Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE
Page 10
One kind of understanding allows you to justify things, and gives you reasons for not being able to do anything different. "Things are this way because . . . and that's why we can't change anything." Where I grew up, we called that a "jive" excuse. A lot of "experts' " understanding of things like schizophrenia and learning disabilities is like that. It sounds very impressive, but basically it's a set of words that say, "Nothing can be done." Personally, I'm not interested in "understandings" that lead you to a dead end, even if they might be true. I'd rather leave it open.
A second kind of understanding simply allows you to have a good feeling: "Ahhh." That woman who de–focuses pictures to get understanding is an example of that. It's sort of like salivating to a bell: it's a conditioned response, and all you get is that good feeling. That's the kind of thing that can lead to saying, "Oh, yes, 'ego' is that one up there on the chart. I've seen that before; yes, I understand." That kind of understanding also doesn't teach you to be able to do anything.
A third, kind of understanding allows you to talk about things with important sounding concepts, and sometimes even equations. How many of you have an "understanding" about some behavior in yourself that you don't like, but that understanding hasn't helped you behave differently? That's an example of what I'm talking about. Concepts can be useful, but only if they have an experiential basis, and only if they allow you to do something different.
You can often get someone to accept an idea consciously, but only seldom will that lead to a change in behavior. If there's one thing that's been proved beyond a doubt by most of the religions of the world, that's it. Take "Thou shalt not kill," for instance. It doesn't say "except ... " Nevertheless, the crusaders happily sliced Moslems in two, and the Moral Majority wants more missiles to wipe out a few more million Russians.
Often people in seminars will ask, "Is a visual person the same as the 'parent' in TA?" That tells me they are taking what I'm teaching and stuffing it into the concepts they already have. If you can make something new fit into what you already know, you will learn nothing from it, and nothing will change in your behavior. You will only have a comfortable feeling of understanding, a complacency that will keep you from learning anything new.
Often I'll demonstrate how to change a person in minutes, and someone will say, "Don't you think he was just fulfilling the expectations of the role situation?" I've rolled a few drunks, but I've never rolled a situation. Those are the people who come to seminars and get nothing for their money, because they leave with exactly the same understanding that they brought with them.
The only kind of understanding I'm interested in is the kind that allows you to do something. All our seminars teach specific techniques that allow you to do things. That seems simple. But sometimes the things I teach don't fit into your existing understanding. The healthiest thing you can do at that moment is to become confused, and many people complain about how confusing I am. They don't yet realize that confusion is the doorway to a new understanding. Confusion is an opportunity to rearrange experience and organize it in a different way than you normally would. That allows you to learn to do something new and to see and hear the world in a new way. Hopefully the last exercise gave you a concrete experience of how that works, and the kind of impact that can have.
If you understood everything I said, and never got confused, that would be a sure sign that you were learning nothing of significance, and wasting the money you paid to come here. That would be proof that you are continuing to understand the world in exactly the same way as when you got here. So whenever you get confused, you can get excited about the new understanding that awaits you. And you can be grateful for this opportunity to go somewhere new, even though you don't yet know where it will take you. If you don't like where it takes you, you can always leave. At the very least you will be enriched by knowing about it, and knowing that you don't like it.
Some people's understanding has uncertainty built into it. I know an engineer whose understanding is composed of a rectangular matrix of pictures, about eight rows down and eight columns across. He starts thinking he understands something when the matrix is about half full of pictures. When it's about ninety percent full, he knows he understands something pretty thoroughly. However, his matrix always has empty frames which signify that his understanding is always incomplete. That keeps him from ever getting too sure about anything.
One of my most capable student's understanding is a dissociated movie of herself doing whatever it is she understands. When she wants to actually do it, she steps into the movie — doing and understanding are nearly identical. Behind that movie is a succession of movies of herself doing it in different situations, doing it while overcoming obstacles, etc. The more different movies she has, the surer she is that she understands something well. I once asked her, "How many movies do you have to have to understand something?" She replied, "It's always a question of how well I understand it. If I have a few movies, that gives me a little understanding. If I have more movies, I understand better. The more different movies I have, the more I understand it. But I never understand completely."
In contrast, there are people who are completely confident that they understand how to do something if they have a single movie of having done it, I know one man who flew a plane once, so he was completely sure that he could fly any plane, anywhere, anytime, in any weather, while standing up in a hammock! He came to a five–day seminar of mine, learned one pattern and left at noon the first day, totally confident that he knew all of NLP. How's that for getting stuck?
