Worldview and working model of neuro-linguistic programming

The Worldview and working model of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) covers the underlying philosophy of NLP, and how and why this philosophy is intended to be used in practice.

Neuro-linguistic programming is an approach to communication and psychology. It is based upon observing naturally self-taught expertise, and modeling the processes and habitual patterns such experts seem to repeatedly use which seem to be responsible for the results they obtain. As such, NLP has its own methodology and philosophical approach towards being effective within the human world, born of pragmatism rather than theory.

Much of NLP's philosophy, worldview and approach, and discussion of their basis, was laid out in its early books, such as Structure of Magic vol. 1 + 2 and Frogs into Princes.

Overview of NLP
Neuro-linguistic programming studies and models how people think about and perceive aspects of their life, and how to work with the underlying cognitive and emotional processes at a practical level. The range of potential uses is varied, and NLP has an exceptionally broad and adaptable structure.

The field originated in the work of Richard Bandler, John Grinder in association with polymath Gregory Bateson in Santa Cruz, California in the early 1970s, when they recorded and studied in depth several world renowned therapists who seemed to obtain almost magical results by the therapeutic standards of the time. They concluded that a comprehensive set of self-taught approaches and skills was largely responsible for their success, that these could be summarized and expanded upon, and that much of human perception and experience was also structured and could be worked with effectively in this way. They stated, in contravention of the professional wisdom of that time, that the internal human experience demonstrated itself in people's behaviors, and could be worked with directly given an appropriate mindset, and that this was why certain individuals were so singularly successful as therapists compared to the norm.

Despite its substantial influence and adoption of its viewpoints, extreme skepticism persists in some quarters, due both to its pop psychology usage and non-traditional approach to psychology.

Techniques v. attitudes
Grinder and Bandler made very clear that there was a profound (although blurred) difference between skills and techniques as a basis for working with people, and attitudes and approaches.


 * "People who come to us in therapy typically have pain in their lives and experience little or no choice in matters which they consider important. All therapies are confronted with the problem of responding adequately to such people. Responding adequately in this context means to us assisting in changing the client's experience in some way which enriches it. Rarely do therapies accomplish this by changing the world. Their approach, then, is typically to change the client's experience of the world. People do not operate directly on the world, but operate necessarily on the world through their perception or model of the world. Therapies, then, characteristically operate to change the client's model of the world and consequently the client's behavior and experiences."

Purpose and basis of NLP's world view
The founders of NLP emphasize that in their experience, experts in human communication all have a similar approach, and it is this approach (and not the technical skills) which distinguishes them, and which can be learned:


 * "When you watch and listen to Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson do therapy, they apparently could not be more different...People also report that the experiences of being with them are profoundly different. However, if you examine their behavior and the essential key patterns and sequences of what they do, they are similar.... The same was true of Fritz Perls... when he was operating in what I consider a powerful and effective way, he was using the same sequences of patterns that you will find in their work.

Analyzing this further, Grinder and Bandler stated that there were a very few common traits such people – whether top therapists, top executives or top salespeople – all seemed to share:
 * Everything they did in their work, was pro-active (rather than reactive), directed moment to moment by well-formed outcomes rather than formalized fixed beliefs
 * They were exceedingly flexible in approach and refused to be tied down to using their skills in any one fixed way of thinking or working
 * They were extremely aware moment by moment, of the non-verbal feedback (unconscious communication and metaphor) they were getting, and responded to it - usually in kind rather than by analyzing it
 * They enjoyed the challenges of difficult ("resistant") clients, seeing them as a chance to learn rather than an intractable "problem"
 * They respected the client as someone doing the best they knew how (rather than judging them as "broken" or "working")
 * They had certain common skills and things they were aware of and noticed, intuitively "wired in"
 * They worked with great precision, purpose, and skill
 * They kept trying many many different things until they learned enough about the structure holding a problem in place to change it

They summarized their findings:
 * "You need only three things to be an absolutely exquisite communicator. We have found that there are three major patterns in the behavior of every therapeutic wizard we've talked to — and executives, and salespeople. The first one is to know what outcome you want. The second is that you need flexibility in your behavior. You need to be able to generate lots and lots of different behaviors to find out what responses you get. The third is you need to have enough sensory experience to notice when you get the responses that you want..."

