III. ELICITATION
At a dinner party, the question, "How do you make such a delicious chicken cacciatore?" will elicit from the culinary artist of the house a precise sequence of steps — a specific strategy — for securing the outcome of a "delicious chicken cacciatore." If you miss part of the strategy (leave out a spice) or reverse two of its steps, it is most unlikely that you will later be able to achieve that particular gustatory outcome. Leaving out what generates the "m–m–m–mmm" response can result in an "ugh" response, a culinary disaster. On the other hand, once you've mastered the basic recipe, creative variations can produce delightfully rewarding outcomes.
Without question skill in the elicitation process provides access to a wealth of powerful and effective behavioral options that might otherwise remain as mysterious and elusive as the sensory–specific
3. The Elicitation Process
By the word elicitation we mean the procedure the neurolinguistic programmer uses to gather the necessary information to make explicit the ordered sequence of representational system activity that constitutes a particular strategy. The first step in the process is, of course, to elicit, as a single behavioral unit, the strategy you would like to model, utilize and/or modify. There are two primary ways to elicit a strategy. First, and perhaps most commonly, it can be done verbally, through questioning. Secondly, a person may be asked to carry out a task which requires that s/he use the strategy in question. The second method has the advantages of less interference from introspection, memory and congruency check cues. To extract, unpack, break down and chunk the strategy into its individual steps two major tools of analysis are necessary:
a) A vocabulary — an explicit set of representational distinctions and a notational system with which to describe any particular sequence of human behavior (like that provided by the 4–tuple).
b) A set of sensory–grounded indicators or behavioral signals within the ongoing behavior of any individual through which these representational distinctions may be identified.[15]
3.1 Eliciting the Strategy
Many strategies will spontaneously and naturally appear during the course of a conversation or interaction; that is, people do what they are talking about. As a person talks to you about a problem, the outcome s/he desires, or any other aspect of experience, s/he will explicitly demonstrate, verbally and nonverbally, the strategies ordinarily used to access and make sense of that experience. By being attentive and observant the programmer can reduce much of his or her work and effort in the elicitation process. As people talk about past decisions, they re–run through their strategy steps for making those decisions, like the "instant replays" frequently shown on television sports programs. When an individual talks to you about a stressful experience s/he will cycle through the sequence of representations that lead to the stressful response. A person talking about his or her difficulty in learning will demonstrate to you the very sequence of representations that is giving them the problem.
Typically, however, the particular strategy that you wish to modify or to utilize as a resource is not immediately available to the individual. In such cases the programmer will need to draw upon his or her own resources to elicit the individual's strategy. There are a number of effective ways of doing this.
a) One way to elicit a strategy is to physically place the person in the situation in which the strategy naturally occurs — to work "on location" or "at the scene of the crime," so to speak. The context in which the strategy was developed contains many natural anchors or triggers for that strategy. This kind of elicitation would include options like putting the psychiatric patient back with his family, the pianist at her piano, the mechanic in his shop, the artist in her studio, and so on. You can also gather much useful information with this method about the context, the environment in which the strategy occurs — you will be seeing, hearing and feeling the strategy in action. In some cases, however, this procedure may be inconvenient, costly or impossible to carry out.
b) Presenting, imitating or reproducing a portion of the context in which the strategy takes place will help elicit it. You might choose to mimic the tonality and gestures of the employer, for example, that your client is having difficulty communicating with, or of the sister with whom the client enjoys communicating (depending on the purpose for which you are eliciting the strategy). In The Structure of Magic II we presented an example in which a young mother came to us for help with a severe and uncontrollable habit of child beating. One of the authors elicited her strategy for child beating by mimicking that portion of her child's behavior which triggered the strategy. Once made explicit, the strategy was modified and the woman's problem was solved. Playacting and role playing are other effective means of eliciting strategies using this general approach.
c) By having an individual exaggerate some small portion of the strategy available to them, you will assist that person in accessing the rest of the strategy through the process of transderivational search. We have discussed the transderivational search in detail in Patterns I and II. It is essentially the process of going back across representations from someone's personal history, representations that contributed to the development of some pattern in the person's ongoing behavior. It may usefully be thought of as an age regression to some experience or series of experiences in our personal history that we wish to recover and apply to our ongoing experience to help us modify, cope with or make sense of it. Using our 4–tuple description of experience, we can illustrate the process in the following way:
…..
…..
…..
Here, each 4–tuple is a full representation of some related experience from the client's personal history. In each case something in the context has accessed the same kinesthetic component (Ki) that was originally experienced in the 4–tuple established when the client was three years old. This kinesthetic component serves as the thread which ties all of the experiences together. As the individual exaggerates the kinesthetic component, increasing its relative intensity value, he or she will begin to trigger or anchor up the other components of the 4–tuple representations from the past, increasing their signals in the ongoing situation. For example, a client who was bothered by constant feelings of intense jealousy was assisted through the authors' use of transderivational search to go back in time and to recover full 4–tuple experiences in which he had had that same "jealous feeling." The search stopped when the client was able to describe an incident that happened when he was three years old, an incident in which he recalled screaming and crying because he did not want his mother and father to leave him with a baby sitter. With the initial triggering experience (Ki) elicited, his strategy for becoming "jealous" was modified and he experienced no further problems. Any of the representational systems can provide the thread that links a number of 4–tuples together.
Similarly, exaggerating one step in a strategy will serve to access into the present time/space other representations that are linked to it synesthetically. In the example presented in the previous paragraph, the kinesthetic component (Ki) was a key step in the client's jealousy strategy, and by asking him to exaggerate it, the authors initiated a transderivational search to experiences in his personal history where the strategy was employed before. As these experiences surfaced more and more, the other steps in the strategy began to surface and to become incorporated into his ongoing experience.
The process of transderivational search is, of course, constantly operating in the ongoing experience of all people. We continually apply representations from our personal history to help us make sense of and deal with our present time/space experience. It is one of the basic methods for learning and understanding common to all members of the human species.
d. Perhaps the most frequently used approach in eliciting a person's strategy for a particular behavior is to ask him or her direct questions about that behavior. The questions we ask will trigger representations and strategies from the individual's personal history.
For instance, if you want to elicit a person's motivation strategy, ask, "Has there ever been a time when you were really motivated to do something?" or "When was the last time you were really motivated?" Similarly, if you wish to elicit someone's creative strategy, simply ask, "What is it like when you are exceptionally creative?" or "Have you ever been in a situation where you were very creative?" As people answer these questions they will access, through transderivational search, the steps of the strategy in question.
Thus, to access someone's strategy for the behavioral outcome "X", you would simply ask questions such as:
"Can you tell me about a time when you were able to X?"
"What is it like to X?"
"Can you X?"
"How do you X?"
"Have you ever X?"
"When were you best able to X?"
"How would you know if you could X?"
"What do you need to do to X?"
"What happens as you X?"
"When was the last time you X?"
If you want to elicit a strategy to serve as a resource to help someone develop more choices about a particular behavioral difficulty, you may also want to ask questions like, "Has there ever been a time when you didn't X?" Then, find out what was different about their strategies and experience at that time as compared to the person's ongoing experience. Referring to the three–point process we presented earlier
will provide a strong format within which to structure a specific procedure for elicitation in each individual case. If, for example, someone tells you, "I just can't seem to do my work right, or get it in on time… ." (present state), you can elicit a strategy to be used as a resource by asking, "Has there ever been a time when you were able to complete your work satisfactorily and comfortably by the appropriate deadline?" As the individual accesses and recounts this experience, s/he will also access and demonstrate a strategy useful in obtaining the outcome desired at this point in time.
Meta Strategy 1
If someone wants to embark on a new behavioral voyage, a voyage for which no reference strategies are available from their personal history, you can still access resources for them to make the launching process easier and more efficient by asking such questions as, "Have you ever encountered an unfamiliar situation and surprised yourself with how easily you were able to learn what you needed to know to operate effectively in those circumstances?" Again, as the individual remembers and recounts the reference experience s/he will go back through the strategy that led to that outcome.
Because strategies themselves are purely formal, they will be equally applicable no matter what the content of the ongoing situation is. Creativity, motivation, remembering, decision and belief strategies can be plugged in as resources for any given context. An individual will be able to utilize a creativity strategy, for instance, no matter what situation is encountered.
Meta Strategy 2
Another resource strategy that we typically elicit is what we call "uptime." Uptime is when all of our external channels are fully open and operational, allowing us to respond easily and immediately to any appropriate external cues. To elicit this resource the programmer might ask something like, "Has there ever been a time when you had all of your full resources and potential as a person, were vibrant and alert, and able to respond appropriately to anything in your ongoing environment?"
This capacity for immediately eliciting resources to help people overcome difficulties or problems, or to help them change, grow and expand their potentials, is integral to NLP. Our presupposition is that everyone already has all the resources and abilities they need to accomplish any task or to handle any situation (by virtue of the fact that we all have access to all of our representational systems — barring severe organic damage). It is simply a matter of eliciting the sequences and reference experiences appropriate to each task or situation. If we could model and incorporate Einstein's strategies, we would in essence be able to do the same things he could do.
The process of eliciting resources in terms of reference experiences and strategies is equally applicable in working with families, groups and organizations. If a couple, for instance, is experiencing difficulties in communication and decision making and is fighting and arguing you can access resources for them by asking if there was ever a time when they were able to communicate comfortably and effectively, and arrive at a decision that was agreeable to both of them. They will begin eliciting reference experiences and strategies for themselves as a couple, and for each of them individually, in which they are able to achieve the outcome that they now desire.
For organizations and political groups caught up in bickering, infighting and disagreements, the same procedure will work with equal force. When the right questions are asked, people will describe and demonstrate the very resources they need to achieve the outcome they desire. These patterns apply as powerfully in complex scenarios involving negotiation, arbitration, cross–examination and team building as they do in educational and therapeutic contexts. If a group of people wants to work together efficiently and effectively, ask them — first individually and then as a group — "Have you accomplished that outcome in the past? What would it be like if you accomplished it now? How would you know if you accomplished it now?" They will give you the strategies you need to help them achieve this outcome. If an individual is uncomfortable working with or in front of a particular group of people, ask the person, "Has there ever been a time when you were able to work with or in front of a group and were still able to be comfortable?" If the individual has no reference experience, ask them, "What would it be like if you could do it?" or "What would have to happen in order for you to be comfortable in that situation?" They will tell you the resources they need.
3.2 Unpacking the Strategy.
Once you have elicited the strategy that you wish to model, modify or utilize, you will need to unpack it and chunk it into the appropriate sequence of steps required to achieve the outcome.
As we previously mentioned, clients will go through the steps of the strategy as they access the experience in question. Internal processes often work very rapidly, however, especially those which have achieved the status of an unconscious TOTE. The client may go through a very complex sequence of representational systems in a matter of seconds. In order to be able to identify each step explicitly you will have to be able to do one of two things: (1) Increase your abilities to observe rapid and minute behavioral changes, or (2) Slow the process down so that it is easier to follow.
We strongly urge you to choose the first of these two options. Increasing your observational skills will make your work and your life much more rewarding and effective. In fact this is absolutely required for you to become a proficient neurolinguistic programmer. There is no substitute for clean active sensory channels.
As you begin to practice these skills, however, you will need to slow the individual's processes down at first, in order to be able to detect and retain the information that you will need. This can be done simply by asking questions like, "What happened first that allowed you to be creative in that situation?" or "What do you do first when you motivate yourself?" or "What's the first step you take when you make a decision?" The purpose of these questions is, of course, to establish the beginning of the strategy. As a general rule, you will want to find the intitial external stimulus that triggers the strategy (which from then on may involve both internal and external components of experience). So if an individual says something like, "Well I just begin to feel motivated," you will want to ask questions such as, "What happens just before that?"
From there the procedure for slowing down and unpacking the strategy into its component sequential steps is a matter of asking, "What happened next?" or "And then what do you do?"
What will be of the utmost importance in getting useful answers to these questions is that the description the individual offers you of his/her experience specifies one particular sensory channel so that you may determine the representational system for that step in the strategy.
3.21 Unpacking Through Predicates.
We said earlier in this section that there is a revealing tendency for people to do what they are talking about. One of the most effective tools for unpacking strategies is a result of the fact that the inverse of this claim is also true — that is, people talk about what they are doing. Through their language, people will literally tell you which representational system they are employing to make sense of and organize their ongoing experience. The words you use to communicate your experience, specifically the class of words known as predicates (ie., adjectives, verbs, adverbs and other descriptive language), will be an accurate transform of the way that you represent your experience.
