Day 1: An Introduction to NLP

What is neurolinguistic programming? That's actually one of the hardest questions to answer quickly and simply. Just as fish might have trouble describing water, just as you might have trouble describing air, it's hard to describe the practices of neurolinguistic programming because they are a way of observing yourself and your interactions with others and making changes so that you like the results. And you're doing that moment to moment, hour to hour, every day. It is a natural set of behaviors. And the value of learning it and of turning it into technique is that you get more choice about what you pay attention to and more choice about how you learn and store patterns and memories so that they will be useful to you in the future.

Now, how do we teach that? In the very first day of our NLP Practitioner certification, the first day uses NLP to teach people about NLP. And what I mean by this is the first most important thing is the big pattern of the day which is broken into four parts so that people can understand there are going to be four different aspects of NLP and depending on which point of view you take you will see NLP a little bit differently. The real answer is not one or the other of the aspects but in the whole day. Within each of those four parts we teach through experience. It is not about talking at you. It is not about what words are.

It's about what NLP is. And you learn it by doing it with other people and with repetition. The other people are important because you get live feedback and that feedback starts making you build a pattern where you understand that feedback is how we learn. That without feedback, learning is slow and clunky and unreliable. Feedback is the fastest route to improvement. Not improvement against some external standard. Improvement in our ability to carry out our goals through our behaviors.

So there's lots of practice in the first day. The third thing is that we establish that NLP needs to be done safely by building on strengths, by looking for strengths in other people and by keeping what should be private, what feels private, private. There is no way to overcome yourself. You are yourself. And if your whole self, your bigger self, you can call it your unconscious mind, you can call it your brain, is sending you a strong signal, do not talk about that, then the only way to have self respect is to not talk about it. And because NLP is working with patterns and not with details, most of the time you will find other places in your life that have a similar pattern. You will know what you are really working on, but other people don't need to know.

So if you don't feel safe sharing something, we tell you not to share it. If you think other people will not feel safe hearing it, we ask you not to share it. So NLP works in patterns. It works with feedback and it needs to be safe. Three principles that guide everything we do all day every day. And we set them up in the first morning.

Now our very first NLP exercise is what we call a calibration game. Calibration is measuring against a set standard. And what it tells you is you cannot read people cold. What you need to do is to observe people so closely that when they enter an emotion, a state, when they have the same kind of thought, when they're ready to move, and you've seen it before, you recognize it when you see it again. Calibration games amp up your awareness of how much you can observe about other people when you turn your mind to thinking about the person in front of you and not guessing about the ideas in their head. The way a game works is we'll say, "Think about a time you were working on a big project." Go all the way back into that memory. See what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel.

It's an NLP mantra. It reminds you that every lived experience you have had, you have had in your body using all of your senses. And so when you want to remember to put back together a memory of a time that you have experienced, you do it by remembering first the sensory components. And this is very specific and it shows up very specifically in your body and in your face so that somebody watching you can observe changes. They can actually see you thinking.

Now, we'd also say, think of a time you were learning something and it was really engaging you. Now, we have two different situations that you have remembered. And your coach, your partner then says, "Think of either the time you were working on the big project or the time you were learning something engaging." And this wording is important. We say, "Hold that state so clearly that your coach will know which one you have chosen because this is a cooperative game, not a competition. The point is not to mindread and invade. And the point is certainly not to deceive or hide. Instead, the point is to hold a thought so clearly that it shows up in your body and influences other people.

And when you're the coach, the point is to clear your mind so you can observe so closely that you recognize very small indicators in breath, in movement, in rhythms, in expression, and you recognize them in relation to a specific thought. And this becomes the basis for knowing how you are connecting with people and what you are connecting with them about. It's a game because you're just trying it out. It's very very important that we welcome feedback and we don't welcome feedback when it is punishing, when it is used so one person can win and the other person can lose. Instead, we say as a team, did you hold the state? Was your coach observing so closely that your coach guessed correctly? You both win.

Did your coach not guess correctly? Well, it's a hard thing to read somebody else's mind. No big deal. Try again over and over. And this pattern, if you learned nothing else but that pattern, in just that fraction of our first segment, it would stand you in good stead in every meeting, in every conversation. Quiet your mind, observe with your body and assign meaning to it.

