My NLPing Blog

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Derren Brown Using NLP???

Learn to make your communication more persuasive with presuppositions. A presupposition is an assumption that your listener perceives from your communication. For example, a very common presupposition I used with clients in my hypnotherapy practice was, "before you go deeper (into hypnosis), I would like you to notice how your breathing seems to be deeper .. . ". That line had 2 presuppositions in it, that even if the client has consciously negated one, the other is still accepted. Milton Erickson was able to embed his communications with presuppositions that were often quite well hidden.

Overview: The Presupposition Method
Step #1: Select your presuppositions
Step #2: Embed them in sentences
Step #3: Create a conversational approach with the sentences and set-ups
Step #4: Practice on people

Step #1. Select your presupposition.
Imagine that you are about to encourage a trance state while in a conversational format.

Think of at least five things that you could presuppose (assume is a close synonym) about the person and their experience that you could leverage for relaxation, rapport, healing, and trance.

For example: "... this allows you to more fully feel the relaxation spreading from your shoulders," (presupposing that the person is already relaxing and that it is spreading from their shoulders, making it possible to feel sensations that can be interpreted as relaxation and increase awareness there that will induce relaxation) or, at a higher logical level, 'As you go into your day, your subconscious will continue to heal you and build you," (presupposing that the subconscious has this agenda and is already healing and building).

Step #2. Embed them in sentences.

Create sentences that, as I showed in step one, include these presupposition. You get bonus points for preceding each sentence with a sentence or two that set up the presupposition to make it more stealthy.

For example, "As you inhale, you can feel your shoulders spread very slightly, with your exhale allowing them to feel their natural weight. This allows you to more fully feel the relaxation spreading from your shoulders, into the weight of your hands, through the ends of your fingers."

Step #3. Create a conversational approach with the sentences and set ups.
String these presupposition bearing sentences together into a conversational approach to trance.

Step #4. Practice on people.
Try this on a willing participant, or record it and try it on yourself.
Observe your subjects for signs of trance.

Notice how your use of presuppositions can encourage what you presuppose to actually take place or become the basis for other behavior.

CREDITS FOR THE CREATION of this NLP pattern belong to Milton H. Erickson, modeled by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind"- Rudyard Kipling

(Page 528 of "The Big Book Of NLP")

Nested Loops - A Sample Story

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE for a Nested loops story. As you read, please remember that this method is most effective when used out loud. Therefor, try to imagine me speaking to you with these words:

''You know, this is amazing because for the last few days I didn't really get any question about this method, although it is quite an impressive and effective one. Everybody uses stories, you know, some are doing it well and some are doing it well but not in an effective or influence or both ways down ... and see, right as I write to you, I am reminded of that first time I ever read a story that have truly influenced me. I am not sure if you are familiar and know this one - the catcher in the rye. it is truly a lovely story that does influence you in many ways. Two of the ways that it has impressed upon me were exactly what I thought they would be, but much more - first, I started seeing people around me that acted exactly like that kid in the story ... now who wrote that one ... hold on, let me use my neurons well - wrote it, I believe, JD Salinger. what is that JD anyway? Is it a shortcut or is it his name? anyway, what I was saying, I read a lot of stories in my life and some were good and some were not. and you would think that all a good story needs is a good plot, but it isn't so, at least so I believe, because you see, I believe a story should challenge your own beliefs. doesn't really matter which beliefs, and if you do believe in them or only caught them for awhile, but it is for me an essential thing that you will be challenged. Otherwise, what's the point of paying 20 bucks for 300 or 400 (how many are those today anyway?) pages of a fiction. It's not real you know ... just like the subconscious ain't real. it's a fiction, you probably know this by now but let me tell you how I thought of it: I think the subconscious is a fairy tail, because you see, no one can point out exactly where in our brain or even in the whole nervous system which lies all over your body, you know, where is it then? can you touch your nose with your right finger and tell me whether it's there? how about your eyebrows? neck? back? stomach? pancreas? little piggie? "and that little piggy went to the markeL.", my grandma' did this gig to me even when I was well grown up (in fact, I was 22 years old). She kept telling me I don't eat enough, though she only saw me like maybe once a week. A great woman she was, even as a nana (grandma') she kept telling jokes, even dirty jokes! you'd be surprised how funny it is that your grandma' is telling jokes like these ... and isn't that just not only amusing but gives a sense of youth-full-ness, gratitude and relaxation ... now double that because she did tell extensively funny jokes. anyway, I miss her.