One interesting choice as a communicator is to take people's language literally. When someone says, "I see what you are saying," you may legitimately respond, "How interesting! What color is it?" We accept that when a lawyer says that you should look at every issue from a number of perspectives, she is telling you to use your visual representational system. When a politician tells you that he feels frustrated, we accept that his kinesthetic representational system has the highest signal at that point in time. When business executives say they have heard about NLP, we accept that they acquired that information through their auditory representational systems. When an auto mechanic says, "That experience left a bad taste in my mouth," we accept that the experience has in some way become associated with a gustatory representation. Even in idiomatic language like, "I smell a rat," we accept that the individual has employed at some point, probably through synesthesia, their olfactory system, or, in other idioms, whatever sense has been referred to.
Some other examples of sensory specific predicates are:
a) Visual — I can see the pattern now; I just can't picture myself doing that; That looks like a good idea; I need a clearer image of the problem; I just go blank; That casts some light on the subject; Looking back on it now I can begin to see the light; An enlightening and colorful example.
b) Auditory — That sounds about right; I can hear your unwillingness; Does that ring a bell; Everything suddenly clicked; There's a lot of static inside my head; I can really tune in to them; Ask yourself if it's right and listen carefully for the answer; There is this idea that's been rattling around in my head; That has a negative tone to it; Something tells me the time is now.
c) Kinesthetic — I feel like I'm still reaching for an answer but I just can't seem to get a handle on it; It's a heavy problem; Things got pretty intense; I need to get in touch with my blocks; He's got a solid understanding of what's involved; She is so cold and insensitive; I have a feeling something is about to happen; Walk me through it.
We have presented these predicates only in terms of the three major representational classes. It will be up to you to determine from the context whether the individual is referring to internally generated experiences within the particular representational system, or whether that experience is being drawn (or was drawn at the time it occurred in the strategy) from external sources. It should be fairly obvious that when someone says "I can't picture that," or "I'm going blank, " that they will be referring to internal activity; and that when people say "Did you see that?", or "Look what you've done", they are directing visual attention externally. Similarly the difference should be fairly distinct between "That really strikes a chord, " (auditory, internal) and "I could hear the anger in his voice"; (auditory, external) and between "I felt bad about what happened" (kinesthetic, internal), and "Your muscles feel very tense" (kinesthetic, external). Others will be somewhat more unspecified like "I just couldn't see it," "It sounds pretty good," and "I kept feeling around for it."
We choose not to go into detail for the olfactory and gustatory senses because, in this culture at least, they are not used prominently for organizational strategies, although they are excellent triggers for past 4–tuples. A certain smell or taste can rapidly catapult you into a transderivational search. This is common for such experiences as the smell of the doctor's office, the smell of a former lover's perfume or cologne, the taste of castor oil, the smell of your father's aftershave, etc.[16]
Even though it seems that, to most people in this culture, being lead around by the nose stinks as an organizational strategy, we hope that you don't allow your ability to hear these predicates sour. Hopefully we have given you a sufficient taste of how to identify them that you can follow the scent and sniff them out for yourself.
Predicates, then, may be used to identify the steps in an individual's strategy. For example, a woman who had never heard of the notion of predicates and their connection to representational systems was being introduced to the significance of eye position in NLP. In the course of conversation the woman spontaneously responded, "You know, I really feel (Ki) that I can see (Vi) what you are saying (Ae) better when I don't look (Ve) at you as I listen (Ae) to you." Even though she had no conscious awareness of the significance of her words, the woman gave the author an explicit description of her strategy for making sense out of the ongoing interchange. As she listened to the external auditory output of the author (Ae) she would make internal images from the words the author was saying (Vi). She would then test the images (most likely against remembered images from her personal history), check the results through her feelings (Ki), and decide whether to operate (probably by asking the author more questions (Ae) about what he was talking about, based on her internal images) or exit, accepting the verbalizations the author was offering to her. If she watched the author, however, looking external to herself (Ve), the incoming visual sensations would interfere with her internal construction and testing process. Externally and internally initiated experiences within the same representational system tend to interfere with one another because they share the same neural pathways in the brain; a high external signal tends to mask internal visual experience and vice versa. This inverse function between internally and externally generated experience exists within all of the representational systems.
Because she had a kinesthetic check, then, this woman became aware of the interference between her internal and external representations through her feelings. Using the 4–tuple notation we would show this strategy in its most elegant form as:
As you listen to predicates, pay attention to those which may be unspecific with respect to representational systems. Words like "light" may be interpreted kinesthetically or visually. Adverbs like "clear" may also apply to more than one representational system —you may hear something clearly as well as see something clearly. Many words like this will be specified, of course, through context, or through accessing cues (which we will detail later).
Words like "understand," "identify," "sense," "know," "think," "become aware of," "notice," etc., are also unspecified with respect to representational systems. Each of these processes may occur through any of the representational systems. A good rule of thumb to employ when confronted with words that you are not sure of, a rule that applies to all elicitation procedures, is: when in doubt, ask. And keep asking (operating) until you get a description that is sensory specific.
For example, suppose you have asked somebody how they begin their creative strategy and they answer, "Well, I just start getting into it." This verbalization is not specific with respect to the representational system they are using, so you will want to ask, "How specifically do you 'get into it'?" In response to this question the person replies, "I start thinking about all of the things I could do with it." Again their response is unspecified with respect to their sensory process, so you ask, "How specifically do you start 'thinking' about all of the things you could do?" The person answers this question with, "I just look at it and start to see all of these ways of using it." With this answer the individual has identified the first two steps in the strategy: "looking at it" (visual, external — Ve) and "see all these ways of using it" (visual, internal — Vi). Note that the internal visual representations follow the external input, so that there will be no interference.
The individual might also answer the question with, "I get this feeling that I'm going to really do something good." Here the individual is specifying internal kinesthetic sensations, but does not tell you what they are triggered by. In this case, then, you would want to ask, "What happens right before you get those feelings?"
You might also get an answer like, "I start going, 'Yeh, this is going to be fun! I can do this and that …', and so on." Here, the person is actually quoting internal dialogue, specifying auditory, internal (Ai). Again, however, if you want to specify the external stimulus which cues this internal dialogue, you will want to ask, "And what happens just before you begin to say this to yourself?" The answer may range from "I put a record on that really gets me into a creative mood" (Ae) to "I go jogging" (Ke) to "I look at the clock and see that I have a lot of time." (Ve).
You may also consistently end up with an answer, of course, like "I don't know." This indicates that the step is out of consciousness for the individual. As they answer, however, you may notice that they look up and to the left. It is here that close attention to each individual's non–verbal accessing cues will be of extreme importance. These will be presented later in this section.
The best way we know to assist you in becoming proficient at accessing the kind of sensory specific information you will require for eliciting strategies is to practice the meta–model that we presented explicitly in The Structure of Magic I. The meta–model provides powerful verbal tools with which you can decode and break down practically any verbalization into the primary sensory experience from which it was derived. We strongly suggest you look over The Structure of Magic I if you wish to increase your verbal skills and intuitions for any purpose. This same tool has powerful applications in decision making and management situations for securing high quality information.
Also, listen for predicate combinations which indicate synesthesia patterns. If someone says, "That looks uncomfortable, " the term "uncomfortable" does not constitute a visual description. A visual description has to take place in terms of colors, shapes, depth, position and brightness. This utterance is rather a description of a visual–kinesthetic synesthesia — an interpretation resulting from the feelings the individual derives from looking at the phenomenon she is remarking about, probably based on past experience. Other examples of this kind of language would be:
"It sounds like a colorful place" (auditory–visual).
"Don't look at me with that tone of voice" (visual–auditory).
"It sounded frightening" (auditory–kinesthetic).
The Structure of Magic II contains many useful examples and exercises that will amplify your abilities to hear interpretive language and break it down into sensory specific descriptions.
3.22 Expanding 4–tuple Notation — Part 1.
Thus far we have presented, through the 4–tuple, two major distinctions with which to classify and notate the steps in the strategy that you are extracting and unpacking:
1) Representational systems — auditory (A), visual (V), kinesthetic (K), and olfactory/gustatory (O)—and
2) Whether the representational system is oriented toward internally generated experience (indicated through a superscript "i") or toward experience which is coming from sources external to the individual (indicated by a superscript "e").
There are, of course, many possible distinctions that could be made about a particular step in a strategy as you analyze it in finer detail, such as color, location, pitch, clarity, etc., each of which may be useful at some time to achieve a specific outcome. As you choose the level of detail at which you will classify the representations in the strategy you are extracting, you'll want to opt for the description which is most elegant — that is, the one which employs the fewest distinctions but is still able to secure the outcome for which it was designed.
We have found the two distinctions presented so far to be the most essential for any adequate description of an experience. At times it may be important to add other modifiers into your notational description of a strategy, indicating which steps are involved in testing and operations, and checking the content experience being run through the strategy. We did this when we were identifying the difference between the constructed visual image (Vic) and the remembered visual image (Vir) in describing the test that took place in the visual spelling strategy. Memory (recall) and construction (imagination and fantasy) are formal distinctions that can be made for the internally generated experience in any of the representational systems, and seem to be a result of the functional differences ascribed to the two cerebral hemispheres in human beings.
Much research in recent years has been done on the functional differences in the neurological processing between the dominant hemisphere (the left cerebral hemisphere in most right–handed people) and the non–dominant hemisphere (the right cerebral hemisphere in right–handed people). The dominant hemisphere, it is claimed, tends to carry out linear, sequential, cause–effect type processing and, as a result, is responsible for the manipulation and construction of our internally generated experience. The non–dominant hemisphere, it is claimed, tends to carry out the more presentational, spatial, integrative, gestalten types of processing, and is thus responsible for much of the reaccessing and recalling of past sensory representations.[17]
Because of "handedness" (the fact that we tend to use one side of our body more than the other for many tasks), the dominant hemisphere will in many cases have a higher signal level than the activity taking place concurrently in the non–dominant hemisphere. As a result people are often more conscious of the activity taking place in their dominant hemisphere and less aware of non–dominant functions. We have found that making the distinction between dominant and non–dominant hemisphere functions (specifically those involving consciousness, memory and construction) is sometimes important for our work, particularly that involving altered states of consciousness (this is presented in detail in Patterns I & II). We will therefore often include some of these distinctions in our notation for strategies.
We have already used the "r" (remembered) and "c" (constructed) notation for these distinctions in this book. Using the "r" and "c" as a subscript to Vi, Ai, Ki or Oi, is redundant in the sense that we know that if someone is constructing or remembering an image they will be necessarily employing an internal orientation for that representational system. To make our notation more elegant, then, when it is necessary to indicate a remembered versus a constructed distinction, we will notate the "c" or "r" as a superscript in place of the "i". A constructed sound then will be noted as Ac; a remembered feeling will be noted as Kr ; and so forth.
Another distinction related to hemispheric functioning that we consider useful is the difference between digital (verbal) representations in the auditory representational system, and those involving tonal and tempo (non–verbal) qualities. Our language (auditory, digital) representations tend to be primarily organized by neurological systems localized in our dominant hemisphere (the left hemisphere for right–handed people). Although remembered verbal experiences, such as tapeloops and cliches, become incorporated by the non–dominant hemisphere, this .hemisphere seems to be somewhat specialized for organizing the tonal, melodic and rhythmic portions of our auditory experience. The information carried by each of these different processes will often have a very different functional significance. The digital portions of our communications belong to a class of experience that we refer to as "secondary experience." Secondary experience is composed of the representations that we use to code our primary experience — secondary experience (such as words and symbols) are only meaningful in terms of the primary sensory representations that they anchor for us. This is why we will often show the digital[18] component of an experience to be outside of the 4–tuple:
Here we have distinguished between the tonal and digital portion of our auditory representational system by subscripting with a "d" for digital or verbal, and a "t" for tonal and tempo qualities. (See Patterns II pp. 17–19 for a more explicit discussion of this distinction).
We have also indicated in this diagram the remembered and constructed distinctions as being possible subcategories of the internally generated experience.
Another possible distinction you may wish to make is that between the tactile (somatosensory) and visceral (emotional and proprioceptive) portions of kinesthetic experience.[19] Sometimes emotional or visceral representations will have a different functional significance for the behavioral task than those which involve purely external tactile sensations (pain, pressure and temperature). In general, however, we choose, for notational purposes, to class visceral sensations as kinesthetic internal experience (in the same category as remembered and constructed kinesthetic sensations).