Second thing we do, bigger time wise, is we do what is called mapping in NLP. And mapping is really slowing down what we just did. So instead of saying see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel, we say see what you see and notice how you are seeing. We are very accustomed to answering the question what are you seeing? And when we say what are you seeing our attention goes external. When we say how are you seeing, we start recognizing that we all pay attention differently. We encode information differently.

And by recognizing particular ways of encoding information in our eyes and our ears and our bodies, we create what we call in NLP states, what you might think of as mindsets or emotions. It is the state of your mind and body as they work together. So we start with the state of relaxed energy because that is like I like to say the Swiss army knife of states. It is useful in so many different situations to have the energy you need and only the exact amount of tension you need to do what you want to do.

So we take you back into that and we start mapping out are you seeing a picture? Is the picture moving? Some people close their eyes, all they see is that their eyes are closed. Other people can visualize really clearly. One is not right or wrong, better or worse. It is how you are learning about how you perceive the world.

So even people who are not aware of clear pictures will be able to answer questions like is the picture in black and white or in color? Is it a still picture or a moving picture? We move through different qualities of vision. And then we do the same thing with sound. Are you aware of sound as you remember this experience you once had of a relaxed energy? Is it loud or soft? Does it have a rhythm?

Does it have a pitch? And we just become really curious about physical sound. Not about the meaning of the sound, just about the physical sound and the way you experience it. And then you scan from the top of your head all the way down through your muscle groups, noticing whatever comes into your awareness. Some people who have done body work before have very detailed body maps. They can say there's a little tension over one eyebrow. I'm noticing just a tiny twitch at the corner of my mouth.

I am noticing different things in the back of my neck at the top and then at the bottom there's a little bit more tension or less tension. They're very very detailed. Other people are like, "No, I'm not really noticing anything about my head." But everybody notices something. And so the goal is to accept that this is not a competition to see who has the most information. It is a practice where a coach helps move your attention so that you can really pay attention to parts of your experience you've maybe never thought about consciously before. The way your thoughts and your experience show up in your body, in your neck, in your shoulders, in your breath, in your chest, in your core, right down to your feet, right through you as a sense of energy or balance. And that's what mapping is.

Now, mapping appears in lots of different mindfulness practices. Mindful mapping is generally a way of calming your system and heightening your awareness at the same time. So if you're somebody who thinks that calm means being kind of dozy, this isn't that. Instead, this is being relaxed. You're not putting any extra tension into the world or feeding it into yourself, but you're very aware. And that's very useful because this is how we learn to do states that are useful to us. States like being relaxed with energy that we might want to do on purpose.

And so after we have a map, we can think of a situation a day from now, a week from now, something coming up and say, "What would it be like to be able to walk into that situation with relaxed energy?" And as you imagine the situation, your coach reads your map, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling throughout your body as you walk into that situation. And it becomes a kind of detailed mental rehearsal like the kind of mental practice that athletes or other performers can do that sets you up so that when you walk into that situation in real life, that map has told you which small changes you need to make in your body and your attention so that you are in the state you want to be in to interact in the way you want to interact. That's just the morning, the very first session. In late morning, we move on to how we connect with other people. And another really core set of NLP practices, which are called triple description.

Now, you probably know that in language there's first person, that's when you say, "I." There's second person, that's when you imagine somebody else's experience and you say you. And there's third person, which is this kind of abstract, detached they, him, her, over there, not connected to me. In NLP, what we say is in first position, you're in your own body experiencing the world through your own senses. In second position, you imagine, you can't do it really, but you imagine being in someone else's body and experience so that you perceive the world as that person perceives it. And in third position you get outside of the body so that you can observe the interaction of two or more people but also so you can observe the way a person is interacting in an environment or situation.

So we run through an exercise where people just move their attention through these three perceptual positions for the first time. And it's a great way of remembering what you already know, which is your way of seeing the world is not everybody's way of seeing the world. Your memory of a situation is not the same memory that everybody else has of that situation. And when you are wrapped up and engaged with somebody, it can be very hard to tell who's leading and who's following. The best way to figure that out is to get outside and be an outside observer. Looking at the interaction, looking at the way the game is played on the field and seeing the movements and counter movements.

