Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

There are several important ways in which what we do differs radically from others who do workshops on communication or psychotherapy. When we first started in the field, we would watch brilliant people do interesting things and then afterwards they would tell various particular metaphors that they called theorizing. They would tell stories about millions of holes, or about plumbing: that you have to understand that people are just a circle with pipes coming from every direction, and all you need is Draino or something like that. Most of those metaphors weren't very useful in helping people learn specifically what to do or how to do it.

Some people will do experiential workshops in which you will be treated to watching and listening to a person who is relatively competent in most, or at least part, of the business called "professional communications." They will demonstrate by their behavior that they are quite competent in doing certain kinds of things. If you are fortunate and you keep your sensory apparatus open, you will learn how to do some of the things they do.

There's also a group of people who are theoreticians. They will tell you what their beliefs are about the true nature of humans and what the completely "transparent, adjusted, genuine, authentic," etc. person should be, but they don't show you how to do anything.

Most knowledge in the field of psychology is organized in ways that mix together what we call "modeling"—what traditionally has been called "theorizing"—and what we consider theology. The descriptions of what people do have been mixed together with descriptions of what reality "is." When you mix experience together with theories and wrap them all up in a package, that's a psychotheology. What has developed in psychology is different religious belief systems with very powerful evangelists working from all of these differing orientations.

Another strange thing about psychology is that there's a whole body of people called "researchers" who will not associate with the people who are practicing! Somehow the field of psychology got divided so that the researchers no longer provide information for, and respond to, the clinical practitioners in the field. That's not true in the field of medicine. In medicine, the people doing research are trying to find things to help the practitioners in the field. And the practitioners respond to the researchers, telling them what they need to know more about.

Another thing about therapists is that they come to therapy with a set of unconscious patternings that makes it highly probable that they will fail. When therapists begin to do therapy they look for what's wrong in a content-oriented way. They want to know what the problem is so that they can help people find solutions. This is true whether they have been trained overtly or covertly, in academic institutions or in rooms with pillows on the floor.

This is even true of those who consider themselves to be "process-oriented." There's a little voice somewhere in their mind that keeps saying "The process. Look for the process." They will say "Well, I'm a process-oriented therapist. I work with the process." Somehow the process has become an event—a thing in and of itself.

There is another paradox in the field. The hugest majority of therapists believe that the way to be a good therapist is to do everything you do intuitively, which means to have an unconscious mind that does it for you. They wouldn't describe it that way because they don't like the word "unconscious" but basically they do what they do without knowing how they do it. They do it by the "seat of their pants"—that's another way to say "unconscious mind." I think being able to do things unconsciously is useful; that's a good way to do things. The same group of people, however, say that the ultimate goal of therapy is for people to have conscious understanding—insight into their own problems. So therapists are a group of people who do what they do without knowing how it works, and at the same time believe that the way to really get somewhere in life is to consciously know how things work!

When I first got involved with modeling people in the field of psychotherapy, I would ask them what outcome they were working toward when they made a maneuver, when they reached over and touched a person this way, or when they shifted their voice tone here. And their answer was "Oh, I have no idea." I'd say "Well, good. Are you interested in exploring and finding out with me what the outcome was?" And they would say "Definitely not!" They claimed that if they did specific things to get specific outcomes that would be something bad, called "manipulating."

We call ourselves modelers. What we essentially do is to pay very little attention to what people say they do and a great deal of attention to what they do. And then we build ourselves a model of what they do. We are not psychologists, and we're also not theologians or theoreticians. We have no idea about the "real" nature of things, and we're not particularly interested in what's "true." The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful. So, if we happen to mention something that you know from a scientific study, or from statistics, is inaccurate, realize that a different level of experience is being offered you here. We're not offering you something that's true, just things that are useful.

We know that our modeling has been successful when we can systematically get the same behavioral outcome as the person we have modeled. And when we can teach somebody else to be able to get the same outcomes in a systematic way, that's an even stronger test.

When I entered the field of communication, I went to a large conference where there were six hundred and fifty people in an auditorium. And a man who was very famous got up and made the following statement: "What all of you need to understand about doing therapy and about communication is that the first essential step is to make contact with the human you are communicating with as a person." Well, that struck me as being kind of obvious. And everybody in the audience went "Yeahhhh! Make contact. We all know about that one." Now, he went on to talk for another six hours and never mentioned how. He never mentioned one single specific thing that anybody in that room could do that would help them in any way to either have the experience of understanding that person better, or at least give the other person the illusion that they were understood.

I then went to something called "Active Listening." In active listening you rephrase what everyone says, which means that you distort everything they say.

Then we began to pay attention to what really divergent people who were "wizards" actually do. When you watch and listen to Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson do therapy, they apparently could not be more different. At least I couldn't figure out a way that they could appear more different.

People also report that the experiences of being with them are profoundly different. However, if you examine their behavior and the essential key patterns and sequences of what they do, they are similar. The patterns that they use to accomplish the rather dramatic things that they are able to accomplish are very similar in our way of understanding. What they accomplish is the same. But the way it's packaged—the way they come across—is profoundly different.

The same was true of Fritz Perls. He was not quite as sophisticated as Satir and Erickson in the number of patterns he used. But when he was operating in what I consider a powerful and effective way, he was using the same sequences of patterns that you will find in their work. Fritz typically did not go after specific outcomes. If somebody came in and said "I have hysterical paralysis of the left leg," he wouldn't go after it directly. Sometimes he would get it and sometimes he wouldn't. Both Milton and Virginia have a tendency to go straight for producing specific outcomes, something I really respect.

When I wanted to learn to do therapy, I went to a month-long workshop, a situation where you are locked up on an island and exposed every day to the same kinds of experiences and hope that somehow or other you will pick them up. The leader had lots and lots of experience, and he could do things that none of us could do. But when he talked about the things he did, people there wouldn't be able to learn to do them. Intuitively, or what we describe as unconsciously, his behavior was systematic, but he didn't have a conscious understanding of how it was systematic. That is a compliment to his flexibility and ability to discern what works.

For example, you all know very, very little about how you are able to generate language. Somehow or other as you speak you are able to create complex pieces of syntax, and I know that you don't make any conscious decisions. You don't go "Well, I'm going to speak, and first I'll put a noun in the sentence, then I'll throw an adjective in, then a verb, and maybe a little adverb at the end, you know, just to color it up a little bit." Yet you speak a language that has grammar and syntax— rules that are as mathematical and as explicit as any calculus. There's a group of people called transformational linguists who have managed to take large amounts of tax dollars and academic space and figure out what those rules are. They haven't figured out anything to do with that yet, but transformational grammarians are unconcerned with that. They are not interested in the real world, and having lived in it I can sometimes understand why.

When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages. If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same. There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not. Our job as modelers is to do a similar task for other things that are more practical. Our job is to figure out what it is that effective therapists do intuitively or unconsciously, and to make up some rules that can be taught to someone else.

Now, what typically happens when you go to a seminar is that the leader will say "All you really need to do, in order to do what I do as a great communicator, is to pay attention to your guts." And that's true, if you happen to have the things in your guts that that leader does. My guess is you probably don't. You can have them there at the unconscious level, but I think that if you want to have the same intuitions as somebody like Erickson or Satir or Perls, you need to go through a training period to learn to have similar intuitions. Once you go through a conscious training period, you can have therapeutic intuitions that are as unconscious and systematic as your intuitions about language.

If you watch and listen to Virginia Satir work you are confronted with an overwhelming mass of information—the way she moves, her voice tone, the way she touches, who she turns to next, what sensory cues she is using to orient herself to which member of the family, etc. It's a really overwhelming task to attempt to keep track of all the things that she is using as cues, the responses that she is making to those cues, and the responses she elicits from others.

Now, we don't know what Virginia Satir really does with families. However, we can describe her behavior in such a way that we can come to any one of you and say "Here. Take this. Do these things in this sequence. Practice until it becomes a systematic part of your unconscious behavior, and you will end up being able to elicit the same responses that Virginia elicits." We do not test the description we arrive at for accuracy, or how it fits with neurological data, or statistics about what should be going on. All we do in order to understand whether our description is an adequate model for what we are doing is to find out whether it works or not: are you able to exhibit effectively in your behavior the same patterns that Virginia exhibits in hers, and get the same results? We will be making statements up here which may have no relationship to the "truth," to what's "really going on." We do know, however, that the model that we have made up of her behavior has been effective. After being exposed to it and practicing the patterns and the descriptions that we have offered, people's behavior changes in ways that make them effective in the same way that Satir is, yet each person's style is unique. If you learn to speak French, you will still express yourself in your own way.

You can use your consciousness to decide to gain a certain skill which you think would be useful in the context of your professional and personal work. Using our models you can practice that skill. Having practiced that consciously for some period of time you can allow that skill to function unconsciously. You all had to consciously practice all the skills involved in driving a car. Now you can drive a long distance and not be conscious of any of it, unless there's some unique situation that requires your attention.

One of the systematic things that Erickson and Satir and a lot of other effective therapists do is to notice unconsciously how the person they are talking to thinks, and make use of that information in lots and lots of different ways. For example, if I'm a client of Virginia's I might

"Well, man, Virginia, you know I just ah ... boy! Things have been, they've been heavy, you know. Just, you know, my wife was... my wife was run over by a snail and... you know, I've got four kids and two of them are gangsters and I think maybe I did something wrong but I just can't get a grasp on what it was."

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to watch Virginia operate, but she operates very, very nicely. What she does is very magical, even though I believe that magic has a structure and is available to all of you. One of the things that she would do in her response would be to join this client in his model of the world by responding in somewhat the following way:

"I understand that you feel certain weight upon you, and these kinds of feelings that you have in your body aren't what you want for yourself as a human being. You have different kinds of hopes for this."

It doesn't really matter what she says, as long as she uses the same kinds of words and tonal patterns. If the same client were to go to another therapist, the dialogue might go like this:

"Well, you know, things feel real heavy in my life, Dr. Bandler. You know, it's just like I cant handle it, you know ..."

"I can see that, Mr. Grinder."

"I feel like I did something wrong with my children and I don't know what it is. And I thought maybe you could help me grasp it, you know?"

"Sure. I see what it is you're talking about. Let's focus in on one particular dimension. Try to give me your particular perspective. Tell me how it is that you see your situation right now."

"Well, you know, I just... I'm ... I just feel like I cant get a grasp on reality."

"I can see that. What's important to me—colorful as your description is—what's important to me is that we see eye to eye about where it is down the road that we shall travel together."

"I'm trying to tell you that my life has got a lot of rough edges, you know. And I'm trying to find a way...."

"It looks all broken up from ... from your description, at any rate. The colors aren't all that nice."

While you sit here and laugh, we can't even get as exaggerated as what we've heard in "real life." We spent a lot of time going around to mental health clinics and sitting in on professional communicators. It's very depressing. And what we noticed is that many therapists mismatch in the same way that we just demonstrated.

We come from California and the whole world out there is run by electronics firms. We have a lot of people who are called "engineers," and engineers typically at a certain point have to go to therapy. It's a rule, I don't know why, but they come in and they usually all say the same thing, they go:

"Well, I could see for a long time how, you know, I was really climbing up and becoming successful and then suddenly, you know, when I began to get towards the top, I just looked around and my life looked empty. Can you see that? I mean, could you see what that would be like for a man of my age?"