As we said before, choose to make the distinctions you determine to be necessary to achieve the outcome you are working towards. It is sometimes important to break down the auditory digital aspects of someone's strategy into the corresponding meta–model category. For instance, we have observed that in many people the appearance of modal operators of necessity (words like "should," "must," "have to," "is necessary," "need to," etc.) in the verbal portions of their motivation or decision strategies often trigger the kinesthetic sensations of anxiety or stress. If they change these words to modal operators of possibility (words like "can," "is possible," "will," etc.) they are still able to achieve the outcome of the strategy but experience much less stress and discomfort.
You can also feel free to customize your notational system to fit your own needs, and to include distinctions that you think are important for the strategies that you find yourself working with. The distinctions we have offered here simply constitute what we believe to be the most minimal and elegant set of distinctions with which to analyze and notate strategy steps.[20]
3.23 Unpacking Strategies Through Accessing Cues.
We have previously mentioned that the verbal portion of our communication constitutes only one aspect of the entire process of communication. In fact, in our way of thinking, it often constitutes the least important part of the communication. A tremendous amount of information is communicated through the nonverbal (tonal, gestural and tactile) aspect of our communication, that typically takes place beneath the conscious awareness of most . people. Further, most people are unconscious of the vast majority of representations that pass through their neurological systems as they cycle through their strategies. It is very difficult for many people to tune into their actual sensory experience, or to communicate it verbally.
By paying close attention to accessing cues and the non–verbal portions of people's behavior, you can pick up a vast wealth of information that most often passes by people's conscious attention and defies their abilities to verbalize. The behavioral accessing cues that an individual employs to tune his or her neurology to single out one particular representational system through which to accept and process some input at a particular point in time, will provide you with an excellent index with which to identify the representational system being employed for a particular strategy step. These cues will directly indicate the representational system they are being used to access. This becomes very useful when the rapid and complex representational sequences that make up some strategies are not available through the verbal report of the individual who has displayed the strategy.
In this book we will be detailing only a few of an endless range of possible indicators and accessing mechanisms, all of which are available to your ongoing sensory experience. By paying attention to the systematic and recurrent behaviors that people go through as they communicate and act, we have discovered a number of non–verbal cues which may be used to index the sensory specific processes people run through during behavioral activity. These include eye position, tonal and tempo qualities of the voice, breathing rate and position, skin color changes, body temperature, heart rate, posture and muscle tonus, even EEG activity.[21] The two basic principles that underly our method of classification are:
a) Any occurrence in one part of a system (such as the neurological and biological system that makes up a human being) will necessarily affect all of the other parts of that system in some way. When the patterns of interaction between the parts of the system are identified, the effects of the different parts of the system on one another can be predicted and utilized.
b) In humans, all behavior (macro–and micro-) is a transform of internal neurological processes, and therefore carries information about those processes. All behavior, then, is in some way communication about the neurological organization of the individual — a person can't not communicate.
The goal of this process of information gathering is the goal of all of behavioral science, to decode the overt transforms of neurological strategies, which are generally not available to the consciousness of those in whom they operate, in order to gain understanding of how the representational components are organized with respect to one another.
The process of discovering regularities between an individual's observable behavior and their internal processes is an example of the process we have employed to generate all of our models of behavioristic. Gregory Bates on has elegantly formalized some of the properties of this process in his work:
"If from some perception X, it is possible to make better than random guesses about some Y, there is 'redundancy' between X and Y, 'X is a coded message about Y\ or 'Y is a transform of X', or 'X is a transform of Y' …" ("Reality and Redundancy" — 1975)
"… when an observer perceives only certain parts of a sequence or configuration of phenomena, he is in many cases able to guess, with better than random success, at the parts which he cannot immediately perceive (guessing that a tree will have roots, for example)." (Steps to an Ecology of Mind— 1973)
Note that this definition says nothing of statistical verification. Statistics may support or reveal patterns but they do not establish them; nor do they determine whether a pattern will be useful or not. Statistical averaging may sometimes be used to help find a pattern, but the statistics themselves are not the pattern, as they are often assumed to be. Indeed, the behavior we are studying becomes established, not on the basis of statistical averages, but on patterns. The child learning to speak does not assimilate the language by taking statistical averages of the meanings of words s/he is learning to use, but rather on the basis of the patterns offered by relatives, friends and others as the child grows up. The overwhelming majority of children become competent native speakers of the language they learn in this way.
The patterns and generalizations we offer concerning accessing cues can be and have been supported by experimental research, but we have chosen simply to present these generalizations and patterns as we have observed them in the more useful context of our professional experience. We will present no numbers, tables or graphs.
The ultimate success of a neurolinguistic programmer will depend on the ability to observe, identify and utilize the multitude of transforms and patterns that will be constantly offered to you in your ongoing sensory experience by the members of our species; not on the ability to measure and average types of behavior or to remember numbers and tables. We offer the generalizations in this book as a way to assist you to begin the process of expanding your own perceptual abilities, not as "laws". We suggest that you develop a strategy with which to observe these patterns in your ongoing interactions and verify them for yourself until you have incorporated the strategy so thoroughly that you can let it drop out of consciousness. In our experience, the patterns we offer have held for every individual we have observed and questioned.
3.231 Eye Movements as Accessing Cues.
We have noticed that the eye movements people make as they are thinking and processing information provide a remarkably accurate index for sensory specific neurological activity. We introduced these patterns in Patterns II:
"When each of us selects the words we use to communicate to one another verbally, we typically select those words at the unconscious level of functioning. These words, then, indicate which portions of the world of internally and externally available experience we have access to at that moment in time. More specifically, the set of words known as predicates (verbs, adjectives and adverbs) are particularly indicative. Secondly, each of us has developed particular body movements which indicate to the astute observer which representational system we are using. Especially rich in significance are the eye scanning patterns which we have developed. Thus, for the student of hypnosis, predicates in the verbal system and eye scanning patterns in the non verbal system offer quick and powerful ways of determining which of the potential meaning making resources — the representational systems — the client is using at a moment in time, and therefore how to respond creatively to the client. Consider, for example, how many times you have asked someone a question and they have paused, said "Hmmmmm, let's see" and accompanying this verbalization they move their eyes up and to the left. Movement of the eyes up and to the left stimulates (in right handed people) eidetic images located in the non dominant hemisphere. The neurological pathways that come from the left side of both eyes (left visual fields) are represented in the right cerebral hemisphere (non dominant). The eye scanning movement up and to the left is a common way people use to stimulate that hemisphere as a method for accessing visual memory. Eye movements up and to the right conversely stimulate the left cerebral hemisphere and constructed images—that is, visual representations of things that the person has never seen before (see Patterns, volume I, page 182).
"Developing your skill in detecting the client's most highly valued representational system will give you access to an extremely powerful utilization tool for effective hypnotic communication. There are two principal ways which we have found effective in teaching people in our training seminars to refine their ability to detect representational systems:
(1) attending to accessing cues which may be detected visually. Specifically (for the right–handed person):
accessing cue – representational system indicated
eyes up and to the left … - eidetic imagery (V)
eyes up and to the right … - constructed imagery (V)
eyes defocused in position … - imagery (V)
eyes down and to the left … - internal dialogue (A)
telephone positions … - internal dialogue (A)
eyes left or right, same level of gaze … - internal auditory (A)
eyes down and to the right … - body sensations (K)
hand[s] touching on midline … - body sensations (K)
(2) attending to the choice of predicates selected (typically, unconsciously) by the client to describe his experience (see Patterns, volume I, pages 68–76, 82–86 and The Structure of Magic, volume II, part I). When describing experiences, each of us selects words to describe the portions of experience we attend most closely to. Thus, as communicators, when we train ourselves to detect which representational system is presupposed by the words selected by our clients to describe their experience, we have information which we can utilize effectively in our communication with them.
"These are, of course, only two way of learning to detect representational systems — there are many others. We have found, for example, that breathing patterns are an excellent indicator of which representational system a person is using at a point in time to organize and represent their experience to themselves. During visualization, for example, the person's breathing tends to become shallow and high in the chest. Other equally useful indicators in our experience are the shifts in the tonal qualities of the person's voice, the tempo of speech, the color of the person's skin … We have presented two specific ways of detecting representational systems in sufficient detail to allow the reader to train him or herself to detect the representational system being used by a client at a point in time. Once you have comfortably mastered these two techniques — refined your ability to make these sensory distinctions — we suggest that you explore for yourselves other indicators which allow you to gain the same information. Such exercises in making sensory distinctions will not only increase your ability to be effective and graceful in your hypnotic communication but will increase and refine your ability to have the sensory experience which is, in our experience, the very foundation of effective communication and hypnosis."
Figure 1 depicts the eye movement index described in this excerpt in more detail, adding the tonal/digital and remembered/ constructed distinctions and the eye positions which access them.
3.232 Gestural Accessing Cues.
We also presented, in this excerpt, another form of accessing cue/indicators involving gestural complexes — "telephone positions" for internal dialogue, and hands touching the midline of the body for kinesthetic sensations. Telephone positions are those in which the person leans his head on his hand or fist so that his head tilts to one side (typically to the left) as if he were talking on a telephone. Stroking your chin with one of your hands or touching the area around your mouth nose and jaw is another common indicator and accessor of internal dialogue.
People will often (consciously or unconsciously) point to or touch with their hands the sense organs for the particular channel of representation that they are using as a means to access or indicate that channel. Someone might say, "I really began to realize the importance of what was going on," and be pointing to his or her ear — indicating auditory. More obvious is the person who says something like, "I give myself a lot of static about that," as they make circling motions around one of their ears with a finger.
Another example would be the person who says, "I noticed your disappointment," as she points toward her eyes, or the individual who says, "Now let me see," and begins to rub his eyes and the bridge of his nose.
Similarly, you may notice that when a person says, "That movie was really intense," she may place her hands over her chest and heart area, or when someone says "That was really delightful" he may rub or fold his hands over his stomach.
These gestures will, of course, also occur without the accompanying verbalizations.
3.233 Breathing Changes.
Breathing is one of the most profound and direct ways we have of changing or tuning our chemical and biological state to affect our neurology. Breathing at different rates, and filling or expanding different areas in our lung cavity will involve most of our body —accessing different muscle groups and changing the chemical composition of our blood (which provides the medium in which our brain operates). We have found that breathing changes constitute a powerful indicator and accessing mechanism for sensory specific states.
a) Breathing high and shallow in the chest (or the momentary cessation of breathing) accompanies and accesses visual attention.
b) Deep, full breathing low in the stomach area indicates kinesthetic accessing.
c) Even breathing in the diaphragm or with the whole chest, often accompanied by a somewhat prolonged exhale (as if speaking without moving one's mouth to make the words), will accompany internal dialogue.
These breathing patterns access attention within representational systems either externally or internally.
3.234 Posture and Muscle Tonus Changes.
Concurrently with these different types of breathing and to help tune in a particular representational system, we adjust the musculature and skeletal position of our bodies as well.[22] We have noticed the following correlations between postural variations and representational system accessing:
a) Muscle tension in the shoulders, neck and often the abdomen; shoulders hunched and neck extended characterize the body accessing posture for visual attentiveness.
b) (1) General muscle relaxation, with the head sitting solidly on the shoulders, which tend to droop, is characteristic of most internal kinesthetic accessing, unless the feelings are fairly intense; the accessing will then be accompanied/initiated by exaggerated abdominal breathing and expressive or even violent gestures. (2) External (tactile and motor) kinesthetic accessing will share the breathing and head position of internal kinesthetic cuing, but the body will be more in motion and the shoulders will be held more broadly (as is common to athletes).
c) Auditory accessing is characterized by relatively even muscle tension and minor rhythmic movements. The shoulders tend to be thrown back, although somewhat slouched, into what we call the "saxophone" position (because the individual holds his body as if s/he were playing a saxophone). The individual will also often have his head tilted to one side.
3.235 Tonal and Tempo Changes.
The breathing, postural and muscle tonus changes that an individual goes through will affect other behavioral outputs that can also serve as effective indicators of representational system activity. Changes in voice tempo and tonality will be caused by the changes in breathing and muscle tension in the face and neck area. The amount of air, and the rapidity with which it is pushed over one's vocal chords, will cause noticeable changes in voice quality.
a) Quick bursts of words in a high pitched, nasal and/or strained tonality with a typically fast tempo of speech accompanies visual processing.
b) Slow voice tempo with long pauses and in a characteristically low, deep and often breathy tonality indicates kinesthetic accessing.
c) A clear, midrange tonality in an even and sometimes rhythmic tempo and typically well enunciated words will accompany activity in the auditory representational system.
Some other indicator/accessing cues for the auditory system are tapping, snapping the fingers and making clicking, humming or whistling noises with one's mouth.
Organizing things on one's fingers tends to accompany internal dialogue and other auditory digital accessing.
