Learning about “Anchors and Anchoring” is an essential part of every basic NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) training. Unfortunately, most new students seem to learn that creating an anchor is a way of creating change, but this is not the case. Anchors do not cause change in the sense of doing something to revise unwanted wiring and patterning, or of installing something that is desired and new.

In NLP class, it is not uncommon to see a giggling student give another student’s arm a squeeze in a moment when something amusing has occurred. Although the squeezing student may actually have created an anchor on the arm of the the squeeze student, and although this anchor might be worth a giggle, there has been no actual change, other than to provoke the giggling. To effect any kind of change, the squeezer –the setter of the anchor–would have to do something with that anchor once it was created. Anchors are merely handles, or stabilizers, for states and experiences. They give us delayed access (slightly delayed, in the case of most anchors, because they tend to extinguish fairly fast whenever they are not kept active) to whatever states/experiences they are the anchors for.

For example, if someone properly anchors the experience called “confidence” by squeezing your arm in a moment when you are experiencing confidence, then we have an anchor for confidence. That state of confidence can be reactivated, or reaccessed, by firing the anchor, but unless it is combined with another state or experience, there is no “change-work” occurring.

An anchored state is an interesting but pointless phenomenon, unless it is used for something. An anchor is not the state being anchored. An anchor is not the resource being anchored. The anchor is a tool that gives the practitioner access to the state or resource, so that something can be done with it.

Having a tea bag, and even having it handily present, right there at your fingertips, does not actually make any tea. To make tea, you have to do something with the tea bag; you have to put it in the hot water, so that the tea is forced, by physics, to merge part of itself with the water. That is the change in this analogy.

Anchoring has only one purpose: to make it possible to combine things so that they stay combined. When anchors of any kind are “collapsed together,” the states that did not formerly have an association are fired together, and therefore wired together. That is change-work.

By Carl Buchheit

The mother’s family had left Poland and emigrated to the United States, fleeing the violent persecutions of Jewish citizens there. The constellation roles included representatives for the client, her mother, and her grandmother.

The grandmother immediately sank down and began looking longingly and sadly at a place on the floor. The client’s mother sat down next to her. The grandmother said she felt she was looking over the edge of something at some horror that she felt compelled to pay attention to. The facilitator intuited (from the history of the family and experience with other similar constellations) that the grandmother could be staring into a mass grave. All the grandmother’s emotional energy and devotion was focused on the bodies in the grave, making her not fully available for the living. This included her not being fully available for mothering her daughter, the client’s mother.

The grandmother indicated that she wanted to shield her daughter from the horror, and, at the same time, felt it was her responsibility always to remember the dead ones. She said that part of her wanted to join them there, as if by doing so she could save them from their fate. Unfortunately, her intense devotional remembrance was keeping the dead ones from passing on peacefully and could do nothing to change what had already happened. She was effectively keeping both herself and her daughter from fully participating in life, since, in honor of, her daughter was not fully living either.

The facilitator then had representatives lie down in the mass grave area. A spokes-representative for the dead ones said to the grandmother, “This is our fate, not yours.” There was no way the grandmother’s devotional attention, no matter how sincere and loving, could change their awful deaths. “Leave it with us,” said the dead one, for all of them.

The grandmother then felt she could relax her vigilance, and she spoke to each one of the dead ones, acknowledging what a great loss it was and her desire to remember. Once the dead were fully seen and acknowledged, one by one, they were able to rest peacefully, and the grandmother could leave the edge of the grave and rejoin the living. The grandmother was then able to be available to her daughter, the client’s mother, who was then able to be lovingly available for her own daughter, the client. She looked her daughter in the eyes as if for the first time and said, “I am your mother.  Now I see you.”

The client reported that her mother emailed unprompted the next day and said that somehow her usual empty feelings were turning into feelings of more fullness and that she was feeling “blessed and more and more connected to life.”

The facilitator began with two representatives, the client and “the one-who-raped.” The roles were done “blind,” meaning that neither representative knew what role they had. The client’s representative felt extremely anxious and then ashamed and at fault. The client informed the facilitator that during the rape experience she had been terrified, had lost all sense of volition, and had frozen up, unable to fight or strongly verbalize a protest against the other’s actions. The representative for the one-who-raped felt anger, disgust, and then shame. It soon became apparent that he was confused and seemed to be not fully aware that what he had done was considered rape.

The facilitator had the one-who-raped state what had happened so that it could be fully seen and acknowledged: “I took you because I wanted you. I wasn’t really looking for whether you wanted it or not.” At these words, the high anxiety the client’s representative was experiencing began to relax and release somewhat. After a few moments, the one-who-raped was then able to feel some compassion and sorrow, and he said, “I’m sorry for what my actions cost you.”

The facilitator then brought in a representative for the child. The client’s representative moved toward the child and said, “I was afraid, and I was angry at your father, so I gave you away. I see you now with love.” Eventually, both parents were able to stand next to each other, acknowledging their parenthood despite the original circumstances. What had happened had been clearly stated and seen for what it was, the consequences had been faced and acknowledged without blame, but with full responsibility. This enabled the pain and loss to be released. Both parents were then able to reach for the child who had suffered the loss of both of them in its life.

The next day, the client reported feeling immense emotional relief, a release of blame towards the father and towards herself, and more inner peace. The constellation had not erased what had happened, or made it “all better,” but had helped the client move through and complete a very painful experience that had become frozen in time so that now she could experience more joy and self-acceptance in her life.

In the last couple of years I have come to really appreciate these two words: “chreode” and “entelechy.” Each word is fabricated from Greek roots. “Chreode”-a very recent invention-was coined in the mid-20th century. The other word, “entelechy,” is also a little bit newish, but in a much older kind of way. In print, “entelechy” can be traced back to about the year 1600. I love these words. They communicate about ideas and experiences that are important to all of us humans.

Chreode is a neologism (meaning a “new word”) created by C.H. Waddington (1905 to 1975), a British biologist and geneticist. It is made from the Greek roots chre, meaning “it is necessary,” and hodos, meaning “route or path.” Chreode can be defined as “the path of what must be.” Nature seeks this path always, as it is the most stable, requires the lowest amount of energy, and presents is the least resistance to development along its way. It is the path of least resistance. Think of chreodes as grooves or channels; they allow our systems to operate with least energy and maximum efficiency, but they also trap us in paths of meaning and behavior that we may want to change, but which we simply lack the means or energy to get out of. If the groove is too deep, it’s hard to get out of it. “Almost there” doesn’t do it, because we slide back down the sides, back to the bottom of this “path that must be.”

Entelechy is derived from the Greek roots of “to have” and “perfection.” Aristotle uses the word to convey “the realization or complete expression of some function; the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality.” In various applied senses (apparently due to misconceptions of Aristotle’s meaning), entelechy is “that which gives perfection to anything; the informing spirit.”

We all seek our own version of entelechy, the “realization of potentiality.” When we succeed, this is very cool! But when we succeed in manifesting something, we can also get ourselves caught in unwanted chreodes, the seemingly un-revisable patterning that keeps running long after the good effects of our desired manifestation go from being positive to being incredibly limiting-as when the solution overstays its usefulness and becomes a new, apparently permanent problem. This is pretty much always a confusing development, because if it weren’t for the chreodic tendency of past solutions to keep ruining present successes, we would probably have many fewer present problems.

For those familiar with the Transformational NLP toolbox, two main questions may come to mind: “What would you like?” which is our way of beginning movement toward entelechy, and “What stops you?” When paired with proper physical calibration, “What stops you?” is our most high-speed chreode tracer. The art of good change-work is to create new outcomes and solutions that will not stabilize themselves into future limitations. The good news is, this is all quite learnable, and can be applied to ourselves and others equally.

Most of us are mostly inclined to assume that most of our actions and decisions, or at least most of our more private and intimate choices, are the result of some kind of free will process.  Or, if we can no longer convince ourselves of this, we at least want to assume that it is our inner patterning for making meaning and selecting behavioral options that is the source of most of what we decide and do.

One of the main presuppositions of NLP is, “Choice is better than no choice.”  We routinely assert that one of the objectives of good training in NLP is to expand the experience of having more choices on our “maps of reality.”  However, there are many other points of view, some of them quite elegant and compelling, which argue that this “free choice” frame is illusory and counter to the experience of happiness and well-being.

What interests me are some of the alternatives to Bert Hellinger’s immensely convenient concept/creation that we usually call “The Family Soul.”  Within Hellinger’s frame, descendents in families seek to take possession of the pain of ancestors because of motivation that is mainly based in three things: the emotion of love; the desire to assert innocence; and the need to avoid or deny guilt.  At NLP Marin, we have developed some remarkable ways to utilize family constellations, to reveal and revise the beautifully intended but pointless transgenerational suffering that flows naturally from these three primary needs.

Whereas Bert Hellinger’s model of transgenerational suffering involves descendant’s seeking to locate and heal the unresolved pain of ancestors, there is another viewpoint that maintains just the opposite.  This concept is usually summarized as “cellular memory.”  Within this frame of “cellular memory,” the unresolved problems of the ancestors ask the following generations to find solutions.  ‘Souvenir albums’ containing memories of unsurvived trauma and unresolved loss are handed down from one generation to the next for this purpose.  In this way, perhaps, our “creature consciousness” seeks to perfect its relationship with a threatening and dangerous physical universe.  Or, perhaps, the “preconscious collective” of our hominid ancestors demands that it’s future expression – in our time, in our lives – prepare a future paradise or promised land, in which pain, loss and death will threaten no more.

Still another point of view, this one popularized by several noted interpreters of “A Course In Miracles,” maintains that time is a “vast illusion.”  Within this point of view, which is vastly difficult to comprehend adequately, all of our experience – both physical and non-physical, both in time and beyond time – is an entrancing replay of events and choices that were determined at the moment of creation (of the universe).

So, considered in these very broad terms, some of our options seem to be: 1) we voluntarily suffer for our ancestors in an unworkable effort to correct their pain, so that this pain will not be able to reach us in time.  This is the Hellinger description based on the emotion of love.  2) That it is not love, but fear that directs us to recapitulate family suffering–generation upon generation.  Within this frame, DNA has direct control over our choices; it compels present conformity with past family calamity.  3) Everything is predetermined until we wake up from the trance of time and non-time altogether.  (It is important to note that within this frame, the process of dying and the experience of death do not actually help us understand anything more about what’s really going on.  In this frame life is an illusion and death doesn’t help.)

So, do we actually have free will or not?  As practitioners and teachers of NLP, all we can know for sure is that the only really important question is “What would you like?”

“Belief Blaster!”  “Limitation Annihilator!”  “Fear Destroyer”… these are the names of some typical, conventional “NLP change techniques.”  The grab bag of these “interventions,” which are mainly patterns that help one part of a person to more successfully defeat (annihilate!…crush! ..exterminate!) some other part of the very same person, is what conventional NLP is best known for.  For the most part, this kind of “frat rat” NLP stuff is perceived to be what NLP is, at least by the small part of the world that has even heard of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  So, may I say this simply: this kind of stuff, especially when offered without context, and with little or no education about the broader experience of being human, is just plain embarrassing.  It’s not that these “techniques” cannot be useful.  For the most part, they actually do work to produce a narrow range of internal processing revisions for which they are intended.  But again, absent context, this stuff is little more than junk.

When NLP was first being uncovered, disclosed, and developed, one of its main selling points was that it would allow someone with no experience working with others to–”magically”–replicate a substantial part of the skill and effectiveness of the eminent thinkers and practitioners who were the first exemplars for Bandler, Grinder, et al.  What this meant was that someone of adequate intelligence could behave like Virginia Satir, talk like Milton Ericson, and think like Gregory Bateson and Alfred Korsybski, without knowing anything about what these people actually knew about.  It was amazing, truly! The distillation and crystallization of that much wisdom and know-how were awesome.

The difficulty comes later.  Here’s an analogy: have you ever driven somewhere new, someplace unfamiliar to you, using only the GPS?  You fly to a new city, rent a car, fire up the GPS, and the procedure it offers allows you to execute brilliantly, going directly where the procedure will take you, arriving in good shape and on time, without ever knowing where you are, really, or what is around you.  Isn’t that strange? I ask people about this all the time. Many people have no trouble with this experience; they want to get where they need to get, and it matters not at all that they do not know where they are or, really, how they got there.

Of course, like most everyone else, I use this super-efficient, more-or-less reliable, GPS-guru approach to go somewhere new all the time. For example, I recently drove a rented car from Philadelphia to visit the battlefield monument in Gettysburg, PA. The “GPS Lady” took me right there efficiently, even exactly into the perfect parking lot.  But I had not looked at a real map before I left, so, although I was where I wanted to be, and hadn’t even been thrown into confusion by all the detours in downtown Gettysburg, I still could not feel where I was, except I was there, but where was that there at?  This became especially annoying through the afternoon, as I encountered more and more references to geography and communities of the surrounding counties that had some role in the unfolding of the three-day battle. So, I could learn that General Longstreet did such and such here, because the exhibit showed me that, but I could not extend my awareness and curiosity to step into what General Meade did when he moved from over there, to someplace that was off the map at the Visitors’ Center. Later, when I got to a big AAA map of Pennsylvania, rather than just the GPS set of instructions within a procedure, I could feel a whole lot more of what I had just been part of experiencing, and, for me, this was a much better feeling.  I could feel the surrounding territory, and I could have created my own procedure for how to get somewhere, a procedure based on my curiosity, rather than on the procedural expertise of the GPS programmers.

