NLP

by Tom Hoobyar

  Tom viewed my son as a very large fish he had to pull in with a very weak fishing line. So he would pull him closer and then let him retreat a little. One night when the three of us were watching TV, Tom turned to my son (who had no piercings in his face, his hair cut conservatively, and a baseball cap on his head, facing forward) and said, “Who are you and what have you done with our son?” We had a good laugh! No doubt about it, Tom saved the life of my younger son. He is now a very successful salesperson and an exceptional parent to his six-year-old son.

  When Tom and I first married, my oldest son was in Ranger training with the U.S. Army. He called one night and said he was having some problems with impatient feelings toward his wife. Over the telephone, Tom had him notice the control panel that was in his mind. Tom helped him imagine installing a lever to control how many rpm’s his mind was going. This way he could lower the rpm’s when with his wife and increase the rpm’s when doing Army tasks.

  A couple of weeks later, my son called Tom and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I made some changes to the control panel.” (Cute, huh?) Tom asked him, “What did you do?” He explained that he had added a computer screen with handles to his control panel. On the screen, he put a picture of his physical training instructor. And when he held the handles, all of his instructor’s power ran into his body. He taught the process to his fellow soldiers and they beat the Army Ranger physical training records.

  Tom and I decided together that we would be really “present” for others. That meant that we made it a priority to really connect with people and to talk with people who were in crisis, no matter what we were doing at the time they called. (On more than one occasion, I sat in a Starbucks, in Boston, in New York, and in Philadelphia, while Tom coached a troubled friend over the phone.) We also attended every wedding and funeral we knew about. Over the thirteen years we were married, we had six more adorable grandchildren added to our large family. We made monthly trips to Reno, Nevada, to visit Tom’s daughter, Tracy, and her family. We were present with each other—and with others.

  Tom and I were blissfully happy together. Because we were always talking and he kept coming up with these “gems,” I learned to carry a notebook so I could write down and refer to my favorites. One was “Behavior is high quality information.” It wasn’t a new concept, but the way it was worded really resonated with me. There were hundreds of these gems collected over the years. I would say, “Did you just hear what you said?” Describing things in an engaging way was so natural for him that he was unaware of how special this was. I told him he should write a book sharing those gems. Although he liked the idea, he was at that time extremely busy running his manufacturing company, coaching people, and running an alumni study group called the NLP Café. So any plans for a book went on the back burner.

  We also hoped to someday in the not-too-distant future develop and offer a vacation-type retreat center in a rural setting. With his expertise and my training and experience in marriage counseling, we believed we could really help couples. We had a great relationship and even though we encountered challenges in our time together, there was no issue we couldn’t resolve.

  Tom frequently quoted John Lennon’s line, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Perhaps that quote turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, Tom was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in August 2009. He passed away one month later. He had the contract for this book under his belt and he had begun working on it. Thanks to Susan Sanders and Tom Dotz, Tom Hoobyar’s dream of leaving a legacy has become a reality. All in all, Tom coached hundreds of people. He didn’t just do NLP; he lived it. I hope to live up to Tom’s glowing example of being a truly giving person.

  Common NLP Terms

  Accessing Cues: Behaviors that are correlated with the use of a particular representational system; e.g., eye movements, voice tones, postures, breathing, etc. (See Representational Systems.)

  Anchor: A cue or trigger that elicits a response, similar to the stimulus response of classical conditioning. Anchors, mental sticky notes, can be auditory, visual, kinesthetic, or even spatial (mental sticky notes).

  “As If” Frame: To pretend that something is possible or completed and begin thinking with that in mind.

  Associated: Being in an experience or memory as fully and completely as possible (with all the senses); looking out from one’s own eyes, hearing from one’s own ears, feeling one’s own feelings.

  Auditory: The sense of hearing. (See “Representational Systems.”)

  Backtrack: A spoken or written review or summary of information, usually to build/maintain rapport and to invite revision or correction.

  Beliefs: Generalizations about yourself, other people, and/or the world.

  Behavioral Flexibility: The ability to vary one’s behavior in order to elicit a desired response from another person (in contrast to repeating a behavior that hasn’t worked).

  Break State: To change a person’s state dramatically. Usually used to pull someone out of an unpleasant state.

  Channel: One of the five senses—sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell. (Also see “Representational Systems.”)

  Chunk Size: The size of the object, situation, or experience being considered. This can be altered by chunking up to a more general category, chunking down to a more specific category, or chunking sideways or laterally to others of the same type. For example, beginning with “car,” you could chunk down to a Ford or to a carburetor, chunk up to a “means of transportation,” and chunk sideways to a plane or train.

  Congruent: When all of a person’s internal strategies, behaviors, and parts are in agreement and working together coherently.

  Content: An aspect of meta-programs that addresses the five domains—people, place, information, activities, and things.

