Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Man: What do you do with a client who doesn't have much awareness of internal process? When I ask some of my clients how they do things inside, they just shrug and say, "I don't know."

There are several things you can do. One is to keep asking until they pay attention inside. Another is to ask a lot of questions and read the nonverbal "yes/no" responses. Ask, "Are you talking to yourself?" and watch the response just before the verbal "I don't know." This technique is discussed fully in the book Trance–formations.

Another thing you can do is to create the problem situation and observe the person's behavior. All submodality shifts are demonstrated in external behavior. For instance, when someone brightens a picture, the head rotates back and up, but when a picture comes closer, the head moves straight back. If you observe people when you ask them to make submodality changes, you can calibrate to the behavioral shifts that we call "submodality accessing cues." Then you can use those shifts to determine what someone is doing inside, even when he's not aware of it. I always use this calibration as a check to be sure the client is doing what I ask him to.

Like everything else in NLP, the more you know how change works, and the more you are calibrated to behavioral responses, the more you can do things covertly. For instance, sometimes a person has to practice the swish a few times. You can ask her to do it once, and then ask her, "Did you do it right?" In order to answer that question, she'll have to do it again. Then you can ask, "Are you sure you did it right?" and she'll have to do it again. She'll also do it faster and easier that way because she isn't consciously trying to do it.

Woman: Do you have any long–term follow–up studies of the effectiveness of this method?

I'm much more interested in twenty–minute follow–up studies. The only good reason for a long–term follow–up study is if you can't tell when the person changes in your office. Think about this: if you did produce a change in someone and they remained changed in that way for five years, what does that prove? That says nothing about whether or not that change is a valuable one, or whether or not it could have evolved any further. You see, making it possible for a woman to not be phobic of worms or not be compulsed to eat chocolate, is not a very profound accomplishment, even if it lasts the rest of her life. The important thing to understand about the swish pattern is that it sets the person in a direction that is generative and evolutionary. When I have done longer–term follow–ups on people I've swished, they typically report that the change I had made became the basis for all kinds of other changes that they are pleased with. The swish pattern doesn't tell people how to behave, it keeps them on the track of going toward what they want to become. To me, setting that direction is the biggest part of what change is all about.

(For information on videotapes of the Swish pattern, see Appendixes II and IV.)

Afterword

There is one thing that more than anything else delineates when somebody knows what NLP is. It is not a set of techniques, it's an attitude. It's an attitude that has to do with curiosity, with wanting to know about things, wanting to be able to influence things, and wanting to be able to influence them in a way that's worthwhile. Anything can be changed. That's something Virginia Satir said the first time I saw her give a workshop, and it's absolutely true. Any physicist knows that. Any human being can be changed with a .45—that's called "co–therapy with Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson." Whether a change is useful or not is a more interesting question.

The technology that you have been learning here is very powerful. The question about how you will use it, and what you will use it for, is one that I hope you will consider very carefully —not as a burden, but with the curiosity to find out what's worthwhile. The experiences in your life which have been the most beneficial to you in the long run, and which provide the basis of your being able to have pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment, and happiness, were not necessarily utterly enjoyable at the time they occurred. Sometimes some of those experiences were as frustrating as they could be. Sometimes they were confusing. Sometimes they were fun in and of themselves. Those experiences are not mutually exclusive. Keep that in mind when you design and provide experiences for others.

I got on a plane once to go to teach a seminar in Texas. The guy sitting next to me on the plane was reading a book called The Structure of Magic. Something about the cover caught my eye. I asked him, "Are you a magician?"

"No, I'm a psychologist."

"Why is a psychologist reading a book about magic?"

"It's not a book about magic, it's a serious book about communication."

"Then why is it called The Structure of Magic?"

Then he sat there for three hours and explained to me what the book was about. What he told me about that book had nothing to do with what I thought I was doing when I wrote it. At best the relationship couldn't even have reached being tenuous; he got lost in chapter two. But as he told me about the book, I asked him questions, such as, "How specifically?" and "What, specifically?"

"Well, if you look at it this way ... "

"If I were to look at it that way, what would I be seeing?"

"Well, you take this picture, you know, and take the other picture (He didn't know that most people don't have two pictures all the time), and you make this picture smaller and this one larger.

As he began to describe these things that were very matter–of–fact for him, I was sitting there thinking, "Wow, that's weird. There might be a whole new world here!"

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.