For me, this whole subject is about my preference for understanding context, for having adequate information (even if the “procedure” does not ask for more information), and especially about having good access to creative choice instead of pre-programmed procedure, however “expert” the programmers may be, or claim to be.  Imagine doing NLP changework using the “NLP GPS:”  ($129.99 on E-Z Pay!)  Just select the “technique” you want to do, then follow the instructions:  “Make a right turn at the next floor anchor; prepare to ask the Outcome Frame question printed on that card; stop here; ask the question; when the answer is spoken, press Continue to proceed to the next step……etc.” Horrifyingly, this actually is how NLP actually is in most places.  The NLP practitioner is not a really a practitioner; they have almost no original perception or imagination, or uniquely contributing sense of their participation in the longer, wider scope of human unfolding and fulfillment.. They are merely following the GPS’s instructions, trusting the famous name who made the program up, perhaps years before.  They are not Practitioners; they are technicians, following technical procedures, according to specifications.

To me, this is a nightmare.  We do not need more well-trained technicians in this field.  We need technically competent practitioners who live and work with wisdom and heart–with interest in and respect for the complicated business of human experience.  Wisdom and heart can be modeled and taught, and, to some extent, they can even be learned and developed in the presence of good teachers, over time.  But they cannot be learned simply by following the step-by-step, context-less instructions that come from the GPS.

Carl Buchheit NLP Marin 2010

When clients come into the NLP practitioner’s office, they often describe panic attacks in exactly this way: a sudden episode of intense fear that develops for no apparent reason. The attacks are always frightening, and often they overwhelm the client’s capacity to deal with everything that has become connected with the “attack” experience–people, places, activities, etc. By the time they come in, clients are usually well into the process of adapting to and hoping to continue to tolerate severe restrictions on their freedom of action and movement. Even worse, for most people, the apparently mysterious nature of “panic for no reason” has been replaced by less mysterious, more predictable, but nearly arbitrary associations between their experience of panic and being in some specific activity or environment–such as driving on a bridge, or on a roadway with no shoulder area, or on any kind of freeway.  Again, these associations, between panic and situation A, or panic and activity B in condition C, etc., are very nearly arbitrary. What were once merely neural associations (“neurons that fire together, wire together”) evolve and generalize to become cognitive understandings, e.g., “I panic because I drive on the bridge.” These disturbing generalizations can provide a certain kind of comfort, they make “panic” a predictable and, therefore, avoidable experience. (“I’m not crazy, I’m just afraid of bridges; when I stay away from bridges, I’m OK.”)

Alas, one of the main tendencies of our “neural legacy” safety patterning is to generalize the experience of fear. Again, our creature neurology does not think or speak, but if it did, it would say something like: “If x amount of fear and panic makes my organism safe, then surely 3x amount of fear and panic will make it at least three times safer! OK, let’s generalize this thing!!!  What else is [even a little bit] similar to what we are already panicking about? Let’s panic about that TOO.  Excellent!!!  SAFER, SAFER, SAFER!!!” Of course, the human, who is mostly on the receiving end of this good intention, becomes more and more terrified about more and more different things and situations. The human is in a difficult spot when the brain learns to associate quantity and intensity of fear with degree of safety.

Eventually, the person begins to panic about the possibility of panicking–they are afraid that they will be afraid. “What if I panic while I’m driving!?” “What if I panic while I’m in the meeting!?” “What if I panic while I’m on the bridge (…in the plane, at the party, in the city, too far from my house, too far from my town, etc.)?  After a time of trying to think and reason themselves out of what their brain is providing for them (i.e., safety through fear), the client is so demoralized and bewildered that fear of fear and panic about panicking are the experiences that make the most sense, that seem to be most understandable and rational, and are, therefore, very highly valued. This development makes things worse for the client, in terms of their being able to find their way to more secure experience in their world.

For the Transformational NLP Practitioner, it is vital to stay connected with the awareness that “no apparent reason” is not the same as no reason at all. In fact, once the representational structure and belief-level underpinnings of panic attacks are adequately and accurately unpacked, it is not uncommon for a person with this presenting issue to begin a conversation with, “I just want everything to be the way that it was.” As a Transformational NLP Practitioner, one of the first maneuvers one has to make is to build rapport with the parts or aspects of the client’s consciousness that are creating the panic, respecting the intended positive outcome of the panic attack experiences, while simultaneously maintaining rapport with the client’s conscious self that is, of course, massively out of rapport with the panic attacks–that is terrified of them.

To resolve this, a practitioner’s first internal questions are always, “How is this experience organized? How is this person’s brain doing this? How is it generating a panic response, a full blown, adrenaline based freeze/flight/fight reaction–something normally reserved for seriously dangerous situations (lions, and tigers, and bears!)  to something that “ought to be” innocuous or easily manageable (bridges, and tunnels, and walking the dog!).

In NLP terms, the programming language of the brain, the source code for human reality, is mainly a series of pictures (Visuals or V’s), sounds (Auditory representations or A’s) and feeling responses (Kinesthetic representations or K’s). In order to help someone begin to mitigate or remove the patterning for a panic reaction, we need to know what, literally, the person’s brain is looking at and/or listening to in their mind’s other-than-conscious eyes and ears.  These are what cause the panic reaction, nothing else, and these are almost always representational imprints from long ago and far away. The triggers are proximate in the client’s current world (the bridge, tunnel, etc.), but the dark magic of the panic itself is usually caused by learning from far, far away. The underlying practitioner question is, as always, “What are the V’s and A’s that are making these very negative K’s?”

When tracking down the original imprinting by stabilizing and unpacking eye accesses, we, as practitioners, are looking for imprints that have an isomorphic structure (same shape and feel) as the unwanted present state. So, here our work also involves making the elements of the original imprint–that were worth being terrified about–conscious for the client, thus normalizing the panicky feelings as we disconnect all of the past learning from the current trigger(s).

Once the literal content of the earlier imprinted learning becomes available, the essential re-frame is simply: “If I were looking at that on the inside every time I was (on a bridge, in a tunnel, out for a walk, driving), I would be panicking also.” This normalizing of the panic experience introduces the idea that the fear is actually a sensible reaction to specific internal events–the other-than-conscious internal representations–which have continued to operate within the client’s unconscious system.

Why fear processes continue far beyond their usefulness is a subject for another article–for many articles, actually. For example, whose points of perception–whose eyes, for instance–are being used to generate the client’s out-of-date, apparently spurious, but still panic-worthy representations? Clients will frequently age-regress into their parents’, or even their grandparents’ experience.  These issues of identity, loyalty, and trans-generational belonging go far beyond the relatively simply VAKOG sequencing of strategy-level work with fear and panic issues.

Carl Buchheit NLP Marin 2011

Q:       In your 30 years’ experience working with people, have you seen any common themes that cause people to struggle with eating properly?

Carl:   Of all the things that human beings can reach for when they’re looking for something to change their state or feel better, or adjust their experience in life, food is by far the best thing to reach for.  Food reliably produces chemical changes, it is legal and the effects are reversible.  What I’ve noticed more and more among people who reach for food when they don’t want to, is that it’s the only good way they have of reaching for life.

Q:       So how exactly is reaching for that pint of Ben & Jerry’s similar to reaching for life?

C:        When we get cut off from something in ourselves that we instinctively know to be valuable or important for us, then we reach for life in some other way.  People will reach for life in the form of money, or the experience of another person in a relationship of some kind.  They’ll reach for food, they’ll reach for drugs, they’ll reach for alcohol.  They’ll reach for all kinds of things when they can’t, or for some reason won’t, reach for life itself.

Food is an excellent way to reach for life when we’re not reaching some other way.  So it’s part of a high level belief structure about food that arches over the day to day context of our lives.  Down at the nitty gritty level where you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with a container of Ben & Jerry‘s at 1:30 in the morning, there’s something else in play… our creature’s nervous system trying to find the best offer it can for itself in that moment.

Q:       So there I am, eyeball-to-eyeball with the pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  Is there anything useful that I could be thinking or doing to avoid gorging on the ice cream that sits before me?

C:        Thinking about it almost never helps.  In fact, once we’re thinking about it then we might as well just go get the container of ice cream, pull the lid off and throw that lid away – you will not need that lid again.  So we don’t want to be thinking about it.  We want to have something that automatically happens for us which means a revision of patterning for behavior, for safety, for comfort, for security.

This is an example of when we are in conflict with ourselves –one part of us wants to eat that ice cream (the part that walked you over to the fridge) and another part really wants to not eat the ice cream. So, if one part of us wins in the conflict, then who is it exactly that wins?

Whenever we eat something that we don’t want, it’s never a complete loss because obviously some part of us wants to eat it, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing that.  So it makes working with it a little bit complicated and, at the same time, it can be made more straightforward.  If we have a better relationship with the “I” who would like to eat properly, then it’s easier to do what we want.

Q:       What’s the ideal relationship one should have with food?

People frequently come into my office and say, “I want to change my relationship with food.”  This is really common parlance.  It’s not that it’s inaccurate or not useful, but I almost always seek to refine the wording so that it’s not about relationship.  What they need to be able to do is eat properly and not have a relationship with their food.  They should just have food choices so that they can eat and enjoy eating rather than having to revise a relationship with food.  If they want a relationship with their food, then they should probably do relationship counseling and not counseling about eating.

Q:       Some people eats very sensibly and always knows when to stop.  They never say, “I ate too much.”  What’s going on for them?

C:                The odds are extremely high that they’re basing their food choices and their portion choices on how their body feels rather than on the emotional content of their previous or upcoming life experience.  The people who eat naturally and stay slender usually have a way of selecting food by checking whether eating this much of this kind of food is going to feel as good in their body two hours from now it  feels right now, not having eaten the food yet.

Q:       So they are able to make smart eating choices based on how their body feels?

They look at the food and say, “Huh, if I eat this food, how will I be in two hours?  Will I feel worse or better than I feel now?”  If the answer is, “I’ll feel as good or better than I feel now,” then they go ahead and eat the food.  And if they’re not going to feel better in 2 hours, then they don’t eat the food.  Connirae Andreas calls this the Naturally Slender Eating Strategy.

Now how do they do that?  It’s simple.  It’s like asking someone, “Would you rather have someone snap you in the arm with a rubber band, or would you rather have them not do that?”  It’s not a dilemma.  It’s an easy choice.  Would I rather feel really bad in a little while or would I rather feel good in a little while?  That choice only happens when we don’t have to process the emotional content of our lives in order to get a forkful of something for nutritional and enjoyment purposes.

Q:       Do people learn the Naturally Slender Eating Strategy or are they just wired that way?

C:        Some people are just wired that way.  They just do that naturally and spontaneously.  It wouldn’t occur to them to do anything else.  If you said to one of these people, “Okay, before you order your food, would you please take a moment and review the worst moments of 7^th Grade, relive them as realistically as possible, call forth all of that old pain and self doubt and once it’s maximally there, would you please place an order for something that seems to have an equal amount of significance, and eat it all as fast as you can.”  (Which is how most of us choose food most of the time.)  If we tried to teach them to use that 7^th Grade technique, they would think it was funny and stupid.  Why would anyone want to do that?

Q:       Is the Naturally Slender Eating Strategy something that can be taught to others?

C:        Yes, there are ways of training our nervous system, our reptile/mammal neurology – especially the part that overlaps with our human 7^th Grade neurology – to simply move toward better body feelings and make that the main criterion.  It’s easy to learn, and it’s not learned by reading about it.  It’s actually learned by evoking and using the internal sense of body sensation, body well being, pictures and sounds.  There are ways of learning that and having one “install” it in oneself so that we actually acquire it.  Then it just runs automatically.

Carl Buchheit  NLP Marin 2010

One of the really important reasons this is still happening for us humans is that, courtesy of creative evolution, we all have more than one brain, and each of them has a different set of instructions and descriptions about what well-being really is.  A simplistic but still decent analogy is the issue of “legacy” hardware and software that plagues the computer world.  Computer designers and engineers are forever faced with the job of providing their end-users with better tools (more elegance, reliability and functionality, for example) while still making sure that all of the old software can still work with and through the newer hardware designs.

Mother Nature has had a similar task with us humans:  how to add functionality, adaptability, and ease-of-use without disinheriting everything that came before, in terms of our neurobiology.  The result is that nature always builds new brain components and functions on top of (literally, on top of) whatever the processes of interactive evolution have already perfected across eons of time.  As a result of this rather conservative approach to designing our hardware and inner software, all of us have a least four brains, and each of the four seems to have its own orientation, goals, and success indicators.