Skills vs. philosophy in NLP
Grinder and Bandler stated categorically that although these people had developed many innovative and effective skills, the core of their effectiveness was neither their skills, nor some mystical or unknowable quality or personality. It was primarily the attitudes, approaches and philosophies they had in common which made them capable of effective work, and these could be learned and transmitted. When this was done, others could learn from these models to be effective the same way. This approach became central within the philosophy and epistemology of NLP:

Subjectivity
Unlike classical psychology, the subjective character of experience is integral to NLP. (Subjective in the NLP sense means "as internally experienced", rather than 'arbitrary' or 'whimsical'). It is taken for granted that what people perceive, believe and feel, is more significant to their lives than what is objectively 'true', and takes for granted that each person's awareness and inner world is different and unique. It is emphasized that one must leave ones' own preconceptions behind, and be willing to understand and work within the other person's "reality", to have any great effect, since no one map of reality can be said to be "true". There are only (in NLP's view) better or worse maps, a concept taken from Korzybski's general semantics.

There is an order and a structured logic to it. But that order and logic varies individually and people interact and judge their (and others) lives and actions based upon their own understandings of the world, not upon some objective reality.

Human nature
NLP does not (subject to physiological pathology) consider people "broken" or "working". All people have a neurology, experience of life, and the innate ability to change their perspective on any aspect of their life, and the nature of neurology is very adaptable. They also have great wisdom in their unconscious minds, even if they do not seem to be able to always use it or it seems on the surface, dysfunctional. One does not have to be in trance for unconscious processes to be effective.

NLP views human authenticity as bound up with the capability to respond and how much awareness of choice is experienced in actions and responses. Bandler comments, "We're talking about basic beliefs regarding human capability. Here's the only truth about that. Nobody knows."

In NLP, "understanding" is less important than change. Most human learning occurs outside consciousness, and some learnings may even be sabotaged by conscious attention. According to NLP, the brain is capable of learning (or re-learning) patterns extremely fast, and that change can happen quickly, often without conscious mediation. Dysfunctional patterns can be addressed through cognitive routes (talking therapies) or non-cognitive routes (working with the body and unconscious mind), and particularly, by directly retraining the mind to use its innate capability to learn new patterns in a deliberate manner. NLP believes that "People already have all the resources they need, to change", that the mind/brain is very willing to change once it "knows" how, and that guided with skill and sensitivity, change provides an increased sense of control over ones' life.

A powerful demonstration of these interactions by Baxter (1994) found that NLP reframing used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder in place of Prozac, resulted in the same raised serotonin levels and reduced caudate nucleus activity as control subjects who took medication (as measured by positron emission tomography, a type of neural imaging).

Systems view
People are complex adaptive (learning) systems and processes, and have a richness to them which no simple system can fully predict or capture. Our bodies, our societies, and our planet form an ecology of complex systems and sub-systems all of which interact with and mutually influence each other. "Intuitively obvious" results are not always to be expected. Positive and negative feedback, leverage points, interpretational context, and other features of complex systems will come into play. In humans, the body impacts on the mind, and the mind impacts on the body. Thought, emotional state, somatic awareness, perception, and body usage, as well as neurochemistry and other hormonal interactions, and external circumstances, are all profoundly interdependent and deeply connected, and any can influence or be influenced by another.

In NLP it is therefore seen as important not to make untested assumptions about individuals, that there are many more ways than the obvious to approach a seemingly intractable problem, it is understood there will usually be unconscious goals, limiting beliefs or secondary gains present in any situation, and that there is an art as well as a skill in perceiving how best to approach this. Change is also systemic. That is, it does not happen in a vacuum and is not limited to the "problem area", but usually is connected to other aspects of life, which are part of the situation as well as a necessary part of any solution. Partly for this reason, NLP leaves deliberately open and unlimited, its areas of interest and its scope.