I was saying about the subconscious is not real. you know it isn't. can't point to it, can't put it in a barrell (old meta-model conspiracy) ... it's a nominalization. It's actually a process, or more so - a group of processes that is just it - subconscious.

In other words - all the processes of your nervous system that you are not aware of at this specific moment, because you don't pay attention to many different things at once as you read this. because you know, as you read this you have to first let your eyes catch the letters and form them to the words that I have written previously, and then let your inner voice form it to auditory conversation that is way inside your mind. that's consciousness. now add noticing you're blinking and your ever deeper breath, and friend - you don't have many conscious options ... all the rest is 'sub' of the consciousness. and because you don't pay much attention to
whatever happens outside of this scope of reading these words and making sense of whatever I'm saying, it is surely important to us, I believe, to screen our reading list. Read the stories that worth reading, read things that challenge our beliefs - there, I said it again, didn't I? a challenge .. A story that will make you think if the way that you interpret reality is the reality itself. Harry Potter did it for many children.

And Jerome David Salinger did that exactly in his Catcher In The Rye story ... oh, yes, that's it. JD is Jerome David ... ahhh, I remember. Right. Now... he wrote many
books, but that was the book that got my attention.

The Catcher In The Rye is marvelous, truly, go read it if you can. I can still remember its main character, Holden Caulfield, a 17 years old boy, who's also telling the story ... that boy is troubled with that transition from boyhood to adulthood. And he got me thinking so much you know ...

Amazingly enough, not everybody are reading stories, and not everybody who are reading, are reading the right stories. And even those who are writing stories wonder why their stories are being read less than others who write even less-seemingly-interesting stories... and that's because the language these writers use is more effective and influence better. And my goal in the article you commented on was to expose one of many methods to influence others by doing a series of stories with
Nested Loops.

I can only assume you can see the effectiveness and power of this easy to learn easy to do method. Can you not?"

(Page 404 of "The Big Book Of NLP")

The Nested Loops Method

Influence and persuade others merely by telling them stories.
This is one of the best, if not THE best, method of conversational hypnosis. It involves no inductions, no snapping fingers, no need to get an approval for a hypnotic session.

It's also very easy to learn and practice.

It can be used for almost any situation where you would want to implant hypnotic suggestions without being obvious (which also means almost certain failure), and without the need to induce a person into hypnosis.

You can use this method to talk with your kids before bedtime, and install some positive suggestions that will benefit them and the family.
You can use it to talk with your boss about a raise (or to be precise, tell your boss when he'll give you a raise).
You can use it to talk with your employees to motivate them and to inspire creativity.
You can use it in training Gust like Bandler has been doing for years and years with his stories.
You can use it in writing, like I do from time to time.
There is no end to the ways you can use The Nested Loops method.

The Nested Loops method is another classic method that Milton Erickson has created and used successfully for many years.

By using this method, you're building tension, just like they do in regular story telling.

You create five stories, that are interesting to your audience (which you should know, of course).

You open one story after the other, and on a cue point you switch to the next story (the graphic below demonstrates it).

Once you open the fifth story, you include your hypnotic suggestions in it and then you close story number five, and continue to complete and close the stories in reverse order.

That's the classic application of this method, and it is thoroughly explained below.

There are number of reason why this method works so well to influence people:

Our mind doesn't like loose ends, so your mind begins a TDS (Trance-Derivational Search) in order to close the open loop.

Your mind looks for the completion of it, and while it waits for it, more stories are opened, overloading the mind's attempts to keep track. It is all done subconsciously, of course.
Concentration on the content and entertaining details of the stories will confuse the listener, and will cause his mind to drift from the structure to the details; chunking down, in other words. By the time you get to the fifth story, your listener's mind has less tendency to resist suggestions and these will most likely be accepted immediately.
There is no "watch out" sign. When you induce hypnosis, some people will go into a defensive position, guarding their subconscious mind as though it were a precious fortress.

Hypnotherapists work long and hard at bringing down these defenses, and it takes a lot of energy and time.

By telling a story in a casual conversational style, without even mentioning the word "hypnosis" or snapping your fingers, the defenses are down (unless that person has a good reason not to trust you).
The loop is habitual. Our mind picks up patterns quite fast. Once one loop has been closed (story number five), the listener's mind expects that the rest will be closed too, and it is much more alerted to pick it up.

Once another one is closed (number four or five), it forgets all about the suggestions and lets them sink into the subconscious with the stories.

