First published in NLP World, Volume 2, No. 1, March 1995
Mastery, New Coding and Systemic NLP
Judith DeLozier
Edited by James Lawley
from a presentation to The Central London NLP Group, 19 April 1993
Thank you for taking time out of your busy
lives to be here tonight. What this group is doing here really does
remind me of how NLP started in the first place. There are not very
many places I've been in the world where the community spirit of NLP
is creating what you are creating here. And that is a really
wonderful thing and you all do yourselves proud. It makes me want to
cry because this is what I want to see happening.
I was asked to write something for a brochure
and I want to read it to you, "The discipline known as NLP began
before it had a name with an interdisciplinary community of people.
[Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Leslie Cameron, Mary Beth Megus,
David Gordon, Robert Dilts, and myself, to name but a few.] We were
motivated by a shared curiosity about how we know, about how we
learn, how we communicate, and how we change. And how we can
influence the process of change in a well-formed, ecological way. The
patterns of NLP were not imparted to us, but unfolded in our
learning."
I want you to be aware of just how special
what you are doing is. That you can get together on a regular basis
and unfold knowledge in this group. Because it really is about
unfolding knowledge in a group of people coming from different models
of the world. So, bravo to you. I will carry this around the world
and let them know what you are doing here.
In The Beginning
I want to tell you a little bit about myself.
My background is in religious studies and anthropology. I got
involved in NLP about the time the book, The Structure of Magic
was just a manuscript. My friend, John Grinder, brought it to me, and
said, "Read this, and tell me what you think." And I read the book,
and I said, "You know, this is a really nice thing for people to hang
their experience on. This could really help people to make sense of
things that happen to them in the world that they don't have any way
to express. It's a really nice structure". It was that particular
setting, called the University of Santa Cruz, which really allowed us
to do what we were doing. The Dean of the University at that time had
a vision: to create a context where interdisciplinary ideas and
different models of the world could come together in a creative way
to produce new possibilities.
What I want to talk about tonight is the idea
of mastery in NLP, especially with respect to New Code NLP. "New
Coding" is what I call it. It is another description and actually has
about seven different pieces to it. I also want to touch on the
development of Systemic NLP.
Old Coding
There was the first description of NLP, Old
Coding as I call it, which unfolded out of the disciplines of
linguistics, Gestalt Therapy, and systems theory. This yielded the
language patterns (The Meta Model) and their connection with the deep
structure of experience which in turn yielded the ideas of
Representational Systems and submodalities, strategies, separating
intent from behavior, and all the permutations we can do with these
codings in order to create technology; call it six-step reframing,
change personal history, anchoring, or visual/kinesthetic
disassociation.
And a lot came out of the answer to one
question: "How do you know?" The epistemological question. People
would say, "Oh, I'm going to the show tonight." And we would ask,
"How do you know?" We began to notice that they made eye movements,
and we would wonder what was going on. And they would say, "Well, I
can see myself going to the show." And we found out that they really
do see something. We started connecting together the patterns of
physiology, of language and of internal state. Once you understand
the level of what patterns are involved, you can create your own
patterns.
People would go out with just the meta model
and start meta modeling the hell out of people. They couldn't
understand why they were losing all their friends! They were viewing
NLP as technology, as a procedure which I call a ritual. There is no
wisdom in a piece of technology. Wisdom has to be in the carrier of
that information. John Grinder and myself thought, "How are we going
to get people to start thinking about where is the wisdom?" and that
is how Turtles All The Way Down:
Prerequisites to Personal Genius got
written in 1984.
New Coding
The second description, or New coding,
developed from different roots; John Grinder's and my own
understanding of NLP, Gregory Bateson's work with information theory
and biology, the books of Carlos Castaneda about the Yacqui Way, and
our African experience of drumming, dancing, singing and
story-telling in the Congo. So we took these ideas, and we asked,
"How can we give another description of what already has been
specified in this other code?" And we came up with a series of about
seven elements.
