[Neurons] 2013 Meta Reflections #9

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2013  #9

February 18, 2013

Modeling Excellence Series #3

 

 

MODELING INTUITION

 

For many people, intuition is a wonderful, mysterious, and near-magical
phenomena.  Yet, what is intuition?  What do we refer to when we use this
term?  And how do we use our intuition in our work as we coaches,
consultants, trainers, therapists work with people?

 

NLP began by modeling the intuition of three world-class communicators.  You
will find this statement and this language in the early books of NLP,
especially The Structure of Magic, Volumes I and II (1975, 1976).  Richard
and John modeled the intuition that Virginia had about people, communicating
with them, deciding on what to do as an intervention.  They did the same
with Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson.  What resulted from their modeling?
NLP.  That is, the models of NLP and the patterns derived from those models.
And more specifically:

            The Meta-Model of Language in therapy: asking the questions of
specificity.

            The Strategy Model using representation systems and the TOTE
process.

The Representational Model of how people think, encode "thoughts," and
manifest via neurology.

The Milton Model of Language for inviting a person to go inside ("downtime")
and access resourceful states.

 

Modeling Virginia's Intuitions 

In the original NLP books, The Structure of Magic, Bandler and Grinder
talked about the intuitions of Perls and Virginia and said that what they
modeled were their intuitions.  That how they worked with people, how they
chose what to say or do, were the result of their whole lifetime of
experiences which had now become habitual and automatic.  They noted,
"Virginia took a lifetime to learn her intuitions."  Yet we do not have to
replicate her life experiences, today we can model those intuitions to make
explicit what she does "by intuition."  And doing that, we can then transfer
her intuitions to ourselves and others.  And that's what NLP is about (or
should be about).

 

Intuition comes from Latin and refers to "in-knowing"-to what a person
"knows" "inside."  And where do people get that inside knowledge?  They were
not born with it.  Nobody is born "knowing" anything.  Unlike the animals
who "know" what to eat, how to build a nest, who is a predator, etc., we
humans are born without content information instincts.  Our "instincts" are
without content information and because of this gap- we have tremendous room
inside for learning- and learning we do!  We learn everything.  Yes, we have
dispositions and latent "talents" that can be developed.  Yet without
learning, the dispositions and talents do not develop.  You may have a
disposition for mathematics, or linguistics, or visual-spatial distinctions,
or many other things, yet if you are not exposed to such areas and given a
chance to develop, the "talent" will lie dormant.  It will not develop.

Intuitions are learned.  Whatever intuition you have about anything, you
learned that intuition.  You were exposed to an area of learning and you
developed it, consciously or unconsciously.  How you made it an "in-knowing"
is through exposure, experience, repetition, and learning.  You now have an
intuition about how to drive a car because of your original exposure to
driving and to your experience of driving.  Today your learning (in-knowing)
is your intuitive sense of driving and is unconscious unless you teach
driver's education.  The conscious learnings, understandings, concepts, etc.
have "dropped out of conscious awareness into your unconscious awareness."
Now you "know" how to do things and don't know how you know.  You just know-
we call that "intuition."

 

Intuitions are also subject to the errors and inaccuracy that all learnings
are subject to.  And given that, then intuitions are not infallible.  They
are not god-like.  They are fallible, human, and subject to all of the
fallibilities that all other learnings are- to cognitive distortions, to
fallacious thinking patterns, to biases, prejudices, etc.  Your intuitions
can be very, very wrong and mis-lead you.  This suggests that we should
never blindly trust our intuitions.  Just as you would not blindly or
absolutely trust your thinking, believing, understanding, perceiving - it is
not wise to do so with your intuitions.

 

This fact provides a significant challenge to modeling.  When modeling the
intuitions of an expert, we have to be cautious about the intuitions that we
are modeling.  We could model an error in the expert's knowledge
(in-knowing).  So we have to test what we are modeling and have to test
whether we are modeling an actual knowledge that is accurate and useful.

 

How do we model an expert's intuition?  This is where the NLP models for
modeling offer some very powerful tools.  We model intuition by reverse
engineering.  First we look at the excellence.  In the case of Perls and
Satir, the ability to communicate in a therapy context with clients and via
the therapeutic context to enable a client to change his or her mental
models (maps) of the world so that they have more understanding and choice
in how to respond to the challenges that they experience in the world.  Then
we ask, What is the expert actually doing?  Here we get a sensory-based
(empirical) description of how they are talking, gesturing, relating, etc.

 


>From there we follow the sequence of actions (behavioral and linguistic)

from beginning of the conversation to the end.  This gives us a "strategy"
-a strategic set of actions.  As we interview the expert we can get the
inside information about the distinctions the person is making about what to
do, when to do it, how to do it with the person, and why (which gives us
their thinking, believing, assumptions, etc.) for their decisions and choice
points.  (See NLP: Volume I, 1980, Robert Dilts).

 

But we're not done yet.  Next we go meta.  That is, we look for where the
expert reflexively thought-and-felt something else about their previous
thought-or-feeling and so layered their thinking with one or more additional
frames.  Human "strategies" do not work in a simple linear  way.  As we are
processing through anything, we have frames of meaning in the back of our
mind that govern our experiencing, and we also are constantly stepping back
to reflect on our experience.  (See NLP Going Meta, 2005).

 

Once we have a "model" -a set of internal and external steps for how the
expert produces the excellence, we can test it by trying it out ourselves.
Does it work?  To what extent can we replicate the expertise?  To what
extent do we fail to replicate it?  These questions drive us back to revisit
the interview and to ask more interviewing questions to find out the
distinctions we are missing.  Doing this recursively over a period of time
enables us to finally create a workable, actionable, and transferable model
of the expert.  And if we do that repeatedly with other experts in the same
field, and create a synthesis of the best of each, we can generate a more
expansive and rich model for a given expertise.

 

We model intuitions.  So this is one use of the term intuition in NLP and
Neuro-Semantics.  There are yet other meanings and we will look at those in
the next posts.

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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