It is much more important to the mind to close the loops than to deal with the suggestion that has been "slipped" in between them.

Overview: The Nested Loops Method
Step #1: Create a well-formed outcome
Step #2: Come up with an indirect suggestion
Step #3: Build the five stories and cue points
Step #4: Introduce the beginning of story #1
Step #5: Tell the stories, open the loops
Step #6: Embed the suggestions within story #5
Step #7: Close the rest of the loops

Step #1. Create a well-formed outcome.
You must firmly decide what you want to accomplish and with whom. You need to know your outcome as well as your audience's needs, wants and desires. By knowing this information, it will be easier for you to construct your stories and suggestions in the most effective manner.

Ask yourself questions such as:
Who do I want to influence?
What do I want to suggest to them? (Don't write the suggestions yet, just your outcome.)
Who are they exactly? Is it better if I work with only one at a time?
What are their needs? What do I know about their needs, wants and desires? If I could sum it up in one word, how would I name what they want themselves?
What type of stories would be most appealing to them? (You'll know the answer once you answer the previous questions.)
When would be the best time to sit down and talk to them without interruption?
Do they already trust me, or do I need to establish trust (and rapport, of course)?

Step #2. Come up with an indirect suggestion.

Since we're talking about a conversational hypnotic method, it would be much more effective to use indirect suggestions. Saying something like, "and you would find yourself passionate about cleaning your room," is a very direct suggestion. Saying instead, "and you know, I felt great after cleaning my room, just like you do with yours ... " provides an indirect suggestion.

Since it takes time to master this method (as with every good thing), start with only one suggestion. Later on, once you learn to go through these steps without planning too much, you can use more suggestions.

Step #3. Build the five stories and cue points.

There are very few rules for these stories:

They must be entertaining, since we're using five of them. If they are boring, you'll have a sleeping audience.
The method will work better if you use real-life stories from your own past. Do not use stories that involve the person you're trying to persuade; they have their own version of this memory. Don't even include their role, as that is too obvious. If you must, you can make up your story.
Learn to tell those stories in an interesting way. Record yourself before you try it out on someone else. Fine tune your story telling until there is nothing in the content or in the delivery that is likely to annoy. Craft it into an engaging, thrilling tale.
The length of your story shouldn't be an issue, but don't say 100 words where five would be enough. Say it short but say it all, and in an interesting manner. You can repeat some key points if needed.

Once you've chosen your five stories, break each into a Cue Point; a place where it would be appropriate to cut the story, BUT... that DOES NOT give away the end of the story.

Step #4. Introduce the beginning of story #1.
Now comes the tricky part; how to get them to listen to you. It's hard to advise you exactly what to do, since every situation is different.

The easiest situation is when you're have control over the environment as you do when you're a presenter in a training or a father putting his kids to bed.

In a business meeting, where there would be normally several interactions between you and the listener, you can still use this method, but keep in mind that you will have to let the other party speak from time to time.

I always introduce the beginning of story number one by saying, "You know what, I must tell you something that just popped up in my mind and reflects almost exactly what you said..."

Another option would be, "let me tell you a story"... or even better, "Did I ever tell you about the time I jumped from a bridge ..."

The first sentence is crucial because it is used to initiate the momentum of listening to your story. The the more completely you occupy their conscious mind with interesting stories, the better you will maintain the momentum.

Step #5. Tell the stories, open the loops.
A good idea (actually, a very good idea) is to remember the order of the stories you tell them. I do so by using my right hand fingers, and tie each story to a finger. I start with the thumb, and in my own imagination I picture a keyword from the story tied into my thumb.

So for example, if story number one involves a monkey, I see that monkey biting my right thumb. If the second story involves a diaper, I can see my index finger covered with a diaper, hitting the monkey who's biting my thumb. That idiotic image will definitely remind me of the order of my stories.

You tell story number one up to the cue point, and then you use some linking phrase to break it and go to the beginning of story number two.

You can use almost anything here. "And the police man asked me about my uncle, who you know is a carpenter. By the way, I never told you, but I did work for him for a couple of months when I was 12 In fact, in that summer, just after my birthday, he felt so sick that I had to do all of his work. In one client's house ... ", and they have the policeman story unfinished while hearing about your sick carpenter uncle.

When you get to story number five, that's the time for the next step.

Step #6. Embed the suggestions within story #5.

That's where the juice is. You tell story number five from beginning to end, while in the middle of it, right after the Cue Point, you slip in a few suggestions. It is so easy you won't believe me unless you try it.