3.24 Employing the Elicitation Procedures
These distinctions as we have suggested, are but a few of the wealth of possible patterns available to you with which you can break down complex sequences of behavior. For the purposes of this book, however, we will for the most part limit our analysis to those cues involving eye movements and verbal predicates, and we will employ the other distinctions listed here only where they are important or obvious. We have found that the distinctions provided by the eye movement patterns and verbal predicates constitute the minimum number of distinctions necessary to unpack practically any strategy.
We are now ready to begin to apply all of the various components of the elicitation procedure together. Through a few examples we will demonstrate how the process as a whole takes place.
EXAMPLE A
Consider the following sequence of behavior presented by an administrative director of an organization in making a decision. She has just read a written report that had been submitted to her and must generate an outcome decision on the basis of the information contained in the report. This person could just as easily be a judge, diplomat, executive or anyone in a decision making capacity.
"As I look this over . .." (eyes scan paper, then she pauses and takes a deep breath as her eyes shift down and to the right momentarily and then move over to the left) "… I get the feeling that something may have been left out …" (reaches up and strokes her chin) "… and I have to ask myself, how might this affect the results of this decision where it is so important that we have a clear understanding?" (Eyes move up and to the right where they make a number of slight lateral shifts and then move down and to the right before returning to make eye contact with the person standing before her.) "I really don't know what to say about it."
Analysis: She begins with the external visual stimulus from the written report (Ve ) which she has probably read in detail sometime earlier.
Predicate: "look over"
Accessing cue: Eyes scan external object.
Analysis:The visual stimulus accesses internal kinesthetic sensations (Ki) about what was printed.
Predicate: "I get the feeling"
Accessing cue: Deep breath, eyes move down and right.
Analysis:These feelings then initiate an internal auditory digital response (Aid).
Predicate: "ask myself”
Accessing cue: Eyes down and left, hand strokes chin.
Analysis:She then constructs a series of internal visual images in response to the internal verbalization (Vc1 , Vc2, … Vcn).
Predicate: "clear understanding"
Accessing cue: Slight shifts of the eyes while in up and right position.
Analysis:The constructed images access internal feelings (Ki).
Predicate: -
Accessing cue: Eyes down and right.
Analysis:Were the decision to be made, or still in progress, the administrative director would be able to make some verbalization (Ad) in response to the feelings to either exit or continue the decision process. Her comment here, however, indicates the absence of experience within that representational system. (Lack of information is information.)
Predicate: "don't know what to say about it."
Accessing cue: -
Assume this administrative director is talking to you. Perhaps you have submitted the report she is reviewing and have some concern about the outcome of the decision. Perhaps you are a consultant assisting the person in making this important decision. In any case, you wish to access resources to help this administrator deal with her indecisiveness. In our way of thinking, arguing with or confronting the person over the content of the proposal will typically be of little value in helping her get the decision made. It is the way the individual processes the content (her strategy) that is important in cases like this. She has already given you all of the information you need to unpack the strategy that is leading to the indecision:
We could notate this strategy in the following way:
You will notice that we have bracketed the series of constructed visual images, one beneath the other, to indicate that they occurred in the same step. We have put the (?) in front of the A^ step to indicate that even though it is the appropriate next step in the strategy, the activity within it has not reached a sufficient magnitude for the strategy to continue.
You could also punctuate the strategy into the following functional steps.
1) The external visual experience of the written material anchors, synesthetically, the kinesthetic representation of an incongruence the administrator has derived from previous testing of the material in the report.
2) The content of the feelings were such that they initiated an operation involving internal dialogue (asking herself a question) and generating images on the basis of the verbalization.
3) The constructed images were then tested against one another or against remembered images (this isn't specified directly by the administrator's behavior, nor is it particularly important for the analysis of the strategy), and an incongruence again appears, in the form of feelings, that blocks the strategy from existing.
4) Some constraint, however, prevents the individual from operating again — the first step in her operation procedure, auditory digital activity, doesn't have enough signal strength to initiate any new images ("I don't know what to say about it."') The constraints could be caused by the feelings of incongruence overriding the administrator's internal dialogue, or by interference from other representational systems bringing up time constraints, or by the need to gather more information before a successful operation may be made, or even because the present operational strategy could be ineffectual.
From the short statement made by the administrator we can determine the essential elements of her decision making strategy. These can be represented in their most elegant form as:
This shows that she typically starts with auditory digital activity, derives internal visual images from that activity, tests the images, the results of which are represented kinesthetically, and on the basis of these feelings will either exit or cycle back through the strategy. We will return to this example after a brief but important excursion into notational punctuation.
3.241 Expanding 4–Tuple Notation — Part II
At this juncture we would like to add a final set of modifiers to the behavioral calculus that we have presented so far. These modifiers have to do with the relationships between the representational components of the strategy. These modifiers distinguish whether a step in a strategy is a congruent response, polarity response, or a meta response to the step before it.
a. We will define a congruent response as essentially a continuation of the representation before it but in a different modality. A "modality" difference, here, will be constituted by a change in any of the 4–tuple modifiers we have presented so far. A switch from a visual external to a visual internal representation would constitute a modality change. So would a switch from constructed auditory experience to remembered auditory experience, or from a digital auditory representation to a tonal representation.
For example, if an individual is deciding whether or not to take a swim, he may go through a strategy in which he looks up and to the left and sees how it looked through his own eyes the last time he was swimming, in his mind's eye. A congruent response to this image in the kinesthetic system would be experiencing the body sensations of physically being in the water. A congruent response, in turn, to these body sensations in the auditory tonal representational modality would be hearing the sounds of the water lapping the edges of the pool and covering his ears as he ducks below the water surface.
We will notate a congruent response by simply using an arrow " '", to point from the initiating step to the one that is a congruent response to it. In the case of our example:
b. A polarity response will be defined as a representation which is essentially a reversal in content of the step preceding it. For instance, if the individual in the above example had made the internal image of swimming described above and, rather than experience the body sensations of being in the water, had felt frightened or nauseous, this would constitute a polarity response kinesthetically.
Note that hearing the sounds of the water of the pool following this kinesthetic experience would constitute a polarity response to the feelings. Hearing a worried tone of voice in internal dialogue would constitute a congruent response to the kinesthetic sensations.
We notate a polarity response as an arrow with a "p" beneath it between the two steps in question. Thus we would show the frightened feelings in response to the image, in this example, as:
c. A meta response is denned as a response about the step before it, rather than a continuation or reversal of the representation. These responses are more abstracted and disassociated from the representation preceding them. Getting feelings about the image (feeling that something may have been left out of the picture, for instance) that the individual had made of what it would look like to be swimming, rather than in direct response to the content of that image, would constitute a meta response in our example. Saying to himself, "I wonder if feeling this way means that I actually don't want to go swimming?" would be an internal auditory–digital meta response to these meta feelings.
We will notate the meta response modifier as an arrow between the steps with "m" beneath it, ". We would show the three steps described in the paragraph above, then, as:
Remember that these distinctions are purely a matter of punctuation — of how a particular strategy step is related to the steps around it. A representation which constitutes a meta response to one step may constitute a congruent response or a polarity response to some other step (and vice versa) even though it is the exact same representation. These modifiers are not the result of physiological differences in neural structures or processes, as are the other modifiers we have presented. That is, there is no separate portion of our neurology set aside for congruent, polarity or meta responses. The significance of these distinctions is purely in relation to the steps that provide the context in which the representation occurs; they provide information about the relative contents of the representations in the strategy.
As with all of the modifiers presented, we strongly suggest that you only employ these distinctions when they are important or useful to achieving the outcome you are attempting to secure.
These distinctions are the least rigorously defined and identifiable of those we have presented in this book. They can, however, be extremely useful to you at times in identifying patterns of behavior. For instance, you may notice that someone will consistently have a kinesthetic polarity response to verbal directions (Aed,t) from external sources, but a congruent response if she gives herself the directions with her own internal dialogue in her own tone of voice (Aid,t), even if it is exactly the same words she heard externally. Some people will have great difficulty in making decisions because their strategy involves a long string of meta responses, each about the step that has come before it, so they never get around to directly confronting the issues involved because they are caught up in their own processes. Conversely, other people who only respond with congruent responses may experience themselves as having no choices, because they can never think about what they are doing until after they have already gone through the behavior.
3.242 Applying the New Modifiers.
Returning to EXAMPLE A of the decision making strategy we analyzed earlier in this section, we will apply these modifiers to make a more explicit analysis of the administrator's strategy as a means to assist us in accessing more resources for her and for ourselves. We can now add the following distinctions to our analysis:
1) The feelings that the individual has derived from her testing of the report material are a meta response — "I get the feeling that something may have been left out." These feelings are obviously not a congruent continuation of the content presented in the report, nor are they a negation or reversal of the content. A congruent response might be, "This proposal catches my feelings exactly." A polarity response might state, "My feeling is that we have to take an entirely different approach."
2) The administrator begins her operation with a meta auditory digital response about the feelings: "I have to ask myself, how might this affect the results of this decision?" A congruent response would be something like, "… and I say to myself, 'yes, something really is missing'." A polarity response would have gone something like, "… but a part of me says, 'it's really as complete as it can be'."
3) At this point in the elicitation process it is uncertain whether the images the administrator constructs from this verbalization are meta, polarity or congruent responses, although we can postulate from the context in which they appear that they are probably congruent responses to the verbal question, "How might this affect the results of this decision?"
4) The relationship of the feelings is also not specified verbally. However, it is likely that they are feelings about the images being made — a meta response.
5) The final auditory digital step is a meta response as well. She is saying that she doesn't know what to say — clearly a response about the step.
The fully notated strategy, then, adding in the new modifiers, looks like:
We have put question marks under the constructed visual and the second kinesthetic steps to show that they aren't yet verified. In general, when the nature of the response is not specified, we simply show an arrow by itself "→".
To complete the elicitation process in this example, to help the person access the appropriate resources needed to make the decision, you have a number of choices available:
a) You could gather more information, specifying the relationship between (1) the constructed visual images and the preceding auditory digital response by asking questions like, "Just how do you picture the effects that the information you feel is missing might have on the results?" (2) the kinesthetic response and the constructed images, by asking questions like, "What kind of feelings do you get as you look at the possible effects of the missing information?"
b) You could help the individual to supply the missing auditory digital activity ("I don't know what to say") by responding, "I'd say (Ai) it might be a good idea to look at (V) some alternatives and feel them out (Ki)." Notice that in making a verbalization such as this you also match the decision strategy of the administrator, packaging your response to be maximally congruent with the decision strategy of the person you are assisting. (We will discuss this process in detail in the next section of this book.)
c) You can circumvent the individual's present strategy that has left her indecisive and access some possible resource strategies such as: 1) Change the strategy she is using now, which involves testing the material to find what might be wrong or what is missing, to a strategy that operates to generate and test possible ways of solving the dilemma. The new strategy could be elicited by asking questions like "How would you know if this proposal were sufficiently complete and appropriate to provide a clear understanding and to get the results that are important for this decision?" Or "What specifically do (you, I, we) need to do in order to get the information needed to make this proposal complete and appropriate?" 2) Elicit a reference experience from the past through transderivational search in which the individual has already employed a strategy that assisted them in breaking through to make a decision in a situation similar to the one now being faced: "Has there ever been a time when you were faced with a difficult decision such as this before, when after getting stuck you were able to come up with just the right answer — one that allowed you to make the most appropriate decision, getting results that were completely satisfactory to everyone involved?" Through each of these two possible options you will elicit another sequence of representations, or strategy, that the administrator may employ as a resource to help her achieve the outcome desired. As the individual presents you, through her behavior, with the sequential steps, you would again identify the representational form of the strategy. (Techniques for the resourceful utilization of these strategies will be presented in the remaining sections of this book.)
For instance, in response to the question in (2) above, the administrator might answer:
"Well (head and eyes orient down and to the right, takes a deep breath) I remember one time I was feeling so stuck I was just about ready to totally give up and suddenly (eyes dart to level and left position) … I remembered something someone told me once about trusting your intuitions and I began to get the feeling that all I had to do was wait and the answer would come … and sure enough in a matter of moments (eyes shift up and left) I flashed on a great solution."
Analysis: Here the person starts out negatively describing an intense kinesthetic sensation that resulted from the testing of previous operations.(Ki- )
Predicate: "I was feeling so stuck …"
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and to the right. Takes a deep breath.
Analysis: When the feelings reach a certain level of intensity, however, she has a polarity response auditorily, by remembering something positive someone has told her. <Ard>
Predicate: "I remembered someone told me”
Accessing cue: Eyes level and to the left.