"Well, I'm beginning to get a sense of grasping the essence of the kinds of feelings that you have that you want to change."

"Just a minute, because what I want to do is I'm trying to show you my perspective on the whole thing. And, you know—"

"I feel that this is very important."

"And I know that a lot of people have a lot of troubles, but what I want to do is to give you a really clear idea of what I see the problem is, so that, you know, you can show me, sort of frame by frame, what I need to know in order to find my way out of this difficulty because quite frankly I could get very depressed about this. I mean, can you see how that would be?"

"I feel that this is very important. You have raised certain issues here which I feel that we have to come to grips with. And it's only a question of selecting where we'll grab a handle and begin to work in a comfortable but powerful way upon this."

"What I'd really like is your point of view."

"Well, I don't want you to avoid any of those feelings. Just go ahead and let them flow up and knock the hell out of the picture that you've got there."

"I... I don't see that this is getting us anywhere."

"I feel that we have hit a rough spot in the relationship. Are you willing to talk about your resistance?"

Do you happen to notice any pattern in these dialogues? We watched therapists do this for two or three days, and we noticed that Satir did it the other way around: She matched the client. But most therapists don't.

We have noticed this peculiar trait about human beings. If they find something they can do that doesn't work, they do it again. B. F. Skinner had a group of students who had done a lot of research with rats and mazes. And somebody asked them one day "What is the real difference between a rat and a human being?" Now, behaviorists not being terribly observant, decided that they needed to experiment to find out. They built a huge maze that was scaled up for a human. They took a control group of rats and taught them to run a small maze for cheese. And they took the humans and taught them to run the large maze for five-dollar bills. They didn't notice any really significant difference. There were small variations in the data and at the 95% probability level they discovered some significant difference in the number of trials to criterion or something. The humans were able to learn to run the maze somewhat better, a little bit quicker, than the rats.

The really interesting statistics came up when they did the extinguishing part. They removed the five-dollar bills and the cheese and after a certain number of trials the rats stopped running the maze…. However, the humans never stopped!... They are still there! ... They break into the labs at night.

One of the operating procedures of most disciplines that allows a field to grow and to continue to develop at a rapid rate is a rule that if what you do doesn't work, do something else. If you are an engineer and you get the rocket all set up, and you push the button and it doesn't lift up, you alter your behavior to find out what you need to do to make certain changes to overcome gravity.

However, in the field of psychotherapy, if you encounter a situation where the rocket doesn't go off, it has a special name; it's called having a "resistant client." You take the fact that what you do doesn't work and you blame it on the client. That relieves you of the responsibility of having to change your behavior. Or if you are slightly more humanistic about it, you "share in the guilt of the failure" or say he "wasn't ready."

Another problem is that the field of psychotherapy keeps developing the same things over and over and over again. What Fritz did and what Virginia does has been done before. The concepts that are used in Transactional Analysis (TA)—"redecision" for example—are available in Freud's work. The interesting thing is that in psychotherapy the knowledge doesn't get transferred.

When humans learned to read and write and to communicate to one another somewhat, that knowledge began to speed up the rate of development. If we teach someone electronics, we train them in all the things that have already been discovered so that they can go on and discover new things.

What happens in psychotherapy, however, is that we send people to school instead. And when they come out of school, then they have to learn to do therapy. Not only do they have to learn to do therapy, but there's no way to learn to do therapy. So what we do is we give them clients, and we call what they do "private practice" so they can practice privately.

In linguistics there's a distinction called nominalization. Nominalization is where you take a process and you describe it as if it's an event or a thing. In this way you utterly confuse those around you, and yourself—unless you remember that it is a representation rather than experience. This can have positive uses. If you happen to be a government, you can talk about nominalizations like "national security" and you can get people to worry about those words. Our president just went to Egypt and changed the word "imperative" to the word "desirable" and suddenly we're friends with Egypt again. All he did was change a word. That's word magic.

The word "resistance" is also a nominalization. It's describing a process as a thing without talking about how it works. The earnest, concerned, authentic therapist in the last dialogue would describe the client as being callous and insensitive, so totally out of touch with his feelings that he could not communicate effectively with him. That client was really resistant.

And the client would be out looking for another therapist because that therapist needed glasses. He had absolutely no perspective at all. He couldn't see eye to eye with him at all!

And they would both be right, of course.

Now, is there anyone here who hasn't yet identified the pattern that we're talking about? Because it really was the beginning point for us.

Woman: Ah, in the last dialogue the client was using visual words like "look, see, show, focus, perspective." And the therapist was using feeling words like "grasp, handle, feel, smooth, rough."

Right. And there are also some people who use mostly auditory words: "I hear what you're saying,""That rings a bell," "I can resonate with that," etc. What we noticed is that different people actually think differently, and that these differences correspond to the three principal senses: vision, hearing, and feeling—which we call kinesthetics.

When you make initial contact with a person s/he will probably be thinking in one of these three main representational systems. Internally s/he will either be generating visual images, having feelings, or talking to themselves and hearing sounds. One of the ways you can know this is by listening to the kinds of process words (the predicates: verbs, adverbs and adjectives) that the person uses to describe his/her experience. If you pay attention to that information, you can adjust your own behavior to get the response you want. If you want to get good rapport, you can speak using the same kind of predicates that the other person is using. If you want to alienate the other person, you can deliberately mismatch predicates, as we did in the earlier client-therapist dialogues.

Let me talk a little about how language works. If I look at you and say "Are you comfortable?" you can come up with a response. The presupposition of your being able to respond congruently to my question is that you understand the words that I am speaking. Do you know how you understand the word "comfortable" for example?

Woman: Physically.

You understand it physically. You sense some change in your body which is distinctive. That shift in your feeling state is distinctive from "terrified." That's a different response.

She senses a change in her body as a way of understanding the meaning of the word "comfortable. "Did anybody else notice how they understand it? Some of you will see visual images of yourself in a comfortable position: lying in a hammock, or lying on the grass in the sunshine. And a few of you may even hear the sounds which you associate with comfort: the babbling of a brook, or wind blowing through some pine trees.

In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words—which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history—and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word "comfortable. "That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.

Eskimos have some seventy words for snow. Now, does that mean that people who are raised in a tribe called Eskimos have different sensory apparatus than we do? No. My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness. It's not surprising that the Eskimos have seventy-some words for snow in terms of where they live and the kinds of tasks they have to perform. For them, survival is an issue closely connected with snow, and therefore they make very fine distinctions. Skiers also have many different words for different kinds of snow.

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

There is always a slippage between primary and secondary representation. There's a difference between experience and the ways of representing experience to yourself. One of the least immediate ways of representing experiences is with words. If I say to you "This particular table right here has a glass of water partially filled sitting on top of it," I have offered you a string of words, arbitrary symbols. We can both agree or disagree about the statement because I'm appealing directly to your sensory experience.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

Your experience will overlap with mine to the degree that we share a culture, that we share certain kinds of backgrounds. Words have to be relativized to the world model of the person you are talking to. The word "rapport" for a ghetto person, "rapport" for a white middle-class person, and "rapport" for someone in the top one hundred families in this country, are very, very different phenomena. There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences— which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

There's a slippage between the word and the experience, and there's also a slippage between my corresponding experience for a word and your corresponding experience for the same word. I think it's extremely useful for you to behave so that your clients come to have the illusion that you understand what they are saying verbally. I caution you against accepting the illusion for yourself.

Many of you probably have intuitions about your clients when you first meet them. There may be a certain type of client that comes into your office and even before they speak you look up and you know that one's going to be hard, that one's going to be really difficult. It's going to be a rather tedious and long-range project for you to assist that person in getting the choices they want, even though you don't know what those are yet. At other times, before a new client even speaks, you know it will be interesting, it will be a delight. There will be a spark there, there will be a sense of excitement and adventure as you lead this person to some new behavior patterns to get what it is that they came for. How many of you have intuitions like that? Let me have a volunteer. Do you know when you have the intuition that you are having it?

Woman: Umhm.

What is that experience?...

We'll help you. Start by listening to the question. The question I'm asking you is one that I'd like to train you all to ask. The question is "How do you know when you are having an intuition?" (She looks up and to her left.) Yes, that's how you know.

She didn't say anything; that is the interesting thing. She just went through a process non-verbally in responding to the question that I asked her. That process is a replica of the process she actually goes through when she has the intuition, and it was the answer to the question.

If you take nothing else away from this workshop, take away the following: You will always get answers to your questions insofar as you have the sensory apparatus to notice the responses. And rarely will the verbal or conscious part of the response be relevant.

Now let's go back and demonstrate again. How do you know when you are having an intuition?

Woman: Well, let me take it back to the dialogue here earlier… I was trying to put that into some form. And what it was for me was the symbol of—

What kind of a symbol? Is this something you saw, heard, or felt?

I saw it in my head as just—

Yes. You saw it in your head. It was a picture.

Now, all the information that she just offered us verbally is wholly redundant if you were in a position to be able to watch her non-verbal response to the initial question. Everything that she just presented verbally was presented in a much more refined way non-verbally. If you clean up your sensory channels and attend to sensory experience, when you make a statement or ask a human being a question they will always give you the answer non-verbally, whether or not they are able to consciously express what it is.

The information about representational systems comes through in lots and lots of different ways. The easiest way to begin to train your senses is this: people make movements with their eyes which will indicate to you which representational system they are using. When somebody walks into your office, they are planning what they are going to do. They are either visualizing, or they are telling themselves what they are going to say, or they are paying attention to the feelings that they want to describe to you. When they do that, they go inside and they access that information, and they make typical gestures that every one of you knows about unconsciously, and yet through the whole history of psychology no one has ever explicitly described.

For example, I'll name a standard one. You ask somebody a question. They say "Hm, let's see," and they look up and to their left, and tilt their head in the same direction. When people look up, they are making pictures internally.

Do you believe that? It's a lie, you know. Everything we're going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies. Since we have no claim on truth or accuracy, we will be lying to you consistently throughout this seminar. There are only two differences between us and other teachers: One is that we announce at the beginning of our seminars that everything we say will be a lie, and other teachers do not. Most of them believe their lies. They don't realize that they are made up. The other difference is that most of our lies will work out really well if you act as if they are true.

As modelers, we're not interested in whether what we offer you is true or not, whether it's accurate or whether it can be neurologically proven to be accurate, an actual representation of the world. We're only interested in what works.

Let me have three volunteers to come up here….

What I'm going to do next is to ask Fran and Harvey and Susan up here some questions. All I want you out there to do is to clear your sensory apparatus. You could sit there and make images about what something is reminding you of, or you could talk to yourself about such things, or you could have feelings about what's going on.

This is what I am proposing you adopt as a learning strategy for the next few minutes: simply clear all your internal experience. Quiet the internal dialogue, check and make sure that your body is in a comfortable position so that you can leave it there for a while, and don't make internal images. Simply notice with your sensory apparatus what relationship you can discover between the questions I'm going to ask of these three people and the responses they make non-verbally. I would like you to pay particularly close attention to the movements and changes in their eyes. There are lots of other things going on which will be useful for us to talk about at some other time. At this time we simply want you to pay attention to that part of their nonverbal response.

I'll just ask the three of you up here some questions. I'd like you to find the answers to those questions, but don't verbalize the answers. When you are satisfied that you know what the answer is, or you've decided after searching that you don't know what the answer is, stop. You don't have to give me any verbal output; you keep the answers to yourself.