"And you see, at that exact moment, what would you have done? I bet you get a feeling, a good feeling about doing it, and just like you would do your homework as fast as possible to get it done the same day you get them, just like when I went through that mission of ... ".

They won't even realize what is going on. Your previous stories have already overloaded their minds, now the suggestions are not being analyzed.

Step #7. Close the rest of the loops.

Don't leave their minds hanging there, searching for the end of the loops. Close each remaining loop in reverse order. After closing story number five, you have a way to go back to close story number four, because the Cue Point of story number four is what initiated story number five.

Continue closing these loops until you finish story number one.

If you like, you can drop in a couple of questions to encourage time distortion. After finishing story number one, ask questions like:

"By the way, you told me before that you're interested in XYZ, tell me about it."

Of course, XYZ has to be something that the person told you before you initiated the Nested loops method. Tie the loop of story number five (complete the story) smoothly, as though you had never interrupted it.

(Page 398 of "The Big Book Of NLP")

Persuasion By Chunking Up/Down

"It's not the mountain that lies ahead of you that stops you ... it's the pebble in your shoe" ~Muhammad Ali

CHUNK Up - or Chunking Up - means that you move from specifics to generalities.
Chunk Down - or Chunking Down - means that you move from generalities to specifics.

Chunk Up is answering questions such as, "what is this for?", "does it mean that you/I/we/this ... ", "what is the intention?", "what could be the purpose?", etc.

Chunking up doesn't necessarily mean that you move all the way to the most general statement you can make about the subject. It means that you only move to a MORE general statement, not necessarily the highest/most general.

Chunk Down is about answering questions such as, "how could we use it?", "is it...", "does that mean that we could do ... ", etc.

Chunking Down doesn't' necessarily mean that you move all the way to the least general or most specific statement. But, you only move towards a more specific set of ideas.

The Chunk Up -> Chunk Down pattern of persuasion can be described as a range:

Whatever you say or hear can be marked as a point on that Chunk Up -> Chunk Down range. From that point, you can either chunk up and generalize or chunk down and be more specific.

To enhance rapport and get a sense of agreement and unity between you and another person, chunk up! Rarely do people refuse to agree to nominalizations. When you say, "love is wonderful", how many people will disagree? That's a huge chunk. If you say, "your love is wonderful", there's an opening for a debate and not necessarily an
immediate agreement.

You chunk up to get agreement. You chunk down to solve problems.

How do you eat an elephant? Remember that joke, right... one piece at a time. That's chunking down! - a person presents a problem to you and asks for your help to solve it. If you chunk down long enough, they will find their own solutions on their own, making their own decisions and thanking you for opening up their eyes. You don't have to know EVERYTHING, you just need to chunk down further.

You chunk up to hypnotize. You chunk down to de-hypnotize.

You don't need to be a hypnotist in order to hypnotize others. You see, just by using words and talking to people, you're already generate trance states in others. They don't have to close their eyes and quack like a duck. Hypnosis is everything between a day dream and moon walking. We move in and out of hypnosis numerous times during the day.

When you're in any state of hypnosis, you're more suggestible to be influenced by your surrounding and obviously by your own inner world. When you chunk up, you get people to think about intentions, purposes, philosophy and meaning - by using a nominalization (a word that describes something you cannot physically point at, like love, influence, subconscious, etc.) you cause the other person to go inside and think about the meaning of what you said. He must make sense of it - and that inner search after the meaning, that's a trance!

Sometimes you would want to de-hypnotize, take a person out of hypnosis. If your chat mate is spacing out too often, have a hard time listening and concentrating or is in pain (another form of self hypnosis concentrating obsessively on the physical feeling of pain) - you can de-hypnotize that person by chunking down. When you dig into details, the present reality kicks in and the world of philosophy is faded.

If you remember, in one of our articles about Milton Erickson's method to relieve pain, we spoke about chunking down. By analyzing the physical pain, wherever on the body it is, you make it smaller and less important. The brain goes from "oh, it is painful in my teeth" to "oh, there's that rough sensation in the 3rd tooth from the right, on its front side right above that small white dot".

In hypnotherapy we use chunking down a lot when dealing with phantom pains - pains that are felt as if they are real, even though there is no physical reason or indication.

(Page 392 of "The Big Book Of NLP")

My NOTE: Chunking UP means generalizing while Chunking DOWN means narrowing it down to specifics by elimination process (asking specific questions)

Meta-Programs Identification

"As a leader ... I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I always remember the axiom: a leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, where upon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind" - Nelson Mandela

CREDITS FOR THE CREATION of this NLP pattern belong to various contributors.

