Or perhaps you have met a person or had the experience of spending time with an individual who is eminently successful in the particular field they have chosen to accept and you have wondered what characterized the differences in their behavior from yours or from that of other individuals. You may have asked yourself what is it that allows them to do what may seem incredible or magical to others.
Or perhaps you yourself have a particular talent or ability that you would like to offer or teach to others, but have no real idea of what it is that enables you to perform your task with such elegance and sophistication.
This book is about how to unpack and repackage behavior, like that in the examples above, into efficient and communicable sequences that will be available to every member of the species. It will provide the reader with a set of tools that will enable him or her to analyze and incorporate or modify any sequence of behavior that they may observe in another human being.
1. Modeling
Down through the ages human beings have evolved many systems or models for understanding and dealing with the universe we live in. These models for organizing and coding the interactions of people in their environment have been handed such names as culture, religion, art, psychology, philosophy, politics, industry and science. Each model typically overlaps with other models and may include smaller models nested inside itself, just as science includes physics, biology, oceanography, chemistry, etc. and overlaps with industry in the area of research. Each model differs from the others in terms of that portion of human experience it represents and emphasizes and in terms of the way it organizes and uses its selected set of representations. All are similar in their ultimate concern with the outcomes of human behavior.
The purpose of each model is to identify patterns in the interaction between human behavior and the environment, so that the behavior of individual human beings can be systematized within the selected context to achieve desired and adaptive outcomes more efficiently, effectively and consistently. For example, scientists are trained to operate within a specific model to help them organize their behavioral priorities in gathering and interpreting data. They are taught to recognize and work toward specific desired outcomes — as are businessmen, artists, politicians and medical doctors.
1.1 The Map Is Not the Territory
As participant organisms within the universe,[4] we, the model–makers who devise, perpetuate and extend our cultural models, do not operate directly on the world. Rather, we operate through coded interpretations of the environment as received and experienced in our sensory representational systems — through sight, sound, smell, taste and feeling. Information about our external universe (as well as our internal states) is received, organized, consolidated and transmitted through an internal system of neural pathways that culminate in the brain — our central processing biocomputer. This information is then transformed through internal processing strategies that each individual has learned. The result is what we call "behavior." In NLP behavior is defined as all sensory representations experienced and expressed internally and/or externally for which evidence is available from a subject and/or from a human observer of that subject. That is, the act of skiing down a beautiful snow–covered mountainside and the act of imagining oneself doing so are equally to be considered behaviors in the context of neurolinguistic programming.
Both macrobehavior and microbehavior are, of course, programmed through our neurological systems. Macrobehavior is overt and easily observable, as in driving a car, speaking, fighting, eating, getting sick or riding a bicycle. Microbehavior involves subtler though equally important phenomena such as heart rate, voice tempo, skin color changes, pupil dilation and such events as seeing in the mind's eye or having an internal dialogue.
Obviously, not all culturally transmitted models for behavior have been incorporated into all members of the human species, but most of us have many of them available in our representational systems.[5] The development, then, of these models—and the behavior generated through them—form a significant statement about the neurological systems of those individuals who have adopted them as organizational strategies for their behavior. That is, the variety and range of human behavior, viewed in the context of the models that generate those behaviors, tells us much about human neurological organization. The state of these models today —the most current point in their development—represents the evolution of ideas, the surviving wisdom of our predecessors. Ultimately, after the uproar of economic, religious and ideological disputes has subsided, models are kept or discarded on the basis of their adaptiveness or usefulness as guides for the behavior of members of the species. The acceptance or rejection, the elaboration and expansion of these models reflects the evolution of human thought and behavior.[6]
1.2. A New Model
Neurolinguistic programming is a natural extension of this evolutionary process—a new model. It is important to realize that models such as those described in Section 1 are not simply "out there" somewhere, external to us as individuals. Rather, politics, religion, psychology and the other models are ways of looking at, talking about and feeling about the same experiential domain: human behavior. NLP differs from other models of behavior in that it is specifically a model of our behavior as model–makers. It is what we call a meta–model, a model of the modeling process itself.
Implicit in NLP as a meta–model is its broad range of practical applications. From individual interactions to group, corporate and system dynamics of any kind, the behavioral parameters can be identified, organized and programmed to obtain specific objectives. When the confusions and complexities of life experience are examined, sorted and untangled, what remains is a set of behavioral elements and rules that aren't so difficult to understand after all. In this book we will describe techniques and applications derived from NLP and designed for use in behavioral interactions in any area of human endeavor.
1.3 The Structure of Models
The construction of all models requires the identification and representation of 1) a set of structural elements and 2) a syntax. The structural elements are the "building blocks" of a model. The syntax is the set of rules or directives that describe how the building blocks may be put together.
In linguistic models, for example, the structural elements are typically words: written and/or spoken vocabularies. The syntax is the set of grammatical rules that dictate how the various words may be fitted together. The English language has a relatively small vocabulary (about 36,000 words), yet throughout the history of English speaking people, millions of different sentences have been uttered and millions of different ideas have been put into words. This is possible because the words may be assembled in different orders, sequences and forms which provide particular contexts in which words can evoke unique meaning and significance. All the books ever written in the English language are composed of the same words used over and over in different orders; the words, in turn, are assembled from the same twenty–six letters of the alphabet.
4
3. The term
5
Strictly speaking, there are two possibilities—the models are stored:
a) Extra–somatically—written form, pictures, engravings… .
b) Somatically—as discussed in the text. Some fascinating implications of the method of storage are drawn in Delozier (1978).
6
The term