In the United States there's an interesting phenomenon called "traffic lights." Is the red or the green at the top of the traffic light?... When you came here today, how many traffic lights did you pass between where you started your trip and arriving here at the hotel?...What color are your mother's eyes?... How many different colored carpets did you have in the last place you lived? (Fran stares straight ahead in response to each question; Harvey looks up and to his left; Susan looks up and to her right, or sometimes straight ahead.)

Now, have you noticed any movements in their eyes? Do you see systematic shifts there? OK. Store that information for a moment. These are complex human beings, and they are giving more than one response. However, notice what is common about the responses they gave to that set of questions.

I'm going to shift the questions a little bit and I want you to notice if there is a systematic difference in the way they respond.

Think of your favorite piece of music.... What is the letter in the alphabet just before R?... Can you hear your mother's voice? (Fran and Harvey look down and to their left as they access information after each question; Susan looks down and to her right.)

Now, there was a difference between the last set of responses and the previous set.

Now I'm going to shift my questions again.

Do you know the feeling of water swirling around your body when you swim?... What happens in winter when you are in a nice, warm, cozy house, and you walk out into the cold air outside?... (Fran and Harvey look down and to their right while accessing the answer to each question; Susan looks down and to her left.)

Can you make a connection between the classes of questions I was asking and the kind of movements that you were seeing? What did you actually see in your sensory experience when I asked the questions?

Man: I noticed especially that when it seemed like Susan was picturing something, she would look up. And then there were times when she would look straight ahead.

OK. I agree with you. How do you know when she was picturing something? That's an assumption on your part. What were the questions that I was asking that those movements were responses to?

Man: The color of eyes. How many lights—like she was picturing the intersections.

So the questions I was asking demanded visual information by presupposition. And the responses you noticed were a lot of up movements. Did you notice any preference as to side?

Woman: Susan looked to her right. She looked to her right because she is left-handed.

Because she's left-handed Susan looks to her right? She doesn't always look to her right. Watch this.

Susan, do you know what you would look like with long flaming red hair?... Do you know what you would looklike if you had a beard?... Do you know what you look like sitting right here?... (Her eyes move up and to her left.) Which way did her eyes go that time? Distinguish left and right with respect to her. You said that she typically went up to her right in answering the previous visually-oriented questions. What movement did you see with her eyes just now, in response to the last questions? This time her eyes dilated and moved up to her left and back. So she doesn't always look up and to her right. She sometimes looks up and to her left. There's a systematic difference between the kind of questions I asked just now, and the kind of visual questions I was asking before. Can you describe the difference?

Woman: The first questions had to do with experiences she was remembering, and the second group she had not experienced and was trying to visualize.

Excellent. The first set of pictures we call eidetic or remembered images, and the second set we call constructed images. She's never seen herself sitting here in this chair in this room. It's something she has had no direct visual experience of, therefore she has to construct the image in order to see what it is that she would look like.

Most "normally organized" right-handed people will show the opposite of what we've seen with Susan here. Susan is left-handed and her visual accessing cues are reversed left to right. Most people look up and to their left for visual eidetic images and up and to their right for constructed visual images.

However, lots of normally organized right-handers will look up and to their right as they respond to questions about visual memory. Barbara, here in the audience, looked up and to her right to recall something a few moments ago. Do you remember what it was you saw up there?

Barbara: No.

Do you remember one of the houses you lived in as a child?

Barbara: Yes, I do.

She just went up and to her right again. What did you see, Barbara? Name one thing you saw.

Barbara: I saw the living room.

I'm going to predict that the living room that you saw was peculiar in a specific way. I want you to check this and let me know whether my statements are accurate. The living room you saw was suspended in space. It wasn't bounded in the way it would be bounded visually if you were actually inside of that living room. It was an image which you had never seen before because it was a fragment of a set of images you'd seen lots of times in the past. It was not a visual input that you've ever had directly. It was literally extracted, a piece of a picture extracted from some part of your experience and displayed separately. Is that accurate?

Barbara: Yes.

When you ask visual memory questions and a person looks up to their right, you cannot conclude that they are left-handed or that their accessing cues are reversed. All you can conclude is that they looked up and to their right. If you want to explore it further, there are a couple of possibilities. One is what's true of Susan—namely, that she has reversed cerebral organization. The other possibility is that they could be constructing images of the past, as is true of Barbara. If that is so, the images will not have the color, the detail, the contextual markers, or the visual background that an actual eidetic remembered image has. That is an important difference.

When Barbara recalls images, she recalls them outside of context, which is characteristic of constructed images. By the way, she will argue about the past with people a lot—especially with someone who remembers eidetically.

Sally: I didn't see Fran's eyes going up or down, just straight.

OK. Was there any marked difference between the way she was looking straight at me before I asked a question and the way she continued to look straight at me after I'd asked the question? Did you notice any change?

Sally: Yes. She looked more pensive then.

"Pensive." What looks like "pensive" to you and what looks like "pensive" to me may be totally different kinds of experiences. "Pensive" is a complex judgement about experience; it's not in your sensory experience. I'm sure that "pensive" has appropriate meaning for you, and that you can connect; it with your sensory experience easily. So could you describe, so that we could agree or disagree, what you actually saw, as opposed to the judgement that she was being "pensive"?

As we said before, all these questions are being answered before the verbalization. So if you have the opportunity to watch anyone we're communicating with directly, you will always get the answer before they offer it to you verbally. I just asked Sally to describe something, and she demonstrated non-verbally what she saw. She mirrored in her own movements what Fran was doing.

Sally, do you remember the feeling of what you just did?

Sally: My eyes kind of closed a little.

So your eyelids dropped a little bit. Is there anything else that you could detect either from what you felt your eyes doing or from remembering what Fran was doing?...

Have you ever had the experience in a conversation that the other person's eyes are still resting on your face but somehow suddenly you are all by yourself? You are all alone? That's what was going on here. In both of these cases the pupils dilated and the facial muscles relaxed.

If you have trouble seeing pupil dilation, I believe that's not a statement about pupil dilation; it's a statement about your own perceptual programs. And I'm not talking about whether you have 20/20 vision or 20/2000 vision with corrective lenses. Your ability to perceive is something that is learned and you can learn to do it better. Most people act as if their senses are simply passive receptacles into which the world dumps vast amounts of information. There is a vast amount of information, so vast that you can only represent a tiny fraction of it. You learn to actively select in useful ways.

So what we’ll ask you to do in a few minutes is to change your perceptual programs to determine (1) whether the patterns we're talking about exist, and (2) whether they can be useful. We're going to proceed in that step-wise fashion. We're going to rely on whatever rapport we have with you to get you to do an exercise in which you discover for yourself, using your own sensory apparatus, whether in fact these things we're talking about are there. Then we'll talk about how to use them because that's the really important thing. The ultimate question is whether this is worth knowing about.

Let me reassure you that if you have patterns of communication that work for you now in therapy or education or business, those skills will still be available to you when we finish this seminar. I guarantee you that much. We're not going to do anything to take choices away. We would like you to consider a new approach. My guess is that some of you are quite effective and competent communicators therapeutically. You get results and you're pleased with them, and it's a challenge, and you like your job, at least some of the time. But even in the cases where you do very, very well indeed, you get bored from time to time. There's a tendency for you to repeat some set of interventions that you've made in the past which were successful, hoping for success again in the present. I think one of the most dangerous experiences human beings can have is success—especially if you have success early in your career—because you tend to become quite superstitious and repetitious. It's the old five-dollar bill at the end of the maze.

For example, say you once had somebody talk to an empty chair and visualize their mother in that chair and they dramatically changed. You might decide that every therapist in the country ought to do that, when in fact that's only one of a myriad ways of going about accomplishing the same result.

For those of you who are doubtful, and those who have skeptical parts, we would like to ask you—and this is true for all of the lies we are going to tell you—to do the following: accept our lie for a limited period of time, namely during the exercise that follows our description of the pattern we claim exists. In this way you can use your own sensory experience—not the crazy verbalizations we offer you—to decide whether in fact the things we describe can be observed in the behavior of the person you're communicating with.

We're making the claim right now that you've missed something that was totally obvious. We're claiming that you have been speaking to people your whole life and they've been going "Well, the way it looks to me..." (looks up and to his left), "I tell myself..." (looks down and to his left), "I just feel..."(looks down and to his right)—and you haven't consciously noticed that. People have been doing this systematically through a hundred years of modern psychology and communication theory and you've all been the victims of a set of cultural patterns which didn't allow you to notice and respond directly and effectively to those cues.

Accessing Cues Exercise:

Find someone you don't know, or you know minimally. One of you is going to be A and one of you is going to be B. A will begin asking questions. Make the task of learning this relatively simple for yourself by organizing your questions into sets the way I did. Start out by asking visual eidetic questions: What color are the carpets in your car? What color are your mother's eyes? What shape are the letters on the sign on the outside of this building? All of those are questions about things that people here have seen before.

Then ask questions about things that the person has not seen and will have to construct: How would you look from my point of view? How would you look with purple hair?

Then ask auditory questions: What's your favorite kind of music? Which door in your house sounds the loudest when it's slammed? Can you hear somebody very special that you are close to saying your name in a particularly delightful way? Can you hear yourself sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb"?

Visual accessing cues for a "normally organized" right-handed person.

Those are all ways of accessing auditory experience. The cues that the person will offer you non-verbally will be systematically different from the cues they offer you to the previous sets of questions. Then ask a set of kinesthetic questions: How do you feel early in the morning? What does cat fur feel like?

Visual accessing cues for a "normally organized" right-handed person.

Vc – Visual constructed images.

Vr – Visual remembered (eidetic) images.

(Eyes unmoving and defocused also indicates visual accessing)

Ac – Auditory constructed sounds or words.

Ar – Auditory remembered sounds or words.

K – Kinesthetic feelings (also smell and taste).

A – Auditory sounds or words.

Woman: Is there a difference between the eye movements people make when they are remembering something that they've heard in the past, and when they are trying to imagine what something would sound like?

When you say "imagine" that presupposes images or pictures. Ask them to create a sound they haven't heard before. There will be a difference, yes. Discover that for yourself.

I'd like to warn you of two pitfalls. You may think that the word "think" is one representational system. It's not. The words "think, understand, be aware of, believe, sense, know," are all unspecified. Do not use those words because the response you get will be random.

You will also get confusing responses if you say "Do you remember the last time you felt the feeling of swimming through the water?" You've asked them to do two things. You've asked them to remember and then to feel. They may remember visually; that is, they may search or scan visually, they may repeat it auditorily, or they may do it directly kinesthetically. However they do it, you are going to get a two-step process. One will be the remembering portion, following your instructions, and the other will be actually recovering those feelings of swimming.

If you get responses which do not make any sense to you, ask the person what they did internally. Your job is to correlate what you can observe on the outside with the questions you ask. Correlate the relationship between the kind of information you are asking for and the non-verbal eye movement responses you're getting from your partner. If you don't understand it, ask. "I saw this on the outside. What does that correspond to in your internal processing?" If they don't know, ask them to guess.