This pattern makes you into a more effective communicator by helping your pace the meta-programs of another person. This is very important in sales, leadership, and coaching, as a rapport-building skill that improves your perception and understanding.

Overview: The Meta-Program Identification Pattern
Step #1: Assess the person's meta-program use
Step #2: Communicate with their style of meta-program use
Step #3: Transcend the limitations of your own meta-program style.
Step #4: TEST!

Step # 1. Assess the person's meta-program use.
Analyze the other person's communication in terms of the metaprograms that they are using. See the appendix on meta-programs as needed.

Step #2. Communicate with their style of meta-program use.
Use the same meta-programs as your person as you communicate with them.

Step #3. Transcend the limitations of your own meta-program style.
Take note of any ways that your own driver meta-programs may be causing you to miss anything about your person's use of meta-programs.

Expand your communications with them as insights emerge.

Step #4. Test.
Notice any ways that using their meta-programs improves your rapport with them, including your ability to empathize with them or understand their perspective, motives and thinking.

(Page 382 of "The Big Book Of NLP")

Introduction To The NLP Meta-Programs

LESLIE Cameron Bandler and her collaboration first developed the meta-programs model in NLP with Richard Bandler. Later on, Wyatt Woodsmall, another famous NLP developer, further developed it. We've heard of other people in the history of NLP contributing to the development of the meta-programs model, but without concrete evidence. Surely many people, experimenting practitioners and participants alike, have given their outputs for the creation of this model.

Meta-programs allow you to really understand human behavior, to learn how the person's mind is processing reality and therefore producing a certain outcome. People's behavior may sometimes seem random, spasmodic and thoughtless, but under the surface the factors influencing even a mood change are quite complex and intriguing. The next time another person snaps at you, as if they were trying to "get to you," step back and, instead of participating in the emotional roller-coaster, try to guess their meta-programs.

Meta-programs are deep structure tendencies that drive automatic behaviors and thought patterns. The meta-programs are related to all levels of a person's mind management. They relate to personality, decision-making, beliefs, values, dynamic relationships to self and others, emotions, true memories, false memories, and so on.

Meta-programs describe functions on a continuum. They do not describe personality traits, though they relate to personality. In essence, the meta-programs do not come to portray what a person IS, but how that person functions at a given moment in time in a specific context or situation (preferably, the moment you're communicating
with them).

In other words, it is not "the way I am," but it's "the way I do it." My identity is not a noun ("I am") but a continuing and dynamic process ("my current strategies"). If you say, "I am a failure," you're generalizing too much; if you say, "I failed in math 3 times in the past year," you're already taking a new perspective on those 3 events. The meta-programs are not necessarily going to show you how to succeed in math, but they are going to show you how your deep structured neurology is working perfectly, but not always towards the outcomes you envision for yourself.

Meta-programs are changeable, manageable and predictable. The person you're trying to analyze might express the same meta-program distinction, in both extremes, given different contexts and situations. People are complex, so even if you've easily identified a metaprogram distinction in someone, it does not mean that this person will hold and cherish it for a long time. It is bound to change.

What you define by working with the meta-program model is the "how," not the "is." The person you're analyzing is not a mismatcher, he's a person who's currently using the mismatch strategy, and if you change the theme or topic of your conversation, he might become a very extreme matcher! This makes the meta-programs model much more interesting and usable, because you don't need to tag people or memorize their attributes, you need to constantly shift your communication with them, according to your own outcomes, to their current influencing metaprograms and the context in which you both participate.

The meta-programs offer much more than just random analysis of people's tendencies in given contexts. The meta-programs allow you to also discover ways by which you can stop behaving in a certain way and install new ways, or strategies, for "working differently." If you find that you tend to see things in black and white terms, that may be useful in some contexts, but certainly not in your relationship with your spouse; not if you want a nurturing and loving marriage. With your spouse, you would want to hold a continuum as your perception. You would want to see all shades of gray and understand him or her from multiple viewpoints. If you only see things as "good" or "bad," every little thing about them might bother you too much. If they're late, or the dinner gets cold, or the kids didn't make it to a game because of a Yoga class, or whatever else, you might over-generalize merely because of a tiny Perception Category meta-program!

