Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

by Richard Wayne Bandler

  The primary way in which that works is that a really fine distinction is made between outcomes—what we are going to use this material for—and the process of generating ideas with other human beings. Reframing is the same principle applied more generally.

  What I've noticed over and over again in corporate work, in arbitration, or in family therapy, is that there will be a goal toward which a number of members in the system want to move. They begin to discuss some of the characteristics or dimensions, or advantages or disadvantages, of this future desired state. As they do this, other members involved in that negotiation behave as if they feel compelled to point out that there are certain constraints that presently exist in the organization which make it impossible to do that.

  Now, what is missing is the time quantifier. Indeed they are correct. There are constraints on the organization or the family which make it impossible, concretely speaking, to engage in that proposed behavior now. If you work as a consultant for an organization or a family, you can teach people to distinguish between responses they are making that are congruent with the description of the future state, and responses that are a characterization of the present state. Once that is done, you avoid about ninety-five percent of the bickering that goes on in planning sessions. You convince the people in the organization that it is useful for them to feel free to restrict themselves to discussing the future state, the desired state, propositions entirely distinct from present state constraints. This is an example of sorting out certain dimensions of experience, dealing with them in some useful way, and then later re-integrating them back into the system.

  You also need a monitor. All of you have had the following experience. You're in an organizational meeting or a family system. And no matter what anyone says, there's one person who takes issue with it. No matter what the proposal is, there is someone who behaves as if it were their function in that system to challenge the formulation that has just been offered. It's a useful thing to be able to do, but it can also be very disruptive. What techniques do you have to utilize what's going on at that point? Does anybody have a way of dealing with that effectively?

  Woman: You can escalate it; ask them to do it more. So you would use the gestalt thing of exaggerating. What's the outcome you typically get?

  Woman: Ah, they stop.

  They stop doing it. That's a nice transfer from therapy. She's using one of the three patterns which are characteristic of Brief Therapy therapists, the pattern of prescribing the symptom. For instance, when somebody comes to Milton Erickson and asks for assistance in losing weight, typically he demands that s/he gain exactly eleven pounds in the next two weeks. That might seem to be irrational behavior on his part. However, it's quite effective, because one of two things will happen. Either the person will lose weight—a polarity response— which is the outcome he is working toward anyway, or they will gain eleven pounds. Typically they don't gain ten or twelve, they gain eleven. Since they were able to accomplish that, the behavioral presupposition is that they can control what they weigh. In either case it unstabilizes the situation. I've never heard of people stabilizing. Something always happens. It's the same kind of maneuver that Salvador Minuchin makes when he allies himself with a member of the family to throw the system out of kilter. This is a really nice example of a transfer of a therapeutic technique to the organizational context.

  Let me offer you another utilization. As soon as you notice that the challenging behavior is disruptive, you can interrupt the process, and say "Look, one of the things I've discovered is that it's useful to assign people specific functions in a group. In my experience of consulting and working with organizations, I have found that this is a useful way of organizing meetings. One group member keeps track of the ideas, and so on." Then you can assign this person the function of being the challenger. When a well-formed proposition is brought before the group by anyone, or by a sequence of suggestions, his job is to challenge that formulation at some point. You explain that by challenging the formulation, he will force the people making the proposal to make finer and finer distinctions and to hone their proposal into a form that will be effective and realistic. You've prescribed the symptom, but you have also institutionalized it. I've had the experience of simply prescribing the symptom, and at the next meeting the same thing happens, and I have to do it again. One way to make sure that you don't have to make that intervention over and over again is to institutionalize it by assigning the function of challenger to that person.

  You've essentially taken over the behavior. Now you can control when the challenges will be made. This is an example of utilization. You don't try to stop the problem behavior, you utilize it. The primary metaphor for utilization is the situation where I never fight against the energy offered me by anyone, or any part of them. I take it and use it. Utilization is the psychological counterpart of the oriental martial arts, such as Aikido or Judo. This is a parallel strategy for psychological martial arts. You always accept and utilize the response, you don't fight or challenge the response—with one exception, of course. If the person's presenting problem involves their running over people then you clobber them, because the presenting problem involves the very pattern that they are using: namely, they get their way. But, of course, that's a paradox, because if they were really getting their way, they wouldn't be in your office.

  So let's say that Jim here makes a proposal and Tony is the guy I have assigned to be the challenger. When Tony begins to interrupt, I say "Excellent! Good work, Tony! Now, listen, Tony, what I think you ought to be sensitive to is that we haven't yet given Jim enough rope to hang himself. So let him make a more complete proposal and get responses from other people, and then I'llcue you and you jump right on it. OK?" So I've essentially delivered the message "Yes, but not yet."