Getting stuck in a particular way of understanding the world — whatever it is — is the cause of three major human diseases that I'd like to do something about. The first one is seriousness, as in "dead serious." If you decide that you want to do something, fine, but getting serious about it will only blind you and get in your way.
Being right, or certain, is the second disease. Certainty is where people stop thinking and stop noticing. Any time you feel absolutely certain of something, that's a sure sign that you have missed something. It's sometimes convenient to deliberately ignore something for a while, but if you're absolutely certain, you'll probably miss it forever.
It's easy for certainty to sneak up on you. Even people who are uncertain are usually certain about that, too. Either they're sure they're sure, or they're sure they're unsure. Rarely do you find someone who is uncertain about his doubt or uncertain about his certainty. You can create that experience, but you don't usually encounter it. You can ask someone, "Are you sure enough to be unsure?" That's a stupid question, but he won't be sure anymore after you ask it.
The third disease is importance, and self–importance is the worst of all. As soon as one thing is "important," then other things aren't. Importance is a great way to justify being mean and destructive, or doing anything else that's unpleasant enough to need justification.
These three diseases are the way most people get stuck. You may decide something is important, but you can't get really serious about it until you're certain that it's important. At that point you stop thinking altogether. The Ayatollah Khomeni is an excellent example — but you can find lots of other examples closer to home.
Once I pulled up in front of the grocery store in a small town I used to live near. A guy came running over and said angrily, "My friend said you flipped me off"
"I don't think so; do you want me to?"
"Let me tell you something — "
I said, "Wait just one minute," and went into the store and shopped.
When I came back out, he was still out there! When I walked up to my car, he was panting with anger. I picked up a bag of groceries and handed it to him, and he took it. I opened the car door, put the other three bags in the car, took the bag from him and got in the car and closed the door. Then I said, "All right, if you insist" flipped the bird at him, and started to drive away.
As I drove away he burst out laughing hysterically, because I simply would not take him seriously.
Now go back to an earlier time in your life, when you didn't even know about that, or you knew about it but it didn't mean anything to you. ...
You really didn't know what you were missing, did you? You had no idea how you were stuck back there, and you weren't motivated to change it. You were certain that your understanding was an accurate representation of the world. That's when you're really stuck. What are you missing now? . . .
Certainty probably impedes human progress more than any other state of mind. However, certainty, like anything else, is a subjective experience that you can change. Pick a fairly detailed memory in which you were absolutely certain that you understood something. You were in a learning experience; perhaps you were being taught. Maybe it was hard, maybe it was easy, but at a certain time you got that "Oooh, yes! I understand!" feeling. Remember it in as much detail as you need. . . ,
Now I want you to remember all that backwards, just like running a movie backwards. . . .
When you're done, think about whatever it is that you learned or understood. Is it the same as it was a few minutes ago?
Marty: When I played the picture forwards, I went from a state of confusion to "Aha! I understand!" And then when I ran it backwards, I ended up at the place where I was confused.
Yes, that's running it backwards. What is your experience now, when you think about whatever it is that you were certain you understood a few minutes ago?
Marty: Well, I'm back at the confusion state, and yet part of me knows that I still have the understanding that came later. I can't create the same total feeling of confusion that I had the first time. But I'm not as certain, either.
How about the rest of you. Is it the same?
Ben: Well, I learned something new that I don't know that I was aware of at the time, about what happened with me in the experience.
Well, that's interesting, but it's not what I asked about. I want to know if your experience of what you learned is different.
Ben: No, there's no difference.
There's no difference whatsoever? You have to actually stop and think about it. You can't just say, "Oh, it's the same." That's like saying, "I tried to learn to fly, but I couldn't get out to the plane, so it doesn't work." . . .
Ben: Well, it's funny you mentioned flying, because what I remembered was learning the feel of landing on water — the feel of that contact with the water. When I ran it backwards, I moved out of the feeling of it, and to get the airplane to move backwards I had to view it from a distance. And that added a new dimension to the learning of the touching on the water.
It gave you another perspective. Now do you know anything more about landing a plane than you did before? Ben: Yeah.
What else don't you know? Yet? That's quite a lot to get from just running a movie backwards. A lot of people rerun movies forward as a way of learning from experience, but not many run them backward. How about the rest of you. Is your experience the same?
Sally: No. The details changed. What I pay attention to changed. There's a sequence of things ordered differently.
The sequence is ordered differently. Now, is what you learned different?
Sally: Yes.
How is it different? Do you know something that you didn't know before? Or could you do something different now?