However, you do want to keep the black and white extreme when it comes to traffic rules, right? You do want to stop at a stop sign every time, drive under the maximum
allowed speed and certainly never drive after drinking alcohol. These are black and white Perception Category situations, in which the Continuum would be ineffective or even dangerous. Surely you can't argue with a policeman and say, "but there aren't any other cars around" after crossing a red light. Policemen do not care about the gray area, they want the law to be followed as is.

How Does A Meta-Program Work?

Meta-programs exist to make us more efficient. When you work with a familiar workflow, you "chunk up" and perform faster and better each time. A meta-program is kind of a set of instructions that your mind has gotten used to. In our modern and ultra-fast world, making prompt decisions is a necessity. A meta-program exists to perform even when your conscious mind is overloaded and stressed. Knowing meta-programs can help you tremendously to understand and predict other people's behaviors, and your own.

One of the most crucial elements to successful living is really just getting along with people, and especially getting along with people who can or should contribute to your achievable outcomes. Although the meta-programs can be used effectively in persuasion settings, like sales or therapy, they also serve us in other important ways.

The meta-programs give us a way to better understand another person's model of the world. We get to "read" and interpret reality through their processing preferences. As with the example I gave a few paragraphs ago, if you know that your spouse is categorizing her perception on a continuum, seeing all shades of gray, you can use language to communicate with her more effectively. You can still express your "extreme" black or white perception, but you would do so by acknowledging her way of seeing things first. Why? Because you want your relationship to work and improve, not to deteriorate because of lack of communication. And what is lack of communication if not ignoring each other's model of the world?

This is why we try to understand each other; we want to relate. Relationships are a crucial factor in any human's life (in fact, in almost any species), because there aren't many men or women who live on a deserted island. We have to communicate in order to survive, to propagate, to experience shared joy, to learn and grow and so on. There is no way around it. Either you work hard on your communication skills, or you are not going to get far on your outcomes.

When you and another person can't understand each other, you both feel misunderstood, frustrated and disconnected. Even if you discover the differences between you, you still need to come to agreement (in relevant contexts). How would you do that if you can't understand where each other is coming from and how you got there?

One of NLP's basic presuppositions, or advantageous beliefs, is that you are responsible for the results of your communication with another person. So if you and I are talking, for example, it is your responsibility to make me understand your point. The opposite is also true. As I am communicating with you, it is my responsibility to help you understand my point. Don't think of it as a shared responsibility, think of it as the responsibility of the person who's trying to convey his or her message
to others.

When you try to explain your ideas, you need to use an effective approach. This requires being in a frame of mind in which you take the responsibility for your communication. Then you are in a good position to accept and even appreciate the differences between us, and then utilize what you know to get me to understand your
message.

At this point I'd like to remind you of a commonly used NLP pattern: the Physiomental State Interruption pattern (p92/76). In order to interrupt a person's state of mind, use the opposite extreme of a meta-program you recognize in their language. If the wife from the example above is a "gray zone" advocate, send messages implicitly as black and white perception. "I love X more than anything" or "I hate X more than anything" are two examples of a Black and white style of thinking.

Using the opposite preference of a specific meta-program is a sure way to get a person agitated or a bit angry at you. But it will also break the state, and you can always smile as if you meant it as a joke, change the topic and you're off on another conversational atmosphere.

The benefit of using meta-programs, among others, is that instead of assuming and predicting another person's thoughts and behaviors, in an ineffective way, you're actually aiming for the right ones. You can never really understand what's going on in another person's mind. Each one of us is a complex individual with a whole lot
of memories and experiences that comprise a unique identity. You can't "figure out" a person, you can only assume a close guess, more or less.

Another key related to metaprograms, and NLP in general, is that each person is trying to impose his or her model of the world on the rest of us. Unless you're a well-trained NLP enthusiast, you're seeing the world through your own perceptual filters and consider it to be the only reality. You would see bad people and good people, comfortable situations and stressful events, misfortune and greed, and so on. But if you wish to master NLP, this facade is not going to fool you anymore.

You will no longer tag people for any reason. You'd be exploring their map of the world instead of judging them according to yours. You would have more curiosity and agility to help you learn HOW a person is functioning and not WHY are they "not working well"

One of the hardest stages I had to go through as a practitioner is when I received a phone call from a parole officer, asking me to work with a convicted ex-prisoner who was just released after a sentence of several years for abusing his wife. I really had to grow inside to accept such a client. I always thought that a perpetrator of a crime should keep paying so he or she won't forget to stop themselves the next time. Meeting this person has changed my way of thinking. He really needed help and he was willing to do anything and everything to "become normal," as he said. I changed my mind, accepted him, and that was one event I remember well because from then on, I started being curious about every person's HOW, regardless of the outcome.