Courtesy of the neurophysiologists and their new and amazing brain investigation technologies (scanners of various kinds), we can observe our four different brains at work.

The First Brain

First and oldest is the brain with the most seniority—our Reptile Brain.  It is not much changed in function from that of the average garden lizard.  It is responsible for the basics of physical survival—heart beat, blood pressure, respiration, etc.  (An old neuroscientist joke says that the Reptile Brain is responsible for the “4 F’s”—Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing…..and reproduction.)

The Second Brain

The Old Mammal Brain.  A later development that is on top of around the Reptile, our Old Mammal Brain adds in a wonderful capacity to generate strong emotions, and to use these emotions to promote creature-level safety and well being.  The additions of greater emotional range give the creature that has them even stronger drivers to move toward or away from conditions and experiences that will affect overall survival.

Note:  At NLP Marin, we refer to the First and Second Brains, collectively, as our Critter Brain.  It is not human, and it does not operate with truly human criteria.  It has no attention to things like happiness, fulfillment, justice, truth or beauty.  It works to fulfill the Four F’s, and that’s about it.

The Third Brain

Our third brain is our Primate neurology.  It occupies a large part of the top and back of the inside of our heads.  The Primate brain is very sophisticated, with a wonderful capacity to understand the realities and rules of community—the so-called primate dominance dynamics.  Compared with us humans, however, the Primate brain lacks much inertest in or capacity to make meaning about abstractions, values, and long periods of time.  It is the brain of a remarkable ape, but an ape that is not concerned with 20 year plans about anything.

The Fourth Brain—the Human Brain

This is the newest and most human part of us, neurologically speaking—our frontal and pre-frontal lobes.  These are the reasons we have foreheads that are vertical instead of slanted.  This Fourth Brain, especially their pre-frontal aspects (located immediately on the other side of our foreheads) are where the “I-ness” of us resides.  If life damages part of our motor cortex or a speech center, farther back in our heads, then we may have impaired movement or speech, but we are still “us.”  Damage to the pre-frontals, however, changes who we are and how we create meaning in the world.  Moreover, there are some who say that our pre-frontal lobes are one of our main connections into whatever it is that we are part of in terms of non-physical reality.

All of four brains are operating constantly.  They rely on each other and usually coordinate themselves magnificently.  There are a few bugs in the interfaces, however, and these bits of bad programming can cause us huge difficulties as humans.

Some of the biggest bugs in our multiple brains

Bug #1

The main driver for the Critter Brain is fear, with the goal of survival, and with no attention to changing anything that has already become associated with this experience of survival.  In complete contrast, the main driver for the Human Brain is love, with goals of learning and, basically, nothing but change.  Consequence:  our Human is always imagining things being different and better, while our Critter simultaneously values it all staying the same, especially if we are not dead yet (see Bug #3, below).

Bug #2

The Critter Brain does not deal in time, at least not in Human time.  The Critter does a truly good job of being here now.  For the Critter, there is meal time and nap time, but not a life-time.  Consequence:  the Critter will happily run hugely unproductive or damaging patterning forever.  For the Critter, forever is just for-now.

Bug #3

The Critter has only one success indicator it uses to know if it is doing a good job for us.  The Critter cannot actually speak, but this one success indicator comes down to a simple question, “Are we dead yet?”  If the answer is no, then the Critter gives itself full marks, gold stars, and many thumbs up for doing a great job.  The Human who is sort of riding along on top might be in life agony—doing their third failed business or fourth alcoholic marriage, for example, and the Critter will regard this as continuing a high-quality outcome.  After all, these difficult or tragic experiences are no trouble for the Critter.  It values a heart that beats; it has no attention to whether or not that heart is open or closed in more non-physical terms.

Whether our heart is open or closed, for example, is well above the Critter Brain’s pay grade.  It does not know how to make meaning at this level.  It can only create associations, and if a “broken heart” becomes associated with not-having-died, then the Critter will value “broken-heartedness” highly, and it will promote and foment the experience throughout the Human’s life.  The more the Human tries to change things, the more the Critter operates to set them back to original conditions, to the ones with the most “survival value”—the experiences that we learned to survive and that, unfortunately for us humans, our Critter Brains then associated with continued survival.  And because the Critter Brain is the one that generates most emotions, it knows how to create the feelings within us that will allow it get its way.  Bug #3 is a serious bug indeed.

About thirty years ago, the founders of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) invented a description for their then newly synthesizing discipline, a new way of understanding and changing human experience.  They described NLP as “the study of the structure of human experience and human excellence.”  The important word here is “structure.”  NLP is a terrifically good toolbox for helping us to understand how we create and maintain our experience as humans.  The question that usually gets a session of  NLP-based change work rolling is, “What would you like?”  NLP change work is designed to locate and revise just exactly those kinds of Critter/Human communication problems that generate almost all of our unwanted experiences, the ones that go in the unwanted-yet-impossible-to-stop-or change category.

And working with the NLP toolbox promotes Critter/Human coordination and harmony.  Our goal is to have what we want, based on our most truly human desires and standards, and to do so in actual present time.  Neuro-Linguistic Programming can do this superbly well because it speaks English (or another language) to the Human Brain, but it speaks to the Critter Brain in the programming language of creature neurology, which is a language not of words, but of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes.  It’s like plugging a keyboard into the Critter wiring.  When we reprogram or re-pattern the Critter in its own programming language, it accepts updates easily and, if desired, permanently.

In fact, at NLP Marin, we describe NLP as “a toolbox to help our creature neurology to better support our most human and spiritual goals.”

© 2006 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

“What is stopping you?” is a question used world-wide in coaching endeavors. It is most often posed in an effort to assist the client to identify the internal and external barriers they are facing as they contemplate making a change in their life. There are several problems with that question when posed in that language and for the purpose of assisting a client to change.

First of all, by adding the “p-ing” to the verb “stop”, the action of “stopping” continues into the present. So that the only answer the client can give you is the present moment, conscious processing of the information that they are aware of. The problem with most beliefs, however, is that we are not conscious of them. We just believe them to be true. So asking someone’s conscious mind to give you an answer about how their other-than-conscious process is structured is essentially asking the least informed piece of their universe for help.  This is not the most useful way to illuminate unconscious process. That is simply the nature of unconscious beliefs – we are not conscious of what they are.  Most of the time, this is actually useful, because having to be consciously aware of the nearly arbitrary nature of the myriad of beliefs that generate our experience would completely overwhelm our limited amount of conscious attention.

Transformational NLP is a methodology for–among other things–assisting the creature self, or our creature wiring, to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals.

In Transformational NLP, we use a working premise that thought has structure. It has a language or, if you would, a code. That code is made up of internal pictures (Visual, or V’s), tonal sounds and digital soundtracks of content (Auditory, or A’s), smells and taste sensation (Olfactory/Gustatory accesses, or O/G’s) and feelings – both physical body and emotional (Kinesthetic accesses or K’s). These internal patterns of VAKOG’s get triggered and go by at hyper speed in patterns which create meaning for humans. An external experience of wet and cold might be attached to the meaning “humiliation” if it is linked to VAKOG’s of the time our older brother and his friends threw a bucket of water on us and laughed, or it might be experienced as meaning “pleasure” if it triggers an internal VAKOG pattern of going skiing (assuming we enjoy that activity).

For example, the purely sensory experience of being “wet and cold” has no meaning by itself. It is just a set of sensations.  It has no meaning until we link it with other internal representations–something remembered or imagined–that can turn “wet and cold” into “fun with snow” or “miserable waiting for a bus in the rain.”

Human beings are meaning making machines. But it is not the external or triggering experience that creates the meaning, it is the internal pattern of VAKOG that creates the meaning. It is the internal pattern of VAKOG that creates belief. In essence, the language – or code – in which our brain has written our beliefs is combinations of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes– VAKOG. It is the neurological links between a stored representation (often a memory) and a feeling (both emotional and body sensation) that give experience meaning. Does the feeling of wet and cold link neurologically to a stored picture of boys throwing a bucket of cold water, the stored memory sound track of being laughed at, and a feeling – muscular and chemical response – that is unpleasant, or does it link to a stored picture of skiing, a shushing sound, and a pleasant feeling?

As Transformational NLP practitioners, when a client describes an experience they are having that they do not want, the question we are asking inside ourselves is: “What are the V’s and A’s that are making those K’s-the unwanted, limiting feelings?” In other words, what internal pictures and auditory tracks is the client running–outside of any conscious awareness–that are triggering the feelings that the client is experiencing? What is the internal code that is giving their external or lived experience this unwanted, un-resourceful meaning? In Transformational NLP, we don’t want generalizations or interpretations from the conscious mind, we are after the literal content of those internal representations that are running out of conscious awareness.

These can be uncovered by tracking how and where the client’s eyes move as the person’s unconscious accesses those representations.

(It is not the purpose of this article to elucidate exactly how to track and unpack eye accessing cues. However, as a note to more experienced practitioners let’s just point out that the question “What stops you?” provides far more useful physiological answers than the question “What is stopping you?”)

The brain stores those internal representations in its impression of the external, 3-D space around our bodies.  The brain literally looks at its recording of apparently invisible internal pictures, or listens to apparently silent internal sound recordings, etc., as it is processing. Some of the patterns that feel most limiting to the human adult were often created by a very young “creature self” in an effort to ensure survival. If a child experienced a traumatic event, and then decided–all at once or over time– “I am worthless,” and then survived the situation, that child’s creature self will code for the successful survival. Consequently, the experiences that were dangerous or threatening become labeled as necessary for continuing survival, “survival” being the creature self’s highest rating for well-being.  As a simple example, if the child learns to survive terribly painful shame, then the experience of shame will become a necessary component of that person’s on-going experience of safety and survival.  Of course, this will be completely contradictory to what the individual consciously wants to experience in life.  This disparity–between the imperative of creature-level survival and the criteria for human happiness and well-being–is what makes us feel most hopeless, as if there were something defective within us at a really, really basic level.  The good and bad news is that there is nothing really wrong with us, it is just the conflicts within our patterning for well-being that create the apparent disconnects and (using the word informally) craziness.

Moreover, the creature self runs its patterning at light speed, so to speak, the more deliberate and slow-paced human aspects of our systems usually have no idea what is going on.  We will tend to make sense and well-ordered meaning of things by generalizing decisions about ourselves and the world in we which we live and operate.  These decisions that help us make sense of things, some of which are nearly randomly installed, are called beliefs, and these beliefs then function to add whole new layers of mysterious stabilization to our already highly stable, unwanted patterns of behavior and experience.

NLP is a methodology for assisting creature self, or creature wiring to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals. Patterns (“strategies” in NLP-speak) of VAKOG that create beliefs such as “I am worthless” cause immense pain and limitation for adult human, but to truly re-solve those patterns we must hold them as life-giving interventions that contain hidden intended positive outcomes. The art of it is to hold them not as patterns to be defeated, crushed, or forcibly removed, but to understand that we do not have to risk our self-preservation in order to learn or grow.

When representations are unpacked, they most often reveal literal content about important or traumatic events from the person’s factual past. Sometimes, what we learn is revealed more metaphorically, as compilations or even representations from someone else’s past (e.g. their mother, father, or other ancestor with whom they are identified and whose experience they somehow downloaded). These representations can get quite cosmic, but they are still created in  real time, right now, in the VAKOG code of human experience.

Carl Buchheit  NLP Marin 2010

Human skulls house a brain which has distinctive parts, some dedicated to reptilian survival, and some apparently directed toward spiritual evolution, namely the pre-frontal cortex. These two purposes can appear to be in conflict and that conflict, or rather that illusion of conflict, seems to cause pain and suffering. Transformational NLP is a methodology for assisting creature self, or creature wiring, to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals.

Our creature brain, (the reptilian brain is found in the brain stem and hind brain plus its newer but still ancient cousin, the paleo-mammalian brain) is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze instincts, and is mainly concerned with ensuring our physical survival.  This brain does not know or care about the quality of our experience, only that we survive it, whatever it happens to be.  Although it probably is not conscious in the human sense, and although it has no thoughts and lacks a speech center with which to voice anything, it can be said to be constantly asking one and only one question, “Are we dead yet?” If it finds that we have survived an experience, no matter how difficult, painful, or unrewarding, it will immediately code that experience as survivable, and therefore as part of its overall potential for survival. The critter brain operates to attract and stabilize the presence of that which threatens it, but which it has associated with survival.  It will then attract and re-create these situations for the rest or our lives.

For example, a child growing up in an abusive household might find his survival, his self preservation, dependent on how well he can stay invisible, and he would then create a whole set of beliefs such as “I am worthless” in order to be as invisible as possible. Those beliefs will continue to run out of conscious awareness as that child becomes an adult and the reason for being invisible is long past. Since we are committed to maintaining the coherence and constancy of our beliefs (ordinarily a good thing as it prevents us from feeling and acting crazy), that person will unconsciously recreate conditions of abuse in his adult life to support the belief “I am worthless.” Thus we get the observable phenomenon that people who were physically abused as children often partner with abusive people as adults.

