“There are people around us that we meet on a daily basis as well as sort of famous people, people who have been identified socially as being particularly adept and excellent in their performance.
NLP is the bridge between either being jealous of such people, or admiring them. This offers in Tony Blair’s terms, a third way.
Rather than simply admiring or being jealous of such people, it gives you a specific set of strategies, to unconsciously assimilate precisely the differences that make a difference between these geniuses, let’s say, and an average performer in the same niche.
It is an accelerated learning strategy. It is a mapping of tacit to explicit knowledge. It is a programme that allows you to explore one extreme of human behaviour, namely excellence.
Side comment, I have been astonished since I first learnt about this thing called psychology. That it focuses on average performance. Bertrand Russell, I remember reading when I was just nine or ten years old, an article called “On Education” by Bertrand Russell, in which he proposed something that has a great deal of wisdom. The structure of the educational system, even today, 2003, is closely allied with the structure of industrial work context. And that the implicit objective of most mass educational systems is the preparation of the citizen to participate in the work force. I think we could do it a lot better.
From my own point of view we are living in the age of the accountant, the age of the left brain, and for historical rebalancing purposes, some set of strategies, NLP is an example of this set, some set of strategies which restore the recognition of, and the active deployment of unconscious processes, as an essential ingredient in learning, would serve very well to restore some kind of balance. We are in the age of imbalance at this point, in favour of the so-called dominant hemisphere.
So, NLP then in summary, in its heart, in its core activity, is the modelling of excellence which includes the phase of unconscious assimilation in which you suspend all attempts of conscious processes, all attempts to make meaning of your experience in favour of registering it with macro or micro muscle movements. And, imitating the behaviours which are the behaviours that make the difference between the genius and the average, in parallel context, until you can produce in your behaviour, and invoke from your group the same responses with the same quality in roughly the same timeframe.
That’s criteria. Until you achieve that criteria, you remain unconscious and imitative.
When you achieve the criteria, then “click”, you switch on all these analytic competencies that all the conscious processes which you work so hard in universities and other places to develop. You go ahead and do a very powerful and very challenging part of modelling which is to find an explicit vocabulary, usually sensory grounded, in which you can code what you are now capable of doing behaviourally.
So, you have two data points. The model, him or herself or the team, and your own behaviour, since you had demonstrated through imitation, you can achieve the same results in the world. That’s your original model.
Of course, NLP for 99% of the people of the world has nothing to do with what I just described. It is the utilisation of the product of these core processes which I have just described. That is the distinction between the process of actually modelling excellence and making it explicit and then its subsequent application after it’s been packaged. People like packages. The majority of people that claim to do NLP are doing NLP application. This is to be applauded. There’s lots of creativity in this activity.
It’s not the core activity. It’s capitalising or exploiting the product of the core activity. That is the product is an explicit model which it then can be applied in multiple contexts. If it’s well done, as I said, this is to be applauded. And, my concern expressedly is, if no one is following, no one is refilling the well.
And, as you here in Western Australia know as well as I do, here in London and when I am in California, that it is nearly impossible, at this point historically, to attend the higher management training for example that doesn’t consist largely of NLP patterns. Whether they are so identified as having that as a source or not.
It’s fine. I have no difficulty with this.
I prefer that they mention the source because it would invite people to explore other dimensions which are not been presented in the workshop.
But the fact is being so deeply integrated into these advanced courses, it is to be applauded and greeted with joy because it is the product. The payoff is the application.
Obviously, my agenda which is not very secret, which is to recruit people who will engage in the modelling process itself.”
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