It is extremely helpful to direct the person to the appropriate accessing cues as you lead him through the strategy to make sure that he will be accessing the appropriate representational system. Your major task will be to keep him from getting hooked into the old strategy by accessing the same old triggers.
EXERCISE B
STEP 1. Elicit a motivation strategy from someone.
STEP 2. Identify some simple and relatively inoffensive behavior that the individual is not motivated to do. This could be something like standing on his head, driving around the block, lifting up a chair, taking the garbage out, etc.
STEP 3. Have the person reconsider the behavior in a sequence that paces his motivation strategy. That is, direct the person's processing of the behavior so that it matches his strategy for motivation.
For instance, let's say you have elicited a motivation strategy that takes the form of the following sequence:
Here the individual looks at the situation in question (Ve) and then makes a constructed image of carrying out the proposed behavior. (Vc). He then gets a positive feeling about what he sees (Ki+) and hears a ringing or humming in his head (Aic). As soon as he hears the ringing he gets up and executes the behavior. If your task was to motivate this person to stand on his head you might direct him to first look for a place where there is enough room to stand on his head (Vc). Then ask him to imagine himself walking over and standing on his head (Vc) and to imagine feeling really good (Ki+) about doing it. When he can really experience the good feelings that he could get by standing on his head, ask him to hear that hum begin to come up (Aic).
What will be important for the successful completion of these exercises is that you (a) make sure all of the steps occur in the appropriate order and (b) make sure the appropriate kind of representation is in each step. If you left out the visual constructed step or put it after the internal auditory tonal (A;) step, you would not get the outcome of motivation in the above exercise. Further, if the constructed visual image were a polarity response —if, for instance, the person constructed an image of walking out the door instead of standing on his head — or if he just constructed an image of a purple cow, he would not get the outcome of motivation. If, however, you are careful with your elicitation and your pacing procedures you will end up with the outcome designated by the strategy. An individual cannot not respond to his own internal processes.
4.21 Identifying and Utilizing Decision Points.
The elicitation of a successful and appropriate outcome from a strategy will depend on your ability to help people satisfy specific tests that they have incorporated to organize and process aspects of their experience. Every strategy will have at least one step that functions as a decision point or choice point. The decision point in the strategy is the step where the individual decides to a) exit from the strategy, b) operate to change representational value in the strategy, c) go on to the next step in the strategy or d) switch strategies if the one being employed is ineffectual. The purpose of all the information gathering and operations that we perform is to allow us to satisfy the tests or decision points in our strategies.
Consider the following diagram of the decision making strategy discussed earlier in this section.
Here, the individual makes a decision by looking at possibilities, describing them to himself and then deriving internal feelings on the basis of those descriptions. The internal feelings constitute the decision point in the strategy. If the feelings are congruently positive (+), the person decides in favor of that particular verbal representation; if the feelings are congruently negative ( —), the individual decides against it. If the feelings are ambivalent or incongruent (?), the individual operates by looking back at the options and by describing them again.
Depending, then, on the outcome you are working toward, you will want to emphasize different kinds of content representations at this step. If it is appropriate for the individual to decide in favor, you will emphasize a positive kinesthetic representation ( + ). If it would be useful for the individual to decide against, you will emphasize negative kinesthetic sensations ( —). If you want many alternatives to be considered, then be sure to stress ambiguity in feelings (?).
Decision points, then, are steps in the strategy where different values of the representational system involved in that step (kinesthetic, visual, auditory or olfactory) will trigger different directions in the unfolding strategy sequence. What happens in the representational system at a decision point will have a great impact on the eventual outcome of the strategy.
The creative strategy and the motivation strategy that we used for examples in EXERCISES A and B contained two other examples of internal kinesthetic decision points. In the creative strategy:
the internal feelings about the previous verbalizations either trigger an operation in which the subsequent verbalizations are transformed into constructed images, or trigger an operation in which the individual loops back to the beginning of the strategy and looks at the situation again.
In the example of the motivation strategy:
the internal feelings either initiate the auditory tonal representation and exit to the behavior, or they do not. If the feelings do not initiate the internal tone, no motivation occurs.
Not all decision points, of course, are internal kinesthetic representations. Consider the following learning strategy:
In this strategy, Ve and Ar are both decision points. The outcome of this strategy is for an individual to learn or incorporate some behavioral patterns. The person starts off by performing some physical movement or activity (Ke). Then, depending on what the external visual feedback (Ve ) is for that action the person will choose between two subroutines. Within one of these subroutines, some remembered auditory experience will also serve as a decision point where one of two other substrategies will be selected.
Notice also that the Vr or A e representations that appear at the end of two of the subroutines are also decision points that will either trigger an operation in which the strategy loops back on itself again, or moves on to exit.
Another example of a decision point would be the situation below:
Here the decision point is shown as a comparison of steps from two different processings of the same content, with conflicting results, Ai- and Ki+ (they feel that they should do one thing, but something tells them to do another). In this situation, most likely, the representational system with the highest signal magnitude will determine what sequence of behavior is to follow.