listen. What can you hear, inside the room you’re in?

Listen again. What can you hear, coming from outside the room you’re in?

Listen once again and pay careful attention. What can you hear, in the distance, the farthest sounds? 

What do you feel in your body? On your skin? 

What can you smell?

All of the information you entered above is considered real time sensory perception. It happens at the moment you perceive and recognize it. Now, let’s go one level deeper. Choose one big and clear object in the room you’re in, an object that is not right in front of you. What is it?

Close your eyes and imagine this object. Hold that image for 10 seconds. When you open your eyes again, do NOT look at it again. Describe in detail the image you had experienced while your eyes were closed? 

The image you described is NOT the object itself and it is NOT the perception of the object itself. It is an image in your imagination, that REPRESENTS the memory of the perception of the actual object in your room. 

There’s the object in reality, existing whether you notice it or not. Then, there’s the light coming to your eyes when you take a look at it. Then, there’s the processing of that perception in your brain. Then, when you think about this object, an image pops up in your brain, that represents the original experience of perceiving it in reality. 

Take a good look at this object again and describe details you missed on, when you were only writing about your memory of it.

When you’re using your mind’s eye to recall visual information, we call it a Visual Representational System. The visual modality (seeing an object) is used to recall that information internally, and therefor REPRESENT it to your consciousness. There are 3 main representational systems in NLP – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. In short, we call them Rep. Systems. Think about your favorite song and let it play in your mind. What song is it and who’s the artist?

How can you be sure it is what you say it is, if you haven’t heard it right now through the speakers or headphones? 

Of course, you ‘know’ the song and you ‘recognize’ the artist, even though it’s being played only inside your head. That’s the Auditory Rep. System in action. When you were very young, how did you differentiate between your father’s voice and a random man on the street? 

What were the characteristics of your father’s voice, that hearing even a single word was enough for you to be certain it’s him? 

Can you imagine pain? You’ve had at least one headache in your life – what was it like having a bad headache? 

Now take a positive experience. How about joy? How did you experience joy in your body?

Love? 

Nervousness? Stage fright? Anxiety?

Compassion? Being accepted?

While it may be more difficult to pinpoint sensations and emotions, we rely on this Kinesthetic Rep. System quite a lot. Imagine driving. You do not drive with your eyes or ears only, but your body in whole is involved. Even if your mind takes you elsewhere, while you’re driving, your kinesthetic rep. system is activated and in hyper-alert to anything around you that may pose danger. Did you ever press the brakes on an intuition, and a second alter a child or a small dog ran to the street in front of you? Can you recall any similar experience, when you reacted intuitively and only after the fact realized how lucky you were? 

On the surface level, you experience the world through your senses. Then, it goes a little deeper, when that information is processed and you are conscious of certain stimuli around you. Then, we went a little deeper, and used the internal rep. systems to recall and re-experience events. You saw, heard and felt experiences that do not happen in real time – they happened today only inside your head. Did they feel real to you?  

How to Work with a Pattern

This website lists over 300 NLP patterns, techniques and strategies. You cannot realistically memorize them all, and frankly, you don’t need to. When you choose a pattern to work with, go through the steps carefully and make sure you understand the process. There’s wisdom behind every procedure in Neuro Linguistic Programming. There’s logic to theRead more

Your Mind Vs. Reality

Alfred Korzybski, the creator of General Semantics, have given us one of the most iconic and accurate description of human perception: 

“the map is not the territory”. 

It became one of NLP’s core presuppositions. 

The map in your head is NOT the reality it represents. We can say it in another way: “the menu in the restaurant is NOT the meal it represents”. You don’t eat the line that says “pasta”, you eat the actual pasta that the menu is referring to. How do we construct our mental maps that represent reality, but aren’t reality itself? 

We collect data about the world around us through our senses. We have external senses, so we can see and hear and feel what’s going on outside our body, and we have internal senses, so we can become aware of some of the things that are going on ‘inside’ our head. 

Our sensory modalities, inside and out, are extremely sensitive but limited in function. Most of what is really happening outside and inside our body – is not perceived at all.  You cannot perceive cellular internet with your ears or eyes, nor can you interpret radio signals or ultraviolet light with your senses. More than so, even if you do perceive a lot of what’s going on, your senses get tired and fatigue. Our organs adapt to outside conditions and so you can become deft or blind due to extreme changes in your surroundings.  

Imagine the information coming in through your eyes – the human eye can perceive at once more than 500 million bits of visual sensory data per second! But that’s less impressive when you learn that your CNS can process less than 500 bits per second. It means your brain must discriminate, very fast, what it will process and what it will completely ignore. In an earlier exercise, when you were asked to look for anything brown around you, how many things did you notice that were blue? None. Even if they were there, the brain’s criteria for discriminating the 500 million bits coming in was BROWN only. 

Some people think that our eyes work the same as a camera does. They’re not. We do not have an SSD in our brain, not do we have any kind of hardware to store accurate digital data. 