If you're not getting the kinds of eye movements we were talking about, make the question more difficult. "What color shoes was your mother wearing the last time you saw her?" If you ask "What color are your mother's eyes" and you don't see any movement, make the question more complex. "Your eyes are blue, too. Is the color of your eyes brighter or deeper in color than your mother's eyes?" That's a more complex, comparative question. She will then have to form an image of the color of her eyes and her mother's eyes and then make a visual comparison.

After four or five minutes of asking your partner these sets of questions, you should have an idea about what eye movements you can see which indicate unequivocally which of the internal representational systems that person is utilizing at that moment. Switch roles, so that both of you have the opportunity to ask questions and observe responses. If you run into things you don't understand, we will be wandering through the room—wave to us. We will come over and assist you in making sense out of it. We are offering you generalizations, and every single generalization anyone has ever offered you is going to be false at some time and some place. The generalizations are only tricks—as most of what we will do here is—to get you to pay attention to your experience, to notice a certain dimension of sensory experience which culturally you've been trained not to notice. Once you notice it, it constitutes a really powerful source of information about the other person's unconscious processes.

You will find people who are organized in odd ways. But even somebody who is organized in a totally different way will be systematic; their eye movements will be systematic for them. Even the person who looks straight up each time they have a feeling and straight down each time they have a picture, will remain consistent within themselves. The important thing is that you have the sensory experience to notice who is doing what. Go ahead now and discover what, if any, patterns you can discover.

* * * * *

OK. How did the exercise go? Many of you are nodding. Some of you had difficulties, or questions, or were perplexed by some of the things you saw. Let's have those. Those are more interesting.

Woman: We found that we could learn as much by watching the questioner as the listener. By watching the questioner's eyes we could predict what kind of question we were about to be asked.

Man: When I asked my partner, Chris, an auditory question, she went up and visualized.

Do you remember the question you asked?

Man: "What are the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?"

OK. Now, did other people have the same experience? Some of you asked people auditory questions, or kinesthetic questions, and you noticed them visually accessing and then giving you auditory or kinesthetic information. Do you have an understanding of what was happening? Chris, what did you do? Did you read it off the score? Did you see a record player or did you see an album?

Chris: I heard it.

You heard it. OK. Were you aware of starting with any kind of picture whatsoever? If the rest of you are watching, this is one of those interesting discrepancies between her consciousness and what she's offering us non-verbally.

Chris, do you know what the second four notes of Beethoven's Fifth are? OK, you know what they are.

Woman: Ah, that might be a spatial thing for her.

Can you give us a sensory correlate for the word "spatial'? Whether it's the notion of looking "pensive" or that's a "spatial" thing, what we're going to ask you to do, since we all have different understandings of those words, is to use words either before or after the judgements that you make which we can agree or disagree with. What is it you saw or heard or felt?

Woman: Well, when I did it, I went "da da da DUM," you know, and I looked at the spatial interval. I wasn't seeing the notes.

Those of you who had partners who had this kind of experience, check with them. I will guarantee the following was going on. They searched and found a visual image which somehow represented the experience they were looking for. From that image, by simply imitating the image or stepping into it, they then had the feelings or sounds which were appropriate for that particular visual experience.

We've got to make a distinction now. The predicates, the words a person chooses to describe their situation—when they are specified by representational system—let you know what their consciousness is. The predicates indicate what portion of this complex internal cognitive process they bring into awareness. The visual accessing cues, eye-scanning patterns, will tell you literally the whole sequence of accessing, which we call a strategy. What we call the "leadsystem" is the system that you use to go after some information. The "representational system" is what's in consciousness, indicated by predicates. The "reference system" is how you decide whether what you now know—having already accessed it and knowing it in consciousness—is true or not. For example. What's your name?

Ted: Ted.

Ted. How do you know that? Now, he's already answered the question, non-verbally. It's an absurd question. Ted understands this, but he also answered it. Do you know how you know? Right now, sitting in this room, if I call you "Jim," you don't respond. If I call you "Ted," you do respond. That's a kinesthetic response. Now, without me supplying any stimuli from the outside, when I simply ask you the question "Do you know what your name is?" do you have an answer?

Ted: Yes, I have.

Do you know what to say before you actually say it?

Ted: No, I don't.

So if I say "What's your name?" and you don't answer, you don't know what your name is?

Ted: I know what my name is because when someone says "Ted" I have a certain feeling, a response because that's me.

Are you saying "Ted" on the inside and getting that feeling as a way of verifying when I ask you that question? Ted: Yeah.

So you have a strategy to let you know, when supplied input from the outside, which is an appropriate response to which, right? "Ted" but not "Bob." But when I ask you "What's your name?" how do you know what to say to me?

Ted: I don't think of it.

So you have no consciousness of any process that you use at that point?... OK. Now, did anybody else notice a cue that would tell you the answer to the question even though Ted at this point doesn't have a conscious answer to the question we asked him?... Each time we asked the question, his eyes went down to his left and came back. He heard his name. I don't know whose tonality he heard it in, but it was there. And he knows that the name "Ted" is correct because it feels right. So in this case his lead system is auditory: that's how he goes after the information, even though he's not aware of it. He becomes conscious of his name auditorily; in this case his representational system is the same as his lead system.

His reference system is kinesthetic: when he hears the name "Ted" either outside or inside, it feels right.

One of the things that some people do when you ask them questions is to repeat them with words inside their head. Lots of people here are doing that. I say "Lots of people repeat words" and they go inside and say to themselves "Yeah, people repeat words."

Have any of you had the experience of being around somebody whose second language is the one you're speaking? Typically the first eye movement they will make as they hear something is to translate it internally, and you'll see that same auditory cue.

Some people take forever to answer a question. What they usually have is a complex strategy in consciousness. For example, one guy had a fascinating strategy. I asked him "When was the first time you met John?" And he went inside and said "When was the first time I met John? Hmmm. Let's see," and his eyes went up and he made a constructed picture of John. Then he looked over to his left and visually flipped through all the possible places he remembered, until he found one that gave him a feeling of familiarity. Then he named the place auditorily, and then he saw himself telling me the name of that place, and imagined how he would look when he did that. He had the feeling that it would be safe to go ahead and do it, so he told himself "Go ahead and do it."

There's a whole set of advanced patterns we call streamlining which you can use to examine the structure of a strategy and streamline it so that all the unnecessary or redundant steps are taken out. It involves examining strategies for loops and other kinds of restrictions and problems, and then streamlining those out so that you have efficient programs to get you the outcomes you want.

Let's take an example from therapy. Somebody comes in with the problem that they're very jealous. They say "Well, you know, I just... (looking up and to his right) well, I just (looking down and to his right) really feel jealous and (looking down and to his left) I tell myself it's crazy and I have no reason to, but I just have these feelings." He starts leading visually; he constructs an image of his wife doing something nasty and enjoyable with someone else. Then he feels the way he would feel if he were standing there actually observing it occurring in the room. He has the feelings that he would have if he were there. That's usually all he is aware of. Those feelings have the name "jealousy" and that's the representational system, kinesthetic. He leads visually, represents kinesthetically, and then he has an auditory reference system check which tells him that his feelings are invalid. So all three different systems are used in different ways.

Woman: So in that situation you're suggesting that if you were working with that person you would tie in with the feeling system, the representational system?

It depends on what outcome you want. Our claim is that there are no mistakes in communication; there are only outcomes. In order for us to respond to your question you have to specify what outcome you want. If you want to establish rapport, then it would be useful to match the representational system, indicated by the predicates. The client comes in and says "Well, I feel really jealous, man, you know, and it's hard on me and I don't know what to do." You can say "Well, I'm going to try to help you get a handle on it because I feel you are entitled to that. Let's come to grips with this and really work to have some solid understanding about this." That would be a first step which would help you to establish rapport. If instead you said to that person "Well, I'm going to try to help you get a perspective on your feelings," you would not get conscious rapport. You might or might not get unconscious rapport, which is the most important one anyway.

When this man comes in with his jealousy problem and you can see the accessing cues, you have all the information you need to understand the process he goes through. Even when people begin to get an idea that this kind of stuff is going on, they don't teach people new ways to do it. If your therapist just tries to assist you in making more realistic pictures, he's working with content, and still leaving the structure intact. Most of the time people don't try to change the actual structure of the process. They try to make it "more realistic" or workable. This means that as long as the revised content remains the same they'll be fine, but when they switch content they will get into trouble again.

The way you motivate yourself may have the same structure as jealousy: you make a picture of what you want that feels good and then tell yourself how to make that picture come true. If that's so, then until you have another way to motivate yourself you are going to keep that way no matter how unpleasant it is sometimes. Even the crummiest strategy is better than none at all.

Man: What's the difference in the cerebral hemispheres as to the dominant hand and dominant eye?

Each time we do a seminar someone asks us that question. As far as I can tell, there is no research to substantiate the idea that there is eyed-ness. You won't find any research that is going to hold up. Even if there were, I still don't know how it would be relevant to the process of interpersonal communication, so to me it's not a very interesting question. Your eyes are split so that half of each eye is connected to each hemisphere. The tendency to look in a microscope with one eye or another has been noted as statistically significant; however, I don't know of any use for that information right now.

Man: What about a situation where one eye is measurably much better visually? One is practically blind and the other one is OK. Is there any correlation there with the handedness?

I don't know. I have no idea. Again, I've never found that a useful organizing principle in communication. If you know of something in that area, let me know about it.

Man: At what age do you assume that human beings establish hand dominance?

I don't. No assumptions. Linguists claim that it occurs somewhere around four and a half. I have no basis on which to substantiate that. Handedness is a dimension of experience which I know exists in the world, I have never found any useful connection to communication. There is an infinite amount of sensory experience available right here in this room. We consistently make unconscious choices about what we sample. If we didn't, we'd all be "idiot savants," who can't forget things; they can't not know things. When you ask them about anything, they have to give you a complete "dump" of all the information they have ever had on that particular topic.

Most therapy is founded on the presupposition that if you know how things came about, the roots where it all originated, that will give you a basis from which to change it. I believe that that's an accurate and limiting assumption. Yes, that is one way to go about changing, but it is only one out of an infinite number of ways to understand behavior. When people achieve handedness is in no way significant, as far as I can tell, in the process of doing therapy and communication unless what you really want to do is to teach children to be differently handed.

The only thing I've ever used handedness in is stuttering. That's the only time I've ever used it face-to-face, experientially with a kid to assist him in getting more choices. I simply noticed that if he were given a task in which it was specified he do it with this hand as opposed to that hand—and it didn't matter which hand—and he didn't have to talk simultaneously, he could do the task and then describe it. If he had to talk at the same time, or if the task involved both hands, so that there was hemispheric switching, he had difficulty.

Children do have accessing cues at a very young age, and that is relevant information to notice. There is something now that they are imposing upon children called "learning disabilities." Many of these "learning disabilities" are really functions of the educational system. For example, I was given a bunch of children who fell into the classification of "crossed hemispheres" and they told me that this was something that existed in the world. They wanted me to find out if there was any difference between these children and the rest of them, given accessing cues and so on. What I discovered is that they were all children who were trying to spell auditorily. When I said "How do you spell the word 'cat'?" they went inside and their eyes moved down and to their left. I asked the children what they were doing and they said "Sounding the word out," because they were taught to spell phonetically. You can't even spell "phonetics" phonetically!

Who here is a good speller? Somebody who used to win spelling bees? How do you spell the word "phenomena"?

Woman: I read it.