This is a survival pattern – an experience we learn to survive that becomes the condition upon which continued survival depends, for the creature itself. Being invisible and believing “I am worthless” is coded as a “success” for the parts of that person in charge of survival.The parts of ourselves that are in charge of survival do not know – or want to know – any other way. Believing “I am worthless” and remaining not visible worked so well for the child that when the question “Am I dead yet?” gets asked by the creature self, we can unequivocally state “No” and proceed to carry on running the survival pattern.

Our human self is generally out of rapport with this whole process. The human wants to experience love, and joy and belonging, not continue to experience the worst of the experiences it has ever learned to survive.

The parts of us that create experience – even experience which we would think of as “negative” or undesirable –  always, always, always have an intended positive outcome for the experience they are creating. In this case the recreation of a “negative” experience has the intended positive outcome of self preservation. Parts of us may choose to re-experience fear, humiliation, or worthlessness because our creature self knows that this is guaranteed survival.

Our whole beautifully integrated system tends to default to the evolutionary wisdom of the creature self which is based on the question, “Are we dead yet?” If we’re not, then whatever that organism is experiencing is regarded as extremely workable. Again, the human gets very much out of rapport with that. When the human gets out of rapport with that process – what the human experiences as suffering, with a small “s”, and the creature/self experiences as survival, or self preservation, then we have a situation – there is an apparent dilemma or conflict that personal development is at odds with their entire system’s instincts towards self preservation.

This situation begins to explain why people sabotage themselves. When they make wonderful and beautiful changes in their lives, creature consciousness does not yet have this coded as survivable. So it will seek to restore what it knows it can survive, even if other parts of the self are out of rapport with that. The creature does not know that it is safe to endure happiness.

So we’ve got survival/self-preservational patterning that has an intended positive outcome (IPO) and this can feel like it’s in conflict with other parts of us who want to experience joy and harmony and growth. The first task of Transformational NLP is then to understand that this is not actually a dilemma; we do not have to risk our self preservation in order to learn or grow. And we do not have to defeat our self preservation in order to learn or grow.

Many disciplines would ask us to overcome, to overpower the creature self, in service of the human, in service of the learning and growing. If we could only defeat our instincts towards self preservation we could be more alive and well. Unfortunately for us, or fortunately for us, the self-preservational patterning has millions of years of perfection in it and it basically says to us, “Just try it.” And when we try it, we generally fail or we create a mess, because the so called “problem” (which is actually a successful survival strategy) ceases to operate in context A where we’ve been working on overpowering it, and it moves over to context W and re-erupts over there.

Alas, self preservation seems to be directly opposed to personal growth or development or learning – bummer!

The operation of self-preservational instinct has a small scale daily, weekly, monthly, yearly expression of the patterns of behavior and meaning that continue even when they’re not wanted at all, by the human part of us. The underlying question of all successful changework then has to be: “What is the intended positive outcome of all that unwanted patterning?” At the creature level, it’s self preservation, but there can also be other layers, for example involving love and belonging in family systems.

By including the self-preservational instinct, by explicitly including the intended positive outcome of survival while separating out the method by which that is being achieved, we can begin to work with (not “work through”) that patterning and we can begin to create congruence between the different aspects of ourselves.

For lasting change to happen, our creature-self must be explicitly valued; it must not only be  respected but that respect must be so palpable that this creature mind can register that it is safe, undamaged, and whole. (We should note that this is very far from the usual, basically pointless, “peak performance coach” chatter about “destroying your lizard brain” and “murdering our monkey mind.”) We must allow our creature-self to make its contributions according to its programming, rather than our trying to fight that programming, or rather than trying to make it do something else–trying to force it to be a different operating system that produces different outcomes (aka experience) for us.  When we communicate respectfully with both our future-self and our more ancient self, allowing each to contribute on its own terms, we learn to adapt through choice to effectively produce more of the experience we would like. We begin to teach the creature brain how to survive in conditions that also and perfectly support those more “advanced” or “spiritual” aspects of our complex humanity.

To not get caught up in the illusions of conflict of this apparent dilemma, where self-preservation seems to conflict with personal and spiritual evolution, we humans must learn to not distort or improperly generalize our creature-level feeling signals. We all have some learning to do, so that our feelings are signals and communications, rather than indications of low-ranking cosmic status, or of the snares and traps set for us by a corrupt, functionally evil ego.  To me, most all of this other stuff seems to be basically an entertainment device.  We actually do know what we’re doing, and part of what we are all refining is that art of avoiding inappropriate self-preservation reactions. We really can learn to respectfully, and nearly, instinctively, re-coordinate and choose the most useful combination of physically safe and spiritually beneficial choices.  We are all getting the hang of this. It is actually the most natural thing in the world!

Carl Buchheit

by Carl Buchheit

Part the First

Marin-style NLP has always been something that is difficult to characterize, especially when it comes to explaining how it is different. It has much in common with conventional NLP, yet it is tremendously not-like-that at the same time. So, from time to time I would like to share a little with you about where our forms of this wonderful work come from.

Their foundation is solidly in the amazing work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s. After all, even one of our Holographic NLP-level presuppositions is: “No matter how cosmic it gets, it’s still all V’s, A’s and K’s.” We never get too far away from this awareness, and when we do we return to it pretty quickly.

Although it is based in the NLP of the 1970s (what Robert Dilts calls “1st generation NLP), Marin NLP is not about techniques and procedures for techniques. Marin NLP is greatly filtered through my (Carl’s) experience of Dr. Jonathan Rice. Jonathan was my main teacher. He was the only one of Richard and John’s early students to be a credentialed therapist and Ph.D. psychologist. Jonathan added 1970s NLP into the work he was already doing with his clients in his practice in Carmel, just down the road from Santa Cruz. He studied with and stayed around John and Richard not because of their great charm, but because he watched them get results with people that were beyond what he knew how to do. However, Jonathan did not throw away his training and experience as a psychologist.

“Jonathan-style NLP” is heavy on attention to hypnotic language, elegant use of the outcome frame, and close calibration of physiology—especially!!—physiology. Jonathan was determined to teach himself to use Richard and John’s remarkable discoveries about accessing cues to observe and understand the structure of his own clients’ experience. Jonathan never stopped refining and extending this part of the NLP model. For example, the “what stops you” question is something we owe in great part to Jonathan’s persistence and creativity. In the earliest day’s, “what stops you?” was asked for information about content (as in, “Just ask the question and write down what they say”), not for the representational physiology of unconscious safety patterning. “What are the V’s and A’s that are making the K’s?” is Jonathan’s question also. (He didn’t remember saying it, but he thought it was a great one when I brought it up, years later.)

“Jonathan-style NLP” is also something that is usually done seated, not standing, and it expects the practitioner to improvise and constantly adapt, so that no two sessions are identical, and the techniques, if they can be called that, are generally hidden in the flow of life-revising rapport. Moreover, the practitioner seeks to serve the client, not to impress him or her with the practitioner’s amazing personal power. This should all be instantly and hugely recognizable to our NLP Marin students.

I spent years switched with Jonathan. Anyone who knows Jon can sense this in me, any time I am teaching or working with clients. I am greatly indebted to him.

“From Intended Positive Outcomes to IPO’s”

By Carl Buchheit

In the spring of 1979, when I first encountered the very new field of knowledge called NLP, I was immensely relieved to find within it a wonderful “presupposition” about human experience:

“All behavior has an intended positive outcome,”

(which was/is also stated as)

“Behind every behavior is an intended positive outcome.”

From here in 2008, almost thirty years later, I don’t remember if this statement about intended positives was formalized yet, as a presupposition, or even if “The Presuppositions of NLP” existed in codified form. I heard that the idea seemed to come from John and Richard’s exploration of the work of Virginia Satir, and I remember thinking, “Virginia Satir, whoever you are….way to go!”

All by itself, this one line about intended positives was enough to make it worth my while to learn a lot more about NLP. It directly condensed an entire worldview into seven or eight words. Even better, the idea gave all of us human beings credit for knowing what we are doing—even though our lives are so often so weirdly sad and compellingly hopeless. The presupposition resonated persistently with a thought that had appeared in my mind, elastic and sticky, some years before: “Being human is not a fallen condition!”

For years, I had been becoming increasingly cranky with a variety of “growth” methods and “spiritual” movements in which the main order of business was “purification” of some sort. It was as if the short-format version of these schools was, “Welcome to physical reality. Big mistake! Now, here’s how to recover and become worthy of something better.” There was something so intrinsically and intensely disrespectful about this that I really couldn’t help but think, “That has got to be nuts.”

During this time, I was also still voraciously consuming the work of Jane Roberts and her co-conspirator, the channeled entity, Seth. Jane’s writing was about “the eternal validity of the soul,” but what came through equally strongly was the intense “validity” of physical experience. Years before, Seth/Jane had flattened me with the line, “Within your physical atoms, the origins of all consciousness still sing.” Jane often wrote about the amazing creativity that goes into the achievement of being “securely couched” in physical reality. Since that’s pretty much where I happened to be noticing myself securely couched at the time, I thought that was great.

So, we might begin to imagine my dismay as I discovered that much of the NLP world, which I would come to regard as the place where “they” do conventional NLP, didn’t take the frame of intended positives all that seriously. It was more like, “Behind every behavior there is an intended positive outcome, except for….(except for when the person’s life is too awful….except for when they had really cruel parents….except for when they were misdiagnosed in the second grade….except for when, surely, they have nothing to do with what’s gone so wrong….except for, essentially, they are—surely—the victim, not the source, of their experience”) Out of this kind of nonsense have come “change patterns” that are beyond ugly, “techniques” with names like “Belief Crusher” and “Parts Annihilator,” and so on, and on, in the ceaseless, in-bred plague of “techniques” that is what NLP is for most of the world.

I have purposefully made a completely hardball interpretation of Intended Positive Outcomes the foundation of our Marin-style NLP. I have even extended the presupposition just a little: “All behavior, and all experiences, have intended positive outcomes—no exceptions, ever.” For me, this presupposition is the essential reframe that NLP offers the world. It is an important and powerful assertion. It is far more important than telling people about cybernetic this-and-that, for example. It is the idea that sets us apart.

Because it preserves our proper dignity as conscious beings, by requiring respect for the legacy of our personal ecology, the hardball IPO frame (somewhere I began to abbreviate Intended Positive Outcomes into the acronym IPO’s) hugely eases the experience and processes of change. It allows us all to begin from where we are, without having to pour energy into fighting where we’ve already been.

By adhering to the universal validity of IPO’s, we have been able grow the unique expression that is NLP, Marin-style. Our forms of NLP, so fundamentally rooted in the amazing work of Bandler, Grinder, Robert Dilts, Jonathan Rice, and many wonderful others, yet so completely different in tone, are able to further the soul’s fulfillment without dishonoring the life’s intentions. And that is just the beginning of the story.

By Carl Buchheit

To recap:

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

7. That now is the only time there is.

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

Our brain’s main function is to filter out everything that doesn’t fit its own ideas about what fits with its ideas. Consequently, it is always very busy not noticing things. However, the good result of this is that it provides us with a stable, more-or-less predictable world in which to live.

To make the experience of being human even more fun, the older, most reliable parts of our brains—our creature brains, which don’t even know that they are parts of human beings—have only one important success indicator, one way to tell if they are doing a good job. This part of the brain doesn’t think, analyze, create, synthesize or talk. It is simply there to establish and maintain associations between this and that. It doesn’t care what this and that are, as long as the associations are intact. Thus, it does not care about the content of our human experience; it only cares that that content (the associations between this and that) do not change. Consequently, its most important success indicator is the answer to the question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, it knows to keep on with whatever it has been doing. If this happens to involve our being miserable in life, at the human level, that is not its problem, nor even its concern.

Our brain is not supposed to care how we feel. We are supposed to care how we feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

Most really wonderful, positive change can eventually lead to feeling bad again. There are some beautiful ways of working with this unfortunate aspect of being human, so that it is not actually always true good change leads to feeling bad. However, for most of us, learning to allow wonderful change to stay positive takes a little practice. This is what we call “the ecology of personal growth.” It is quite an art form, and an extremely valuable thing to learn.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

Everything we think and feel affects all the space, all the time. We really do have this kind of huge effect. Having power like this is never a bad thing. Learning to recognize and use this power is a many lifetimes’ respectfully creative journey. Overall, this is pretty good news.

By Carl Buchheit

To recap:

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

Almost all of western psychotherapy seeks, in one way or another, to separate clients from their parents. This movement is in exactly the wrong direction. If we want to know what would come out of the mix if we put our parents into a giant blender and then hit the frappè button, the answer is—we would exist. We are exactly, precisely that combination.