(1) State
One description is state. Just looking at the
idea of state alone. What is the state that you would develop to
model excellence in the world? We asked, what are the pieces that go
into developing a quality state for modeling, and what are the
things we can do to have a choice about our state, and to manage our
state on the problem side, as well as the evolutionary and generative
side for ourselves?
That was the first piece. And then we went
out and began to look at people who had done interesting modeling
projects, like Carlos Castaneda. What they had in common was using
what I call the 'nerk-nerk' state. A state of 'not knowing' -- when
you don't know... yet. You're gathering information in the system.
You have intuitions about it but you don't know what it is that you
know. As soon as you have an intuition, someplace in there knows
something; it just has not come into consciousness. The pattern has
not presented itself yet. But if you wait, and the pattern continues
to happen, it will. This connects with Gregory Bateson's idea that
there are always two ways of knowing. There's knowing in the unit of
mind, and then there is knowing cognitively what we know. There is
also understanding the relationship between those two.
In modeling mastery, certain patterns began
to emerge. One being the idea of state management, that a person has
tools to maintain the qualities in their breathing, physiology,
representation and beliefs that support the outcome of demonstrating
mastery or excellence in the world. For example, as you sit there,
place tension in your shoulders, sit off balance; allow your
shoulders to press towards your ears. A typical stress state. How is
your breathing? Is this a comfortable state? Do you find the
physiology useful for learning? Where is your attention? What beliefs
about learning do you maintain in this state? Now change position,
move a little, maybe stand up and sit down again. Find a balanced
comfortable position. Go through the body and release any excess
tension, breathe and repeat the questions above. Which state is more
conducive to learning?
Another pattern we discovered is how to have
the highest quality contact with the model. It requires a state where
a person drops the filters of internal dialogue, foveal vision and
excess tension. This is a very clear state, sometimes referred to as
the uptime trance. It is a state in which we have interfaced our
attention with the model where patterns are to be placed in our
neurology and later extracted for the purpose of building a
transferable code. A modeling state is quiet, without internal
dialogue, uses peripheral vision, not foveal vision.
(2) Conscious-Unconscious
Relationship
What else did those people do? Well, they had
a really interesting quality relationship between conscious and
unconscious. What we call first attention and second attention.
Whatever that small piece is that we call consciousness, that feeds
back into the larger unit, affects the quality of the relationship.
These people said they were continuing to find ways to enhance and
develop the quality of that relationship. With the understanding that
you never "get there", that it is an ongoing process, an evolution
which enhances as time goes by.
How many people have done something called a
"second-position shift"? Most of the group. Do you remember the first
time you did it compared to the last time? Is the quality much
different? Would you say that each time you do it, it goes up in
quality? Well, that is what I'm talking about. So what kind of
mechanisms do you have that continually develop this relationship?
How many people meditate? How many people pray? How many people do
self-hypnosis? How many people do something that requires that the
whole unit of mind act in a one hundred percent and honest way, as
Gregory Bateson would say?
Gregory also recognized that masters of
anything have a highly developed quality relationship between their
conscious and unconscious resources. In his words, a master knows
when to use the tight thinking of the cognitive conscious mind, and
when to use the loose thinking of the more creative unconscious mind.
Take Milton Erickson's metaphor of the horse and the rider. The horse
being our unconscious mind and the rider being our conscious mind. Of
course all of us who have ridden a horse know what happens when the
rider wants to go in one direction and the horse another. Neither one
easily reaches their destination and it requires a lot of time and
uses up a lot of energy. So that was the second part of mastery and
the New Coding.
(3) Balance Between Practice and
Spontaneity
The third idea was, how do I balance between
practice and spontaneity? Which is also very much connected with
conscious and unconscious relationship. NLP is about having outcomes.
