Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes - Neuro Linguistic Programming

Then if you ask "Why not?" they are going to give you reasons and that's a great way to get stuck. If you ask them "What would happen if you did?" or "What stops you?" you'll go somewhere else more useful.

We published all this in The Structure of Magic some years ago, and we ask a lot of people "Have you read Magic I"? And they go "Well, laboriously, yes." And we ask "Did you learn what was in it? Did you learn Chapter Four?" That's the only meaningful part of the book as far as I can tell. And they say "Oh, yes. I knew all that." And I say "OK, good. I'll play your client, and you respond to me with questions." I say "I cant get angry." And they say "Ah, well, what seems to be the problem?" instead of "What prevents you?" or "What would happen if you did?" By not having the meta-model responses systematically wired in, people get stuck. One of the things that we noticed about Sal Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls is that they intuitively had many of those twelve questions in the meta-model wired in.

You need to go through some kind of program to wire in your choices so that you don't have to think about what to do. Otherwise, while you are thinking about what to do, you will be missing what's going on. We're talking right now about how you organize your own consciousness to be effective in a complex task of communication.

As far as the conscious understanding of the client goes, it's really irrelevant. If the client wants to know what's going on, the easiest way to respond is "Do you have a car? Do you ever have it repaired? Does the mechanic describe in detail what he is going to do before he does anything?" Or "Have you ever had surgery? Did the surgeon describe in detail which muscles were going to be cut, and how he was going to clamp the arteries?" I think those are analogies which are pertinent to respond to that kind of inquiry.

The people who can give you the most detailed and refined diagnosis of their own problems are the people I 've met on the back wards of many of the mental institutions in this country and in Europe. They can tell you why they are the way they are, where it came from, and how they perpetuate the maladaptive or destructive pattern. However, that explicit conscious verbal understanding does them no good whatsoever in changing their behavior and their experience.

Now what we would like to do is to make a suggestion. And of course we are only hypnotists, so this is only a suggestion. And what we'd like to do is to suggest to the unconscious portion of each of both of you, whose communication we have been delighted to receive the entire day today, that since it has represented for you at the unconscious level all the experiences which have occurred, both consciously and otherwise, that it make use of the natural process of dreaming and sleep, which will occur tonight as a natural course in your life, as an opportunity to sort through the experiences of today. And represent even more usefully than up to this point the material which you have learned here today without fully realizing it, so that in the days and the weeks and the months ahead you will be able to discover to your delight that you are doing new things. You had learned new things without even knowing it, and you will be delightfully surprised to find them in your behavior. So if you should happen to remember, or not, your dreams, which we hope will be bizarre this evening, allowing you to rest peacefully, so that you can arise and meet us again here alert and refreshed, ready to learn new and exciting things.

See you tomorrow.

Yesterday we described a number of ways that you can get rapport with another person and join their model of the world, as a prelude to helping them find new choices in behavior. Those are all examples of what we call pacing or mirroring. To the extent that you can match another person's behavior, both verbally and non-verbally, you will be pacing their experience. Mirroring is the essence of what most people call rapport, and there are as many dimensions to it as your sensory experience can discriminate. You can mirror the other person's predicates and syntax, body posture, breathing, voice tone and tempo, facial expression, eye blinks, etc.

There are two kinds of non-verbal pacing. One is direct mirroring. An example is when I breathe at the same rate and depth that you breathe. Even though you're not conscious of that, it will have a profound impact upon you.

Another way to do non-verbal pacing is to substitute one non-verbal channel for another. We call that "cross-over mirroring." There are two kinds of cross-over mirroring. One is to cross over in the same channel. I can use my hand movement to pace your breathing movement—therise and fall of your chest. Even though the movement of my hand is very subtle, it still has the same effect. It's not as dramatic as direct mirroring, but it's very powerful. That is using a different aspect of the same channel: kinestheticmovement.

In the other kind of cross-over mirroring, you switch channels. For example, as I speak to you ... I watch ... your breathing ... and I gauge the ... tempo... of my voice... to the rise... and the fall... of your chest. That's a different kind of cross-over. I match the tempo of my speech to the rate of your breathing.

Once you have paced well, you can lead the other person into new behavior by changing what you are doing. The overlap pattern we mentioned yesterday is an example of that. You join the client in their representation of the world and then overlap into a different representation.

Pacing and leading is a pattern that is evident in almost everything we do. If it is done gracefully and smoothly it will work with anyone, including catatonics. Once I was in Napa State Mental Hospital in California, and a guy had been sitting there for several years on the couch in the day room. The only communication he was offering me were his body position and his breathing rate. His eyes were open, pupils dilated. So I sat facing away from him at about a forty-five degree angle in a chair nearby, and I put myself in exactly the same body position. I didn't even bother to be smooth. I put myself in the same body position, and I sat there for forty minutes breathing with him. At the end of forty minutes I had tried little variations in my breathing, and he would follow, so I knew I had rapport at that point. I could have changed my breathing slowly over a period of time and brought him out that way. Instead I interrupted it and shocked him. I shouted "Hey! Do you have a cigarette?" He jumped up off the couch and said "God! Don't do that!"

I have a friend who is a college president. He is living in a delusional reality that he's intelligent and that he has a lot of prestige and all those things. He walks around stiffly, looks gruff and smokes a pipe; he does this whole number. It's a completely delusional reality. The last time I was in a mental hospital, there was a guy there who thought he was a CIAagent, and that he was being held there by the communists. The only difference between them is that the rest of the people in the world are more apt to believe the college president than the psychotic. The college president gets paid for his delusions. In order to pace either of them I'm going to accept their reality. With the college president I'm going to say that "Since he's so intelligent and prestigious he will be able to"—and then I'll say whatever I want him to do. If I go to an academic conference and I'm there with all the people who live in the psychotic reality of academia, I am going to pace that reality. Ill present a paper, because raw experience wouldn't pace their reality. If there was any experience there, it would just go right by them.