[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #44 IF NLP IS A THINKING MODEL...

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #44

October 16, 2023

 

 
IF NLP IS A THINKING MODEL- 

 

I have proposed that deeper than a Communication Model, or a model about
modeling, psychology, personal development, etc., NLP is most essentially at
its core a Thinking Model (#43).  Viewing NLP from this perspective changes
several things about NLP.  It changes numerous things that we can claim for
NLP, how to sell NLP trainings, and perhaps even the future of NLP.  Let's
start from the premise of the title, If NLP is a thinking model, then what?
What inevitably follows if that is the case?

 

1st) NLP enables you to think better.  Even the very idea of "thinking"
suddenly becomes much more specific and actionable.  I discovered that when
I first studied NLP.  Learning about the sensory representational systems,
namely, that we think in images (visual), sounds (auditory), sensations
(feelings, kinesthetics) along with smells and tastes, I discovered that I
had almost completely ignored the auditory channel.  Why?  That was due to a
misbelief I picked up in college, namely, that I was tone-deaf.  Having
lived with that mis-understanding for 30 years, I simply paid no attention
to that system.  Now suddenly I discovered a whole new realm for information
coding.  I was not tone-deaf!

 

When you know about the VAK sensory systems for representing information,
you have many more specific channels for thinking.  You have multiple ways
of enhancing your internal snapshots and movies about things.  There's
scores of cinematic features (sub-modalities) that you can now use to enrich
what and how you think.  It's actually quite amazing.  It makes actionable
the multiple intelligence model of Howard Gardner (see Frames of Mind,
1983).

 

2nd) NLP enables you to be an effective critical thinker.  If the VAK model
enriches your internal coding of information so that you can "think" with
much more richness, then the Meta-Model of Language empowers you to learn
the essence of critical thinking.  The discipline of "critical thinking" is
about thinking more clearly, precisely, accurately, and rationally.  To do
that, the Meta-Model specifies 21 linguistic distinctions to pay attention
to so that your thinking will be "well-formed" and not suffer from the
ill-formedness caused by deletions, generalizations, and distortions.

 

If that sounds complicated, it really is not.  Nearly all of the deletion
distinctions are already intuitive in you as a native speaker.  When you
hear, "He rejected me" you intuitively know that the verb "reject" is not
specific.  So you naturally ask, "How did he reject you?"  The
generalizations and distortions are partly intuitive, yet most of them you
have to learn to recognize them.  When you do recognize the linguistic
distinction, then ask a question.  That's what the Meta-Model is-a set of
distinctions and questions to get a speaker to be more specific and precise.
How important is that for any communicator?  For any leader, parent,
therapist, coach, teacher, etc.?

 

When I began doing research in the field of Critical Thinking (yes, there is
a whole field!), I discovered that not a single book in that field
referenced NLP's Meta-Model.  Not one!  So I wrote the first one, Executive
Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Potentials (2018).  Why?
Because the Meta-Model is the most direct and simple way to learn how to be
an excellent critical thinker.

 

3rd) NLP enables you to be an effective creative thinker.  As a model, the
Meta-Model not only allows you to think and communicate more precisely, it
enables you to see the very structure (thinking structure) that formulates
an experience.  Every experience has a structure and that structure entails
how a person thinks.  Discovering that structure, which is what the NLP
Strategy model does, as well as the Meta-Programs, now we can create and/or
model expertise that already exists.  

 

In the history of NLP this happened as an accident.  It was not planned.
All that the founders intended to do was to find out how Fritz Perls and
Virginia Satir, two brilliant therapists, were able to achieve tremendous
results in psychotherapy.  So as they listened to how they talked, they
inferred what they must be thinking, then from that they created a whole
list of "patterns" for replicating their expertise.  Those patterns became
the content of NLP training.  They reveal how a therapist would lead a
client to a new way of thinking and experiencing. 

 

4th) NLP enables you to solve problems at the thinking structural level.
>From that "accident," the founders realized that the solutions and cures
were not based on the "content" of what a person thought so much as on the
process of how the person shifted in thinking.  That's why, they explained,
many different approaches and therapies all work.  But therapists of those
schools are wrong in thinking that it is because of the belief system in the
therapy, it's the shift of thinking underneath or within the content.

 

It was in that way that NLP was recognized as a meta-discipline from the
beginning. The "magic" was not in Gestalt, not in Family Systems, not in
Hypnosis, or any other model, it was in the internal structure.  Unknown to
the founders, this corresponded to what Korzybski said, "Structure and
structure alone is the essence of knowledge."  Then, out of this discovery,
arose the focus on modeling.  When we re-code NLP as a Thinking Model, are
many benefits result.  I'll speak of more of them in the next Neurons posts.

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  



 

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