So do you have a time when your outcome is not to have an outcome? Or
if I go down south of the border to Mexico, they would say, "Judy,
it's very important to go to the Land of Not Doing." Do you have that
understanding in your life, to say "Yes, I learn these rituals called
NLP. I learn these techniques, learn these tools, I come places like
this and I practice them. I learn, I unfold in the world"? And there
comes a point when it is so deep in your behavior that you let it
all go and act completely spontaneously. At this moment there is no
self reflection: "Now, I wonder if their eyes are going to go up to
the right, I wonder if they're going to go down to the left." There
is only the systemic loop.
I like the Aikido metaphor: you are on the
mat and you practice and you practice, and when you go to meet an
opponent you are not going to stop and talk to yourself. You are not
even going to decide beforehand what maneuver to use. You really
can't know until you interface with the opponent, because this is a
dance with the outside world.
(4) Perceptual Positions
Number four is perceptual positions. Gregory
said, "It takes two to know one". And we said, "We'll go for three."
At the same time we got together with Robert Dilts, and he told us "I
did this interesting thing the other day. I had somebody with a
phobia. I asked them to take the perceptual position of the thing
they were afraid of, and the most amazing thing happened: that snake
was really scared too." So, we were both on to the same thing. And
then we began to think about the fact that, well, there is my
position, there is your position, and then there is a third or
neutral position, where it is only information.
I have found that for some of us, this is the
difficult one. We would go there, and we didn't want to say, "Well,
it's only information." We wanted to say, "God, how stupid. I can't
believe I did that." This is making sense of a pattern at another
level. I can now see a bigger part of the world and understand it
from a different position than when I was caught in first position or
even when I occupied a second. From third position I can see the
dance.
Characterological
Adjectives
How many know about "characterological
adjectives"? Think of someone you have a difficult time communicating
with; a situation that is certainly not a creative or productive
interaction. It is not a love-based communication. It doesn't bring
out the best in you. You feel stuck in some way. Got anybody like
that?
Now imagine this is a movie theater. See the
person up there on the screen behaving the way they behave, and give
me a word to describe their behavior.
"Self Absorbed." "Aggressive."
OK. So this is a descriptor. Given all those
bits of information of how this person is behaving, this is the way
you would describe them. So now take a big, deep breath and see
yourself up there in the loop with this person. Now you are in third
position. It's only information. And now, there you are, behaving the
way you behave. What are the words you would use to describe your
behavior?
"Withdrawn."
So they are self-absorbed, and you are
withdrawn.
"Defensive."
They are aggressive and you are defensive.
Makes sense. If we put the Batesonian filter on it we are getting the
difference between symmetrical escalating relationships and one that
is complementary. You begin to see your part in the dance. They
wouldn't have any fun doing it by themselves and neither would you.
This is what systems are about: getting a big enough piece of the
interaction so that you can step back and say, "Oh, now I understand
how I'm dancing with this person" and realise what choices you have
of getting out of the dance. From this position you can ask, "What,
when I step back in there with this information, can make a
difference to the quality of that interaction?" Knowing that if one
part of the system begins to move, the whole system is going to
move.
Those perceptual positions then began to
trigger off a whole set of other possibilities and it began to
connect back to the meta model. Take the cause-effect pattern. When I
think of how a pattern demonstrates itself in my life, I begin to
understand the part I play, the part they play, and if I go to blame,
or where I feel blamed, I realize it is a cause-effect
relationship.
Creativity
There is another way of using perceptual
positions that is really fun to do if we think about it in terms of
creativity. Think of a piece of art that has really moved you in your
life. It wasn't just something you looked at and said, "Oh, that's
cool." Rather a piece of art that you felt deep inside your soul.
This is being in the position of appreciating that art from the
perceptual position of the viewer, or hearing a piece of music, or
watching a dance.
Now take the position of the artist who
created it. When you occupy that perceptual position, begin to use
the implicit muscle movements of the painter, the sculptor or the
composer in order to access similar kinds of neurology in yourself.
It is there, it is just that you haven't activated it in yourself in
a long time.