She sees it, she reads it, whichever word you use to describe it. Now, as you visualized the word "phenomena" you somehow knew that was correct. Now, change the "ph" to an "f" and tell me what changes in your experience as you see it with an "f" instead of a "ph."

Woman: It stops being a word.

It stops being a word. How do you know that it stops being a word? What experience do you have?

Woman: It makes the whole rest of the word fall apart in my visual—

The letters literally drop off and fall?

Woman: Yeah, they sort of fuzz out and disappear.

There are two steps to spelling. One is being able to visualize the word, and the other is having a system by which to check the accuracy. Try something for me. Can you see the word "caught"? OK, go ahead and leave it up there and change the "au" to "eu" and tell me what happens.

Woman: It became "cute," and it's changed its spelling. Did anybody who was near her notice what her response was? What did she do?

Woman: She winced.

I said change it to "eu" and her shoulders rolled forward, her head tipped back, and she winced. There was a change in her feelings right here at the mid-line of the torso. No matter what language we've operated in, what country we've been to, no matter what the language is, good spellers have exactly that same formal strategy. They see an eidetic, remembered image of the word they want to spell, and they know whether or not it's an accurate spelling by a kinesthetic check at the mid-line. All the people who tell us they are bad spellers don't have that strategy. Some bad spellers make eidetic images, but then they check them auditorily. Others make constructed visual images and spell creatively.

Knowing this, a question we could then ask is "Well, how is it that some children learn to spell visually with a kinesthetic check, and other children learn to spell in other ways?" But to me that's not nearly as interesting a question as "How do you take the child who is a bad speller and teach him to use the same strategy that a good speller uses?" When you do that, you will never need to teach children to spell. They will learn automatically if you teach them an appropriate process, instead of content.

Man: How about adults? Can you teach adults?

No, it's hopeless. (laughter) Sure you can. Let me address that question in a slightly different way. How many here now see clearly that they are visually oriented people? How many people see that? How many people here feel that they are really kinesthetically oriented people in their process? Who tell themselves that they are auditory? Actually all of you are doing all of the things we're talking about, all the time. The only question is, which portion of the complex internal process do you bring into awareness? All channels are processing information all the time, but only part of that will be in consciousness.

At seminars like this, people always go out at lunch time and try to figure out what they "are," as if they are only one thing, thereby stabilizing everything pathologically. People try to figure out what they "are" instead of using that information to realize that they have other choices. People will come up to me and say "I'm really confused about this representational stuff because I really see myself as being a very feeling person." That's a profound utterance, if you think about it. I've heard that maybe a hundred and fifty times. How many people have heard something like that already this morning? Rather than thinking of yourself as being visually oriented, kinesthetically oriented, or auditorily oriented, take what you do best as a statement about which system you already have well-developed and refined. Realize that you might put some time and energy into developing the other systems with the same refinement and the same fluidity and creativity that you already have in your most developed system. Labels are traps, and one way that you can stabilize a piece of behavior in an unuseful way is to label it. Instead, you can take the fact that you notice most of your behavior falls into category X, to let yourself begin to develop your skills in Y and Z.

Now, I'd like to caution you about another thing. In psychotherapy one of the major things that Freud made fashionable, and that has continued unconsciously as a presupposition of most therapists' behavior, is the phenomenon known as introspection. Introspection is when you learn something about behavior, you apply it to yourself. I would like to caution you not to do this with most of the material we are presenting you, because you will simply go into a loop. For example: How many people here who can visualize easily know what they would look like if they weren't visualizing? ...

If you do that, you get a spinning sensation. How many of you during the exercise were paying attention to the feeling of your own eyes moving up and down? That's an example of introspection and it is not useful to do it to yourself in this context. These tools are mostly for extrospection, sensory experience. They are things to detect in other people. If you use it on yourself, all you will do is confuse yourself.

Man: How well does this pattern of accessing cues hold up in other cultures?

There is only one group that we know of that is characteristically organized differently: the Basques in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. They have a lot of unusual patterns, and that seems to be genetic rather than cultural. Everywhere else we've been—the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa—the same pattern exists in most of the population. It may be a neurological bias that is built into our nervous system as a species.

Woman: Do people who are ambidextrous have any different patterns?

They will have more variation from the generalization that we have offered you. For example, some ambidextrous people have the visualization reversed and not the auditory and the kinesthetic, or vice versa.

It's really interesting to me that the percentage of left-handed and ambidextrous people in the "genius" category in our culture is much higher than the percentage in the general population. A person with a different cerebral organization than most of the population is automatically going to have outputs which are novel and different for the rest of the population. Since they have a different cerebral organization, they have natural capabilities that "normally organized" right-handers don't automatically have.

Woman: You talked earlier about children who spelled badly because they did it auditorily, and that you could teach them how to do it visually. And now you just talked about the auditory or ambidextrous person having something different that makes him unique. I'm wondering if it's worth the energy it takes to make those kids be able to do what other people do more easily if it's taking away from other things that they can do?

If I teach a child how to spell easily, I'm not taking anything away. Choices are not mutually exclusive. Many people close their eyes in order to be in touch with their feelings, but that's just a statement about how they organize themselves. There's no necessity to that. I can have all the feelings that I want with my eyes open. Similarly, if I have an ambidextrous or left-handed person with a different cerebral organization, I don't have to destroy any choices they presently have to add to that. And that's our whole function as modelers. We assume since you all managed to scrape up whatever amount of money it cost you to come here, that you are competent, that you already are succeeding to some degree. We respect all those choices and abilities. We're saying "Good, let's add other choices to those choices you already have, so that you have a wider repertoire" just as a good mechanic has a full tool box.

Our claim is that you are using all systems all the time. In a particular context you will be aware of one system more than another. I assume that when you play athletics or make love,you have a lot of kinesthetic sensitivity. When you are reading or watching a movie, you have a lot of visual consciousness. You can shift from one to the other. There are contextual markers that allow you to shift from one strategy to another and use different sequences. There's nothing forced about that.

There are even strategies to be creative, given different forms of creativity. We work as consultants for an ad agency where we psychologically "clone" their best creative people. We determined the strategy that one creative person used to create a commercial, and we taught other people in that agency to use the same structure at the unconscious level. The commercials they came up with were then creative in the same way, but the content was totally unique. As we were doing the process, one of the people there even made a change in the strategy that made it better.

Most people don't have a large number of strategies to do anything. They use the same kind of strategy to do everything and what happens is that they are good at some things and not good at others. We have found that most people have only three or four basic strategies. A really flexible person may have a dozen. You can calculate that even if you restrict a strategy to four steps there are well over a thousand possibilities!

We make a very strong claim. We claim that if any human can do anything, so can you. All you need is the intervention of a modeler who has the requisite sensory experience to observe what the talented person actually does—not their report—and then package it so that you can learn it.

Man: It occurs to me that in your work, the therapeutic goal of bringing clients to awareness is being replaced by giving the client a new pattern of response that they may choose to use.

If you include unconscious choice, I agree with you. There are several presuppositions in our work and one of them is relevant in responding to you: that choice is better than non-choice. And by choice I mean unconscious as well as conscious choice. Everybody knows what conscious choice is, I guess. Unconscious choice is equivalent to variability in my behavior, such that all of the variations get me the outcome I'm after. If I'm presented with the same real world situation a number of times, and I notice that my response varies but that each response gets the outcome I'm after, I have unconscious choice.

However, if each time you go into a similar context you find yourself responding in the same way and you dislike the response, you probably do not have choice. The important question to me is what structure— and there are lots of different ones—produces the state in which you don't have choice? And then what steps can you take to alter that structure? We're going to give you lots of different ways to go about that.

We're offering you classes of information which are universal for us as a species, but which are unconscious for other people. You need those as tools in your repertoire, because it's the unconscious processes and parts of the person you've got to work with effectively in order to bring about change in an efficient way. The conscious parts of the person have already done the best they can. They are sort of useful to have around to pay the bill, but what you need to work with are the other parts of the person.

Don't get caught by the words "conscious" and "unconscious."They are not real. They are just a way of describing events that is useful in the context called therapeutic change. "Conscious" is defined as whatever you are aware of at a moment in time. "Unconscious" is everything else.

You can make finer distinctions, of course. There are certain kinds of unconscious data which are immediately available. I say "How's your left ear?" Until you heard that sentence, you probably had no consciousness of your left ear. When you hear me say that, you can shift your consciousness to the kinesthetics of your left ear. That is easily accessible from unconscious to conscious. If I say "What color shoes did your kindergarten teacher wear on the first day that you went to school?" that's also represented somewhere. However, getting at it will take a lot more time and energy. So there are degrees of accessibility of unconscious material.

Typically a person arrives in your office and says "Help! I want to make a change here. I'm in pain. I'm in difficulty. I want to be different than I am presently." You can assume that they have already tried to change with all the resources they can get to consciously, and they have failed utterly. Therefore, one of the prerequisites of your being effective is to have patterns of communication which make good rapport with their unconscious resources to assist them in making those changes. To restrict yourself to the conscious resources of the person who comes to you will guarantee a long, tedious, and probably very ineffective process.

By the way, here in this seminar there is no way that you will be able to consciously keep up with the rapid pace of verbalization that will be going on. That is a systematic and deliberate attempt on our part to overload your conscious resources. We understand that learning and change take place at the unconscious level, so that's the part of you we want to talk to anyway. The part of your functioning which is responsible for about ninety-five percent of your learning and skill is called your unconscious mind. It's everything that's outside of your awareness at a point in time. I want to appeal directly to that part of you to make a complete and useful record of anything that happens here, especially the things we don't comment on explicitly, which it believes would be useful for you to understand further and perhaps employ as a skill in your work as a professional communicator— leaving you free at the conscious level to relax and enjoy your experience here.

The point we're at now is "So what?" You have all had some experience identifying accessing cues and representational systems. What do you use it for?

One way I can use this information is to communicate to you at the unconscious level without any awareness on your part. I can use unspecified words like "understand" and "believe" and indicate to you non-verbally in which sensory channel I want you to "understand." For example, I could say to you "I want to make sure you understand (gesturing down and to the audience's left) what we've done so far." My gesture indicates to you unconsciously that I want you to understand auditorily.

You can also use this information to interrupt a person's accessing. All of you make a visual image, and see what happens when I do this. (He waves both arms over his head in a wide arc.) My gesture knocks all your pictures out of the air, right?

Thousands of times in your life you said something or asked a question of someone and they said "Hm, let's see," and they went inside to create a visual image. When they go inside like that, they cant simultaneously pay attention to input from outside. Now let's say that you and I are on opposite sides about some issue at a conference or a corporate meeting. I begin to talk, and I'm forceful in presenting my material and my system in the hope that you will understand it. After I've offered you a certain amount of information, at some point you will begin to access your internal understanding of what's going on. You'll look up and begin to visualize, or look down and begin to talk to yourself or pay attention to how you feel. Whichever internal state you go into, it's important that I pause and give you time to process that information. If my tempo is too rapid and if I continue to talk at that point, I'll just confuse and irritate you.

What often happens is that when I notice you look away, I think that you aren't paying attention, or that you are avoiding me. My typical response in stress during a conference is to increase the tempo and the volume of my speech because I'm going to make you pay attention and drive that point home. You are going to respond as if you are being attacked, because I'm not allowing you an adequate amount of time to know what I'm talking about. You end up quite confused, and you'll never understand the content. If I am facilitating a meeting, I can notice whenever a listener goes inside to access, and I can interrupt or distract the speaker at those times. That gives the listener adequate processing time so that he can make sense of what is going on, and decide whether he agrees or disagrees.