Analysis: A congruent kinesthetic response follows the auditory digital memory. (Ki+)
Predicate: "began to get the feeling …"
Accessing cue:
Analysis: And a congruent visual response is accessed by the positive feelings. (Vi)
Predicate: "I flashed …"
Accessing cue: Eyes up and left.
We would notate this resource strategy as:
Note that we have not specified whether the visual image was one that she constructed or remembered, even though she accessed up and left with her eyes. This is because in our ongoing context, the administrator is remembering the situation and may be accessing a constructed image that was made back then.
Also notice that the steps in this strategy offer a different sequence of representational systems than her previous decision strategy.
The specific utilization of strategies and resources will be covered explicitly in the next section of this book.
Taking our full toolbox of elicitation procedures, let's move quickly through another example.
EXAMPLE B
Consider the following statement, perhaps made by a client, associate, or friend of yours, that is trying to make some change in his life or behavior that is important for him, but who is experiencing difficulty in acquiring the motivation necessary to implement the change:
"I know that I should do it (head and eyes are oriented down and left then shift over to the right) … and I really feel that it's the right thing to do, but… (reaches up and begins rubbing eyes) at the same time I keep looking at all the times I've tried before (stops rubbing, opens eyes, looking up and to left but head remaining down) and haven't been able to … (sighing) it's really a struggle."
Here we are confronted with a case of a multi–representational test:
Analysis: The person begins with an internal dialogue (Aid), probably telling them to do the behavior in question.
Predicate: "I know that …" (unspecified)
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and left.
Analysis: This statement initiates a set of congruent internal feelings. (Ki+)
Predicate: "I really feel that”
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and to the right.
Analysis: These feelings, however, begin to overlap onto a polarity response that occurs visually. (Ki+/Vr-)
Predicate: "at the same I keep looking …"
Accessing cue: Overlap of cues: (K) head down and right —rubs eyes and looks up and left. (Vi)
Analysis: The incongruence between these two representations is represented kinesthetically. (Ki)
Predicate: "struggle"
Accessing cue: Sighs (a deep breath).
We can show this strategy as the following steps:
Another way to notate it might be:
Both of these show that there are two responses to the verbal proposal of the behavior. The final kinesthetic response is about the conflict of the two responses preceding it.
Again, you have a number of options available for eliciting resources for the person:
a. You can elicit a congruent visual representation of making the proposed behavioral change to help reinforce the positive pole of the conflict by asking, "What would it look like if you could do it?" Getting congruent representations of an outcome in all representational systems is a very important and powerful resource in assisting people to attain that outcome because (1) it will reduce the probability of a polarity representation if all systems contain a congruent representation that can be accessed by the individual, and (2) it assures that no important information that is necessary for tests or operations involved in securing the outcome is left out of the strategy.
In fact, one elicitation procedure that we often employ and offer to you as a useful tool is that of eliciting a full 4–tuple as a reference structure for each step in the three point process of:
|PRESENT STATE| + [RESOURCES|→|OUTCOME / DESIRED STATE|
This means that you elicit a representation in each representational system, of both internal and external orientation, of what each of these states is or would be like for the individual:
For each of these states or conditions you will want to ask questions eliciting a representation of the experience from each modality. For example, for each state you will want to elicit the following information:
(Ae) What do you hear happening around you? What does your voice sound like?
(Ai) What do you hear inside your head? Do you have any internal dialogue?
(Ve) What do you see around you ?
(Vi) Do you have any internal pictures?
(VC) What do you look like?
(Ke) What is your tactile or external body awareness ?
(Ki) How do you feel internally?
(Oe) What do you smell? Are you aware of any tastes in your mouth?
(0i) Are you remembering any smells ?
Getting these representations will give you explicit information about the neurological nature of each state, and provide you with much insight into the states. Certain representations will be absent and/or out of consciousness and others will be readily available and/or more exaggerated. (As you elicit each of these representations, anchor them in the same place for each individual state, so that you will be able to retrigger them later — see the Utilization and Installation Sections of this book for a definition and exercises for anchoring.)
These reference structures will provide you and your client with an explicit means for getting feedback on the progress of your work, and will also provide explicit information on what kind of resources, in the form of representational systems, will be appropriate.
b. You can also access the positive pole of the conflict by having the individual exaggerate the congruent kinesthetic response to the initial verbalization. This can be most effectively accomplished by having the individual stop the overlapping of access cues that contribute to the simultaneous access of the interfering representations.
This exaggeration will also help to initiate a transderivational search through the kinesthetic system to previous experiences where congruent motivation has occurred.
c. You may again circumvent the problematic strategy by directly eliciting a motivation strategy that you know has been effective in the past by asking, "Has there ever been a time when you were really motivated to do something of importance for yourself?"
Or, to relate it more to the ongoing problem, you might ask, "Can you think of a time when you were really in a conflict with yourself about whether to devote your time and energy to some particular program of behavior that would have profound and lasting importance to you, and when you were able to resolve the conflict in the manner which turned out be the most beneficial to you and all others involved? How were you able to do that?"
Even though the two examples presented here deal with the behavior of single individuals, the same patterns, as we have said, will apply as well to families, groups and organizations. We will present some explicit examples of how to do this as we move onto the Utilization, Design, and Installation Sections of this book.
Once you have elicited the strategy that you wish to model, modify or utilize, you will need to unpack it and chunk it into the appropriate sequence of steps required to achieve the outcome.
As we previously mentioned, clients will go through the steps of the strategy as they access the experience in question. Internal processes often work very rapidly, however, especially those which have achieved the status of an unconscious TOTE. The client may go through a very complex sequence of representational systems in a matter of seconds. In order to be able to identify each step explicitly you will have to be able to do one of two things: (1) Increase your abilities to observe rapid and minute behavioral changes, or (2) Slow the process down so that it is easier to follow.
We strongly urge you to choose the first of these two options. Increasing your observational skills will make your work and your life much more rewarding and effective. In fact this is absolutely required for you to become a proficient neurolinguistic programmer. There is no substitute for clean active sensory channels.
As you begin to practice these skills, however, you will need to slow the individual's processes down at first, in order to be able to detect and retain the information that you will need. This can be done simply by asking questions like, "What happened first that allowed you to be creative in that situation?" or "What do you do first when you motivate yourself?" or "What's the first step you take when you make a decision?" The purpose of these questions is, of course, to establish the beginning of the strategy. As a general rule, you will want to find the intitial external stimulus that triggers the strategy (which from then on may involve both internal and external components of experience). So if an individual says something like, "Well I just begin to feel motivated," you will want to ask questions such as, "What happens just before that?"
From there the procedure for slowing down and unpacking the strategy into its component sequential steps is a matter of asking, "What happened next?" or "And then what do you do?"
What will be of the utmost importance in getting useful answers to these questions is that the description the individual offers you of his/her experience specifies one particular sensory channel so that you may determine the representational system for that step in the strategy.
3.21 Unpacking Through Predicates.
We said earlier in this section that there is a revealing tendency for people to do what they are talking about. One of the most effective tools for unpacking strategies is a result of the fact that the inverse of this claim is also true — that is, people talk about what they are doing. Through their language, people will literally tell you which representational system they are employing to make sense of and organize their ongoing experience. The words you use to communicate your experience, specifically the class of words known as predicates (ie., adjectives, verbs, adverbs and other descriptive language), will be an accurate transform of the way that you represent your experience.
One interesting choice as a communicator is to take people's language literally. When someone says, "I see what you are saying," you may legitimately respond, "How interesting! What color is it?" We accept that when a lawyer says that you should look at every issue from a number of perspectives, she is telling you to use your visual representational system. When a politician tells you that he feels frustrated, we accept that his kinesthetic representational system has the highest signal at that point in time. When business executives say they have heard about NLP, we accept that they acquired that information through their auditory representational systems. When an auto mechanic says, "That experience left a bad taste in my mouth," we accept that the experience has in some way become associated with a gustatory representation. Even in idiomatic language like, "I smell a rat," we accept that the individual has employed at some point, probably through synesthesia, their olfactory system, or, in other idioms, whatever sense has been referred to.
Some other examples of sensory specific predicates are:
a) Visual — I can see the pattern now; I just can't picture myself doing that; That looks like a good idea; I need a clearer image of the problem; I just go blank; That casts some light on the subject; Looking back on it now I can begin to see the light; An enlightening and colorful example.
b) Auditory — That sounds about right; I can hear your unwillingness; Does that ring a bell; Everything suddenly clicked; There's a lot of static inside my head; I can really tune in to them; Ask yourself if it's right and listen carefully for the answer; There is this idea that's been rattling around in my head; That has a negative tone to it; Something tells me the time is now.
c) Kinesthetic — I feel like I'm still reaching for an answer but I just can't seem to get a handle on it; It's a heavy problem; Things got pretty intense; I need to get in touch with my blocks; He's got a solid understanding of what's involved; She is so cold and insensitive; I have a feeling something is about to happen; Walk me through it.
We have presented these predicates only in terms of the three major representational classes. It will be up to you to determine from the context whether the individual is referring to internally generated experiences within the particular representational system, or whether that experience is being drawn (or was drawn at the time it occurred in the strategy) from external sources. It should be fairly obvious that when someone says "I can't picture that," or "I'm going blank, " that they will be referring to internal activity; and that when people say "Did you see that?", or "Look what you've done", they are directing visual attention externally. Similarly the difference should be fairly distinct between "That really strikes a chord, " (auditory, internal) and "I could hear the anger in his voice"; (auditory, external) and between "I felt bad about what happened" (kinesthetic, internal), and "Your muscles feel very tense" (kinesthetic, external). Others will be somewhat more unspecified like "I just couldn't see it," "It sounds pretty good," and "I kept feeling around for it."
We choose not to go into detail for the olfactory and gustatory senses because, in this culture at least, they are not used prominently for organizational strategies, although they are excellent triggers for past 4–tuples. A certain smell or taste can rapidly catapult you into a transderivational search. This is common for such experiences as the smell of the doctor's office, the smell of a former lover's perfume or cologne, the taste of castor oil, the smell of your father's aftershave, etc.[16]
Even though it seems that, to most people in this culture, being lead around by the nose stinks as an organizational strategy, we hope that you don't allow your ability to hear these predicates sour. Hopefully we have given you a sufficient taste of how to identify them that you can follow the scent and sniff them out for yourself.
Predicates, then, may be used to identify the steps in an individual's strategy. For example, a woman who had never heard of the notion of predicates and their connection to representational systems was being introduced to the significance of eye position in NLP. In the course of conversation the woman spontaneously responded, "You know, I really feel (Ki) that I can see (Vi) what you are saying (Ae) better when I don't look (Ve) at you as I listen (Ae) to you." Even though she had no conscious awareness of the significance of her words, the woman gave the author an explicit description of her strategy for making sense out of the ongoing interchange. As she listened to the external auditory output of the author (Ae) she would make internal images from the words the author was saying (Vi). She would then test the images (most likely against remembered images from her personal history), check the results through her feelings (Ki), and decide whether to operate (probably by asking the author more questions (Ae) about what he was talking about, based on her internal images) or exit, accepting the verbalizations the author was offering to her. If she watched the author, however, looking external to herself (Ve), the incoming visual sensations would interfere with her internal construction and testing process. Externally and internally initiated experiences within the same representational system tend to interfere with one another because they share the same neural pathways in the brain; a high external signal tends to mask internal visual experience and vice versa. This inverse function between internally and externally generated experience exists within all of the representational systems.
Because she had a kinesthetic check, then, this woman became aware of the interference between her internal and external representations through her feelings. Using the 4–tuple notation we would show this strategy in its most elegant form as:
As you listen to predicates, pay attention to those which may be unspecific with respect to representational systems. Words like "light" may be interpreted kinesthetically or visually. Adverbs like "clear" may also apply to more than one representational system —you may hear something clearly as well as see something clearly. Many words like this will be specified, of course, through context, or through accessing cues (which we will detail later).
Words like "understand," "identify," "sense," "know," "think," "become aware of," "notice," etc., are also unspecified with respect to representational systems. Each of these processes may occur through any of the representational systems. A good rule of thumb to employ when confronted with words that you are not sure of, a rule that applies to all elicitation procedures, is: when in doubt, ask. And keep asking (operating) until you get a description that is sensory specific.