Take the pygmy in the forest who has never
been outside and seen the horizon. He is built to see horizons but he
has never been in an environment that stimulates the nerves in the
eyes in order to understand that difference. Things that are far away
from him look really tiny, so he thinks they are bugs when they are
really buffaloes!
Going to second position is a way in which we
can start to stimulate that neurology within ourselves. Then you can
stand back and ask, "What are the differences between being a
perceiver of this art and being the creator?" And, "Gee, do I have
different beliefs when I'm there compared to when I'm here? Do I have
different beliefs about my ability to be creative?" I bet you
do.
So the idea of perceptual positions is that
out of this dance of multiple perspectives, wisdom may begin to
unfold. To really consider the movement from my personal map to an
understanding of your personal map and then to an objective position
of the relationship gives us a basis of wisdom.
(5) Attention
The fifth description has to do with
attention. How I use my attention, where I put my attention and how I
get it back. This happens in very small ways and it also happens in
larger ways that serve as a metaphor. As soon as I focus my attention
on one place, large amounts of the world are deleted somewhere else
and this connects to the meta model pattern called deletion. Am I
fixing my attention so tightly, even when I am doing NLP, that I am
fixated on eye movements and missing a whole lot of other
information? If I get so focused on someone's necklace that I don't
notice the beautiful color of her eyes, I am doing a disservice to
her. Then if I make a hallucination about this woman based on the
necklace I could land on the Island of Conclusion and spend a lot of
time trying to get off!
What happens if you move your attention to
listening to the sound of the birds while you are interacting with a
person? Does it drive your attention in a different way? Does it
inform your behavior in a way that is more creative? Does it make a
difference? If your attention is in a certain representational
system, with certain submodalities, what happens if you change just
one aspect? You can change something very small, or very big. For
example, here I am communicating with somebody, and I become... a
woman from Honduras. Does it make a difference?
Have you read the story of 'The Phantom
Tollbooth'? The part that I liked is about the race of people who,
when they are born, float around at the height that they are going to
be when they are fully grown. They then grow down to the ground. And
that is so that they never have to change their perspective.
If we use characterological adjectives again,
we can apply the idea of attention to discover how it might be
driving the relational loop. For example, while in the interaction, I
can notice where my attention is fixed, i.e. on a voice tone, a
gesture, a facial expression, an internal sensation. I may discover
how fixing my attention on some small aspect of the interaction is
driving my state to a value judgment that may make the interaction
uncreative, difficult or problematic. The idea is to discover where I
fix my attention, to move it to some other aspect of the interaction
and, of course, to notice if the quality of the interaction changes
in a positive direction.
This is another way of looking at the system;
sometimes I want to chunk it down into small pieces, and sometimes I
want to look at the big picture. Along that continuum of possibility
there are places where I can begin to influence the system in a
positive direction, with the least amount of effort for myself and
the other person.
(6) Filters
My mother used to say to me, "Judy, if you
walk through life with a hammer in your hand, you're going to see a
lot of nails." She was teaching me about filters. If you sort the
world in a certain way, that is what you are going to see, and if you
always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've
always got. Did you ever play 'Slug Bug?' The family would go out
driving and the game was for the first person who saw a Volkswagen to
shout "Slug bug". Of course, as soon as you put on the filter to sort
for Volkswagens, they were everywhere.
We are designed to filter information. A big
filter could be a belief. Something becomes believable to me because
I sort the information in a certain way. If I am sorting for just
certain information, I am going to connect that with my deeper
experience and think, "Ah ha, I'm right. I believe this now." So not
only is it important to look at belief systems and filters, it is
also important to look at disbelief systems.
If I maintain a certain filter and I do not
have a way of moving my attention outside of that filter, then it is
very easy to have the deeper experiences that are going to build a
belief based on just that one filter. What mechanisms and processes
do you have that allow you to move your attention around, to create
opportunity, to ask, "What else is out there?" Because it is the
differences that are going to be what makes the difference.