Sally: The body of knowledge is not different. What I learned isn't different, but how I feel about it, and how I look at it, is different.
Would that influence your behavior?
Sally: Yes.
Several of you got quite a lot out of just taking a minute to run an experience backwards. How much would you learn if you ran all your experiences backwards? You see, Sally is absolutely right. Running a movie backwards changes the sequence of experience. Think of two experiences: 1) being able to do something, and 2) being unable to do the same thing, First sequence them 1–2, first, you can, and then can't, do something. . . . Now sequence them 2–1, first you can't, and then can, do something. . . . Those are pretty different, aren't they?
The experiences in your life happened to you in a certain order. Most of that sequence wasn't planned; it just happened. A lot of your understanding is based on that somewhat random sequence, Since you have only one sequence, you have only one set of understandings, and that will limit you. If the same events had happened to you in a different order, your understandings would be very different, and you would respond very differently.
You have a whole personal history that's the wealth that you're going to use to go into the future. How you use it will determine what it will produce. If you only have one way of using it, you'll be very limited. There will be a lot of things you won't notice, a lot of places you never go, and a lot of ideas you simply won't have.
Running an experience forwards and backwards are only two of the infinite number of ways that you can sequence an experience. If you divide a movie into only four parts, there are twenty–two other sequences to experience. If you divide it into more parts, the number of sequences is even greater, Each sequence will yield a different meaning, just as different sequences of letters create different words, and different sequences of words create different meanings. A lot of the NLP techniques are simply ways to change the sequence of experiences.
I'd like to install in you what I think is one of the most important steps in the evolution of your consciousness: be suspicious of success. Whenever you feel certain, and you succeed at a task several times, I want you to become suspicious of what you're not noticing. When you have something that works, that doesn't mean other things wouldn't work, or that there aren't other interesting things to do.
Years ago some people figured out that you could suck creepy gooey black liquid out of the ground and burn it in lamps. Then they figured out how to burn it in a big steel box and roll it all over the place. You can even burn it in the end of a tube and send the tube to the moon. But that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to do those things. A hundred years from now people are going to look at our "high–tech" economy and shake their heads the way we do when we think of ox–carts.
Real innovation would have been easier right at the beginning. They could have done really amazing things. What if they had said "Boy, this really works! What else will work? What else is there to do? What other ways are there to move besides burning stuff and spewing it out the end of something? What other ways are there to move other than rolling in metal boxes and flying in metal tubes?" The more success you have, the more certain you become, and the less likely you are to stop and think, "What is t that I'm not doing?" The things I'm teaching you work, but I want you to think about what else might work even better.
VII. Beyond Belief
Another way to think about behavior is that it's organized around some very durable things called "beliefs," Whenever someone says something is important or unimportant to do, it's because she has a belief about it. You can think about all behavior as being mobilized by the beliefs that we have. For example, you probably wouldn't be learning about NLP if you didn't believe that it would be interesting, or useful, or somehow valuable. Parents wouldn't spend lots of time with their infant children if they didn't believe it would make their children turn out better later on. Parents used to keep young children from getting too much stimulation because they believed it would make them hyperactive; now they give their children lots of stimulation because they believe it will aid their intellectual development.
Beliefs are really phenomenal things. Beliefs can compel perfectly nice people to go out and kill other human beings for a
n idea, and even feel good about it, too. As long as you can fit a behavior into someone's belief system, you can get him to do anything, or stop him from doing anything. That is what I did with the father who didn't want his daughter to be a whore. As soon as I pointed out that his abusive behavior was exactly the way pimps treat whores, he couldn't do it anymore without violating his own beliefs. I didn't compel him to stop "against his will," whatever that means. I made changing fit into his belief system so completely that he couldn't do anything else.
At the same time, beliefs can change. You're not born with them. You all believed things when you were children that you now think are silly. And there are things you believe now that you didn't even think about before . . . taking this workshop, for example.
The word "belief" is a somewhat vague concept to most people, even when they'll gladly go out and kill for one. I'd like to demonstrate what beliefs are made of, and then show you a way of changing them. I'd like someone to come up here who has a belief about yourself that you would like to be different. I want you to think of a belief that limits you in some way. Beliefs about yourself are usually more useful to change than beliefs about the world. So pick one that you think would make a real difference to you if it were different.
Lou: I have one.
As if the rest of them don't! Don't tell me what that belief is. I just want you to think of that belief that you'd rather not have. . . . Now set that experience aside for a moment, and think of something you're doubtful about. It might be true, or it might not be; you're really not sure. . . .