The fact that our brain has to discriminate incoming information is the reason human beings are different one from another. Your process of discrimination of the data you perceive is not the same as anyone else’s. This is an important point to remember, because most conflicts between people are based on the wrong assumption that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste exactly the same sensory data. Another important point: the way we interpret the sensory data greatly depends on the richness of the language we are trained to use. If you visit Iceland, for example, you will meet a lot of people who can differentiate between a 100 different types of: snow. If you grew up in a tropical weather country, you were probably unaware that there is more than one kind of snow. But in Iceland, that information is important for many reasons. As long as you do not wish to live in Iceland, that information is irrelevant to you. But if you do move there, you have a 100 new words to add to your internal dictionary and map in order to be able to move around the territory effectively and communicate well with other Icelanders. So our eyes can welcome 500 million bits of data every second, but our brain can process less than a tiny fraction of it. The discrimination the brain operates by means that we only see things the same way they are interpreted by our CNS. 

In order to ‘see’ our brain has to process the data which our eyes ‘look at’. How often did it happen to you that you were driving home from work, but you were so busy thinking that you find yourself parking the car but don’t remember the way at all? 

What you look at is the stimulus, what you actually ‘see’ is the final result of the processing done in your head. 

The conclusion of all the above is that we can never really talk about an objective world. The objective world exists outside our reach. We share that world with everybody else, but we each live in our own subjective world with unique subjective maps that are either effective or ineffective, but certainly distorted. 

Using language, we can only talk about the “world to me” and the “world to you”, but either way it is always subjective to one of us, not the way it really is. Even when you want to be objective and take every point of view into consideration, that alone means you have to process the information that is already distorted by personal preferences, beliefs, language forms, unique experiences and so on. 

The only truth is subjective. You can only really speak about your own thoughts, feelings, memories and beliefs, that are the constructs of your own internal map. Anais Nin said, “we see the world as ‘we are’, not as ‘it is’”. Projection is not merely a defense mechanism, it is also the general rule of perception. You notice only what you deep inside deem important, whether you’re aware of it or not. 

The meaning of anything out there is not attached to the object or the event. The meaning is constructed in your nervous system by interpreting the raw data collected by your sense organs. That is why the terror event that happened on 9/11 inspired horror and sadness in one group of people, and joy in a different group. 

We do not perceive the meaning of anything, we create it in our response. Our interpretation of reality is built on the principle of abstraction. Because of its limited processing power and its excessive use of energy, our brain ignores most of the data and reshape the rest of it to fit our existing map. 

The selection process that happens during the discrimination of incoming data is based on our past experience – only what seems to fit our current purposes and needs (the highest one, of course, is survival), gets through the gates. 

While you read the last ten sentences or so, what did you hear outside? Can you specify which sounds were reaching your eardrums while you were busy reading? Probably not. Would you notice a strong BOOM if it happened while you were reading? Most likely, yes.

The average daily sounds do not reach your consciousness because they do not disturb your purposes and needs – you want to read, not to process the sound of the cars passing by the street outside. If a strong noise disturbs your consciousness, however, it would take priority over reading and you would have to deal with the information. 

In most cases, you are not aware of the neurological and physiological changes you go through when you react to what happens or what is being said to you. The only way you can explicitly refer to these changes separately is by using language. The total reaction you express to a stimulus is called a Semantic Reaction. 

When you are emotionally upset, can you think straight or are your thoughts all over the place? When you focus very hard, mentally, on learning a new topic, don’t you become tense? 

Your mind and your body are not separated. They are one unit, coordinated and controlled by your CNS and PNS. Your mind influences your body and your body influences your mind. Human beings are organisms that work as a whole, not as a collection of independent parts. You cannot separate your mind from your toe, they are linked in more ways than you imagine. 

The structure of the language we use directs not only the way we communicate with others, but also the way we communicate internally with ourselves. The unconscious processes that give order to your mouth to move and say certain words to other people, also provide the content of your self talk. 

The structure of the language you use, inside your head and outside towards the world, often gives away the structure of the hidden assumptions that construct your mental map. When you form a sentence, even in your head, you force certain symbols (words) into a certain set of order (syntax) and relationships. The manner in which you discover the real hidden patterns in your unconscious mind is not by logic or language, but by mental images. 

By using specialized procedures, which we will do next, you allow mental images float into consciousness, you observe the incoming flood without judgement and only then you use words to describe what you experience inwardly. This can later be analyzed to translate the language you use back to the original sensory modality data. This data can then be evaluated as either effective or ineffective, in context with your values and desired outcomes, and either reinforced or reshaped. 

Before you can adjust and ‘purify’ the conditions that dictate your subjective world experience, you must study the structural characteristic of the unconscious mind, which is always non-verbal. Then, you can use language to expose the primitive structures and align them with your true values and desires. 

The map in your head

The map in your head is made out of your own construction, not out of the actual facts of the world you live in. A good map can be considered as one that is very similar to the territory it describes, because then it can accurately predict what is going on out there. A map of Jerusalem created in the year 1922 is not a good map to use when you want to explore the city today.  

As mentioned before, the inherently limited structure of our language makes it extremely difficult to create accurate verbal maps of the extensional world (reality). Any mental map you may have is one that distorts the territory it describes. It has to do so, because your brain is not a blank slate. 