In parts of the United States there is not
much distinction between discomfort and difference. I grew up in
Oklahoma where the attitude was, "There's a difference. Shoot it."
You got your membership to the National Rifle Shooter's Association at
the same time you got your driver's license. These were really
wonderful people but there was not a lot of moving around of those
filters and accepting of difference. And the world is changing
now.
We can talk about filtering philosophically:
"Am I really seeing what is in the world or am I seeing what is
happening in the back of my brain?" But it is more useful to ask,
"What are the filters that we can potentially let go of?" Then we
find the edges of our map that allow us to know there is more
territory on the other side. Most of us think of what is on the other
side of that edge as uncomfortable, as opposed to merely different.
Take the difference between a person having stage fright and a person
really being frightened. There are certain physiological signals for
both experiences. There are certain parts that are the same and there
are other parts that are very different. Being able to find those
small disparities in those states is a beginning of dropping certain
filters.
Am I seeing this person as directly as I can,
or do I already have a set of filters, of hallucinations, about this
person? As Don Juan's Castaneda said, every baby is born a sorcerer,
every baby is born in the nerk-nerk state, not knowing... completely
open to all possibilities. And then comes foveal vision and language.
Those two big filters begin to get fixed. That fixing is a
relationship between language, the external world and what happens
internally as the child builds that deeper structure. If the rules in
that deeper structure have relationships like cause-effect,
nominalization, huge deletions, over-generalizations, then there are
natural consequences for the child.
How many people speak more than one language?
Do you feel different when you speak that other language? This is
one way that you adopt certain filters. Politics is another, so is
religion, male/female, and animate/inanimate. Just because I can't
see this chair moving does not mean that it is not moving. It is just
that I do not have the apparatus to notice.
You can't know what you can't know, but
knowing that, you can begin to build a belief that operates at
another level. If I know that I don't know, then what kind of things
can I do to move my filters so that I can discover the edges of my
map? We used to say, everything that you have never seen looks the
same. In Winnie the
Pooh , there is this great line, "The
more Piglet looked, the more Pooh wasn't there." It's a question of
knowing that and then saying, "What sorts of arrangements can I make
in my life to move myself to the edge so the surrounding unknown
becomes available?"
(7) Multiple Descriptions
The last description is descriptions
themselves. Multiple descriptions of the world, as opposed to just
perceptual positions. Take this whole thing called NLP; how many
other ways can I describe this? Where could I go to get another
description? Myself, having studied anthropology, I like to go to
another culture, because I have this intuition. I have this intuition
that we're all members of the same species. I say intuition because I
am still questioning New Yorkers! Could be divergent evolution! There
are places where we are the same. And there are places where we are
different. What makes us the same is that we are members of the same
species. We occupy the same form, we have language, we have the same
neurology. We have different ways of carving it up, different ways of
talking about it, and in different parts of the world we pay
attention to different things.
Active Dreaming Exercise
I'm going to give you a little exercise to
allow you to experience New Coding. It comes from the native
Americans and is called active dreaming. It is like dreaming when you
are awake and is a way of solving problems and of having a good time.
It uses the modelling state, focus of attention, filters and triple
description to gather information from the larger unit of
mind.
i. First set an intention or take
on a filter. Say you have a big decision coming up, or you have a
problem you want to solve. This is what you are asking the larger
unit of mind to filter information about.
ii. The second thing is to go into a state of
not knowing, or the nerk-nerk state. It has the following
characteristics: No internal dialogue; peripheral rather than foveal
vision; and no excess tension. Going through the system and checking
for tension is really good, I call this 'cleaning' quality states.