The meta-programs are real, and you can observe them in any person. The reason that they are real lies in the essence of communication with self and communication with others. There are two modes of communication, verbal and non verbal. When it comes to your communication with yourself, you can speak to yourself (internal voice, self talk) and that's verbal communication, or you can imagine pictures or movies (mental visualization) or simply have a "feeling" or intuition, and these are non-verbal communication formats. When you communicate with other people, again you could speak to them verbally (auditory digital), or you could express nonverbally through your physiology.

At this point you still get to have control, more or less, on what you're expressing. But this is just a false sense of control. In reality, you can consciously manage around 7 items or bits of information, more or less, simultaneously. Everything else that you express, verbally and non-verbally, comes from your subconscious mind. Needless to say, your subconscious mind does not know how to lie and does not have the same objectives as your conscious mind or conscious thought process.

The subconscious mind has made it easier on itself by producing patterns. These are neurological connections, a kind of blueprint for processing, reprocessing and reproducing information. Your mind is accessing these blueprints all the time to know how to react to stimuli, how to make a decision, how to relate to the world, and so on.

These blueprints are also context-dependent. Accessing a blueprint to make a decision makes it feel "right," as a kind of intuition that relaxes you and makes you feel like you've made the best choice. And even if you have made the worst decision ever, it was still the best one your mind could produce at that given moment. You always do your best, satisfying some sort of subconscious need, even when it seems like a part of you is against improvement.

People who do not engage in studying these ideas, either investing time in acquiring knowledge from psychology or from NLP, are usually blind to these blueprints. The most they know is, that there are habits that control their thoughts and actions, but they usually claim nonsense such as, "that's just the way I am" or "I am just screwed up like this."

Meta-programs are habitual, true, but they are also easy to change. Merely by recognizing a tendency in your actions or thoughts, in a specific context, reminds you of it the next time you have a similar experience. Taking the example above, if you know that your wife is a "gray-zone" perceptual categorizer, the next time you two argue you will alread have the tools to calm down the emotional storm within you, think logically for a moment, and then reconstruct your words by taking a "middle ground" approach. You need to explain what you have to say in terms that exist in a "Continuum" style of thinking and not in your habitual black and white. This is not to say that you're wrong thinking in either/or terms, this is to say that if you want your wife to understand you, it is your responsibility to express yourself in the formats that her model of the world is working with. And no, you cannot just send her to an NLP seminar and then drop the whole deal on her.

There is another aspect to blueprint blindness. People usually think that everyone else is either working the same way they are, or they are unbearable or just strange! The fact is, that if you take the list of meta-programs and start questioning people, you will find many differences in thinking and decision-making between each and every one of the people you interview.

People are blind not only to their own blueprints, but also to everyone else's. Unless you study communication or psychology or NLP, there is a very high chance that you would find it really hard to "figure out" a person.

The meta-programs model works in such a way that you need to step out of your model of the world and observe objectively the blueprints another person is working with. Most of these blueprints are subconscious, so it makes no use to ask a person which perceptual category he's in at the moment or whether or not he chunked down a certain message you gave him. Observe! Open your eyes, ears and whatever else you need to gather knowledge objectively. The other person will offer you verbal formation (auditory digital) or non-verbal information (visual external), both of which you can use. The more useful one, of course, would be the non-verbal communication, because it is easy to lie with words, but your body language usually speaks the truth. When you observe meta-programs try not to judge the content you're hearing. The "story" is not important as much as the format of it.

How to Learn and Practice the Meta-Programs

There are many meta-programs. In this book I will list the ones that I find to be the most interesting and influential. In order to learn so many distinctions, you would need to work, first of all, slowly and methodically. Yes, of course, go ahead and read them all, no one is going to stop you. But when you go out there, to the real world, and start to practice recognizing and applying meta-programs distinctions, take them one at a time. In fact, I would recommend that you consciously work with only one metaprogram a week.

The reason is that your mind needs time to process these ideas and concepts, and since you're also applying them in numerous social situations, your mind needs to "push" them down to become unconscious competencies. To prevent overwhelm and possible failure, work slowly. It will benefit you later on when you master the meta-programs.

I also suggest that you not apply the meta-programs on everyone in every situation. This is something that new NLP learners mistakenly engage in. They apply everything they learn, on everyone, all the time and everywhere.