For example, suppose you have asked somebody how they begin their creative strategy and they answer, "Well, I just start getting into it." This verbalization is not specific with respect to the representational system they are using, so you will want to ask, "How specifically do you 'get into it'?" In response to this question the person replies, "I start thinking about all of the things I could do with it." Again their response is unspecified with respect to their sensory process, so you ask, "How specifically do you start 'thinking' about all of the things you could do?" The person answers this question with, "I just look at it and start to see all of these ways of using it." With this answer the individual has identified the first two steps in the strategy: "looking at it" (visual, external — Ve) and "see all these ways of using it" (visual, internal — Vi). Note that the internal visual representations follow the external input, so that there will be no interference.
The individual might also answer the question with, "I get this feeling that I'm going to really do something good." Here the individual is specifying internal kinesthetic sensations, but does not tell you what they are triggered by. In this case, then, you would want to ask, "What happens right before you get those feelings?"
You might also get an answer like, "I start going, 'Yeh, this is going to be fun! I can do this and that …', and so on." Here, the person is actually quoting internal dialogue, specifying auditory, internal (Ai). Again, however, if you want to specify the external stimulus which cues this internal dialogue, you will want to ask, "And what happens just before you begin to say this to yourself?" The answer may range from "I put a record on that really gets me into a creative mood" (Ae) to "I go jogging" (Ke) to "I look at the clock and see that I have a lot of time." (Ve).
You may also consistently end up with an answer, of course, like "I don't know." This indicates that the step is out of consciousness for the individual. As they answer, however, you may notice that they look up and to the left. It is here that close attention to each individual's non–verbal accessing cues will be of extreme importance. These will be presented later in this section.
The best way we know to assist you in becoming proficient at accessing the kind of sensory specific information you will require for eliciting strategies is to practice the meta–model that we presented explicitly in The Structure of Magic I. The meta–model provides powerful verbal tools with which you can decode and break down practically any verbalization into the primary sensory experience from which it was derived. We strongly suggest you look over The Structure of Magic I if you wish to increase your verbal skills and intuitions for any purpose. This same tool has powerful applications in decision making and management situations for securing high quality information.
Also, listen for predicate combinations which indicate synesthesia patterns. If someone says, "That looks uncomfortable, " the term "uncomfortable" does not constitute a visual description. A visual description has to take place in terms of colors, shapes, depth, position and brightness. This utterance is rather a description of a visual–kinesthetic synesthesia — an interpretation resulting from the feelings the individual derives from looking at the phenomenon she is remarking about, probably based on past experience. Other examples of this kind of language would be:
"It sounds like a colorful place" (auditory–visual).
"Don't look at me with that tone of voice" (visual–auditory).
"It sounded frightening" (auditory–kinesthetic).
The Structure of Magic II contains many useful examples and exercises that will amplify your abilities to hear interpretive language and break it down into sensory specific descriptions.
3.22 Expanding 4–tuple Notation — Part 1.
Thus far we have presented, through the 4–tuple, two major distinctions with which to classify and notate the steps in the strategy that you are extracting and unpacking:
1) Representational systems — auditory (A), visual (V), kinesthetic (K), and olfactory/gustatory (O)—and
2) Whether the representational system is oriented toward internally generated experience (indicated through a superscript "i") or toward experience which is coming from sources external to the individual (indicated by a superscript "e").
There are, of course, many possible distinctions that could be made about a particular step in a strategy as you analyze it in finer detail, such as color, location, pitch, clarity, etc., each of which may be useful at some time to achieve a specific outcome. As you choose the level of detail at which you will classify the representations in the strategy you are extracting, you'll want to opt for the description which is most elegant — that is, the one which employs the fewest distinctions but is still able to secure the outcome for which it was designed.
We have found the two distinctions presented so far to be the most essential for any adequate description of an experience. At times it may be important to add other modifiers into your notational description of a strategy, indicating which steps are involved in testing and operations, and checking the content experience being run through the strategy. We did this when we were identifying the difference between the constructed visual image (Vic) and the remembered visual image (Vir) in describing the test that took place in the visual spelling strategy. Memory (recall) and construction (imagination and fantasy) are formal distinctions that can be made for the internally generated experience in any of the representational systems, and seem to be a result of the functional differences ascribed to the two cerebral hemispheres in human beings.
Much research in recent years has been done on the functional differences in the neurological processing between the dominant hemisphere (the left cerebral hemisphere in most right–handed people) and the non–dominant hemisphere (the right cerebral hemisphere in right–handed people). The dominant hemisphere, it is claimed, tends to carry out linear, sequential, cause–effect type processing and, as a result, is responsible for the manipulation and construction of our internally generated experience. The non–dominant hemisphere, it is claimed, tends to carry out the more presentational, spatial, integrative, gestalten types of processing, and is thus responsible for much of the reaccessing and recalling of past sensory representations.[17]
Because of "handedness" (the fact that we tend to use one side of our body more than the other for many tasks), the dominant hemisphere will in many cases have a higher signal level than the activity taking place concurrently in the non–dominant hemisphere. As a result people are often more conscious of the activity taking place in their dominant hemisphere and less aware of non–dominant functions. We have found that making the distinction between dominant and non–dominant hemisphere functions (specifically those involving consciousness, memory and construction) is sometimes important for our work, particularly that involving altered states of consciousness (this is presented in detail in Patterns I & II). We will therefore often include some of these distinctions in our notation for strategies.
We have already used the "r" (remembered) and "c" (constructed) notation for these distinctions in this book. Using the "r" and "c" as a subscript to Vi, Ai, Ki or Oi, is redundant in the sense that we know that if someone is constructing or remembering an image they will be necessarily employing an internal orientation for that representational system. To make our notation more elegant, then, when it is necessary to indicate a remembered versus a constructed distinction, we will notate the "c" or "r" as a superscript in place of the "i". A constructed sound then will be noted as Ac; a remembered feeling will be noted as Kr ; and so forth.
Another distinction related to hemispheric functioning that we consider useful is the difference between digital (verbal) representations in the auditory representational system, and those involving tonal and tempo (non–verbal) qualities. Our language (auditory, digital) representations tend to be primarily organized by neurological systems localized in our dominant hemisphere (the left hemisphere for right–handed people). Although remembered verbal experiences, such as tapeloops and cliches, become incorporated by the non–dominant hemisphere, this .hemisphere seems to be somewhat specialized for organizing the tonal, melodic and rhythmic portions of our auditory experience. The information carried by each of these different processes will often have a very different functional significance. The digital portions of our communications belong to a class of experience that we refer to as "secondary experience." Secondary experience is composed of the representations that we use to code our primary experience — secondary experience (such as words and symbols) are only meaningful in terms of the primary sensory representations that they anchor for us. This is why we will often show the digital[18] component of an experience to be outside of the 4–tuple:
Here we have distinguished between the tonal and digital portion of our auditory representational system by subscripting with a "d" for digital or verbal, and a "t" for tonal and tempo qualities. (See Patterns II pp. 17–19 for a more explicit discussion of this distinction).
We have also indicated in this diagram the remembered and constructed distinctions as being possible subcategories of the internally generated experience.
Another possible distinction you may wish to make is that between the tactile (somatosensory) and visceral (emotional and proprioceptive) portions of kinesthetic experience.[19] Sometimes emotional or visceral representations will have a different functional significance for the behavioral task than those which involve purely external tactile sensations (pain, pressure and temperature). In general, however, we choose, for notational purposes, to class visceral sensations as kinesthetic internal experience (in the same category as remembered and constructed kinesthetic sensations).
As we said before, choose to make the distinctions you determine to be necessary to achieve the outcome you are working towards. It is sometimes important to break down the auditory digital aspects of someone's strategy into the corresponding meta–model category. For instance, we have observed that in many people the appearance of modal operators of necessity (words like "should," "must," "have to," "is necessary," "need to," etc.) in the verbal portions of their motivation or decision strategies often trigger the kinesthetic sensations of anxiety or stress. If they change these words to modal operators of possibility (words like "can," "is possible," "will," etc.) they are still able to achieve the outcome of the strategy but experience much less stress and discomfort.
You can also feel free to customize your notational system to fit your own needs, and to include distinctions that you think are important for the strategies that you find yourself working with. The distinctions we have offered here simply constitute what we believe to be the most minimal and elegant set of distinctions with which to analyze and notate strategy steps.[20]
3.23 Unpacking Strategies Through Accessing Cues.
We have previously mentioned that the verbal portion of our communication constitutes only one aspect of the entire process of communication. In fact, in our way of thinking, it often constitutes the least important part of the communication. A tremendous amount of information is communicated through the nonverbal (tonal, gestural and tactile) aspect of our communication, that typically takes place beneath the conscious awareness of most . people. Further, most people are unconscious of the vast majority of representations that pass through their neurological systems as they cycle through their strategies. It is very difficult for many people to tune into their actual sensory experience, or to communicate it verbally.
By paying close attention to accessing cues and the non–verbal portions of people's behavior, you can pick up a vast wealth of information that most often passes by people's conscious attention and defies their abilities to verbalize. The behavioral accessing cues that an individual employs to tune his or her neurology to single out one particular representational system through which to accept and process some input at a particular point in time, will provide you with an excellent index with which to identify the representational system being employed for a particular strategy step. These cues will directly indicate the representational system they are being used to access. This becomes very useful when the rapid and complex representational sequences that make up some strategies are not available through the verbal report of the individual who has displayed the strategy.
In this book we will be detailing only a few of an endless range of possible indicators and accessing mechanisms, all of which are available to your ongoing sensory experience. By paying attention to the systematic and recurrent behaviors that people go through as they communicate and act, we have discovered a number of non–verbal cues which may be used to index the sensory specific processes people run through during behavioral activity. These include eye position, tonal and tempo qualities of the voice, breathing rate and position, skin color changes, body temperature, heart rate, posture and muscle tonus, even EEG activity.[21] The two basic principles that underly our method of classification are:
a) Any occurrence in one part of a system (such as the neurological and biological system that makes up a human being) will necessarily affect all of the other parts of that system in some way. When the patterns of interaction between the parts of the system are identified, the effects of the different parts of the system on one another can be predicted and utilized.
b) In humans, all behavior (macro–and micro-) is a transform of internal neurological processes, and therefore carries information about those processes. All behavior, then, is in some way communication about the neurological organization of the individual — a person can't not communicate.
The goal of this process of information gathering is the goal of all of behavioral science, to decode the overt transforms of neurological strategies, which are generally not available to the consciousness of those in whom they operate, in order to gain understanding of how the representational components are organized with respect to one another.
The process of discovering regularities between an individual's observable behavior and their internal processes is an example of the process we have employed to generate all of our models of behavioristic. Gregory Bates on has elegantly formalized some of the properties of this process in his work:
"If from some perception X, it is possible to make better than random guesses about some Y, there is 'redundancy' between X and Y, 'X is a coded message about Y\ or 'Y is a transform of X', or 'X is a transform of Y' …" ("Reality and Redundancy" — 1975)
"… when an observer perceives only certain parts of a sequence or configuration of phenomena, he is in many cases able to guess, with better than random success, at the parts which he cannot immediately perceive (guessing that a tree will have roots, for example)." (Steps to an Ecology of Mind— 1973)
Note that this definition says nothing of statistical verification. Statistics may support or reveal patterns but they do not establish them; nor do they determine whether a pattern will be useful or not. Statistical averaging may sometimes be used to help find a pattern, but the statistics themselves are not the pattern, as they are often assumed to be. Indeed, the behavior we are studying becomes established, not on the basis of statistical averages, but on patterns. The child learning to speak does not assimilate the language by taking statistical averages of the meanings of words s/he is learning to use, but rather on the basis of the patterns offered by relatives, friends and others as the child grows up. The overwhelming majority of children become competent native speakers of the language they learn in this way.
The patterns and generalizations we offer concerning accessing cues can be and have been supported by experimental research, but we have chosen simply to present these generalizations and patterns as we have observed them in the more useful context of our professional experience. We will present no numbers, tables or graphs.
The ultimate success of a neurolinguistic programmer will depend on the ability to observe, identify and utilize the multitude of transforms and patterns that will be constantly offered to you in your ongoing sensory experience by the members of our species; not on the ability to measure and average types of behavior or to remember numbers and tables. We offer the generalizations in this book as a way to assist you to begin the process of expanding your own perceptual abilities, not as "laws". We suggest that you develop a strategy with which to observe these patterns in your ongoing interactions and verify them for yourself until you have incorporated the strategy so thoroughly that you can let it drop out of consciousness. In our experience, the patterns we offer have held for every individual we have observed and questioned.