Here's another example: If you can determine what a person's lead and representational systems are, you can package information in a way that is irresistible for him. "Can you see yourself making this new change, and as you see yourself in this process, do you have those feelings of accomplishment and success and say to yourself This is going to be good.?" If your typical sequence happens to be constructed images, followed by feelings, followed by auditory comment, that will be irresistible for you.

I once taught a mathematics course at the University of California to People who were not sophisticated mathematically. I ended up teaching it as a second language. The class was a group of linguistic students who had a good understanding of how language systems work, but did not have an understanding of mathematical systems. However, there is a level of analysis in which they are exactly the same. So rather than teach them how to talk about it and think about it as a mathematician would, I simply utilized what was already available in their world model, the notion of translation, and taught them that these symbols were nothing more than words. And just as there are certain sequences of words which are well-formed sentences, in mathematics there are certain sequences of symbols which are well-formed. I made my entire approach fit their model of the world rather than demanding that they have the flexibility to come to mine. That's one way to go about it.

When you do that, you certainly do them a favor in the sense that you package material so it's quite easy for them to learn it. You also do them a disservice in the sense that you are supporting rigid patterns of learning in them. It's important for you to understand the outcomes of the various choices you make in presenting material. If you want to do them a really profound favor, it would contribute more to their evolution for you to go to their model and then teach them to overlap into another model so that they can have more flexibility in their learning. If you have that kind of sensitivity and capability, you are a very unusual teacher. If you can offer them that experience, then they can have two learning strategies. They can now go to some other teacher who doesn't have that sensitivity of communication, and because they are flexible enough they will be able to adapt to that teaching style.

A lot of school children have problems learning simply because of a mismatch between the primary representational system of the teacher and that of the child. If neither one of them has the flexibility to adjust, no learning occurs. Knowing what you now know about representational systems, you can understand how it is possible for a child to be "educationally handicapped" one year, and to do fine the next year with a different teacher, or how it is possible for a child to do really well in spelling and mathematics, and do badly in literature and history.

You can also translate between representational systems with couples. Let's say that the husband is very kinesthetic. He comes home after working hard all day and he wants to be comfortable. He sits down in the living room, kicks his boots off here, throws a cigarette down there, gets a beer from the icebox, grabs the paper, and sprawls all over his chair, and so on. Then the wife, who's very visual, walks in. She's worked hard all day cleaning house so it will look good, as a way of showing respect for him. She sees his stuff scattered all over the living room and gets upset. So the complaint from him is "She doesn't leave me enough space to be comfortable, man. It's my home. I want to be comfortable." What she says to him at this point is "You're so sloppy. You leave stuff lying all over and it looks cluttered, and when it looks cluttered like that I know that you don't respect me."

One of the things Virginia Satir does is to find the kinesthetic counterpart of her visual complaint, and vice-versa. So you can look at the husband and say:

"You don't understand what she said, do you? You really have no idea what she experiences. Have you ever had the experience that she went to bed first, and she's been sitting there watching TV in bed, eating crackers? And you come in and get into bed and feel all those cracker crumbs all over your skin. Did you know that's what she experiences when she walks in and sees your stuff lying all over the front room?"

So there's no fault, no blame. You don't say "You're bad" or "You're stupid" or anything like that. You say "Here's a counterpart that you can understand in your system."

He says "Well, when we're in public, and I want to express affection, she's always standing back, always pushing me away." And she says "He's always making scenes in public. He's pawing me all the time!" That is his way, of course, of simply being affectionate, but she needs to see what is going on. He complains that she moves away and he falls flat on his face. He reaches out toward her and nothing happens. So you find a counterpart and say to her:

"Have you ever had the experience of wanting and needing help, really seeing the need for companionship and assistance, and it's like you're standing in the middle of the desert and you look around in all directions and there's no one there? You don't see anybody and you are all alone. Do you know that's what he feels when he comes toward you and reaches out and you back up?"

The point is not whether those are actually accurate examples or not. The point is that you can use the principle of sorting people by representational systems, and then overlapping to find counterparts between them. That establishes something that even the major insurance companies in this country have adopted, "no-fault" policies. Family and couple therapists ought to at least have that, and have a way of demonstrating it.

As I stand back and give her space to see what I'm saying, and I get in close to him and make good solid contact with him, the teaching at the unconscious meta-level is this: I can get responses from her that he would love to get, and I can get responses from him that she would love to get. That's never mentioned; that's all at the unconscious level. So they will model and adopt my kinds of behavior to make their communications more effective. That's another way of making contact and establishing rapport with each individual member and then translating between representational systems, as a way of teaching them how to communicate more effectively.

Reference systems are also important. What if someone comes in and tells you "I don't know what I want." They are saying that they don't have a reference system. We taught a seminar just recently and a woman there said that she had a very difficult time. She could not decide what she wanted from a menu. She had no basis on which to make that decision. She said her whole life was like that; she could never decide things, and she was always dissatisfied. So we literally made up a decision strategy for her. We said OK, when you are faced with a decision, go inside and tell yourself what it is you have to decide, no matter what it is. Let's say you are in a restaurant. Tell yourself "You must choose food." Then go back to sensory experience and find out what your choices are. In other words, read the menu. As you read "hamburger" on the menu, make a picture of a hamburger in front of you, taste what it would taste like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. Then read "fried eggs," see fried eggs in front of you, taste what they would be like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. After she went through the process of trying that a few times, she had a way of making decisions, and started to make them quickly and unconsciously for all kinds of things in her life.

As she went through that process a number of times, it became streamlined in the same way that learning to drive a car does. It drops into unconsciousness. Consciousness seems to be occupied by things we don't know how to do too well. When we know how to do things really well, we do them automatically.

Man: We were wondering about accessing smells. We played with that a little bit and discovered that they went visual to see the object and then to the smell.

Not necessarily. You used the sequence you described. You said "What we discovered they do is..." and then you described yourself. That is a common pattern in modern psychotherapy, as far as I can tell. Thomas Szasz said "All psychology is either biography or autobiography." Most people are doing therapy with themselves instead of other people. To respond more specifically to your statement, people can access olfactory experience in many different ways. One of the things you can notice, however, is that when people access smells, they will flare their nostrils. That's a direct sensory signal, just as the eye movements we've been talking about are direct sensory signals, to let you know what experience the person is having. They may or may not precede that with a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory access, but you can see the nostril flare.

Turn to somebody close by; one of you decide to be A and the other to be B. I'm going to ask A to watch B respond to the question I'm going to ask. A, clear your sensory channels and watch your partner's nose. B, when was the last time you took a good whiff of ammonia?... Now is there any doubt about that? It's an involuntary response. Usually the person will breathe in at the moment the nostrils flare.

Let me ask you all to do something else which is along these lines to give you another demonstration. As a child, you had lots of experiences. Maybe you had a grandmother who lived in a separate house that had special smells. Maybe it was some special food, or a blankie, or a little stuffed toy animal, or something else special to you. Pick some object from your childhood and either feel it, talk to yourself about it, or see it in your hands. When you have it in any of those systems, breathe in strongly and let that take you whereever it takes you. Try that for a minute. That's one way of accessing smells.

There are as many ways to use this information as your ingenuity permits. If you use visual guided fantasy with your clients, there are some clients you use it with automatically and it works fine. Other people you wouldn't even try it with. What's the criterion you use to decide that, do you know? If they can visualize easily, you use visual guided fantasy, right? We're suggesting that you reverse that. Because for people who do not normally visualize in consciousness, visual guided fantasy will be a mind-blowing, profound change experience. For those who visualize all the time, it will be far less useful. The only thing you need to do in order to make it work for people who don't normally visualize is to join their system wherever they are—wherever their consciousness is—establish rapport and then slowly overlap to lead them into the system you want to engage them in fantasy with. It will be extremely powerful, much more powerful than with someone who already visualizes.

If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all. Let me ask you to do the following: Roll your shoulders forward and close your eyes and feel as though something or someone is pushing down on your shoulders. And then take those feelings, intensify them, and let them come up into a picture. Who or what do you find there? As you get the picture, I want you to notice some dimension of the picture that is connected with some sound that would be occurring if that were actually happening. And now hear the sound.

That's the principle of overlap. You can always go to the state of consciousness a person indicates by their predicates, and from there you can overlap into any other dimension of experience and train a person to do any of these things.

Richard: I know. I did it myself. Four years ago I couldn't see an image; in fact I didn't know that people did. I thought people were kidding when they did visual guided fantasies. I had no idea that they were actually seeing images. And when I figured out what was going on, I realized that there were these differences between people. Then I began trying to make images. Of course, the way I first tried to make images was by talking to myself and having feelings, which is the way people who have trouble making images usually go about it. They say to themselves "Gee, I should look at this even harder!" and then feel frustrated. Of course, the more I talked to myself and the more I had feelings, the less I could see images. I had to learn to do it by overlap: by taking a feeling or a sound and then adding the visual dimension.

You can use overlap to train a client to be able to do all systems, which I think is a benefit for any human to be able to do. You yourself can notice which of the representational systems you use with refinement and sophistication, and which you have difficulty with. Then you can use overlap as a way of training yourself to be as sophisticated in any system as you are in your most advanced.

Let's say you have good kinesthetics but you can't visualize. You can feel yourself reach out with your hand and feel the bark of some tree. You explore tactually until you have a really good kinesthetic hallucination. You can visualize your hand, and then you look past your hand inside your mind's eye and see what the tree looks like, based on the feelings—as you feel the roughness, the texture, the temperature of the bark. If you visualize easily and you want to develop auditory, you can see the visual image of a car whirling around a corner and then hear the squeal of the tires.

Man: Would a congenitally blind therapist be at a disadvantage?

Visual accessing cues are only one way to get this information. There are other things going on equally as interesting, that would give you the same information and other information as well. For instance, voice tone is higher for visual access and lower for kinesthetic. Tempo speeds up for visual and slows down for kinesthetic. Breathing is higher in the chest for visual and lower in the belly for kinesthetic. There are lots and lots of cues. What we are doing is giving one little piece at a time. Your consciousness is limited to seven—plus or minus two—chunks of information. What we are doing is saying "Look, you normally pay attention to other dimensions of experience. Here's another class of experience we'd like you to attend to, and notice how you can use it in a very powerful way."

I can get the same information by voice tone, or tempo changes, or by watching a person's breathing, or the change in skin color on the back of their hand. Someone who is blind can get the same classes of information in other ways. Eye movement is the easiest way that we've discovered that people can learn to get access to this class of information called "representational system." After they have that, we can easily teach them other dimensions.

You might think that a blind therapist would be at a disadvantage. However, blindness is a matter of degree in all of us. The non-sighted Person who has no chance of seeing has an advantage over most other communicators: he knows he is blind, and has to develop his other senses to compensate. For example, a few weeks ago in a seminar there was a man who is totally blind. A year ago, I had taught him how to be able to detect representational systems through other means. Not only was he able to do it, but he was able to do it every bit as well as every sighted person in that room. Most of the people I meet are handicapped in terms of their sensory ability. There is a tremendous amount of experience that goes right by them because they are operating out of something which to me is much more intense than just "preconceived notions." They are operating out of their own internal world, and trying to find out what matches it.