Our broadband connection to the flow of life—the cable sockets themselves, so to speak—happens to be them. Not personally, necessarily, but certainly energetically, the sockets are where they are. We can deny this, but then we have to live on dial-up. When we deny parents, we deny ourselves and cut ourselves off from the sources of strength in life. This never has a good effect. If our parents are dangerous, crazy, or lethally boring, it is probably a good idea to stay away from them physically, but this is not the same as disrespecting them.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

As it turns out, this seems to be exactly what all of us humans value doing more than anything else. We are—all of us—driven to make sure that we experience some version of the tragedies and unresolved losses of the family members who came before us. As long as we experience their pain, or something closely like it, we have hope to provide our families with a better past, which, it follows very [il]logically, will allow us to experience a better present and future for ourselves. This is complicated business, and highly seductive. When our pain now signals us that we are on track toward past and future happiness, we go into a deep, deep trance of secure and loving family salvation. As crazy as this sounds, this is what we do, and are pretty much screwed until we start to catch on. Messing up our own life is never a good way to show respect for anyone.

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

The future is not a perfected or improved past. Our experiences as human beings, whatever this involves in the moment, always represent the very best life solutions that our systems have been able to achieve. We all deal with utterly mysterious and painful inherited patterns, which we then combine with the bafflingly elusive meanings and beliefs we invent for ourselves. However huge the resulting mess might seem to be, it is truly the most creative, positive, and loving solution we could find for ourselves (and for everyone else who was involved) at the time that the unwanted patterning became hyper-stabilized and hard to change. Truly, we are all doing the best we can with what we have, and with what we had.

7. That now is the only time there is.

Being present in the present is wonderful and useful. It’s an indispensable art, an essential part of changing our relationship with ourselves and with life itself. However, for humans who live in time/space, the future and past are real too. Properly created, a good future activates our choosing of it, so that it comes into manifestation against a supportive backdrop called the past. There is no substitute for having a good relationship with our future and our past. After all now, we are now our future’s past, are we not?

By Carl Buchheit

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

When we act to improve our lives by defeating some aspect of ourselves (for example, “an old, unwanted behavior pattern,” or a recurring issue of “self-sabotage”) who is it, exactly, who wins?

One of the most enduring and unfortunate delusions to come out of the personal growth movement (especially the “monster power growth” version of it) is the idea that we all contain a “strong self” that can be trained to compel the subjugation of our “weak self.” It is completely understandable that almost all of us develop this impression. Human beings have been trying to make meaning out of their internal conflicts, their affinity with the light or dark sides of things, with their distresses related to virtue and guilt, for tens of thousands of years—long before the invention of the personal growth weekend seminar, as far as we know.

The easiest way to allow personal change and growth is to include—not to exclude or defeat—whatever it is that is not working in our lives. We can recognize that unwanted patterns of behavior are simply old solutions that have unwittingly outlasted their usefulness. Actually, when we go beyond this—when we seek to actively respect whatever it is that seems to be causing us the most pain and frustration—the experience of including and changing even long-standing patterns becomes safe, fun, and rewarding. Our old patterns are much more available for easy, comfortable change when we do not fight against them. In fact, when they are respected properly, we find that old, unwanted behaviors usually seek to change themselves. It’s as if they want to catch up with the rest of us, and that makes for a wonderful, and defeat-free, reunion.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

Everything in the Universe is coordinated to move and change along paths of least resistance. Everything—electrons, inter-galactic clouds of hydrogen gas, white mice, and melting ice. There are no exceptions. So, it is curious and weird that, for humans, the words “taking the path of least resistance” are usually tossed out as in insult. Now, we are all getting gradually better about this. One is rarely congratulated about the pointlessness and intensity of one’s struggle any more. Still, who do we think we are, anyway?

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

Some of the saddest words are, “At least I respect myself enough to despise myself.” Proper self-regard is always the most courteous way to be in life and the universe. It invites the best for and from others. Too little self-respect provokes other humans to want to withdraw their care and support. They can’t help but feel this at some level. It is an ancient instinct in our hunter-gatherer DNA, a not-quite-knowing designed to protect the well-being of the whole troupe. The instinct can be overridden, and it often is, but to do this requires some energy and work. Proper self-respect is never costly or inconvenient for anyone. And, it is hardly ever fatal.

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Published in 2008

One of our bedrock assertions at NLP Marin is that all human beings will be and do anything to make sure that their beliefs are true. Anything! We are meaning making beings. This is one of our specialties. Whatever we believe is true will be true, and whatever we believe things mean is what they will mean. Even better, to make sure that we are not wrong or crazy about this, we will have “good evidence” for everything, for every part of it. What we believe is so. No exceptions-except sometimes. I would like to explore one of those exceptional times in this and the next article or so.

We accomplish the amazing, perfect alignment of belief and “reality” through the local meaning-making magic of deletion, distortion, and generalization, and through the more non-local magic of using awareness to summon forth a whole world and, ultimately, a whole universe in all its parts. Put simply, we can make sure that things mean what they are supposed to mean precisely because we are just checking with ourselves-however other-than-consciously we might be doing that. We certainly get a lot of help from our families and the larger culture(s) in which we live, but we are basically just checking with ourselves, nevertheless. For example, if we “know” (believe) that an object is green, we will perceive a green object, which will then let us know that the object is green, around and around again in merry infinity of reality perception and perceived reality perfection. The famous 1948 illustration by M. C. Escher, below, says just about everything about this process.

“Drawing Hands”

It illustrates something called autopoesis, or self-creation. One hand is what we believe, and the other is the reality upon which those beliefs are based. Or, one hand is now, and the other is our future. I wonder if one hand knows what the other is doing? (I have to say, “The Secret” is a much better book title than “Autopoesis for Dummies,” but I am fond of the word nevertheless.)

It is usually a good and pleasant thing when our autopoetic processes work magic that generates positive experience. “I have done some nice work on myself. Things are better, and I feel better!” is a pretty wonderful and sensible statement. However, “Things are better, but I feel way worse,” is not pleasant at all. To generate strong negative feelings about having really positive results is a deeply confusing experience. But drive to not feel wrong or crazy means that we will endure any amount of perceived pain rather than-actually, instead of-experiencing that our bad feelings are not accurate reports about the reality of our world. As we grow and learn, as we come to trust and respect ourselves more and more, we may know full well that our negative, painful experience is completely wacky, shot through with contradiction and inconsistencies, but we will still make sure that it is “real and true.” This seems to make things even worse-sometimes a lot worse.

Not only are humans meaning-making specialists, we are stubborn about it! Our wonderfully automatic, unremitting meaning-making stubbornness allows us to both create and stabilize our worlds. This is an incredibly important function. It lets us be human. It lets us rely on having a stable self across time and within that wider world we’re pretty sure we’re supposed to be involved with. There’s a lot to be said for the stability afforded by all this stubborn certainty. (Marin-style NLP change-work is actually based on using our predictable patterning to make changes in our predictable patterning, but that is another article.)

But what happens when we just cannot get good changes to make good sense, when the good things that we know to be so are just too far from the bad experience we are feeling about them? What happens when the reality is so much better than the feelings that seem to be reporting on that reality-when our life experience is actually more positive than our belief systems can account for? This is very difficult territory. It is usually quite scary to be us when this happens.

I have worked with many clients who are caught in “the dilemma”-”My life is really great (or so I am told by people I trust), but my feelings about my life are still really, really, really bad – and this is sort of ruining my whole life, so it’s not so great anymore, only I know it is, except that, based on how it feels to be me, my life is still totally awful, which must mean that there is still something really wrong with me, which is making me feel worse, and about which I am sort of starting to freak out, except that everything is pretty much better, only I can’t feel it.”

Yipes!

Some examples: a client with millions of dollars (much of it in gold!) and several very different businesses, but with the experience that it could (would!) all disappear instantly, including the gold-not in an economic downturn, but literally instantly. The more success this person created, which was a lot, the more terror they developed. I worked with someone whose relationship (primary, significant other relationship) developed into everything they wanted, yet they were certain that somehow, some way, something could instantly (again, that word) undo all of their remarkable accomplishments, in terms of being able to give and receive love. Another client developed superb success in the context of their job, along with all the acknowledgement and corporate trappings that mark this kind of success, but this person’s feelings were those of someone constantly at the very edge of being humiliated and fired. (Again, the experience was that this could happen at any instant.) One more example: a client who worked creatively to revise a serious writer’s block, who then had several published books to their credit, and whose feelings were, nevertheless, those of someone who would never be able to write or express themselves in any way. Also, again, there was a certainty that all of their books could simply be “taken away, instantly.”

There is an excruciating good news/bad news dilemma (a situation in which someone must choose one of two or more unsatisfactory alternatives) in the experience of these people. One of two things just has to be hugely in error: either they are really wrong about the observable realities of their lives, or they are hugely wrong about themselves-about the reliability of their mean-making about self at the deepest levels. Those of us still struggling for the success these people had created might think, “What a great problem to have,” but which would you choose to be “wrong” about-your ability to accurately know yourself, or your ability to accurately know your world?

This crazy-making dilemma presents a serious ecology problem-an unwanted consequence of otherwise wonderful growth and change-that is a challenge for the practitioner and the client both. The problem is, “How do we work with ourselves and others so that lives don’t improve faster or farther than identity can explain, or so that our identity updates keep adequate pace with our life improvements?” My experience is that, using our Marin-style NLP, we can do marvelous change work that actually works, but that if we don’t sufficiently and properly revise a certain belief, then there is nothing but trouble.

This really problematic belief is as simple as it is devastating:

“The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.”

Best, Carl

Not having been there, I don’t know the exact circumstances. But I do know what kind of atmosphere can create a situation like that. Whether or not what I’m going to describe has anything to do with current news events, the patterns are worth all of us understanding in case we find ourselves, or someone we know, in a similar situation

Let’s start with some basics. Human beings need hope. With hope, we will endure almost anything. When we lose hope, we give up. Humans also have a need to feel that they belong. It is hard wired into us. When we feel like we belong to a group, we become very loyal to that group. When we are aligned with the group we feel good. When we go against the group we actually feel like we are doing something wrong. We feel guilty. So it is natural not only to seek out people who give us hope and make us feel that we belong, but also to be intensely loyal to that group.

Powerful leaders use these innate needs of humans to create a loyal following. They offer hope–hope that you can have it all; hope that you can be rich, successful, in love, beautiful, happy, etc. What they offer seems possible, really possible. So you open yourself up to have some hope.

The next step of powerful leaders is to remove fear. They encourage folks to face their fears and demonstrate how you can’t trust it. There are a variety of ways to do this. The basic idea is that they push you through your fear, your doubt, and your logic and have you come out in a better place. After a few times, you begin to doubt your fear and trust the leader just a bit more. You start to want them to push. The eventual goal is for you to trust the leader more than you trust your own feelings.

Once you are in the system, you don’t even realize that you are losing trust in yourself. You may even be thinking that you are having a great experience. You most likely feel like you are doing some important personal growth work and, you are. Learning to face your fears is a critical life skill. It only becomes a problem when you associate the good feeling of facing your fear with the leader and not yourself.

The experience of facing your fear and coming out in a good place is compelling. The experience of having witnesses while you do this is even better, and when you witness others, then a group bonding happens. At this point you have both hope and a sense of belonging.

Then, they add the consequences of giving up. They tell you that if you back down from what scares you, you’ve failed yourself and missed out on something wonderful. They teach you that the only reason you won’t succeed is if you “give up” on yourself. Within this frame, all difficulties you are having with the leader or the organization are because you are being scared. And, the way through that fear is to hang in there a little longer, until you come out on the good side.

This combination of hope, belonging and attitude that “the only way to succeed is to keep pushing forward with this group” is a powerful structure. Stepping out, leaving the group often feels like being cast out or ripped away from the only good in your life. The equation is now: being in the group equals hope and belonging, and being out of the group equals letting my fear win and giving up on myself. Since most of the time when we join these groups, we are in some kind of transition and often do not have a strong support system outside of the group. Going against the group means starting all over and this is extremely hard.

So, you are in this group where you have great hope. You are growing and you feel like you belong. The leader often asks you to do things that are scary or hard, and you always feel better when you do them. This time, it’s sitting in a sweat lodge. It will be uncomfortable, hot and humid, but really nothing to worry about. By the time you are a couple of hours into it, you are in a completely different state. The group pressure to push through this new challenge is quite high. And, you trust that the leader really knows what they are doing. That is the key. Once we hand over authority, humans tend not to take initiative. They leave it to the one in charge. They trust their leaders to do what is best and they don’t trust themselves to override the leader.

Now, we have a huge problem. If the leader isn’t paying attention or is unwilling to act, people can get hurt. People can die. And the ones that live will have a lot of emotional damage to deal with. It will be especially hard because from the outside we can’t even begin to imagine how the others could have witnessed someone in dyer need and not done anything. And, they can’t even explain it themselves. That transfer of their inner authority to the leader happened so subtly they never saw it happen. If we had asked any of them while they were still a part of the group, they would have denied any problems because for them there weren’t any problems. They had hope and they belonged. They had all they needed.