3.231 Eye Movements as Accessing Cues.
We have noticed that the eye movements people make as they are thinking and processing information provide a remarkably accurate index for sensory specific neurological activity. We introduced these patterns in Patterns II:
"When each of us selects the words we use to communicate to one another verbally, we typically select those words at the unconscious level of functioning. These words, then, indicate which portions of the world of internally and externally available experience we have access to at that moment in time. More specifically, the set of words known as predicates (verbs, adjectives and adverbs) are particularly indicative. Secondly, each of us has developed particular body movements which indicate to the astute observer which representational system we are using. Especially rich in significance are the eye scanning patterns which we have developed. Thus, for the student of hypnosis, predicates in the verbal system and eye scanning patterns in the non verbal system offer quick and powerful ways of determining which of the potential meaning making resources — the representational systems — the client is using at a moment in time, and therefore how to respond creatively to the client. Consider, for example, how many times you have asked someone a question and they have paused, said "Hmmmmm, let's see" and accompanying this verbalization they move their eyes up and to the left. Movement of the eyes up and to the left stimulates (in right handed people) eidetic images located in the non dominant hemisphere. The neurological pathways that come from the left side of both eyes (left visual fields) are represented in the right cerebral hemisphere (non dominant). The eye scanning movement up and to the left is a common way people use to stimulate that hemisphere as a method for accessing visual memory. Eye movements up and to the right conversely stimulate the left cerebral hemisphere and constructed images—that is, visual representations of things that the person has never seen before (see Patterns, volume I, page 182).
"Developing your skill in detecting the client's most highly valued representational system will give you access to an extremely powerful utilization tool for effective hypnotic communication. There are two principal ways which we have found effective in teaching people in our training seminars to refine their ability to detect representational systems:
(1) attending to accessing cues which may be detected visually. Specifically (for the right–handed person):
accessing cue – representational system indicated
eyes up and to the left … - eidetic imagery (V)
eyes up and to the right … - constructed imagery (V)
eyes defocused in position … - imagery (V)
eyes down and to the left … - internal dialogue (A)
telephone positions … - internal dialogue (A)
eyes left or right, same level of gaze … - internal auditory (A)
eyes down and to the right … - body sensations (K)
hand[s] touching on midline … - body sensations (K)
(2) attending to the choice of predicates selected (typically, unconsciously) by the client to describe his experience (see Patterns, volume I, pages 68–76, 82–86 and The Structure of Magic, volume II, part I). When describing experiences, each of us selects words to describe the portions of experience we attend most closely to. Thus, as communicators, when we train ourselves to detect which representational system is presupposed by the words selected by our clients to describe their experience, we have information which we can utilize effectively in our communication with them.
"These are, of course, only two way of learning to detect representational systems — there are many others. We have found, for example, that breathing patterns are an excellent indicator of which representational system a person is using at a point in time to organize and represent their experience to themselves. During visualization, for example, the person's breathing tends to become shallow and high in the chest. Other equally useful indicators in our experience are the shifts in the tonal qualities of the person's voice, the tempo of speech, the color of the person's skin … We have presented two specific ways of detecting representational systems in sufficient detail to allow the reader to train him or herself to detect the representational system being used by a client at a point in time. Once you have comfortably mastered these two techniques — refined your ability to make these sensory distinctions — we suggest that you explore for yourselves other indicators which allow you to gain the same information. Such exercises in making sensory distinctions will not only increase your ability to be effective and graceful in your hypnotic communication but will increase and refine your ability to have the sensory experience which is, in our experience, the very foundation of effective communication and hypnosis."
Figure 1 depicts the eye movement index described in this excerpt in more detail, adding the tonal/digital and remembered/ constructed distinctions and the eye positions which access them.
3.232 Gestural Accessing Cues.
We also presented, in this excerpt, another form of accessing cue/indicators involving gestural complexes — "telephone positions" for internal dialogue, and hands touching the midline of the body for kinesthetic sensations. Telephone positions are those in which the person leans his head on his hand or fist so that his head tilts to one side (typically to the left) as if he were talking on a telephone. Stroking your chin with one of your hands or touching the area around your mouth nose and jaw is another common indicator and accessor of internal dialogue.
People will often (consciously or unconsciously) point to or touch with their hands the sense organs for the particular channel of representation that they are using as a means to access or indicate that channel. Someone might say, "I really began to realize the importance of what was going on," and be pointing to his or her ear — indicating auditory. More obvious is the person who says something like, "I give myself a lot of static about that," as they make circling motions around one of their ears with a finger.
Another example would be the person who says, "I noticed your disappointment," as she points toward her eyes, or the individual who says, "Now let me see," and begins to rub his eyes and the bridge of his nose.
Similarly, you may notice that when a person says, "That movie was really intense," she may place her hands over her chest and heart area, or when someone says "That was really delightful" he may rub or fold his hands over his stomach.
These gestures will, of course, also occur without the accompanying verbalizations.
3.233 Breathing Changes.
Breathing is one of the most profound and direct ways we have of changing or tuning our chemical and biological state to affect our neurology. Breathing at different rates, and filling or expanding different areas in our lung cavity will involve most of our body —accessing different muscle groups and changing the chemical composition of our blood (which provides the medium in which our brain operates). We have found that breathing changes constitute a powerful indicator and accessing mechanism for sensory specific states.
a) Breathing high and shallow in the chest (or the momentary cessation of breathing) accompanies and accesses visual attention.
b) Deep, full breathing low in the stomach area indicates kinesthetic accessing.
c) Even breathing in the diaphragm or with the whole chest, often accompanied by a somewhat prolonged exhale (as if speaking without moving one's mouth to make the words), will accompany internal dialogue.
These breathing patterns access attention within representational systems either externally or internally.
3.234 Posture and Muscle Tonus Changes.
Concurrently with these different types of breathing and to help tune in a particular representational system, we adjust the musculature and skeletal position of our bodies as well.[22] We have noticed the following correlations between postural variations and representational system accessing:
a) Muscle tension in the shoulders, neck and often the abdomen; shoulders hunched and neck extended characterize the body accessing posture for visual attentiveness.
b) (1) General muscle relaxation, with the head sitting solidly on the shoulders, which tend to droop, is characteristic of most internal kinesthetic accessing, unless the feelings are fairly intense; the accessing will then be accompanied/initiated by exaggerated abdominal breathing and expressive or even violent gestures. (2) External (tactile and motor) kinesthetic accessing will share the breathing and head position of internal kinesthetic cuing, but the body will be more in motion and the shoulders will be held more broadly (as is common to athletes).
c) Auditory accessing is characterized by relatively even muscle tension and minor rhythmic movements. The shoulders tend to be thrown back, although somewhat slouched, into what we call the "saxophone" position (because the individual holds his body as if s/he were playing a saxophone). The individual will also often have his head tilted to one side.
3.235 Tonal and Tempo Changes.
The breathing, postural and muscle tonus changes that an individual goes through will affect other behavioral outputs that can also serve as effective indicators of representational system activity. Changes in voice tempo and tonality will be caused by the changes in breathing and muscle tension in the face and neck area. The amount of air, and the rapidity with which it is pushed over one's vocal chords, will cause noticeable changes in voice quality.
a) Quick bursts of words in a high pitched, nasal and/or strained tonality with a typically fast tempo of speech accompanies visual processing.
b) Slow voice tempo with long pauses and in a characteristically low, deep and often breathy tonality indicates kinesthetic accessing.
c) A clear, midrange tonality in an even and sometimes rhythmic tempo and typically well enunciated words will accompany activity in the auditory representational system.
Some other indicator/accessing cues for the auditory system are tapping, snapping the fingers and making clicking, humming or whistling noises with one's mouth.
Organizing things on one's fingers tends to accompany internal dialogue and other auditory digital accessing.
3.24 Employing the Elicitation Procedures
These distinctions as we have suggested, are but a few of the wealth of possible patterns available to you with which you can break down complex sequences of behavior. For the purposes of this book, however, we will for the most part limit our analysis to those cues involving eye movements and verbal predicates, and we will employ the other distinctions listed here only where they are important or obvious. We have found that the distinctions provided by the eye movement patterns and verbal predicates constitute the minimum number of distinctions necessary to unpack practically any strategy.
We are now ready to begin to apply all of the various components of the elicitation procedure together. Through a few examples we will demonstrate how the process as a whole takes place.
EXAMPLE A
Consider the following sequence of behavior presented by an administrative director of an organization in making a decision. She has just read a written report that had been submitted to her and must generate an outcome decision on the basis of the information contained in the report. This person could just as easily be a judge, diplomat, executive or anyone in a decision making capacity.
"As I look this over . .." (eyes scan paper, then she pauses and takes a deep breath as her eyes shift down and to the right momentarily and then move over to the left) "… I get the feeling that something may have been left out …" (reaches up and strokes her chin) "… and I have to ask myself, how might this affect the results of this decision where it is so important that we have a clear understanding?" (Eyes move up and to the right where they make a number of slight lateral shifts and then move down and to the right before returning to make eye contact with the person standing before her.) "I really don't know what to say about it."
Analysis: She begins with the external visual stimulus from the written report (Ve ) which she has probably read in detail sometime earlier.
Predicate: "look over"
Accessing cue: Eyes scan external object.
Analysis:The visual stimulus accesses internal kinesthetic sensations (Ki) about what was printed.
Predicate: "I get the feeling"
Accessing cue: Deep breath, eyes move down and right.
Analysis:These feelings then initiate an internal auditory digital response (Aid).
Predicate: "ask myself”
Accessing cue: Eyes down and left, hand strokes chin.
Analysis:She then constructs a series of internal visual images in response to the internal verbalization (Vc1 , Vc2, … Vcn).
Predicate: "clear understanding"
Accessing cue: Slight shifts of the eyes while in up and right position.
Analysis:The constructed images access internal feelings (Ki).
Predicate: -
Accessing cue: Eyes down and right.
Analysis:Were the decision to be made, or still in progress, the administrative director would be able to make some verbalization (Ad) in response to the feelings to either exit or continue the decision process. Her comment here, however, indicates the absence of experience within that representational system. (Lack of information is information.)
Predicate: "don't know what to say about it."
Accessing cue: -
Assume this administrative director is talking to you. Perhaps you have submitted the report she is reviewing and have some concern about the outcome of the decision. Perhaps you are a consultant assisting the person in making this important decision. In any case, you wish to access resources to help this administrator deal with her indecisiveness. In our way of thinking, arguing with or confronting the person over the content of the proposal will typically be of little value in helping her get the decision made. It is the way the individual processes the content (her strategy) that is important in cases like this. She has already given you all of the information you need to unpack the strategy that is leading to the indecision:
We could notate this strategy in the following way:
You will notice that we have bracketed the series of constructed visual images, one beneath the other, to indicate that they occurred in the same step. We have put the (?) in front of the A^ step to indicate that even though it is the appropriate next step in the strategy, the activity within it has not reached a sufficient magnitude for the strategy to continue.
You could also punctuate the strategy into the following functional steps.
1) The external visual experience of the written material anchors, synesthetically, the kinesthetic representation of an incongruence the administrator has derived from previous testing of the material in the report.
2) The content of the feelings were such that they initiated an operation involving internal dialogue (asking herself a question) and generating images on the basis of the verbalization.
3) The constructed images were then tested against one another or against remembered images (this isn't specified directly by the administrator's behavior, nor is it particularly important for the analysis of the strategy), and an incongruence again appears, in the form of feelings, that blocks the strategy from existing.
4) Some constraint, however, prevents the individual from operating again — the first step in her operation procedure, auditory digital activity, doesn't have enough signal strength to initiate any new images ("I don't know what to say about it."') The constraints could be caused by the feelings of incongruence overriding the administrator's internal dialogue, or by interference from other representational systems bringing up time constraints, or by the need to gather more information before a successful operation may be made, or even because the present operational strategy could be ineffectual.
From the short statement made by the administrator we can determine the essential elements of her decision making strategy. These can be represented in their most elegant form as:
This shows that she typically starts with auditory digital activity, derives internal visual images from that activity, tests the images, the results of which are represented kinesthetically, and on the basis of these feelings will either exit or cycle back through the strategy. We will return to this example after a brief but important excursion into notational punctuation.
3.241 Expanding 4–Tuple Notation — Part II
At this juncture we would like to add a final set of modifiers to the behavioral calculus that we have presented so far. These modifiers have to do with the relationships between the representational components of the strategy. These modifiers distinguish whether a step in a strategy is a congruent response, polarity response, or a meta response to the step before it.
a. We will define a congruent response as essentially a continuation of the representation before it but in a different modality. A "modality" difference, here, will be constituted by a change in any of the 4–tuple modifiers we have presented so far. A switch from a visual external to a visual internal representation would constitute a modality change. So would a switch from constructed auditory experience to remembered auditory experience, or from a digital auditory representation to a tonal representation.