This is not healthy. Nothing in excess can be healthy. Stay "normal." Applying NLP 24/7 will make you a control-freak or some kind of a zombie. Now, to make it clear, I'm talking about consciously practicing the skills of Neuro Linguistic Programming. If something has become a part of you, if you do not need to "think about it" to make it work. But if you go out there, consciously trying to apply NLP on everything and everyone, you will find yourself exhausted, frustrated and with many annoyed relatives. Separate practice times from reality times. When you practice, engage with everything you can as an NLP practitioner. When you live your life, give NLP a rest. You will find that the skills you're practicing will naturally flow into your everyday actions and thoughts, so you really do not need to force this process.

Most important, remember that people's actions do not match their identity. You are not defined by your random actions. Everything you do and think about is context dependent, and every blueprint you recognize in yourself or in other people, might change drastically given different circumstances. In other words, respect your own model of the world and respect other people's models of the world. Reality is shared but not perceived the same by everyone.

As I wrote above, the metaprograms are distinguishable on a continuum. There is a sliding scale for most of them. Estimate more or less how far to an extreme a person's tendency is. You cannot be 100% accurate, but you can hit the right mark close enough. You can use the numerical grading system (1 to 10) or percentages (1-100%), or you can imagine it graphically, as I do, like an empty rectangle being filled with a color according to intensity.

When recognizing meta-programs in other people avoid the judgement. It would be counterproductive for you if you start estimating the "good" or "bad" in their preferences. There are no "right" or "wrong" tendencies, but "useful" or "non-useful," and again even this estimation is context-dependent.

Do not expect the meta-programs you elicit in others to be consistent. Even when you come across the same context, a metaprogram can change drastically. People evolve, even when they are not aware of it. Any experience, big or small, can modify a person's meta-program. To use the metaprogram model practically, you treat every interaction like a first one and re-work the meta-programs accordingly.

Finally, have fun! Exploring another person's map of the world is an exciting endeavor. Get curious and stay curious and delighted about other people. You will enjoy social interactions, you will become much more attractive to everyone, and your groupies (every person has some) will grow and grow. Your influence abilities will definitely increase and strengthen, and your days will not seem like carbon copies of each other anymore. NLP can, and should in my opinion, be practiced in a state of
joy.

Perception and Interest Styles Meta Programs

View: Global (Seeing the forest for the trees, big picture) vs. Details (detailed view, specific).

Boundary Locus: Internal (how I feel, think, etc.)
vs. External (what you're doing, what's happening).

Person locus: Self (me, number one, narcissism)
vs. Other (you, empathy, codependency).

Distinction: Match or sameness (how these things are similar or overlap, what they have in common)
vs. Mismatch or difference (how they are distinct, different, in contrast, unique).

Arousal hierarchy: The type of thing that the person finds most interesting to notice or value, can be listed in order of that person's level of interest or sequence of noticing when in a new situation.

People vs. Activities vs. Location vs. Things vs. Information
(other categories can be added as needed)

Arousal sub-hierarchies:

Same as arousal hierarchy, but for categories within the arousal hierarchy item.

Example for People: dynamics, power hierarchy position or class, motivations, usefulness, threat, individual personality characteristics, sophistication or capacity (e.g. psychological, occupational, emotional, social, motivational).

Behavior Styles Meta Programs

Immediacy: Proactive (acting in advance, being prepared)
vs.
Reactive (in the moment, immediacy, emergency)

Personal style:

Similar to Mayers Briggs.
Assertive vs. Passive.
judgmental vs. Open perception.
Thinking and Logical vs.lntuitive.
Active vs. Complacent.
Invasive vs. Tolerant
Concerned vs. Indifferent.

Developmental issues:

Developmental delays
vs.
Age-appropriate maturity (in specific areas of living such as handling authority), physical, thinking (cognitive), and emotional impairments that can affect development (such as a mental health diagnosis which can be mild, moderate or severe).

Outcomes Alignment Styles Meta Programs

Outcome Focus:
Towards (what I want, eagerness)
vs.
Away from (avoiding what I reject or fear, loathing or concern)

Time Focus:
Far vs. Distant,
Past vs. present vs. future (thoughts and reference points tend to be there)

Convincer patterns and learning preferences:
Being convinced of something or learning something most efficiently through reading, observing, doing, experiencing, etc.

McClelland's motivational preferences:
Power vs. Popularity vs. Performance

"I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain" ~Jane Wagner

(Page 661 of "The Big Book Of NLP")