All behavioral models — from complex governmental and business operations involving thousands of people to individual activities like eating an apple and jogging — exist and function through laws, rules and assumptions incorporated into individuals in the form of neural patterns. If the neural pattern is absent, the behavior is absent; if the behavior is ineffective or inappropriate, the neural pattern is not adequately organized to elicit an effective or appropriate behavior. The overt and implied laws, rules and assumptions of any model function as codes or metaphors for different patterns of neurological organization aimed at producing a particular set of behavioral outcomes.
Since NLP is concerned with form, not content, strategies for effective and appropriate behaviors may be drawn from any model and applied to any other model of our choice. For example, the creative strategy of an artist may be appropriately transferred to an uninspired aerodynamic engineer faced with a challenging design problem. Or, the operational motivation strategy of a highly efficient business organization may be adapted to a sluggish government department. Because NLP is ultimately concerned with representations of experience at the neurological level, it is unnecessary to refer to the names or contents of the models from which particular forms, structural interrelationships and outcomes have been derived, except for illustration purposes. It is not important to us whether an individual claims the source of an inspiration to be God, a delicious chocolate mousse or the beauty of a mountain lake — if the same neural strategy sequence in each case produces identical behavioral outcomes.
Just as behavioral strategies may be transferred from one person to another, the same person may apply a successful strategy from one aspect of his or her experience (skill at bridge playing, for example) to another aspect (difficulty in decision–making, for example). Typically, each person has a rich endowment of experiential assets to draw from and may choose to adapt strategies from strong areas of experience to weak or impoverished areas by using methods we will describe in forthcoming chapters.
Neurolinguistic programming is a model designed to increase the possible outcomes of behavior — that is, a model for transforming more environmental variables to the class of decision variables.
The process of modifying behavior, whether applied to an individual, group or organization in order to achieve new outcomes can be described in its most general form as a three–point process:
1. Representation of the present state
2. Representation of the outcome or target state
3. Representation of resources
Resources are accessed and applied to the problematic or present state of affairs to help the individual, group or organization move to the outcome or desired state:
The remainder of this book will essentially deal with the nature of each of these three steps. It will involve, more specifically, such issues as:
a) the nature of maladapted behavior—what constitutes a problematic response;
b) the nature of growth, choice and generative behavior;
c) how to identify, in sensory specific terms, a specific outcome, set or class of outcomes;
d) how to identify and represent, in the appropriate sensory modalities, the elements (resources, external and behavioral) involved in achieving that outcome;
e) the representation of the forms and rules of interaction between these elements that identify, generate and predict the desired outcomes; and
f) how to identify and represent the present state of progress or development so that it may be used to provide the individual, family or organization with feedback on where they are with respect to their outcomes.
Our claim is that if any individual or group displays any sequence of behavior which others find useful, we — employing the tools and principles of NLP — can chunk and punctuate that sequence into units that can be practiced and readily learned by any other member of the species.
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NLP is a new way of thinking — a new model — which involves the use of changing patterns dependent on contextual conditions and upon feedback within and between behaviors observable in your ongoing experience. While both formal and systematic, the NLP process is held rigorously accountable to the evidence of sensory experience—yours and that of others who use the process. As a model of the modeling process, it is constantly changing and growing on the basis of feedback from its own discoveries. (For a further elaboration of this discussion, see our forthcoming book Modeling.)
1.6 Modeling Elegance
In the modeling and reproduction of strategies for eliciting outcomes, we are also extending another evolutionary trend in the development of behavioral models with NLP. This is the trend toward increasingly elegant models. The term "elegance" here refers to the number of rules and distinctions a particular model requires to be able to account for all of the outcomes for which it has been designed. The most elegant model would be the one which employs the fewest number of distinctions and which is still able to secure a domain of outcomes equal to or greater than that of more complex models. For people and organizations, this means a significant saving of time and energy in the development and implementation of behavioral outcomes necessary to achieve their goals.
1. The transition of models toward increased elegance occurs in two ways:The elements identified as having casual importance become more basic to the particular interactions involved in achieving outcomes. In NLP, for instance, we begin by showing how the five classes of sensory experience (seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting) are the basis for the strategies people have for generating and guiding behavior, rather than more complex and abstract concepts such as "ego," "mind," "human nature," mechanisms," "morals," "reason," etc., employed by other behavioral models.
2. The orientation of the model turns much more toward form than content. By "form" we mean the principles or rules of interaction between structural elements that generate the possible states or interactions of the system. The basic equations or physical "laws" developed by Newton, for instance, are simple and elegant statements of the relationships between physical elements (at a certain level of experience) that can be used to describe, predict and prescribe the changing events that make up the content of a large portion of our physical universe. These same formal rules hold for the motions and interactions of many different objects: springs, billiard balls, pendulums, cars, projectiles and so on.
The reduction of the syntax of a model to that set of rules necessary and sufficient to describe interactions among its structural elements increases rather than diminishes the power and effectiveness of the model. For example, chemists don't need to test all possible chemical combinations to discover which outcomes will be successful. A knowledge of the basic properties of atomic elements and molecular structures allows them to predict, in many cases, which chemical interactions will work and which will not. The elegance of the model of modern chemistry enhances efficiency and streamlines the operational strategies for predicting and generating outcomes.