That's a good formula for being disappointed, by the way. One of the best ways to have lots of disappointment in your life is to construct an image of how you would like things to be, and then try to make everything that way. You will feel disappointed as long as the world doesn't match your picture. That is one of the best ways I know of to keep yourself in a constant state of disappointment, because you are never going to get the world to match your picture.

There is another vast source of process information in observing the motor programs that are accessed when a person thinks about an activity. For example, Ann, would you sit in a "normal" position with your legs uncrossed? Thank you. Now let me ask you a preparatory question. Do you drive a car? (Yes.) Is there a single one you drive typically? (Yes.) OK, now, this is a question I don't want you to answer out loud, but just go ahead and access the answer internally. Is it a stick shift or is it an automatic shift? ... Did anyone else get the answer? Would you like to guess about the answer and check it out?

Man: Stick shift.

OK. How do you know that?

Man: She shifted. I saw her move her right hand.

Can you tell by the shift whether it was a manual or automatic?

Man: It's manual.

Now, is that true, Ann? (No.) No, it's an automatic. Now, did anybody else have that answer?

Woman: Yeah, because I figured she was little and she wouldn't want to drive a stick shift.

OK. Did anybody use sensory experience to get the answer?... Well, let me answer the question directly. If you had been watching Ann's feet, you would have gotten the answer to that question. One of the differences in the motor program between an automatic and a stick shift is whether you have a clutch to work. If you had been watching, you could have seen muscle tension in her right leg and not in her left, which would have given you the answer.

If you ask a person a question that involves a motor program, you can observe the parts of their body they will have to use in order to access the information. Information doesn't come out of a vacuum in human beings. In order for a human being to get information to answer a question, they have got to access some representation of it. And although they may only bring one of those systems into consciousness, they are going to access all systems unconsciously to gather the information.

Ann: We have both kinds of car and I drive both. You said "Which one do you drive usually?" If you had asked me "Do you have a different car?" and then asked me about that specific car, would my motor programs have been different? If I was thinking of driving the other car, would my legs have moved differently?

Yes. You use your left foot only if there is a clutch. Consider how you answer the following question. You all have front doors to the homes or apartments that you live in, whether they are long-term homes or apartments. As you walk into your apartment or home, does the first door open to the right or the left? Now, how do you decide that question? ... All the hands are moving.

Let me ask you another question. When you come home in the evening and your house is locked, which hand do you use to actually open the door? ... Watch the hands.

People have always tried to turn body language into a content vocabulary, as if holding your head back meant that you were reserved and crossing your legs meant that you were closed. But body language doesn't work like words work; it works differently. Eye movements and body movements will give you information about process.

The proper domain, in our opinion, of professional communicators is process. If you indulge in content, you are going to unavoidably impose part of your belief and value system on the people you communicate with.

The kinds of problems that people have, usually have nothing to do with content; they have to do with the structure, the form of how they organize their experience. Once you begin to understand that, therapy becomes a lot easier. You don't have to listen to the content; you only have to find out how the process works, which is really much simpler.

There's an important pattern that we'd like to talk about next. If I'm your client and you ask me "Well, how did it go this week?" and I respond to you by going (sighs heavily, head down, low tonality) "Ah, everything worked just great this week. (sighing, shaking head "no," slight sneer) No problems." Now, the laughter indicates that there are a number of people here who recognize that there is some unusual communication being offered. The name that we have adopted for that is incongruity. What I offer you in my voice tone, my body movements, and my head movements does not match my words. Now, what responses do you have to that as professional communicators? What choices do you have to respond to that situation?

Woman: If I knew you really well, I'd say "I don't believe you. "Or I might say "Well, you don't look very happy because things are going well."

So you would meta-comment on the discrepancy that you've been able to perceive, and confront the person with it. Does anybody else have other ways of responding?

Man: I would try to help you express both messages, maybe exaggerate the non-verbal components....

OK, the gestalt technique: amplify the non-verbal message until it accesses the appropriate experience, right? OK, that's another choice. Does everybody understand the choices we're talking about so far? Our job is choice. The notion of incongruity is a choice point which is going to be repetitive in your experience if you are in the business of communication. It makes sense for you to have a varied repertoire, a range of possible responses, and to understand—I hope at the unconscious level rather than consciously—what the outcome will be when you select one of these maneuvers or techniques.

Meta-commenting is one choice, and I think it's a good choice. However, it is only one choice. When I watch and listen to therapists communicate, I often notice that that's the only choice that a lot of them have when presented with incongruity—that the people who are in the business of choice don't have any. You want to have a lot of choices in responding to incongruity. You want to have the choice of exaggerating the non-verbal, or of calling them a liar and attacking them, or of ignoring it, or of simply mirroring back and saying incongruently "I'm so glad!" (shaking head and sneering)

Or you can "short-circuit" them by reversing the verbal and nonverbal messages: "That's too bad" (smiling and nodding head). The response you get to that is fascinating, because most people have no idea what they verbalized." Either they will enter a confusion state, or they will begin to explicitly verbalize the message that was previously non-verbal. It's almost as if they take all the conscious material and make it unconscious and vice-versa.

Or you might choose to respond with an appropriate metaphor: "That reminds me of a story my grandfather O'Mara told me once. He was Irish himself, but he told about this Baltic country that he had spent some time in as a youth when he was traveling in Europe—poor, destitute, but nevertheless out having experience. And the duke that ruled this little principality—this was before the Second World War, when there were a lot of small countries—had a problem. The Minister of the Interior did not have good communication with the Minister of the Exterior. And so some of the things that the Minister of the Exterior could see needed to be attended to in order for a judicious trade arrangement to be made with other entities—other neighboring, surrounding people—came into conflict somehow with some of the needs that the Minister of the Interior felt..."

Now how do people learn to be incongruent? Think of a young child who comes home and hands a piece of homework to his parents. The parents look at the homework and the father says (scowling face and shaking head "no," with harsh tonality) "Oh, I'm so glad you brought that home, son!" What does the kid do? Does he lean forward and meta-comment? "Gee, Dad! I hear you say you're glad, but I notice..." Not if you're a kid. One thing that children do is to become hyperactive. One hemisphere is registering the visual input and the tonal input, and the other hemisphere is registering the words and their digital meaning, and they don't fit. They don't fit maximally where the two hemispheres overlap maximally in kinesthetic representation. If you ever watch a hyperactive kid, the trigger for hyperactivity will be incongruity, and it will begin here at the midline of the torso, and then diffuse out to all kinds of other behavior.

Let me ask you to do something now. I want you to raise your right hand…. Did anybody notice any incongruity?

Man: You raised your left hand.

I raised my left hand. So did many people out there! Some of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your right hand. Some of you didn't notice which hand I lifted. The point is that when you were all children, you had to find a way of coping with incongruity. Typically what people do is to distort their experience so that it is congruent. Is there anyone in here that actually heard me say "Raise your left hand"? Many of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your left hand and probably thought you raised your right hand. If you didn't notice the incongruity, you somehow deleted the relationship between your own kinesthetic experience and my words, in order to make your experience coherent.

If there are mixed messages arriving, one way to resolve the difficulty is to literally shut one of the dimensions—the verbal input, the tonal input, the body movements, the touch, or the visual input— out of consciousness. And you can predict that the hyperactive child who shuts the right hemisphere out of consciousness—it's still operating, of course, it's just out of awareness—will later be persecuted by visual images: dead babies floating out of hot dogs in the air above the psychiatrist's desk. The ones who cut off the kinesthetics will feel insects crawling all over them, and that will really bug them. And they will tell you that. That is a straight quote from a schizophrenic. The ones that cut off the auditory portion are going to hear voices coming out of the wall plugs, because literally they are giving up consciousness of that whole system and the information that is available to them through that system, as a way of defending themselves in the face of repeated incongruity.

In this country, when we have gone into mental hospitals we have discovered that the majority of the hallucinations are auditory, because people in this culture do not pay much attention to the auditory system. In other cultures, hallucinations will tend to cluster in other representational systems.

Woman: I'd like you to comment some more because I stumbled into some of this out of talking with people about hallucinatory phenomena.

Hallucinatory phenomena in my opinion are the same thing you've been doing here all day. There's no formal difference between hallucinations and the processes you use if I ask you to remember anything that happened this morning, or what happened when I said "Ammonia" and all of you went "uhhhrrrhhh!" As far as I can tell, there are some subtle differences between people who are in mental hospitals and people who are not. One is that they are in a different building. The other is that many of them don't seem to have a strategy to know what constitutes shared reality and what doesn't.

Who has a pet? Can you see your pet sitting here on the chair? (Yes.) OK. Now, can you distinguish between the animal that you have here, and the chair that it is sitting on? Is there anything in your experience that allows you to distinguish between the fact that you put the visual image of the pet there, and the fact that the image of the chair was there before you deliberately put it there? Is there any difference? There may not be.

Woman: Oh, yes, there is.

OK. What is the difference? How do you know that there is a real chair and there's not a real dog?

Woman: I really can see that chair in my reality here and now. But I can only picture the dog in my head, in my mind's eye—

You don't see the dog over here sitting in the chair?

Woman: Well, only in my mind's eye.

What's the difference between the image of the chair in your mind's eye and the image of the dog in your mind's eye? Is there a difference? Woman: Well, one's here and one isn't.

Yes. How do you know that, though?

Woman: Well, I still see the chair even when I look away and look back. But if I stop thinking about the dog in the chair, the dog isn't there anymore.

OK. You can talk to yourself, right? Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you at the unconscious level that is capable of having the dog there when you look back? Would you make those arrangements and find out if you can still tell the difference? Because my guess is there are other ways you know, too.

Woman: The image of the dog isn't as clear.

OK, so that's one way that you make a reality check. Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you that can make it as clear?

Woman: Not while I'm awake.

I know your conscious mind can't do it. I'm not asking that question. Can you talk to yourself? Can you go "Hi, Mary, how are you?" on the inside? (Yes.) OK. Go inside and say "Is there any part of me at the unconscious level which is capable of making that image of the dog as clear as the chair?" And be sensitive to any response you get. It may be verbal, it may be a feeling, it may be something visual. While she's doing that, does anyone else know how they know the difference?

Man: Well, earlier when you hit the chair I could hear a sound. When you hit the dog, I couldn't.

So essentially your strategy consists of going to another representational system and noticing whether there is a representation that corresponds in that system to what you detected in another system.

Woman: I know I put the dog there.

How do you know that?

Woman: Because I can remember what I did.

OK, how do you remember putting the dog there? Is that a visual process? Do you talk to yourself? OK. Now I want you to do that same process for putting the chair there. I want you to put the chair here, even though it's already here. I want you to go through the same process you used to put the dog here to put the chair here and then tell me what, if any, difference there is.

Does anybody know the point of all this?

Woman: We're all schizophrenic.

Of course we're all schizophrenic. In fact, R. D. Laing is far too conservative when he talks about schizophrenia being a natural response. Evolutionarily the next step, which we're all engaged in, is multiple personality. You're all multiple personalities. There are only two differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: (1) the fact that you don't have to have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, (2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don't have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

The point that we're trying to make that the difference between somebody who doesn't know their hallucination is a hallucination and yourselves is only that you have developed some strategy by which you know what is shared reality and what is not. And if you are going to have hallucinations, you probably have them about ideas instead of about things.