The idea is to go through and check: Is there tension in the system
and does it need to be there? Because when you start to 'try' you
feel your shoulders going up, your attention starts to constrict, and
the harder you try the more it constricts. Not everything has to be
relaxed. You might want a little tension - it lets you know you are
alive - but not too much.
iii. Then take a walk in this state. You are
open to whatever happens and ready to notice when the outside world
offers you a symbol. I find it usually takes five to ten minutes for
a symbol to pop into my awareness. The symbol may be visual,
auditory, or that you step in a mud puddle! You are just available to
it. There are two ways to think about this. The western way would say
that the unconscious mind just grabbed a symbol of importance. The
native American would say that the universe just offered you a gift.
Both beautiful perspectives, but different perspectives. Remember to
walk with grace and ease.
iv. Assume the symbol is relevant to your
original intention, decision or problem. Then, become the symbol. Go
to second position with the symbol. Ask yourself, "If I am the
symbol, what characteristics would I have?" For instance, if a
particular tree very clearly popped into my awareness, this is my
symbol. If I was that tree, what are my characteristics as that tree?
I could be firmly planted, flexible on top, have birds build their
nests in me with little animals coming to visit.
v. Then go to third position, as an observer,
a witness. And from third position, notice the relationship between
the information carried in the symbol and your intention. How does
the intention and the symbolic information connect? How does my
thinking change with this new information? Perhaps I discover ways to
become more flexible with respect to my intent; perhaps I change my
perception of time and that will be the key that makes a
difference.
For me, the outcome for this exercise is to
discover information. I want to use my consciousness to set the
intent because that is where the problem is perceived. It presupposes
that the lines are open to the larger unit of mind. Also it is a
vehicle to continue to deepen the connection between conscious and
unconscious.
Systemic NLP
We can create further descriptions by taking
Old Coding and New Coding and asking how are they the same, how are
they different and how do they interact with each other? What we get
are the underpinnings for Systemic NLP. And I think a really big part
of what is happening globally is connected to when pictures of the
earth started to come back from outer space. We could actually see
the whole world, a perspective we have never had before. We know that
there are boundaries and countries down there, frontiers you have to
go through, but from up here, they are not there. There is just one
big, continuous place. And that is when we began to get other things
spontaneously happening in science -- like chaos theory, like fractal
geometry, and all those other things that are happening in
physics.
When you have a way to move yourself, change
filters, notice when you are in a loop with another person, recognize
you're using characterological adjectives; when you are in there, when
you are communicating with that person, where is your attention? And
if you move it somewhere else does it make a difference? That is the
only point. When these descriptions start to interact, you get
Systemic NLP, which is just starting to develop.
When I go right back to the beginning, NLP is
systemic anyway. "Systemic" means this whole unit of mind.
But then when I start to code it, it becomes not so systemic. Right?
Because coding is never this whole unit of mind, it is only what
consciousness can pull out and say, "Well, this will represent this,
and this will represent that."
Coding. That is the paradox. As soon as we
code something, is it systemic anymore? At what level do we have to
go to in our thinking to maintain the systemic nature of it? For me,
there is not any new meaning we discover, rather it is something that
we have sort of forgotten and need to recover.
The question is then, how do we put it back
in the body? We look at how the system emerges naturally. We look at
how the system punctuates itself naturally. We look at how it goes
out of bounds and then re-balances itself naturally. That is holistic,
that is systemic. And I think this really is the next challenge for
NLP.
References:
Richard Bandler and
John Grinder, The Structure
of Magic I and II, Science
and Behaviour Books, Inc., Palo Alto, California, 1975 and
1976.
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity,
New York: E. P. Dutton,
1979.
Judith DeLozier and John Grinder,
Turtles All the Way Down:
Prerequisites to Personal Genius, 1077 Smith Grade, Bonny Doon, California, 95060:
Grinder, DeLozier & Associates 1987.
© Judith DeLozier, 1995
The Central London NLP Group was an independent NLP Practice and Support
Group that met every Tuesday for over 15 years. It was founded in 1991
by James Lawley, Penny Tompkins, Sandra Ridolfi and John Goldman. The NLP Group: Building Community with NLP is an article about its origin and the
history.