  Woman: That works if you are the outside consultant coming in, but what if you are already in the system?

  If you are an inside consultant or you are a member of the system at the same level of functioning, there may be people who would resent or resist if you state it as your proposal. So you have to frame it appropriately. It's not a proposal coming from you. It's a proposal you are offering that comes from outside, which you think might be useful for you and the rest of the members of the group. You can do it metaphorically. You can say "I spent a fascinating evening the other night with a corporate consultant in Chicago. I went to a conference and the leader told us the following:" Then you present all the information that I just presented to you. If you do that congruently, it will be an acceptable proposal. You can always suggest an experiential test to find out whether it's worth doing. You can ask people to try it for two hours. If it works, people will continue it. If it doesn't, you haven't lost much, and you don't want to continue it anyway.

  I would like to point out that discussions where antagonistic positions are being presented are the life blood of any organization if they are done in a particular context. That context is that you establish a frame around the whole process of argument, so that the disputes, the discussions of antagonistic proposals, are simply different ways of achieving the same outcome that all members agree upon.

  Let me give a content example. George and Harry are co-owners of a corporation; each owns fifty percent of the stock. I've been brought in as a corporate consultant. Harry says the following: "We've got to expand. You grow or you die. And specifically we've got to open offices in Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Miami this year." And George over here says "Look, you know as well as I do, Harry, that last year when we opened the Chicago and Milwaukee offices, we opened them on a shoestring. And as a matter of fact, they still are not yet self-sufficient. They are still not stabilized to the point that they are turning over the amount of business that gives me the confidence to know that we can go ahead and expand into these other offices. Now how many times do we have to go through this?"

  So there's a content difference between these two human beings about the next thing they should do as a corporate entity. One strateg
y that always works effectively in this situation is to reframe the two responses that they are offering as alternative ways of getting an outcome that they both agree is desirable. So first you have to find the common goal—establish a frame. Then you instruct them in how to dispute each other's proposals effectively, because now both proposals are examples of how to achieve the same outcome that they both have agreed upon.

  So I would do something like the following: "Look, let me interrupt you for a moment. I just want to make sure that I understand you both. Harry, you want to expand because you want the corporation to grow and realize more income, right?" I then turn to George and say "My understanding is that your objection to the expansion at the moment, and your focusing on the fact that the Milwaukee and Chicago offices are not quite self-sufficient yet, is your way of being sure that the quality of the services that you offer as a corporation are of a certain level. You are offering a quality product and you want to maintain that quality, because otherwise the whole thing won't work anyway." And he'll say "Of course. Why do you ask these things?" And then I say "OK, I think I understand now. Both of you agree that what you want to do is expand at a rate congruent with maintaining the high quality of services your corporation offers." And they'll both say "Of course." You've now achieved the agreement that you need; you've now got the frame. You say "Good. Since we agree on the outcome that we're all working toward, let's find the most effective, efficient way to get that outcome. Now you, George, make a specific, detailed proposal about how you will know when the Chicago and Milwaukee offices are stabilized at a quality of operation that allows you to feel comfortable about turning resources elsewhere to continue expanding. Harry, I want you to come up with the specific evidence that you can use to know when it is appropriate to open new branches. What will you see or hear that's going to allow you to know that it is now appropriate to open a new office in Chattanooga, and still maintain the quality of the services you're going to offer?"

  First I use language that generalizes, to establish the frame. Then I make sure it is anchored in. "Since we all agree about the outcome,... Then I challenge them to take the proposals they've been fighting over—now embedded in a context of agreement—back to the level of sensory experience. I demand that each of them give specific evidence to support that their proposal is more effective in achieving the outcome that they have both agreed upon. Now they will have useful disputes. And I will monitor their language to be sure that they are being specific enough to make a good decision. You can always figure out what would constitute evidence that one proposal is more effective than another.

  Let me give you a specific strategy for doing this. You listen to both complaint A and complaint B. Then you ask yourself "What are A and B both examples of? What is the class or category that they are both examples of? What is the outcome that both of these two people will share? What common intention lies behind or underneath both these two particular proposals?" Once you discover that, then you interrupt and state the obvious in some way. You get an agreement between these two people, so that they can then begin to usefully disagree within the context of agreement.

  Now that has the same formal properties of what I did with Dick in the six-step reframing. We found a point where his conscious mind and his unconscious mind could agree about a certain outcome that was useful for him as an individual.

  Harry and George now agree that whatever they end up doing— either one of their proposals, both, or some alternative to those—the outcome they are working toward is to benefit the corporate entity as a unit. So I ignore the specific behaviors, and I go after an outcome that the two parts of the corporation—or the two parts of the human being—can agree upon. Now, having achieved the frame of agreement, it becomes trivial to vary behavior in order to find a behavior that achieves the outcome that both partners can agree to.

