1. Building Rapport — You will have established rapport with your client when you have elicited in him the kind of behavior that is generally labeled "trust," "responsiveness," etc. Rapport, as we have pointed out, is essential to the success of any communication, interaction or relationship. You will know when you have achieved rapport when you can smoothly and easily lead the client into new experiences. The programmer builds rapport by being sensitive to and by pacing the client's strategies and macro– and micro–behavior such as vocabulary, tonality, tempo, posture, breathing rates, facial expressions and so on. Quickly establishing anchors for resources and positive experiences will contribute to the building of rapport. Therapeutically, rapport serves to help eliminate resistance and speed up the process of change.
Programmers should be warned, however, especially those in the field of therapy, that you should not always pace all aspects of your clients' behaviors. It can be physically and mentally maladaptive to pace the behavior of many individuals. In most cases you will want to pace the client only enough to establish the rapport necessary to be able to work to achieve his desired outcomes.
2. Information Gathering — Through questioning and the observation of accessing cues and other minimal cues the therapist will gather information about the client's strategies and sensory abilities, to be used in the three–point process. The therapist will want to find out what natural resources the client already has available, which resources and strategies are missing and which are needed. Some clients may need a strategies to motivate themselves to change old behaviors, establish new patterns of behavior or to access resources that they already have. Others will need to learn new strategies and behaviors to be utilized in their present situation. Still others may need to employ the process of creativity or to make consequential decisions to clear up crippling incongruencies in their behavior. Many times, a number of these processes are involved. To make this determination the therapist will need to gather from the client the following information about the present state, desired state and resources of the client:
a) Desired Outcome — What do you want or need for yourself? How would you know if you got it?
b) Present or Problem state — What is happening now? What is causing you problems? What is stopping you from getting what you want?
c) Resources — What do you need (what would have to happen) in order for you to get the outcome you want? Have you ever got this outcome before? What did you do at that time?
To be relevant and utilizable to the programmer the answers to these questions need to be in terms of sensory based reference structures from the client's model of the world (although the client need not have a conscious appreciation of such answers), and the sensory observations the programmer makes of the client's behavior and strategies. "Sensory based" means specific and non–interpretive. For instance, for someone to say that he wants to be "happy" is not a sufficient answer to define a desired outcome. You need to have definite images, sounds, feelings and smells for what specific changes will be made in their behavior and their environment for them to have that kinesthetic experience. As we have said before, we highly recommend that you study the meta–model (in Structure of Magic I) to acquire skill at eliciting this type of answer.
3. Therapeutic Procedure and Delivery: Repackaging and representing the client's problem in a form that matches an appropriate resource strategy that he presently has available is the primary therapeutic procedure discussed thus far. Utilizing a resource strategy in this way serves to add in abilities that have not yet been brought to bear on the client's problem state. Anchoring is another way to accomplish this.
In the coming chapters of this book, methods for the therapeutic design and installation of new resource strategies will be covered in detail.
4. Operating Off of Feedback: The only way you have of knowing whether what you are doing is working is by the feedback you get from your client. Only a small part of this feedback will be the conscious verbal reports of your client. The majority of it will be changes in the client's ongoing accessing cues and minimal cues, which will all be rooted in your immediate sensory experience.
No technique will magically and automatically bring about change. There are many, many conditions brought to bear on the process and results of a therapeutic interaction. It will be an absolute necessity for you to continually check your work at each step of the way. We have said before that the meaning of your communication is the response that you elicit, regardless of what you actually intend. You should never presuppose your behavior will always have the same effect. An anchor that you have established in one context may be inoperative in a different context. Constantly use your sensory awareness to test the outcomes of your communication in your client. If you find that what you are doing is not working, try something else. If you have proved to yourself that it won't work, why repeat it? There will always be another resource you can elicit, or another strategy to try. If you find that you are running into resistances, interference or incongruence, re–establish rapport and gather more information. (For other methods of dealing with interference phenomena, see the Installation Section of this book.)
We can represent the behavior of the client and programmer, involved in a successful interaction, as two TOTEs:
This shows that the programmer is continually testing the client's present state against the desired outcome and operating to access more resources in the client until the present state and desired state are finally one and the same (that is, until the client has exhibited the desired outcome). The programmer's tests are based on sensory information gathered and stored through all of his/her representational systems.
2) Client's TOTE:
The client must also have a way to test his own progress so that he may continue or initiate the process if necessary at some point when the programmer is not around. Also the client may need to access and utilize information concerning his present state and desired state (perhaps at the unconscious level), information that is not necessary for the programmer to know. All that the programmer needs to know is the result of the test. The client's representation of his present and desired states will consist of 4–tuples and strategies that compose the two states. The client operates to access personal resources until the desired outcome is reached.
One interesting phenomenon we have noticed about many therapists who have participated in our seminars is that, though they have a good TOTE for therapy and can help other people to access resources, they have difficulty accessing resources in themselves when it comes to dealing with their own problems. This is because most of the strategies they have developed for accessing and utilizing resources are triggered by their external auditory and visual experience of their clients' states (a valid strategy for working with other people). Their experience of their own problems, however, is primarily in terms of internal kinesthetic, auditory and visual representations, and fails to trigger their programs and strategies for accessing resources. We humorously refer to this as phenomenon as "therapist's syndrome." When confronted with their own internal experience therapists often have no ready resource programs with which to deal with them. This leads to other negative kinesthetic experiences like "guilt" and "frustration" because the therapist thinks if he can't even handle his own problems, how can he reasonably presume to be assisting someone else?