If one of you in the audience said "Well, wait a minute, there really is a dog there, anybody can see that!" then probably one of the other people in this room would take you away.

Now, when Sally used the word "pensive" earlier, she was hallucinating with exactly the same formal process that a schizophrenic does. For example, there was a mental patient who looked at us and said "Did you just see me drink a cup of blood?" He was doing exactly the same thing. He was taking input from the outside, combining it in an interesting way with a response he was making internally, and then assuming it all came from the outside.

There are only two distinctions between anybody in this room and an institutionalized schizophrenic: (1) whether you have a good reality strategy and you can make that distinction, and (2) whether the content of your hallucination is socially acceptable or not. Because you all hallucinate. You all hallucinate that somebody's in a good mood or a bad mood, for example. Sometimes it really is an accurate representation of what you are getting from the outside, but sometimes it's a response to your own internal state.

And if it's not there, sometimes you can induce it. "Is something wrong?" "What's bothering you?" "Now I don't want you to worry about anything that happened today while you were gone."

Drinking blood in this culture is not acceptable. I've lived in cultures where that's fine. The Masai, in Eastern Africa, sit around and drink cups of blood all the time. No problem. It would be weird in their culture for somebody to say "I can see that you are feeling very bad about what I just said." They would begin to wonder about you. But in this culture it's reversed.

When we trained residents in mental hospitals we used to go up early and spend time in the wards because the patients there had problems we never had the opportunity to encounter before. We would give them the task of determining for themselves which parts of their experience were validated by other people, and which were not. For instance, with the cup-of-blood guy, we immediately joined his reality. "Yeah, warm this one up for me, will you?" We joined his reality so much that he came to trust us. And then we gave him the task of discovering which parts of his reality other people in the ward could validate for him. We didn't say this was really here and that wasn't, but simply asked him to determine which parts of his reality other people could share. And then he learned—as most of us have as children—to talk about those parts of reality which are either socially acceptable hallucinations, or that other people are willing to see and hear and feel, too. That's all he needed to get out of the hospital. He's doing fine. He still drinks cups of blood, but he does it by himself. Most psychotics just don't have a way of making distinctions between what's shared reality and what's not.

Man: Many psychiatrists do not have that, when working with those people.

Many do not have it, period, as far as I can tell! The only difference is that they have other psychiatrists that share that reality, so they at least have a shared reality. I've made lots of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when I worked at an electronics corporation. The corporation people didn't come in in the morning and hold each other's hands and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes. Now, when somebody at the corporation sees somebody do that, they go "Urrrrhhh! Weird!" And the people in humanistic psychology circles think the corporation people are cold and insensitive and inhuman. To me, they are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you think about shared realities, the corporation people are in the majority.

Where you really have a choice is when you can go from one reality to the other, and you can have a perspective on what's going on. One of the craziest things is when a humanistic psychologist goes to teach a seminar at a corporation and doesn't alter his behavior. That inability to adjust to a different shared reality is a demonstration of psychosis as far as I'm concerned.

Therapists feel letters. I don't think that's any more peculiar than drinking cups of blood. Everywhere I go, people tell me they feel 0 and K. That's pretty weird. Or you ask people "How do you feel?" and they say "Not bad." Think about that for a moment. That's a very profound statement. "I feel not bad." That's not a feeling. Neither is "OK."

One of the most powerful tools that I think is useful for you to have as professional communicators is to make the distinction between perception and hallucination. If you can clearly distinguish what portion of your ongoing experience you are creating internally and putting out there, as opposed to what you are actually receiving through your sensory apparatus, you will not hallucinate when it's not useful. Actually there is nothing that you need to hallucinate about. There is no outcome in therapy for which hallucinations are necessary. You can stay strictly with sensory experience and be very powerful, effective, efficient, and creative.

You need only three things to be an absolutely exquisite communicator. We have found that there are three major patterns in the behavior of every therapeutic wizard we've talked to—and executives, and salespeople. The first one is to know what outcome you want. The second is that you need flexibility in your behavior. You need to be able to generate lots and lots of different behaviors to find out what responses you get. The third is you need to have enough sensory experience to notice when you get the responses that you want. If you have those three abilities, then you can just alter your behavior until you get the responses that you want.

That's what we're doing here. We know what outcomes we want, and we put ourselves into what we call "uptime," in which we're completely in sensory experience and have no consciousness at all. We aren't aware of our internal feelings, pictures, voices, or anything else internal. We are in sensory experience in relationship to you and noticing how you respond to us. We keep changing our behavior until you respond the way we want you to.

Right now I know what I'm saying because I'm listening to myself externally. I know how much sense you're making of what I'm saying by your responses to it, both conscious and unconscious. I am seeing those. I'm not commenting on them internally, simply noticing them and adjusting my behavior. I have no idea what I feel like internally. I have tactile kinesthetic awareness. I can feel my hand on my jacket, for instance. It's a particular altered state. It's one trance out of many, and a useful one for leading groups.

Woman: How do you adjust yourself in uptime? You said you keep adjusting until you get the response you want. What adjustments are you making? Do you explain more? Or talk more? Or...

Well, I adjust all the possible parameters. The most obvious one to me is voice tone. You can adjust your facial expression, too. Sometimes you can say the same words and lift your eyebrows and people will suddenly understand. Sometimes you can begin to move your hands. With some people, you can draw a picture. Sometimes I can just explain the same thing over again with a different set of words. Those are some of the logical possibilities that are available. There are lots and lots of possibilities.

Woman: Well, as you're changing your behavior, don't you have to be somewhat aware of what's going on inside you?

No. I think most people try to do it reflexively, with conscious self-awareness, and most of the strategies of reflexive consciousness don't work. That's why most people have such crummy personal relationships. If I want you to act a certain way, and I make you the reference for what I'm doing, then all I have to do is keep acting differently until you look and sound and behave the way I want you to. If I have to check with myself to find out, then I'm going to be paying attention to my feelings and my internal voices, which isn't going to tell me whether I'm getting what I want. Most therapists succeed with their clients a dozen times before they notice it.

Woman: OK. I can see how that would work in therapy, being a therapist. But in an intimate relationship it seems like being in uptime wouldn't be as intimate.

Oh, I disagree. I think it would be much more intimate that way. I don't think intimacy is built on talking to yourself and making pictures internally. I think intimacy is built on eliciting responses. If I'm in uptime when I'm interacting with somebody, then I'm going to be able to elicit responses from them which are pleasurable, and intimate, and anything else I want.

Woman: If I'm talking to someone about something that I'm feeling and thinking is important to me, then I wouldn't be in uptime, would I?

If that is your definition of intimacy, then we have different definitions of intimacy!

Woman: I'm saying that it's part of being intimate; that's one way of being intimate.

OK. I disagree with that.

Woman: How can you do that if you're in uptime?

You can't do that when you're in uptime. You can talk about things that you have thought and felt at other times but then you wouldn't be in uptime. I agree that uptime would be a poor strategy for talking about internal states, but I don't happen to consider that intimacy. For your description, uptime is not a good strategy. Uptime is the only one I know which is a generally effective strategy to interact with people in terms of getting responses.

For what you're talking about, I would design a completely different strategy, because you're going to have to know what you're thinking and feeling in order to talk about it. But I don't think that will produce connectedness with another human being. Because if you do that you're not paying attention to them, you're only paying attention to yourself. I'm not saying that it's bad, I'm just saying that it's not going to make you feel more connected with someone else. You're not going to have more contact with the woman sitting next to you if you're inside making pictures and talking to yourself and having feelings, and then telling her about them. That's not going to put you in contact with her. All that's going to do is tell her conscious mind a lot about what's going on inside you when you're not paying attention to her.

I have an attorney who has a great strategy for solving legal problems. He first has a visual construction in his head of what problem has to be solved. Next, in outline, he goes auditory internal A and checks with a visual eidetic A, auditory internal B and checks with visual eidetic B, and so on, until all of his auditory and visual eidetics add up to that visual construction. Then he knows that he's got that problem solved. It's a super strategy for legal problems, but it's a terrible strategy for personal relationships, and he uses it for that, too. He will make a picture of how he wants to interact with somebody, and then try to find pictures of when he's done it before. He can never do anything new with anyone unless he's already done all the component pieces before. It's just not a terribly good strategy for that task. And while he's using that strategy, he's gone—he isn't there at all!

Recently on TV, a psychologist was instructing people about how to have better communication. In essence, she was saying "Make a picture of the way you want to be, and then behave that way." But there was nothing in it about noticing feedback from other people. She had all these cardboard people standing next to her who were her students, going "Yes! We are very happy and we can communicate. And it is so nice to meet you, yes!" They didn't even know whether they shook hands or not. They had no contact at all, because they were inside making pictures. They all had smiles on their faces, so maybe they were happy, but it's not a very good strategy to communicate.

We once ate lunch with a retired army colonel who decided that he was going to become a communicator. He has two strategies. One is to give commands, and the other is designed to get agreement. Neither strategy has anything to do with gathering information; his entire strategy just simply ends when there is agreement. So no matter what he says, if you say "I agree with you," he can't function anymore. He's the kind of person whom you would never naturally agree with about anything, no matter what he said, because he's got a voice tone that gets you to respond negatively.

When we sat down, everyone went crazy, because they kept saying "Well, I wouldn't put it quite that way," and getting into arguments with him. Finally I stopped them all, and Leslie and I said in unison We agree with you." Whatever he said, we'd say "We agree with you." when we did that, he couldn't generate any behavior! He ceased to function. He would sit there quietly for ten or fifteen minutes, until he would take issue with something that the rest of us were talking about.

We would simply say "We agree with you" and he was gone again. His strategy to decide what he wanted on the menu was to get everyone to have anything off the menu. His strategy was not designed to get food that would please his palate; it was designed to get other people to have the same thing that he had. I guess that's a good strategy for a colonel in the Army. But it's a lousy strategy to get something good in a restaurant, or to pick a restaurant, or to have friends, which is something he didn't have.

Having total sensory experience is a life-long project, and there isn't any limitation to it as far as I know. I now see things, hear things and get information tactually that two years ago would have seemed like ESP to me. That's a statement about my willingness to commit some time and energy to training myself to refine the distinctions I make between internal and external realities, the refinements I can make in every sensory channel, and in every internal representational system.

A lot of our training in our ability to make visual distinctions we got from Milton Erickson, He is one of the most exquisite visual detectors in the world. He can see things that really are "extra-sensory" for other people, but they are there, and they are coming in through the same senses. In the exercise we did, many of you called me over for assistance, saying "Well, this person doesn't make any eye movements." And you finally admitted "Well, there's some slight movement of the eyes." When you say something is slight, that is a statement about your ability to detect it, not about what's going on with the other person.

It's like "resistance." If therapists would take "resistance" as a comment about themselves instead of their clients, I think the field of psychotherapy would develop at a faster rate. Whenever a client "resists," it's a statement about what you are doing, not about what they are doing. Out of all the ways that you've attempted to make contact and establish rapport, you have not yet found one that works. You need to be more flexible in the way you are presenting yourself, until you get the rapport response you want.

What we would like to do next is to offer you an exercise to increase your sensory experience, and to distinguish between sensory experience and hallucination. This exercise has four parts:

Experience vs. Hallucination Exercise: