[Neurons] 2017 Neurons #45 Ironies in NLP History About Modeling

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2017 Neurons #45

October 2, 2017


 

 

IRONIES IN NLP HISTORY

ABOUT MODELING

 

 

Here are several ironies in the history of NLP.  The first irony of NLP is
that it did not start as an attempt to model excellence.  No, not at all.
It started off as an inquiry about what Fritz Perls was doing with his
language and patterning that enabled people to experience personal
transformations.  Another irony is that John Grinder was not involved in the
inquiry.  Frank Pucelik had been studying Gestalt Therapy in San Diego and
Richard Bandler had been transcribing some of Fritz's audio and visual tapes
for a book, and as Richard had begun mimicking Perls, they discovered
something surprising, namely, they were getting the same kind of incredible
transformations that Perls got.  That raised the question, How was that
possible?

 

That was 1972, four years before "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" came about.
So what they called themselves and it at that time was "Meta."  There was no
"pure NLP" at that time.  There was an interest in how could language
patterns of untrained people be so powerful as to replicate what Perls had
been able to do (by 1972, Perls had been dead for two years).  So another
irony- there was no direct modeling of Perls, no interviewing, no
questioning, no "unconscious uptake of his patterns," only modeling his
writings and tapes.

 

Yet in spite of those limitations, they did create a model of his language
and behavioral patterns and together with Virginia Satir's languaging and
behavioral patterns, they created the first NLP model- "the Meta-Model of
Language in Therapy."  That's what they called it in The Structure of Magic
(1975).  Latter they dropped the "in Therapy" focus as they began to realize
that the Communication Model that they had put together could be applied to
anything human- since all human applications involve language and behavior.
That's when they began to think in terms of modeling.

 

Once Grinder entered the picture, he introduced or brought in the leaders of
the Cognitive Psychology Movement and their products.  Having completed his
doctorate in Transformational Grammar, that's what he first brought in,
namely, Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar.  And having worked in
George Miller's Lab for a year, he brought that group of researchers and
their TOTE Model, the Magic Number 7 plus-or-minus 2, etc.  The irony, given
that today two of the founders disparage the "conscious" mind, is that
Chomsky and Miller's influence made NLP a derivative of Cognitive Psychology
and the focus became to enable people to "run their own brains." That is,
become conscious and mindful and take charge of their own lives.  This was
also the basis of the NLP Strategy Model for linear modeling and modeling
short-term immediate subjective experiences like spelling, getting out of
bed, motivation, decision, etc.

 

Ironically, even though the Strategy Model had a little "m" in it, it was
extremely minor and undeveloped for many years.  Much later several began
exploring the role of that "m" (the meta-level) phenomena, especially
"beliefs" in modeling.  Robert Dilts introduced five levels in his
Neuro-Logical Levels.  Then David Gordon with Graham Daws introduced the
Experiential Array.  Both models began to take meta-levels into
consideration and with meta-levels, the beginning of systems thinking. 

 

Yet it wasn't until 1994 when I introduced the Meta-States Model to model
the special kind of human consciousness-self-reflexive consciousness, that a
completely fluid systems approach was added to modeling.  Unlike the earlier
models, Meta-States was not linear, it is non-linear and therefore systemic
as it introduced emergent properties from the layering of states.

 

This now enables us to truly model systemic processes and long-term
subjective experiences- experiences that emerge over many months even years.
A linear approach is reductionistic.  It essentially seeks to reduce a rich
systemic experience to a series of individual strategies and to treat them
as sequential activities.  That would be one way to approach things, but it
would probably not yield the quality of understanding needed to replicate a
desired excellence.

 

What else is there to model?  A whole range of things- in fact, every
subjective human experience that is essentially systemic or long-term.  For
example, consider all of the health states or conditions and their
opposites, especially the 90 auto-immune system diseases.  The only one I've
looked at in any depth has been lupus.  And it is just one of scores and
scores.  So one modeling that would involve finding multiple people who have
recovered from lupus, especially the fatal kind, kidney lupus and cerebral
lupus, and finding both the damaging and the healing frames.  That's what
some of us attempted to do a decade ago.

 

In the last two decades most of my modeling projects have focused on
long-term experiences- leadership, wealth creation, productivity,
persuasion, etc.  Other modeling projects have combined long-term with
systemic experiences- collaborative leadership, coaching mastery, etc.  The
fact is, almost all of the truly richest and deepest of subjective states
have not been modeled and we do not yet have processes (called patterns) by
which we can enable people to replicate the best that's available, the best
peak experiences, the best states of flow, the best loving states, the best
healing states, etc.

 

This, in my opinion, is one of the open areas for exploration in the field
of NLP.  There is so much more to discover!  Today we have so many of the
required tools to engage in modeling human excellence and to go where no one
has gone before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

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