As a special case of systemic thinking, NLP emphasizes that change is relational. That is, change happens in a relational context, whether the self-relationship or the relationship with another person (parent, friend, partner, employer, co-worker, role model, clinician, trainer). Change happens in a relationship, and the quality of that relationship, known as rapport, is often critical to the ability to change.

Meaning and context in communication
NLP views meaning as only existing within a given context, a view known as cultural relativism which is axiomatic in anthropology. Because of this, NLP states The meaning of communication is the result you get – it is not message sent, but message received, and willingness to set aside preconceived interpretive frames, which is most significant in communication.

The process of interpreting "meaning" from thought and speech is complex and (as pointed out in sciences such as cognitive linguistics, transformational grammar and general semantics) can involve a wide range of distortions, errors, and mistranslations because internal experiences, thoughts and feelings have to be translated back and forth through conscious perceptual filters, into crude symbols known as 'words'. The resulting patterns of speech are considered highly revealing of the unconscious perceptual filters involved.

NLP considers all behavior, at some level, communicative. Thus even undesired or clinical states such as depression and confusion have a structure, a purpose, and an underlying communication – or in other words, on their own terms, all mental states have a rational structure within their given context. Such states are often viewed by NLP not as problems, but as valuable resource states which are not being understood or acted upon, or a part of a person trying to grow or change, or which require a better 'map' of reality. NLP also considers much communication metaphorical, and that even its own tools can be philosophically interpreted as metaphors used to guide useful responses, rather than literal objective 'truth statements'.

Form and content
In NLP, underlying subjective (perceived, cognitive) structure ("form") matters more than specific situational "content". The subjective structure of a perceived problem matters more than the situation in which it is embedded. This is an embodiment of the form/content distinction in philosophy, also favored by Western psychiatric medicine (an innovation first argued for by psychiatrists Karl Jaspers and Kurt Schneider), and is also a feature within cognitive linguistics.

NLP takes this principle into the field, with so-called "content free" work being a common respected NLP skill – that is, where no details of the situation are shared or sought, but only the cognitive features of how it is structured are relevant. Despite the practitioner lacking knowledge of the actual situation, knowledge of the structural aspects alone (modalities, strategies, outcome orientation and the like) are often sufficient by themselves to allow NLP to work with full effectiveness. Common rationales for working with reduced content in this manner are:
 * The less content is involved, the more the practitioner is client- rather than self- or interpretation-focussed
 * The less distraction (ie, loss of strategic focus) due to content is likely to arise.
 * Other than perhaps for rapport purposes, the extra information is generally not very relevant to NLP's strategic structural approach, so it is wasteful of time to dwell on it

NLP is in the present and oriented towards the future
No matter the personal history, the only memory of it is in the present neurology and life. The past has no existence independent of this. Therefore what is explored is the memory and impressions of events in the present – present experiences, present constructions, and present limits, including the present beliefs about their existence and origins. What is then aimed for is to build in the present, a changed future, where old, outdated, or dysfunctional beliefs and patterns are no longer an issue.

Common sayings (or principles)
The following are some of NLP's most recognized principles and presuppositions, in their well known aphoristic forms. They are often summarized as soundbites so as to be short, pithy, and memorable, and a fuller discussion of these (as well as some of the other common NLP sayings) is given in Principles of NLP.

Perspectives:
 * The map is not the territory
 * People already have all the resources they need to succeed [or change]

Systemic view:
 * Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes

Information and interpretation:
 * Behind every behavior is a positive intention
 * There is no failure, only feedback
 * The meaning of your communication is the response you get
 * Choice is better than no choice (and flexibility is the way one gets choice)
 * Multiple descriptions are better than one
 * There are no resistant clients; there are only incompetent [less skilled] therapists

Working approaches: (or: If what you are doing isn't working, try something [anything] else)
 * If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got
 * Good NLP is 90% information gathering and testing, and 10% changework
 * Everyone is different
 * Use whatever works
 * If something can be done effectively and ecologically in ten minutes, don't spend an hour doing it