A good leader will do many of the same things that the dangerous leaders will do. Determining the difference isn’t exactly easy. A good teacher will have many ways to challenge you and many things you can learn from them. The main difference will be in their intent. The good leaders are focused on what is best for you, not what is best for them. The false leaders will put themselves first. A true leader, teacher, mentor, will continually hand the reigns back to you. Or refuse to take the reigns when you attempt to hand them over. They will push you, but they will make sure that you don’t begin to blindly follow them. They will not promise you more than they will deliver. Often they will not promise anything, they will simply show you what might be possible. A true teacher understands that their ultimate goal is to help the student outgrow the teacher.

The damage done by false leaders can be very deep. It can not be measured in dollars lost or time spent. These people gradually take away our sense of who we really are, and recovering from that takes time, patience and often some professional help. The shame people feel when they have followed a false leader is immense.

It is very important that we all understand that this really can happen to any of us. Many people have had an experience of following a false leader. The duration of time that we followed varies. It is, however, very common. Unless you understand the combination of factors that create such a following, you are likely to follow a few false leaders on your path.

A leader’s job is to create a compelling experience, one that encourages you to push yourself out of your comfort zone. They will provide an opportunity to feel like you belong and motivate you to keep going. When a leader considers themselves to be more of an authority on your life or your feelings than you are, it’s time to stop following.

If you’ve been there, or are there now, take some time to think about how you got there. Be gentle with yourself about your experiences. There really were good things within that experience and it’s OK to take the good and leave the rest. Most importantly, you are not the only one who this has happened to. You are not alone.

I think that most of us have walked at least a few steps down this type of path and spent a little time with someone who crossed the line a bit too often. When and how we came to terms with it is an individual process. But before we get too excited about the cases that make the news, maybe we need to check out the cases within our own lives and let that serve as a reminder to us to trust ourselves a bit more and be willing to speak out when something seems wrong. A good leader will appreciate that you are speaking out.

By Carl Camou

Founder of Life Re-Solutions and friend of NLP Marin

Progression from Foundations to Advanced asks a lot of our students. There are often time and money questions, as we would expect. But beyond these normal-world kinds of challenges, participation in the Advanced course asks our students to begin to apply all of the Foundations-level perceptual and behavioral skill sets toward doing specific, whole pieces of change work with each other.
Approached this way, the NLP Marin model truly serves those people who want to learn to live and work with the world more peacefully, fruitfully, and respectfully than ever before.

The outcome frame, representational systems, accessing cues, perceptual positions, anchors and anchoring, association and dissociation, and sub-modalities—all of these pieces come together within the even-more-remarkable framework of Advanced-level information and patterns for change. In the Advanced course, students move from beginning to know how to use the NLP Marin tool set to actually learning to do elegant change and communication work within our very beautiful version of the NLP model. By the end the course, everyone who wants to will have the wonderful, life-changing experience of doing a whole piece of work with a civilian—someone not in the class—who has no experience of NLP!

In the course of the Advanced weekends we will fold everything we already know into everything we are just beginning with. We will cover important material related to the rest of the outcome frame. We’ll learn a variety of structured, precise language patterns that allow us to shift another’s map of reality with a few quick statements or questions. We will learn how to get incredibly accurate and useful access to the invisible structure of any stuck experience, and to be able to do that each time in only one or two seconds. We’ll explore the amazing territory of hypnotic language patterning, as well as learn to tell stories that provoke both specific and general changes within the listeners. We’ll learn to do Neuro-Linguistic Programming in its rawest form—by noticing and directly revising the strings of VAKOG events that go on within any human who struggles with any kind of block or frustrated Desired State. Toward the end of the course, we will be ready to move all the way into the amazing territory of beliefs and belief/identity-level change.

Along with all the communication and change tools you will learn and experience, you will engage in a powerful, self-discovered, graceful art of creating a new relationship with yourself and others. NLP Marin is about embracing and working with life, not overcoming it. Being the journey of becoming more conscious of how you specifically are you, and how you do you so well and with this awareness those aspects of you that you wish to change.

Of course, when you ask yourself whether you want to continue to Advanced, you can also notice that one the best parts of the experience will be getting to also continue with the rather interesting and important people you started all this with. They have made an investment in you, as well as in each other.

We so much look forward to having you continue with all of us. I’m sure that Shannon will be contacting you about all this. So…please come join us!

Carl

The objective of this experiment is to demonstrate how your experience, and your experience of your experience, depends as much on how you represent it internally, as it does on what that experience is (the process of the experience vs. the content). Our objective is to shift your experience of something, a memory from the past, without changing the content of that experience. This is a small demonstration of one aspect of the NLP information and skills toolbox. Ready? Do these steps in order:

Step 1: Recall a past experience that gives you a pleasant or good feeling. Notice what that good feeling feels like. Notice also what the picture is, in your mind’s eye, that goes with that good feeling. If you don’t have a picture that goes with the feeling, take a moment to think about it, and just let one occur to you.

Step 2: Look at your inner picture and notice the feeling that goes with it.

Step 3: Now look more closely at that inner picture and answer this question:
“Is this picture in color, or in black and white, or somewhere in between?”

Step 4: If your picture is in color, use your internal visual controls to make it black and white. Just use your brain to turn down the color, just as you would on a color TV. If your picture is black and white, or without much color, turn the color up—use your brain to make the picture much more colorful. In what way(s) does this change in color change the meaning or the feeling of the experience that goes with the picture?

Step 5: If you want, set your internal color control to wherever it helps this picture have the most positive and enjoyable feeling for you.

Step 6: To experiment further, notice how bright your picture is, and make some kind of significant change in this brightness. For example, have the picture fade out to totally dark or gray, then try shifting it so that it becomes extremely bright and just “flashes out.” Notice how these changes in brightness change the feeling that goes with the experience. Try making a simultaneous change in color and brightness. What happens to the meaning or the feeling?
To experiment more, notice where the internal picture is in the context of the external space of the room you are in. Notice if, in your mind’s eye, the picture is far away from your body, if it is right at the end of your nose, or if it is in the middle distance somewhere. Make a big change in this distance factor. Zoom the picture off into the far distance, and then zoom it in toward your head. What happens to the meaning or the feeling that this memory has for you?

Step 7: In doing steps 1-6 you have probably caused some significant changes in the meaning or the feeling that goes with the memory of this experience. But notice that you have not made content changes about this memory—you have merely changed the structure of the visual component of the experience. By way of completing the experiment, set the color, brightness and distance of the picture to where they feel the best, and then let go of the picture and its accompanying feeling(s).

Our experience of the external world is built from input from our five senses, and so is our experience of our internal world. The above mind/brain experiment operates in the realm of what NLP calls internal representations. These internal representations are the sensory events—sights, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes—that are the building blocks of our experience as human beings. Our experience of something in our lives—past, present or future, depends on how we structure and process our experience in terms of our internal sensory representations.

See also this related article.

Personal change, growth, and development can be a bit like a treasure hunt. The perspective of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is that the treasure you are seeking is there, inside, waiting to be discovered. Discovering it takes going beyond the obvious clues. Most of the time we only pay attention to the big clues. The little ones go unnoticed, and the treasure remains hidden. In fact, the really obvious “clues” often aren’t clues at all but symptoms of something more hidden. They are, however, a place to start.

Discovering the little clues can be difficult to do on your own because they are most often so hidden. But you can begin with the following exercises. Training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming or working with an NLP Practitioner are both very effective ways to continue.

To start, acknowledge to yourself something that is present in your life that you don’t want or something that you have been wanting to be present for a long time but that has been elusive. Acknowledging something like this doesn’t mean you are broken, bad, or wrong in any way. It just means that there is something in your life experience that is pointing to something more fundamental, more basic, and more hidden. Something that, for one reason or another, you put there and that served you very well at the time. Something that is badly outdated and that you can change.

To begin, bring to mind the life issue you want to explore. Take a moment to write it down. Work with just one thing at a time. If you have more than one thing you would like to work with, repeat the exercises taking each issue one at a time.

In these exercises, we are inviting you to a deeper exploration of what you have just written down—that something that you don’t want but that hangs around, or that something you do want that seems not possible. To do these exercises you will need to allow yourself to experience whatever issue you are working with. The more fully you allow yourself to be aware of it and feel what it feels like, the more effective the exercises will be. Acknowledging and allowing yourself to experience, without judgment, that issue is a huge step toward resolving it.

The objective in these exercises is to discover some of the little clues. The little clues are often the things in our lives that we hold as so true, so real that we don’t even consider them as having any possibility of change. The little clues, the ones that really pay off, are wrapped in our concept of what is. These are the things that we believe are as unchangeable as gravity.

Exercise #1 … Personal Statements

1. Make a list of statements about yourself regarding the issue you are working with, and about the issue itself, that you believe are totally true. Start with the really obvious stuff “I am female (male)” and work your way to some of the more subtle ones “It’s not OK for me to … .” Sit quietly, pen in hand, and just write down what comes.
2. Look at the list and ask yourself if everyone else believes these things about themselvesor about that kind of issue. The ones to which you say, “No, not everyone believes this,” are all clues to how you might, through your beliefs, be keeping what you don’t want present in your life or preventing what you do want from being there.

Exercise #2 … What do you avoid?

1. Continue to acknowledge and allow yourself to experience the issue you are working with. Again, sit quietly with pen in hand and allow yourself to become aware of the things that you avoid regarding this issue. Write them down. What do you avoid doing? What do you avoid saying? What do you avoid acknowledging?

The things we avoid are also little clues. We must respond to what we are avoiding in order to avoid it, and this limits our flexibility. How might things change if you stopped avoiding those things you just discovered? What if you found a way to allow yourself to deal directly with them?

Exercise #3 … What emotions do you avoid?

1. Again, stay as fully present to the experience of your issue as you can. This time, notice the feelings and emotions that are connected with it. Sit quietly, pen in hand, and notice what is there. Write it down. Some of these feelings you may have been aware of for a long time. They are right there, connected to the issue every time you think about it. Allow yourself to go beyond these. What other feelings and emotions do you become aware of?

The feelings and emotions we avoid are also little clues. What would happen if you found a way for it to be okay for you to experience them? What new actions might you then be able to take?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be described many ways. One simple description is, “NLP is about changing your mind regarding what is or isn’t possible for you.” When we change our mind, new connections are made possible in our mind and new possibility appears. At NLP Marin, Neuro-Linguistic Programming has become famous for asking and then guiding you to effectively answer two important questions: “What would you like?” and “What stops you?” Using our Holographic NLP model, the clarifying work that is done between and around these two questions gets at an inner truth, unique to each person, which then allows lives and relationships and careers to transform.

We hope these simple exercises have assisted you to change your mind in some significant way(s). To explore further, you might consider a Free Introductory Workshop.

Our NLP Marin Free Workshop is an easy-going, fast-paced, three hour tour through some of the most important parts of the completely amazing NLP “toolbox for communication and change.” The Free Workshop is presented by Carl Buchheit, a co-founder of NLP Marin and one of the most experienced NLP trainers in the world.

Why do we have our founder and a trainer with 30+ years experience conduct a three-hour introductory workshop? Because he wants to!

As Carl says,

“The NLP we teach here at NLP Marin is so beautiful and so extraordinary, and it has made such a difference in my life across more than three decades. Because so much of the NLP that people encounter out in the world is such awful, superficial, disrespectful junk, I completely adore having an opportunity to introduce our guests to the kind of NLP that I love and respect.”

In the course of the three hours, Carl lectures for a few minutes, to present a little bit of NLP history and background, and also a little bit of other information about the amazing, original discoveries that started the whole NLP revolution. But Carl will use most of the morning to demonstrate some NLP change and communication basics, and to invite guests to try them out–in the privacy of their own experience. The Free Workshop format is highly interactive, but also respectfully private. Because of the way NLP works, our guests can share about their experience of the various NLP techniques without having to reveal anything about the content of their lives. Of course, all sharing is welcome. We spend most of the morning laughing, and Carl loves questions.

At the end of the morning, everyone will have completely and delightfully new ways to understand and make sense out of their experience of being human, as well as some specific ideas about why their current relationships and other communication situations unfold the way they do. In addition, everyone will leave with some simple but amazingly powerful ways to directly change (improve!) the feelings that are associated with any experience they encounter in daily life.

A powerful evening that clarifies your hidden struggle/fate – and then gracefully finds a re-solution – freeing up your energy to experience more of who you are and offers you the choice to start living your life according to your own purpose.

This workshop is based on the highly original observations and therapeutic genius of German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. Using the patterning of family constellations he evolved, participants will be assisted to explore and re-solve the emotional and energetic entanglements affecting their lives.