By the time you are skillful enough to express yourself verbally, your CNS is a host to numerous subjective beliefs, ideas, concepts, metaphors, agreements and other mental constructs that serve as filters between perception and interpretation. You may think that the trouble is with the distortion in your mental map, but that is not the case. 

The problem is when you are unaware of the distortions and confuse subjective interpretations with facts. 

You can certainly adjust to what’s going on around you when you know you are in the wrong. But when you’re not even aware that you’re wrong – that’s when conflict is ruling your thinking process. 

Remember a while back, when we were discussing disturbing emotions and how important it is to be self aware? If you are not aware of the actual strategy that is running in your unconscious mind and distorts the way you perceive your reality, how can you NOT react with anger and resentment? 

The problem is not in the distortion itself, because merely by becoming aware of how a trigger is causing you to react in anger, you disarm the trigger. Imagine you find out that every time your spouse makes a certain hand movement, your unconscious mind is flooding your brain with associated memories of discomfort and it makes you feel insulted? Your spouse did not mean to insult you. He or she just moved one hand, and you are suddenly in a completely different mood.  

Once you’re aware of such a neurological link between a hand movement and your emotional reaction, you create a gap in that process: consciousness. Now you can consciously assess the situation and choose whether or not it is appropriate or useful for you to feel bad about their hand movement. 

Before you became aware of it, you simply reacted. Your unconscious mind did what it was trained to do, probably when you were much younger and had a strong emotional event in your life that presented a visual symbol (specific hand movement) that happened at the same time as you felt inadequate, angry or insulted. The symbol might not have been even related to the reason you felt insulted originally, but your CNS is not a logical processor – an event happens, a symbol appeared – they are linked. This is the Pavlovian response in essence. 

When you consider it after the fact, it seems silly, but remember: your unconscious mind does not work the same way as your trained conscious mind. It is unreasonable, yet predictable. It will always show the same associations, in the same order, when the same symbol (trigger) is presented. That is why we can map it out and make these links conscious. 

In order to adjust, and literally survive, in the world we live in, we are dependent on having adequate mental maps. Acting out the wrong assumptions in the wrong places can only lead you to troubles. Prisons, hospitals and dysfunctional families are full with people who had distorted maps of reality. 

If you were alone in the universe, you would still have to…

Mark Knopfler wrote in Brothers In Arms: “we have just one world, but we live in different ones” – There is only one reality, but as many interpretations of it as the number of living and conscious human beings. If you were alone in the universe, you would still have to deal with two ‘worlds’. The first is the extensional world: the stuff out there that you can touch and see and hear and otherwise perceive through your physical sensory modalities. The actual building you’re in, the actual plane that is flying above, they are part of the extensional world we all share. 

The second world is your language, the verbal constructions that you use to interpret what is or is not out there in the shared extensional world. You can pass the salt across the table and it is still the same physical salt, but you cannot transmit an experience as an experience. When you hear the words “I love you”, you do not receive the actual experience your lover is experiencing inside their CNS. You receive the translation of their subjective experience into words, which is then perceived by your auditory sensory modality (normally, your ears), and then it is further filtered and translated by your brain to a certain meaning that resembles the experience. 

Why is this important? Think about it this way: 

What if your spouse said the words “I love you” very fast, 50,000 times, non stop? Would it mean the same thing to you as if they expressed it slowly, emphasizing every word, while looking into your eyes, and leaning towards you? 

Think about the body language as a symbol: when someone leans towards you when you speak to them, it gives you a certain feeling: they are interested in what you say. 

When someone emphasizes a certain word in a sentence, the whole phrase could have a different meaning. 

“I love it when you clean the dishes” 

What is the difference in meaning between emphasizing the word “love” and the word “clean” and the word “dishes”? 

Unless you’re a fan of General Semantics, you probably were never conscious of how strongly, and how, specifically, the structure of language affects your mood and your relationships with others. Words are verbal crystallizations of our inner experience, and inside our heads, we are constantly building models of what it is or isn’t out there in the extensional world and we use words to give meaning to these models. The words you use are not the actual object or experience that they represent. Only the structure of language is the connection between the facts of the matter and our verbal processing of it. This is a major point that we will repeat over and over in this training, in many different ways and from any possible angle, because it is the most crucial to your well being and harmonious relationship with others. The models you build in your mind, using the words you automatically and unconsciously structure, are used by your brain as a map to guide you in life. The verbal constructions stored in your nervous system are components of your mental map of the extensional world. The actual experience of “love” cannot be transmitted because it is not a physical object. The translated meaning is delivered and accepted, and as such, the loving feeling you have depends on how Love is represented in your own subjective internal map. 

You can share the same construction of words about Love with others, “love is all we need”, “love is in the air”, “can’t buy me love”, etc., but the actual experience of Love is created internally and subjectively by you alone. You feel Love not because someone else said “I love you” but because the feeling was generated inside of you, based on the rules stored in your map of reality. 

If you have a neural connection between noticing a smiling face (extensional) and feeling unconditional love (interpretation), how will you behave in your day to day? 

If you have a neural connection between an unfavorable event (for example, someone forgets your birthday) and feeling inadequate or depressed, how will your experience of life be?