For example, if an individual is deciding whether or not to take a swim, he may go through a strategy in which he looks up and to the left and sees how it looked through his own eyes the last time he was swimming, in his mind's eye. A congruent response to this image in the kinesthetic system would be experiencing the body sensations of physically being in the water. A congruent response, in turn, to these body sensations in the auditory tonal representational modality would be hearing the sounds of the water lapping the edges of the pool and covering his ears as he ducks below the water surface.
We will notate a congruent response by simply using an arrow " '", to point from the initiating step to the one that is a congruent response to it. In the case of our example:
b. A polarity response will be defined as a representation which is essentially a reversal in content of the step preceding it. For instance, if the individual in the above example had made the internal image of swimming described above and, rather than experience the body sensations of being in the water, had felt frightened or nauseous, this would constitute a polarity response kinesthetically.
Note that hearing the sounds of the water of the pool following this kinesthetic experience would constitute a polarity response to the feelings. Hearing a worried tone of voice in internal dialogue would constitute a congruent response to the kinesthetic sensations.
We notate a polarity response as an arrow with a "p" beneath it between the two steps in question. Thus we would show the frightened feelings in response to the image, in this example, as:
c. A meta response is denned as a response about the step before it, rather than a continuation or reversal of the representation. These responses are more abstracted and disassociated from the representation preceding them. Getting feelings about the image (feeling that something may have been left out of the picture, for instance) that the individual had made of what it would look like to be swimming, rather than in direct response to the content of that image, would constitute a meta response in our example. Saying to himself, "I wonder if feeling this way means that I actually don't want to go swimming?" would be an internal auditory–digital meta response to these meta feelings.
We will notate the meta response modifier as an arrow between the steps with "m" beneath it, ". We would show the three steps described in the paragraph above, then, as:
Remember that these distinctions are purely a matter of punctuation — of how a particular strategy step is related to the steps around it. A representation which constitutes a meta response to one step may constitute a congruent response or a polarity response to some other step (and vice versa) even though it is the exact same representation. These modifiers are not the result of physiological differences in neural structures or processes, as are the other modifiers we have presented. That is, there is no separate portion of our neurology set aside for congruent, polarity or meta responses. The significance of these distinctions is purely in relation to the steps that provide the context in which the representation occurs; they provide information about the relative contents of the representations in the strategy.
As with all of the modifiers presented, we strongly suggest that you only employ these distinctions when they are important or useful to achieving the outcome you are attempting to secure.
These distinctions are the least rigorously defined and identifiable of those we have presented in this book. They can, however, be extremely useful to you at times in identifying patterns of behavior. For instance, you may notice that someone will consistently have a kinesthetic polarity response to verbal directions (Aed,t) from external sources, but a congruent response if she gives herself the directions with her own internal dialogue in her own tone of voice (Aid,t), even if it is exactly the same words she heard externally. Some people will have great difficulty in making decisions because their strategy involves a long string of meta responses, each about the step that has come before it, so they never get around to directly confronting the issues involved because they are caught up in their own processes. Conversely, other people who only respond with congruent responses may experience themselves as having no choices, because they can never think about what they are doing until after they have already gone through the behavior.
3.242 Applying the New Modifiers.
Returning to EXAMPLE A of the decision making strategy we analyzed earlier in this section, we will apply these modifiers to make a more explicit analysis of the administrator's strategy as a means to assist us in accessing more resources for her and for ourselves. We can now add the following distinctions to our analysis:
1) The feelings that the individual has derived from her testing of the report material are a meta response — "I get the feeling that something may have been left out." These feelings are obviously not a congruent continuation of the content presented in the report, nor are they a negation or reversal of the content. A congruent response might be, "This proposal catches my feelings exactly." A polarity response might state, "My feeling is that we have to take an entirely different approach."
2) The administrator begins her operation with a meta auditory digital response about the feelings: "I have to ask myself, how might this affect the results of this decision?" A congruent response would be something like, "… and I say to myself, 'yes, something really is missing'." A polarity response would have gone something like, "… but a part of me says, 'it's really as complete as it can be'."
3) At this point in the elicitation process it is uncertain whether the images the administrator constructs from this verbalization are meta, polarity or congruent responses, although we can postulate from the context in which they appear that they are probably congruent responses to the verbal question, "How might this affect the results of this decision?"
4) The relationship of the feelings is also not specified verbally. However, it is likely that they are feelings about the images being made — a meta response.
5) The final auditory digital step is a meta response as well. She is saying that she doesn't know what to say — clearly a response about the step.
The fully notated strategy, then, adding in the new modifiers, looks like:
We have put question marks under the constructed visual and the second kinesthetic steps to show that they aren't yet verified. In general, when the nature of the response is not specified, we simply show an arrow by itself "→".
To complete the elicitation process in this example, to help the person access the appropriate resources needed to make the decision, you have a number of choices available:
a) You could gather more information, specifying the relationship between (1) the constructed visual images and the preceding auditory digital response by asking questions like, "Just how do you picture the effects that the information you feel is missing might have on the results?" (2) the kinesthetic response and the constructed images, by asking questions like, "What kind of feelings do you get as you look at the possible effects of the missing information?"
b) You could help the individual to supply the missing auditory digital activity ("I don't know what to say") by responding, "I'd say (Ai) it might be a good idea to look at (V) some alternatives and feel them out (Ki)." Notice that in making a verbalization such as this you also match the decision strategy of the administrator, packaging your response to be maximally congruent with the decision strategy of the person you are assisting. (We will discuss this process in detail in the next section of this book.)
c) You can circumvent the individual's present strategy that has left her indecisive and access some possible resource strategies such as: 1) Change the strategy she is using now, which involves testing the material to find what might be wrong or what is missing, to a strategy that operates to generate and test possible ways of solving the dilemma. The new strategy could be elicited by asking questions like "How would you know if this proposal were sufficiently complete and appropriate to provide a clear understanding and to get the results that are important for this decision?" Or "What specifically do (you, I, we) need to do in order to get the information needed to make this proposal complete and appropriate?" 2) Elicit a reference experience from the past through transderivational search in which the individual has already employed a strategy that assisted them in breaking through to make a decision in a situation similar to the one now being faced: "Has there ever been a time when you were faced with a difficult decision such as this before, when after getting stuck you were able to come up with just the right answer — one that allowed you to make the most appropriate decision, getting results that were completely satisfactory to everyone involved?" Through each of these two possible options you will elicit another sequence of representations, or strategy, that the administrator may employ as a resource to help her achieve the outcome desired. As the individual presents you, through her behavior, with the sequential steps, you would again identify the representational form of the strategy. (Techniques for the resourceful utilization of these strategies will be presented in the remaining sections of this book.)
For instance, in response to the question in (2) above, the administrator might answer:
"Well (head and eyes orient down and to the right, takes a deep breath) I remember one time I was feeling so stuck I was just about ready to totally give up and suddenly (eyes dart to level and left position) … I remembered something someone told me once about trusting your intuitions and I began to get the feeling that all I had to do was wait and the answer would come … and sure enough in a matter of moments (eyes shift up and left) I flashed on a great solution."
Analysis: Here the person starts out negatively describing an intense kinesthetic sensation that resulted from the testing of previous operations.(Ki- )
Predicate: "I was feeling so stuck …"
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and to the right. Takes a deep breath.
Analysis: When the feelings reach a certain level of intensity, however, she has a polarity response auditorily, by remembering something positive someone has told her. <Ard>
Predicate: "I remembered someone told me”
Accessing cue: Eyes level and to the left.
Analysis: A congruent kinesthetic response follows the auditory digital memory. (Ki+)
Predicate: "began to get the feeling …"
Accessing cue:
Analysis: And a congruent visual response is accessed by the positive feelings. (Vi)
Predicate: "I flashed …"
Accessing cue: Eyes up and left.
We would notate this resource strategy as:
Note that we have not specified whether the visual image was one that she constructed or remembered, even though she accessed up and left with her eyes. This is because in our ongoing context, the administrator is remembering the situation and may be accessing a constructed image that was made back then.
Also notice that the steps in this strategy offer a different sequence of representational systems than her previous decision strategy.
The specific utilization of strategies and resources will be covered explicitly in the next section of this book.
Taking our full toolbox of elicitation procedures, let's move quickly through another example.
EXAMPLE B
Consider the following statement, perhaps made by a client, associate, or friend of yours, that is trying to make some change in his life or behavior that is important for him, but who is experiencing difficulty in acquiring the motivation necessary to implement the change:
"I know that I should do it (head and eyes are oriented down and left then shift over to the right) … and I really feel that it's the right thing to do, but… (reaches up and begins rubbing eyes) at the same time I keep looking at all the times I've tried before (stops rubbing, opens eyes, looking up and to left but head remaining down) and haven't been able to … (sighing) it's really a struggle."
Here we are confronted with a case of a multi–representational test:
Analysis: The person begins with an internal dialogue (Aid), probably telling them to do the behavior in question.
Predicate: "I know that …" (unspecified)
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and left.
Analysis: This statement initiates a set of congruent internal feelings. (Ki+)
Predicate: "I really feel that”
Accessing cue: Head and eyes down and to the right.
Analysis: These feelings, however, begin to overlap onto a polarity response that occurs visually. (Ki+/Vr-)
Predicate: "at the same I keep looking …"
Accessing cue: Overlap of cues: (K) head down and right —rubs eyes and looks up and left. (Vi)
Analysis: The incongruence between these two representations is represented kinesthetically. (Ki)
Predicate: "struggle"
Accessing cue: Sighs (a deep breath).
We can show this strategy as the following steps:
Another way to notate it might be:
Both of these show that there are two responses to the verbal proposal of the behavior. The final kinesthetic response is about the conflict of the two responses preceding it.
Again, you have a number of options available for eliciting resources for the person:
a. You can elicit a congruent visual representation of making the proposed behavioral change to help reinforce the positive pole of the conflict by asking, "What would it look like if you could do it?" Getting congruent representations of an outcome in all representational systems is a very important and powerful resource in assisting people to attain that outcome because (1) it will reduce the probability of a polarity representation if all systems contain a congruent representation that can be accessed by the individual, and (2) it assures that no important information that is necessary for tests or operations involved in securing the outcome is left out of the strategy.
In fact, one elicitation procedure that we often employ and offer to you as a useful tool is that of eliciting a full 4–tuple as a reference structure for each step in the three point process of:
|PRESENT STATE| + [RESOURCES|→|OUTCOME / DESIRED STATE|
This means that you elicit a representation in each representational system, of both internal and external orientation, of what each of these states is or would be like for the individual:
For each of these states or conditions you will want to ask questions eliciting a representation of the experience from each modality. For example, for each state you will want to elicit the following information:
(Ae) What do you hear happening around you? What does your voice sound like?
(Ai) What do you hear inside your head? Do you have any internal dialogue?
(Ve) What do you see around you ?
(Vi) Do you have any internal pictures?
(VC) What do you look like?
(Ke) What is your tactile or external body awareness ?
(Ki) How do you feel internally?
(Oe) What do you smell? Are you aware of any tastes in your mouth?
(0i) Are you remembering any smells ?
Getting these representations will give you explicit information about the neurological nature of each state, and provide you with much insight into the states. Certain representations will be absent and/or out of consciousness and others will be readily available and/or more exaggerated. (As you elicit each of these representations, anchor them in the same place for each individual state, so that you will be able to retrigger them later — see the Utilization and Installation Sections of this book for a definition and exercises for anchoring.)
These reference structures will provide you and your client with an explicit means for getting feedback on the progress of your work, and will also provide explicit information on what kind of resources, in the form of representational systems, will be appropriate.
b. You can also access the positive pole of the conflict by having the individual exaggerate the congruent kinesthetic response to the initial verbalization. This can be most effectively accomplished by having the individual stop the overlapping of access cues that contribute to the simultaneous access of the interfering representations.
This exaggeration will also help to initiate a transderivational search through the kinesthetic system to previous experiences where congruent motivation has occurred.
c. You may again circumvent the problematic strategy by directly eliciting a motivation strategy that you know has been effective in the past by asking, "Has there ever been a time when you were really motivated to do something of importance for yourself?"
Or, to relate it more to the ongoing problem, you might ask, "Can you think of a time when you were really in a conflict with yourself about whether to devote your time and energy to some particular program of behavior that would have profound and lasting importance to you, and when you were able to resolve the conflict in the manner which turned out be the most beneficial to you and all others involved? How were you able to do that?"
Even though the two examples presented here deal with the behavior of single individuals, the same patterns, as we have said, will apply as well to families, groups and organizations. We will present some explicit examples of how to do this as we move onto the Utilization, Design, and Installation Sections of this book.
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