  If you have more than two people involved—which is usually the case—you can simplify the situation by organizing the discussion. Just say "Look, I'm getting very confused by the way we're discussing things. Let me organize it a little bit in the following way: I want the rest of you to be exquisitively attentive. You have the job of watching and listening to exactly what these two people are going to propose, and assisting me in the process of finding what's common about what they want to do. You can reorganize it into pairs, and then work with one pair at a time. And as you do that, of course you are teaching the pattern to the observers at the same time.

  People have strange ideas about change. Change is the only constant in my thirty-some years of experience. One of the weird things that's happened—and this is a really good example of natural anchoring—is that change and pain are associated. Those ideas have been anchored together in western civilization. That's ridiculous! There's no necessary relationship between pain and change. Is there Linda? Tammy? Dick?

  There is one class of human beings in which you may have to create pain in order to assist them in changing, and that's therapists. Most therapists intrinsically believe—at the unconscious level as well as the conscious level—that change has to be slow and painful. How many of you at some point during the demonstrations have said to yourself "That's too easy; it's too fast." If you examine the underlying presuppositions that cause you to respond that way, you'll discover that they are associated with pain and time and money and stuff— some of which are really powerful and valid economic considerations. Others are just junk that have been associated—like change and pain. So you might examine your own belief structure, because what you believe will come out. It will be in your tone of voice, in your body movement, in the hesitation as you lean forward to do this work with someone.

  All the tools that we offer you are very powerful and elegant. They are the minimum that I think you need to operate, no matter what psychotheology you were previously trained in.

  If you decide that you want to fail with this material, it's possible to. There are two ways to fail. I think you ought to be aware of what those are, so that you can make a choice about how you are going to fail if you decide to.

  One way is to be extremely rigid. You can go through exactly the steps that you saw and heard us go through here, without any sensory experience, without any feedback from your clients. That will guarantee that you will fail. That's the way most people fail.

  The second way you can fail is by being really incongruent. If there's a part of you that really doesn't believe that phobias can be done in three minutes, but you decide to try it anyway, that incongruency will show up in your non-verbal communication, and that will blow the whole thing.

  Every psychotherapy that I know of has an acute mental illness within it. Each one thinks that their theory, their map, is the territory. They don't think that you can make up something totally arbitrary and install it in someone and change them. They don't realize that what they believe is also made up and totally arbitrary. Yes, their method does elicit a response from people, and sometimes it works for the problem you're working on. But there are a thousand other ways to go about it, and a thousand other responses.

  For example, TA has a thing called "reparenting" in which they regress a person and give him a new set of parents. And if it's done appropriately, it will work. The TA beliefis that the person is messed up because when they were a kid they didn't get certain kinds of experiences, so you have to go back and give them those experiences in order for them to be different. That's the TA theology, and accepting that belief system constitutes the mental illness of TA. TA people don't realize that you can get the same result a thousand other ways, and that some of them are a lot quicker than reparenting.

  Any belief system is both a set of resources for doing a particular thing, and a set of severe limitations for doing anything else. The one value in belief is that it makes you congruent. That part is very useful; it will make other people believe you. But it also establishes a huge set of limitations. And my belief system is that you will find those limitations in yourself as a person as well as in y
our therapy. Your clients are going to end up being a metaphor for your personal life because you are making the ultimate tragic mistake. You believe that your perceptions are a description of what reality actually is.

  There is a way out of that. The way out of that is to not believe what you're doing. That way you can do things that don't fit with "yourself," "your world," etc. I recently decided that I want to write a book titled, When you discover your real self, then buy this book and become someone else.

  If you simply change your belief system, you will have a new set of resources and a new set of limitations. Having the choice of being able to operate out of different therapeutic models is very valuable in comparison to only being able to operate out of one model. If you believe any of them, you will remain limited in the same way those models are limited.

  One way to get out of that is to learn to go into altered states in which you make up models. Once you realize that the world in which you're living right now is completely made up, you can make up new worlds.

  Now if we're going to talk about altered states of consciousness, we first have to talk about states of consciousness. You are at this moment in time conscious, true or not true?

  Woman: I think so.

  OK. How do you know that you're conscious at this moment? What are the elements of your experience that would lead you to believe that you are in your normal state of consciousness? I want to know what it is about this state of consciousness that allows you to know that you are here.

  Woman: Ah, I can hear your voice.

  You can hear my voice, so you have auditory external. Is anyone talking on the inside at this moment?

  Woman: I may have some internal voices.

  Do you? While you're listening to me talk, is anyone else speaking? That's what I want to know. And I'm going to continue to talk so that you can find out.