Family Constellations are held from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM at the Novato Oaks Inn, 215 Alameda del Prado, Novato, CA 94949. The Constellations will be facilitated by Carl Buchheit, Michelle Masters, and Carla Camou. Each evening is $45, space is limited. To reserve your place click here.

We are always happy to answer your individual questions. For further information or to discuss how constellations might assist you in your unique circumstances, please call: (415) 499-0639

Saturday Evening Workshop
7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
See Calendar for dates.

Many of you have experienced the power of Family Constellations. Organizational Constellations apply the same principles in the context of businesses. They are used widely in Europe to reveal and often re-solve entangled dynamics in our work place and/or in the businesses we are creating. Work and Business Constellations will offer you a new perspective in the ways your personal experience, behavior and decisions are tied in with the systemic group dynamic of your business and/or workplace.

Based on the systemic constellations work of German therapist, Bert Hellinger, we observe the deep impact the relationships at the workplace and the history of organizations have on what works and where people and organizations get stuck. They offer re-solutions that clearly show you new choices and possibilities to move forward.

We also bring our personal family dynamics into the workplace and see them reflected in our careers. During this evening we will, whenever helpful, use constellations to clarify how our professional and personal spheres overlap and what internal shifts will bring new energy and expansiveness into our professional lives.

By working gently, honestly and directly with facts, rather than beliefs or our story, we can discover how our attitudes and stances contribute to the difficult situations we find ourselves in and how we can contribute to creating a shift in the prevailing dynamics.

The Constellations will be facilitated by Volker Frank (www.VolkerFrank.com).

We are always happy to answer your individual questions. For further information or to discuss how constellations might assist you in your unique circumstances, please call: (415) 499-0639
For registration click here.

Here’s why:  Holographic NLP is a course in conscious transformation—NLP Marin-style.  Holographic NLP is the course in which we explore how Causes, Effects, Time, Space, Mind, and Spirit meet up with, operate through, and respond to our friends, VAKOG.  Because it builds on and extends the Belief/Identity/Systemic foundations of Masters, the formal name for the first course in the series is, “Holographic NLP 1:  Continuing the Journey of Mastery.”

Of course, HNLP 1 will allow you to continue to integrate your Masters learning.  That part will probably never stop.  But the new thing—the main thing—in H 1 is evolving your relationship with the “Three R’s”:

• Relationship with Self

• Relationship with Other

• Relationship with Life Itself

At the end of Masters we did a bit of touching into the new learning territory we call the “Programmer Stance.”  A lot goes into being a masterful programmer—someone with a properly powerful and creative Programmer Stance.  I have noticed that all of what’s really important and magical comes down to having good Masters-level skills, plus a pretty superb, smoothly up-graded, recklessly rigorous, quasi-mindful-yet-fairly-mindless, spontaneously impeccable approach to Self, Other, and Life Itself.

In broader terms, in terms of life outside the Redwood Room, it turns out that the things that go into a proper Programmer Stance—one that has life and power—are exactly the things that go into the creation of a powerful life.  When these elements are correctly developed, usefully sorted out, and applied toward the fulfillment of good things (which, in the Course of HNLP 1, they most definitely will be), amazing learning and conscious evolution occur naturally, and no one has to remember to be different!

HNLP 1 is a truly a wonderful course.  You’ll continue to integrate your Masters learning.  An amazing amount of new and improved stuff will be added into your competence with yourself, others, and Life Itself.

Come join us! (The others really need you, you know that.)

Register here online.

Enrollment info:
Dates: Three (three-day weekends)
May 20-22, May 17-19, July 15-17, 2011
Location: Novato Oaks Inn
Time: 10:00a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Tuition:Holographic NLP is $1575(payments plans available)
Please reserve your place by placing a $250 deposit.

Early Registration:  Save $100 if you register by May 1, 2011
Tuition for early registration is $1475 with a $250 deposit. Payment plans are welcome.

To make it easy you can register here online!

Call Shannon at 415.499.0639 or email Shannon@nlpmarin.com to register.

Please call with any questions, we always are happy to hear from you.

Warm regards,

Shannon

Begins June 24, 2011
Three (three-day weekends)
June 24-26, July 22-24, August 19-21
See Calendar for dates.

Through the course of many constellations, instructions and lecture on the orders governing love in families, all participants will experience a greater sense of their proper place in their families and a fuller appreciation of what it means to be human.

• A way to work with your, or your client’s, largest objections to happiness
• A clearer understanding of the systemic dynamics affecting you and the people you work with
• A sense of your proper place in your family and the groups you belong to
• A way of aligning the resources in your family, or your client’s, so the system can be supportive.

If you are interested in the “facilitating” aspect of this class, we suggest you register early as those spaces are limited.

• Removing limitations and attachment to suffering
• Opening doorways to possibilities and happiness
• Letting people be who they are without making them wrong for it
• Inspiration and excitement about the future
• Allowing the imagination to work for us, rather than against us, in the most glorious ways possible

We are always happy to answer your individual questions. For further information or to discuss how this constellation training might assist you in your unique circumstances, and to determine if this is the right course for you. We look forward to talking with you! please call:  (415) 499-0639 or email: Shannon@nlpmarin.com

Register here online!

In the twenty years or so since its inception, NLP has acquired a variety of reputations. Few who have encountered the power of Neuro-Linguistic Programming have remained neutral. At the extremes, NLP has been hailed as the ultimate fast fix and a panacea for personal growth. Alternately, it has been derided for being “techniquey,” gimmicky, manipulative, and mechanical. The truth is, NLP is neither the cure-all nor the cold, cerebral event that some of its most ardent—and often less informed—promoters and detractors claim.

A Brief History

Neuro-Linguistic Programming was developed in the early-to-middle 1970s by John Grinder, a linguist, and Richard Bandler, an information scientist. Like many others, they had observed that people with similar education, training, background, and years of experience were achieving widely varying results ranging from wonderful to mediocre.

Bandler and Grinder were intrigued by these differences. They wanted to know how effective people perform and accomplish things. They were especially interested in the possibility of being able to duplicate the behavior, and therefore the competence, of these highly effective individuals. In short, they set out to “model” human excellence in such fields as education, business and therapy. What emerged from their work came to be called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

While the name is awkward—and some object to the word “programming”—it is nonetheless descriptive. Neuro refers to the brain and neural pathways of the human organism. Linguistic is about the content (verbal and nonverbal) that moves across and through these pathways. Programming is the way the content is directed, sequenced, and connected by each of us to produce the thinking patterns and behaviors that are our experience of life. As educator and writer Sid Jacobson puts it, “There is a relationship between perceptions, thinking, and behavior that is neurolinguistic in nature. The relationship is operating all the time, no matter what we are doing, and it can be studied by exploring our internal or subjective experience.”

Maps of Reality

It has long been recognized that human experience is based on internal reality maps. The structure and content of the latter determines the former. Our inner maps of reality comprise most of what we deal with as human beings. These inner maps determine what is real and unreal, achievable and not achievable, believable and not believable, for each of us. Understand another’s map, and you can understand (and share) their experience of themselves and the world. Change the map, and you change them and their world.

Study of the structure of experience led Bandler and Grinder to notice external signals and cues that were the keys to understanding the “how” of certain kinds of thought processes and behavior. They were able to assemble their understanding of these cues and signals into a system that allowed its user to know how another human being creates his or her experience—how they organize and maintain their unique internal map of reality that corresponds to and organizes their experience of the external world.

A variety of creative and brilliant people were quickly attracted to Bandler and Grinder’s unique work and discoveries. They helped to expand the NLP models and organize them into a vast and rich set of tools, skills, and information—a process which continues today.

Information Processing, Communication, and Sensory Experience

In NLP, we first distinguish between inner and outer sensory experience. We are all familiar with external sensory experience—the continual flow of sights, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes that make up our experience of the outer world. Our inner experience, our thoughts, emotions, responses, ideas, etc., are also comprised of information in these same five sensory systems.

Even words are multisensory events, although most of this sensory experience is deleted from conscious awareness. For example, if I write the word “walnut” on this page, you must internally access some combination of inner pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells if you are to understand it. Your experience of “walnut” is unique and is comprised of your own internal sequencing and combining of distinct inner sensory events. In other words, thinking is a sensory event. Thoughts are composed of inner pictures, sounds (including words), body sensations, tastes and smells.

Most of our communication with each other, and almost all of our inner sensory representations, operate (for good or ill) outside our conscious awareness. These inner representations—what they are and the order in which they occur—combine to make up our individual reality map. And this map determines what is and is not possible in our world and our lives. Again, understand the structure and process of someone’s map, and you can better understand that person’s experience of life. Change the organization of the map, and you change the life experience.

Above all else, NLP is about understanding and gaining access to human experience at the structural or process level—in addition to the level of content. Put another way, NLP is a set of models and methods—highly learnable, reliable, and effective—for understanding how human beings create and maintain their experience of themselves and the world around them. NLP enables us to know how we, and others, create our unique maps of reality. It enables us to understand our own and others’ processes of decision-making, communication, motivation, and learning.

Understanding our own map of reality enables us to make changes that lead to the life experiences we want. Understanding and having access to another’s map of reality makes it much easier to step off our own map and respectfully step onto the other’s. When this happens, the result is an experience of deep connection that is often experienced as a precious gift.

An “Operator’s Manual” for Human Relationship

NLP’s contribution, then, is to increasing the depth and effectiveness of our relationships—beginning with self and extending through personal and intimate relationships to our professional and work lives and, finally, to the therapeutic arena of working with others to bring about healing, change, and growth. NLP provides the tools that enable this rich connection with self and others to happen.

Chances are you have already encountered NLP, in one form or another, without its being identified and without your realizing it. NLP is so useful for the whole experience of being human that many of its original tools and distinctions have already integrated into education, training, business, and therapy—becoming part of the “common sense” wisdom of our society.

Experiencing the Structure of Experience

The whole issue of the “structure of experience” or the “process of experience” as used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be difficult and deadly dull to communicate with words, but easy to demonstrate with experience. To explore further, please see [Exercises].

In any life situation or activity, success requires competence in the talents and abilities unique to that situation. In every life situation or activity, success also requires a high level of competence in human relations skills and the ability to access and influence one’s own internal states, beliefs, abilities, and resources.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a model for understanding human behavior. It is a fascinating exploration of how we marvelous creatures be ourselves. With the insights that emerge from participation in NLP courses, two significant things happen. First, we are better able to change ourselves in ways that we want. Our lives become more satisfying. We feel more fulfilled. Second, we are better able to understand, relate to, and work with others. Communication and connection are enhanced and our interactions become more satisfying and beneficial both for ourselves and for others.

As a model concerned with human behavior, NLP provides understanding and perspectives. As it is applied in life, NLP provides relationship skills and tools.

At its core, NLP is about understanding both how we human beings create meaning in life and the behavior we engage in as a result of that created meaning. Broadly stated, NLP’s objective is to increase choices. NLP enables you to access the internal resources that are appropriate and necessary to make the desired choice and have the desired experience. NLP asserts that, within a very broad range, if something one desires as his or her experience is possible for anyone else, it is possible for that person as well. Where there was limitation, there can be new choice and new opportunity. Anywhere! Whatever you are doing! Whomever you are with! Whatever the context!

How the student of Neuro-Linguistic Programming uses their learning varies with the context of each student’s life. Essentially, however, using NLP is about enhancing relationship—starting with your relationship with yourself and extending to all of your personal and professional relationships.

In short, studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming is both a human relations skills course and a program of personal development. Learning new skills and developing oneself go hand in glove, and most often both are required for greater success.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has a wide range of very useful applications in human relations––essentially anywhere that two or more people are interacting with a common objective. This is because, at its core, NLP is about understanding both how we human beings create meaning in life and the behavior we engage in as a result of that created meaning. With this understanding, we are then able to act with greater flexibility and resourcefulness and are able to more elegantly influence others with integrity.

Briefly stated, the professional support you can expect from NLP can be conveyed in four words: connection, understanding, communication, and influence.

NLP begins with the observation that each of us has a unique internal map of reality and that it is this map that we all operate from most of the time; even when interacting with others or the world “out there.” The skill sets in the NLP model enable us to get access to these internal maps, and to understand them. As a result, we are more able to connect with others in deeper ways (appropriate to the context) and to then communicate with them in the language of their map. This makes it easier for us to understand them and they to understand us. Deeper connection and understanding, in turn, affect our ability to influence with integrity toward the end of accomplishing our common objective.

Studying NLP involves learning a wide variety of perceptual and behavioral skills. Perceptual skills have to do with broadening the range of what we notice. Behavioral skills have to do with increasing our flexibility in what we do; how we respond. Beyond these two broad distinctions, there are a variety of ways to group these skills. In the world of business, the following categories are useful.

Nonverbal Communication. For the most part, these are messages coming from outside of conscious awareness and are an essential part of what the person is trying to convey. This skill set involves both noticing and utilizing the nonverbal messages.