We also do a calibration game right after this and it's just to set up the key tension in all communication which is it's really important for us to be clear about what we want. This is the most like essential factor in influencing other people in a way that is predictable and gets a result you like. You have to know what it is you want and you have to be able to relax what you want enough to offer real open attention to the other person. So we start by doing a calibration game on being clear but also on being connected and we start experiencing what shifts within ourselves when we're clear, which tends to be a very individual kind of position versus when we are connected, in which we are relaxing our own perceptions and intentions just a little to include others.

In the afternoon, it's time to add words to all of this. How does language actually work? This is the question that has kept me in NLP for a long time because as somebody who has a PhD in English literature, who has been using words and thinking about words as long as I can remember, it's a much more interesting question. Not what are words or what do words mean, but how do words work? And we start answering that by telling stories.

Now, in a lot of places, it's scary to be asked to share a story right off the bat, but in NLP rooms, because our basic principle is to be safe, to be connected and clear about that connection. And to support each other's learning. Somebody will tell a story knowing that other people are listening. And in this exercise, it's just a very simple model of what is happening every day all day in your life, which is somebody tells you a story and you give them a story back. And you think, "Oh, that's hard. I wouldn't know how." But it turns out you do know how. Human beings are born to tell stories.

Some people think the use of stories and metaphors is hardwired into our neurology. And so practicing that one of the points of storytelling is not to convey specific pieces of information. There are other ways to do that. The point of the story is to start building that connection we worked on in the previous section of the course. A connection where both people are aware of their individual intentions but also aware of their desire to connect and build on each other's strengths and experiences.

Now, you've probably been told about matching and mirroring, but you might not know how important it is in language to use the language of the person you are talking to. You might think, "Oh, well, I'm older. I'm wiser. I know more. I should use my language because it'll be better." The best language for talking to somebody is the language they use.

And so we practice being intentional and respectful, but repeating back exact words, not as a mimic, but as a signal that can't be misread, that we were listening, that we heard the exact words they said, and that's why we are able to repeat back exact words. And this idea of language as a signaling system that is first of all signaling our attention and our intention and only after that conveying information is fundamental to being able to quickly improve the way you communicate. Once you know who you are, what's going on in you, how you are connecting with others, and how to use language to support connection, it's time to ask the really big question. So, what do you want? And in the very first day when we're introducing kind of the scope of NLP, we take two different approaches to that. One is the approach in the six step reframe, a really famous NLP pattern developed by John Grinder and Judy DeLozier many years ago and it's interesting because it says there are all kinds of things that we can do even when we don't know how to do them. It interrupts the need to have a definite plan all the time.

Instead, it says, "Why don't you identify what's getting in your way and find out how to move that obstacle?" And when you think about it, there are all kinds of things you want to do for the first time. And you can't have a really good plan for doing something for the first time because you really don't know what you'll be perceiving, what will happen next, how you'll be feeling. But you do know in the course of your life you've done thousands and thousands of things for the first time. So what's stopping you is not really that you've never done it before. Find out what's stopping you. Clear that up. And then there's no reason that you wouldn't have enough ideas to take the next step and then the next step after that, just as you have your whole life.

And we wrap up the day with a kind of a goal setting. It's called the Human Face of Change. It's based on the logical levels developed by Robert Dilts. It's a way of imagining not just what you want, but all the layers to why wanting that is a good fit for you. What will you do?

But what strengths do you have so that you can do what you need to do to have what you want? What beliefs do you hold about the world that support those strengths so you can do those things? Who are you? What is your sense of who you are that allows you to have those beliefs and hold them so that they support your strengths?

So you do the behaviors so that you achieve what you want to achieve in a particular time and place for reals because if there's no particular time and place then it's just a thought. But as soon as there's a particular time and place it is a rehearsal. It is a practice for something that will really happen. And in the biggest question of all, how do you just symbolize your whole process so that it's not step by step, but it is one process of you wanting one thing? And by the end of the day, you're not exhausted. You're excited. You are ready to learn more NLP and you're curious about how you will be able to apply these different ways of thinking and feeling to make a practical difference in specific situations where you want to make change happen.

Watch the rest of this video series for information on what we cover in the other seven days of our NLP Practitioner certification. I'm Linda Ferguson. Thanks for listening.