  Context: The environment within which a communication or response occurs. The context is one of the cues that elicit specific responses.

  Context Reframing: Placing a “problem” response or behavior in a different context that gives it a new and different—usually more positive—meaning.

  Counter-Example: An exception to a proposed general rule, a specific instance of the falsity of a universally quantified statement, e.g., any hardworking teenager is a counter-example to the statement “All teenagers are lazy.”

  Criteria: Standards for evaluation; qualities that can be applied to a wide range of specific behaviors or events. Examples: fun, exciting, inexpensive, interesting, high-quality, bold, practical, new, etc.

  Deletion: The process of excluding portions of experience of the world from one’s internal representations, and one’s speech.

  Disassociated: Being outside of an experience—looking at or trying on things from an “Observer” or third position.

  Distortion: Inaccurate reproduction of events in someone’s internal experience. Distortion in language refers to demonstrably inaccurate comments on any subject.

  Domain: The five elements of meta-program “Content”—people, place, information, activities, and things.

  Ecology: Considering the effects of a change on the larger system instead of on just one isolated behavior, part, or person, e.g., considering how a specific outcome will support your beliefs, values, and important relationships.

  Eye Accessing Cues: Unconscious movements of a person’s eyes that indicate the representational system being accessed. (See “Accessing Cues.”)

  Feedback: The visual, auditory, kinesthetic information that comes back to you as a response to your behavior.

  First Position (“Self”): Experiencing the world from your own perspective; being associated into yourself and your body.

  Flexibility: Having more than one behavioral choice in a situation. (See “Behavioral Flexibility.”)

  Future Pace: Rehearsing in all systems so that a specific behavior or set of behaviors becomes linked and sequenced in response to the appropriate cues, so that it will occur naturally and automatically in futur
e situations.

  Generalization: Taking a specific situation or behavior and generalizing the content across contexts, as if it were a proven conclusion or fact, e.g., “That’s just the way human beings are.”

  Generative or Evolutionary Intervention: An intervention that solves the presenting problem and also generates other changes that make the person’s life better in many other ways.

  Gustatory: Referring to the sense of taste. (See “Representational Systems.”)

  Hallucination: An internal representation of or about the world that has no basis in present sensory experience.

  Incongruent: When two or more of a person’s representations, parts, or programs are in conflict. Being “of two minds” or “torn between two possibilities,” etc.

  Installation: Teaching or acquiring a new strategy or behavior, generally by rehearsal or future pacing.

  Intention: The underlying desire or goal of a behavior, assumed to be positive.

  Kinesthetic: The sense of feeling. May be subdivided into tactile feelings (Kt: skin sensing, physically feeling the outside world), proprioceptive feelings (Kp: movement, internal body sensations such as muscle tension or relaxation), and meta feelings (Km: “emotional” responses about some object, situation, or experience). (See “Representational Systems.”)

  Lead System (also known as Preferred Representational Channel): The representational system initially used to access stored information, e.g., making a visual image of a friend in order to get the feeling of liking him/her.

  Lost Performative (Lost Performer): A linguistic pattern in which the person performing the action or judgment is missing from the sentence, e.g., “It’s important to know this.”

  Map of Reality: A person’s perception of events. (See “Representational Systems.”)

  Matching: Mirroring an aspect of one’s behavior (posture, tone of voice, breathing, etc.) to that of another person, usually to establish rapport.

  Meta Model: A set of language patterns that focuses attention on how people delete, distort, generalize, limit, or specify their realities. It provides a series of outcome specification questions useful for making communication more specific, recovering lost or unspecified information, and for loosening rigid patterns of thinking.

  Meta-Outcome: The outcome of the outcome: one that is at a higher level and an outcome of greater importance than the stated one, e.g., “having financial security or freedom and independence” might be the meta-outcome of “finding a better job.”

  Metaphor: A story, parable, or analogy that relates one situation, experience, or phenomenon to another.

  Meta-Program: A thought pattern based on generalization that the brain uses for efficiency. These patterns act as automatic filters that help us make decisions; they tell us what’s okay for someone and what’s not. Examples include options/procedures, toward/away-from, proactive/reaction, general/specific, and internal/external.

  Mind Reading: Imagining what someone else is thinking or feeling by asking yourself, “What must be going on inside that person for that to be true?” and going into second position with them to try on things from their point of view.

  Mirroring: Matching an aspect of one’s behavior (posture, tone of voice, breathing, etc.) to that of another person, usually to establish rapport.

  Modal Operators: Literally “Mode of Operating.” A linguistic term for one or more of four broad categories of acting: desire, possibility, necessity, choice.

  Modality: One of the five senses—sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell. (See “Representational Systems.”)

  Modeling: Observing and specifying how something happens, or how someone thinks or behaves, and then describing in detail or demonstrating the process for others so that they (or you) can learn to do it.

  Motivation Direction (Meta-Program): A mental program that determines whether a person moves toward or away-from experiences.

  Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): The process of creating models of human excellence in which the usefulness, not the truthfulness, is the most important criterion for success. The study of subjective experience.

  Nominalization: A linguistic term for the words that result from the process of taking actions (verbs) and converting them into things (nouns) that actually have no existence as things; in other words, you can’t put them in a wheelbarrow. Examples of nominalizations are love, freedom, happiness, respect, frustration, etc.

  Observer Position: A disassociated meta-position from which you can observe or review events, seeing yourself and others interact.

  Olfactory: The sense of smell. (See “Representational Systems.”)

  “Other” Position or Second Position: To step into someone else’s experience fully.

  Outcome: Desired goal or result. (Also see “Well-Formed Outcome” and “Meta-Outcome.”)

  Pacing: Matching or mirroring another person’s nonverbal and/or verbal behavior. Useful for gaining rapport. (See “Mirroring” and “Matching.”)

  Paralanguage: How something is said—or, more accurate, how it is perceived to have been said. Separate from the words themselves, paralanguage (such as volume, inflection, speed, intensity, tone, rhythm, pitch) provides audible cues that may telegraph information about someone’s inner state and feelings. For example, tone of voice can indicate sarcasm, which the listener may find funny or hurtful.

  Parts: A metaphoric term for different aspects of a person’s experience. Parts are distinct from the specific behaviors adopted by the “parts” in order to get their positive outcomes.

  Perceptual Filter: An attitude, bias, point of view, perspective, or set of assumptions or presuppositions about the object, person, or situation. This attitude “colors” all perceptions of the object, etc.

  Perceptual Positions: The perceptual positions most commonly referred to: First Position (also called “self”), when someone is in their own body experiencing things from their own senses and point of view; Second Position (also called “Other”), when someone is imagining what it’s like from another person’s viewpoint and trying to “stand in their shoes”; and Third Position (also called “Observer”), when someone is observing something from outside the self and/or situation in a neutral or objective way.

  Predicates: Words that express action or relationship with respect to a subject (verbs, adverbs, and adjectives). The words may reflect the representational system being used or they may be nonspecific, e.g., “That looks good,” “Sounds right to me,” “That feels fine.”

  Preferred Representational System or “Channel”: The representational system or mode that a person habitually uses to process information or experiences; usually the one in which the person can make the most detailed distinctions.

  Presuppositions (in NLP): Unifying beliefs of key individuals (Perls, Satir, Erickson, and Feldenkrais) who were studied to form the operating principles of NLP.

  Rapport: A condition in which responsiveness has been established; often described as feeling safe or trusting, or willing.

  Reframing: A process by which a person’s perception of a specific event or behavior is altered, resulting in a different response. Usually subdivided into Context Reframing, Meaning Reframing, and Six-Step Reframing.

  Representational Systems: The internal representations of experience in the five senses: seeing (visual), hearing (auditory), feeling (kinesthetic), tasting (gustatory), and smelling (olfactory).

  Resources: A piece of knowledge, an understanding about the world, a belief, a behavior, a skill, a person, or an object, that contributes to the achievement of an outcome. When creating a Well-Formed Outcome, resources could also include time, money, support, etc.

  Resource State: The experience of a useful response: an ability, attitude, behavior, characteristic, perspective, or quality that is useful in some context.

  Second Position (“Other”): To “become” someone else fully by taking the perspective and the criteria, history, etc., of someone else—trying things on from their point of
view, walking in their moccasins.

  Self-Position: Experiencing the world from your own perspective; being associated into yourself and your body.

  Sensory Acuity: The ability to make sensory discriminations to identify distinctions between different states or events.

  Sensory based: Information that is correlated with what has been perceived by the five senses. (Contrast with “Hallucinations.”)

  Sensory Modalities: The five senses—sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell.

  Separator State or Break State: Eliciting a neutral state between two other states to prevent them from combining or connecting with each other.

  Six-Step Reframing: A process in which the “part” (or parts) responsible for an undesirable behavior is contacted directly, the positive intention driving the behavior is uncovered, and new choices to satisfy that intention are created, resulting in an integration of conflicting parts. Also used to resolve interpersonal conflicts, especially on work teams.

  State: A state of being, or a condition of body/mind response or experience at a particular moment.

  Stimulus-Response: The repeated association between an experience and a particular response (Pavlovian conditioning) such that the stimulus becomes a trigger or cue for the response, e.g., accidental and intentional anchoring.

  Strategy: A sequence of mental and behavioral representations that leads to a specific outcome, e.g., decision, learning, motivation, specific skills.

  Sub-Modalities: The smaller elements within a representational system; for example, a visual image can be bright, dim, clear, fuzzy, moving, still, large, small, etc.

  Swish: A generative sub-modality pattern used to change habits and responses.