Calibration. This involves first noticing physiology (body movements, eye movements, voice variations, etc.) and then relating it to a unique internal state or experience the speaker is having. When combined with the words the speaker is using this assists us to determine congruency in the message being conveyed. This skill also assists us to usefully adjust our responses throughout the interaction.

Rapport. Rapport skills cover a broad range of perceptual and behavioral abilities that enable deep connection with those with whom we are interacting. This connection is with both conscious and (often more importantly) unconscious aspects of the individual. Rapport does not necessarily mean agreement. It is closer to connection or link-up. Without connection, whatever else we do in our interaction with others cannot succeed. The success of any interaction is directly related to the degree of rapport or connection.

Listening. The words that we use have unique meaning to us. Realizing this and working with the words the other uses significantly enhance connection, understanding, and our ability to influence. Discerning the meaning that the word the other uses has for them rather than substituting our word and meaning (in the assumption that we know what they mean) is often critical to avoiding misunderstanding.

Information Gathering. This involves precise utilization of questions which leads to greater clarity and to more quickly getting to useful information and avoiding that which is extraneous or misleading.

Noticing Objections. This is what NLP refers to as “ecology.” It has to do with identifying, in advance, the objections (often unconscious) that will prevent or sabotage accomplishing the ostensibly agreed objective.

Speaking. The NLP communication toolbox contributes to effectiveness in communication because it provides the speaker with the skills and tools to take responsibility for both what is said and for what is heard. Through utilization of the skills listed above, the speaker is able to assume the full responsibility for ensuring that real communication actually takes place. Whether one-on-one or in front of a group, the speaker is able to adjust the way he or she is speaking to ensure that it can easily be taken in and understood by the audience.

All of the skills referred to are interrelated and are used in combination. They are used, first, to become aware of the unique way in which those we are working with take in information, process it, and store it. Second, these skills enable us to adjust our presentation and, therefore, our interaction with the other’s map. As a result, the outcome of the interaction will more closely match the desired outcome, with greater ease and mutual satisfaction.

In the original research that led to the development of the NLP model, highly effective individuals were observed working. While they work in different fields and used different methods, one ability stood out as being that which made the difference between excellence and effectiveness or the lack of it. Highly effective individuals all had the ability to respectfully step onto the map of the people they were working with and do their work from there.

Training in the NLP model is both a human relations skills training and a program of personal development. Learning new skills and developing oneself go hand in glove, and most often both are required for greater success. Following are examples of ways NLP can contribute to professional success:

• Greater ability to understand and respectfully influence others.
• More clearly know where you want to go and how to get there.
• Quickly establish rapport with colleagues and clients and maintain it.
• Resolve conflict and build effective, aligned teams.
• Teach to your students’ best learning style.
• Avoid “losing the deal” because of simple misunderstanding.
• Develop effective people skills.
• More quickly get to the useful information and avoid getting sidetracked.
• Shift your own mental state and stay optimally resourceful in any situation.
• Eliminate internal obstacles to success.
• Acquire the success strategies of others.

A beam of white light goes out and is received by three people. Through the filter of one it appears red, for another, blue, and for the third, it is dull grey. This is not unlike what happens as we take in our experiences of life. Each new experience we have is filtered through an internal map of reality that is already there. It is what is stored on our map that determines our experience of what happens in life. And, as we shall see, it is our map that enables or limits us as we go forward in life. It is the content of their individual maps that makes something so incredibly easy for one person and so seemingly impossible for another.

We all have an internal map of reality and each of our maps is unique. It’s ours and ours alone. Of course, our map is not totally different from that of others. Our maps overlap to one degree or another—enough, at least, for us to mostly understand, connect with, and relate to each other. But beyond that, our maps are unique.

We each started assembling our map at birth (some say before—but that’s another story we don’t need to go into here) and, over the years, we have added to them. Everything that has ever happened to us, everything we’ve ever decided to be true, and every belief we’ve ever formed is somewhere on our internal map of reality. Our maps contain our beliefs about ourselves—about our capabilities, our deservingness, and how we fit in the world. They contain our attitudes, perspectives, expectations, and general orientation toward life. Some of what is on our internal map of reality we are consciously aware of, but most of it we are not. And, like the highways and byways of a road map, everything that is on our map is somehow connected to everything else. Unlike a passive road map, however, our inner maps of reality are very active. They determine the meaning we make out of life. In fact, they determine our experience of life. Each new experience and new meaning made then gets added to the map; reinforcing, modifying, and adding to what was already there and making the whole thing ever more complex.

Our maps are pretty much automated. New input gets taken in, evaluated, interpreted, and assigned its place as best our internal mapmaker can accomplish those tasks. It’s a tough gig, given that everything new has to fit in with everything that is already there. Sometimes things get misplaced or incorrectly coded. Sometimes the new can’t be integrated and it gets rejected, like a compliment that bounces off because it doesn’t jibe with the view we already have of ourselves.

It’s a good thing that our maps are automated. We all receive far too much input, and need to do far too much internal processing, every moment of our lives to be able to handle all of it on manual. So, most of the time automation is good. It’s good, even great, that all those things we do and like, and all the experiences we attract that work for us, come so easily and unthinkingly—so automatically.

Unfortunately, our maps contain mistakes and they don’t always get appropriately updated. And that’s where problems can come in. Mistaken or outdated or not, our maps continue in their automated way to produce our experience of life. One client arrived saying that he wanted to “not be invisible.” He went on to tell story after story about how being invisible showed up in his life—like being the one who wasn’t asked when sandwich orders were taken at the company meeting; or being bumped into while walking down the street; or not being considered for promotion despite an excellent work record; or being cut in front of when standing in line. Over and over when he spoke up, the response was, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” These kinds of things happened far too often for them to have been just chance. His map was badly outdated. There was a time when he was a very small boy, that it was good and much safer to be able to become invisible when his drunken, angry dad arrived home. But that was a long time ago. His map needed an update in its equating of safety with invisibility.

While dramatic, that example is illustrative. We all have mistakes and outdatedness on our maps that limit us in life and that prevent us from experiencing all of the happiness, fulfillment, and success that we would like and deserve. Someone once said, “No life is so good that we can’t imagine it being better.” How would you like your life to be better? Think in terms of patterns you’ve noticed in your life, those things about which you wonder, “Why is this always happening to me?” or “Why doesn’t that ever happen to me?” Think in terms of what you want; what you would like to have be different in your experience. Examples include a particular person at work toward whom you respond in a way that you don’t like; some area of your life where you feel stuck; difficulty you are having in a relationship; an automatic response you have in a certain situation that doesn’t serve you; some new undertaking that you have been saying you would like to accomplish but have not been able to (perhaps because of fear, or lack of confidence, or for reasons unknown to you). Then you might ask, “I wonder what’s on my map such that I am having (or, the flip side, not having) this experience? I wonder what new perspective, understanding, attitude, or belief would serve me here?”

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a model for understanding and working with human behavior. NLP has the ability to get direct access to our internal maps of reality and to shift them, to reassemble the connections, to update them, and to correct the mistaken representations, so that our life experience reflects more of what we want—personally, in our relationships, and on the job. NLP begins by accepting and respecting what is and what has been. NLP honors you, as you are. But NLP also insists that what you desire is possible. If it is possible for anyone else, it is possible for you.

NLP is always about having more choices more freely available. At NLP Marin, we regard just about everything that people do that they do not want to be doing as expressions of old, out-of-date safety patterning. How much easier and more satisfying would it be, to be human, if our out-of-date patterning could be updated simply and directly? This capability—direct system updates that keep our internal software current with the reality our lives—is one of the main ingredients of NLP personal change magic.

Some of the most striking and common occurrences of unfortunate, safety-related out-of-datedness are the fear-based safety patterns that we all know as phobias and panic attacks. Both kinds of experience can vary considerable in intensity. Each can be mildly annoying or almost life destroying. Both are definitely unwanted, and both are—in terms of all conventional methods of treatment—extremely difficult to get rid of.

Panic attacks are conventionally viewed as “panic without an object,” and phobias as “panic with an object.” The person suffering a panic attack experiences intense fear, and apparently for no reason. The phobic individual at least is able to know what he or she is afraid of, but often not why. However, even in the case of apparently unmotivated panic, there is never “for no reason.”

Fear and panic reactions are always straightforward, sensible responses to specific stimuli, usually invisible, internal pictures and sounds.

The internal sensory representations (internal pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes) that cause “irrational” fear and panic can do this because of a bug in human wiring. Put very simply, the brain circuits that light up when we process an external picture or sound are essentially the same ones we use to process purely internal (“imaginary”) sounds and pictures, etc. As a result, if we are being chased by a real bear, or if we are merely imagining such a chase, parts of our brain dedicated to issues of basic survival cannot tell the difference; they produce the same fear, the very same panic, the very same fight/flight physiological consequences (breathing changes, skin color and temperature changes, etc.). The problem is that we are not aware of what we are seeing internally. Although we are programmed to generate our own internal lions and tigers and bears, we are also programmed to not notice that we are doing this. The result, unavoidably, is fear and panic “for no reason.”

But, again, there is a reason; there is always a reason. There is always an answer to the question, “How are you making yourself afraid?”

Most conventional approaches attempt to correct things by changing attitudes, so that the phobic or panicked individual is more able to cope, and/or by helping to gradually desensitize the person, so that, over a rather long period of time, and after much exposure to the things that are so fearful, they really don’t mind much any more.

These methods have become part of the conventional therapeutic repertoire because they often do some good. However, they have a severe limitation: they treat the symptoms, and leave the source of the unwanted experience intact. NLP goes after the source of the fear in the brain’s processing, directly, with the result that the brain no longer generates the unwanted experience, because it has been re-patterned. Using the NLP toolbox is like plugging a keyboard into the brain. It gives us access to programmed neural instructions that the brain uses to create fear. It allows us to directly restructure, re-sequence, and generally revise the unwanted patterning that generates unwanted experience and behavior.

The NLP toolbox gives us an unequaled way to observe, capture, decode and understand how (not just why) human beings create and maintain their experience. When we can understand how someone generates a glorious capability, for example, or how he or she generates disabling fear and panic, then we can work directly to increase the former and eliminate the latter. The key word here is “eliminate,” not adjust to, adapt to, or cope with, but eliminate the patterning that produces the unwanted anxiety and fear.

Using NLP, the question, “What lets you know to be afraid?” is not useless; it is essential and straightforwardly helpful. It is essential because, through the body, other-than-conscious aspects of the personality always fully answer this question. It is helpful because, through these externally visible movements and changes that correspond to the internal fear sources, the body directs the healing practitioner to locate and reorganize the specific past experience that is causing fear in the present. Again, the client will usually have no idea what this past material is, but body physiology always provides the needed information. In fact, the answers come flooding out.

Once the old pictures and soundtracks that are causing the fear are identified, the next steps in fixing the phobia or eliminating the panic involve scrambling the signals that the brain has been using to produce the unwanted fear. This is done directly, by having the client change the look and sequence of the internal pictures. This is an astonishingly simple thing to do and it has the good effect of interrupting the brain’s ability to produce fear.

In situations where a phobia has generalized severely, or in which the loss of free choice has deeply affected the afflicted person’s identity, their definition of themselves, it is often necessary to do more than simply re-pattern the sensory sequence (the pictures and/or soundtrack) that caused the fear. This presents us with different, additional opportunities for transformational NLP magic, but that is another exploration altogether.

How did you do with all those New Year’s resolutions of years gone by? If you are like most people, most of them got left behind around the end of January. Many became no more than a nagging memory until the next New Year rolled around.

If this sounds even a little like you, read on. You’re not wrong, you’re not alone—and you’re certainly not bad.

Resolutions are an interesting process that we put ourselves through. We use special dates to mark times for making major changes in our lives. We start into them with the best of intentions and the greatest hope and it’s exhilarating the first few days or weeks when we manage to stick to the change. But then something happens—all at once or little by little—intention wanes and hope fades.

It’s not unusual, not even unexpected. We’ve done it before. The sad part about it all is what we do to ourselves after the resolution is broken. We make some sort of a judgment about how weak or undisciplined we are. We get down on ourselves, we get discouraged and, worst of all, we lose a little faith in ourselves.

Most resolutions are hard to keep not because we lack self-discipline, not because we are weak, and certainly not because we are inherently bad. Most of the time, what makes resolutions hard to keep is how we make them.

A resolution is a decision to change our behavior, to do something different. Resolutions are generally made because we don’t like something about ourselves—we want to be different or have a different experience of life in some way. The part of us that doesn’t like something and wants to change makes the resolution. The key here is that the part that is responsible for the way we are (indeed, finds value in it) is never consulted. Most often, if that part of us is acknowledged at all, it is blamed, made wrong, and told to get lost. The result is internal conflict.

When there is internal conflict, we have set ourselves against ourselves and, as a result, we have no way to really win. Even if we manage to keep the resolution, the aspect of us that has other ideas still loses and the internal conflict begins to escalate. Eventually, the battle to keep the resolution will wear us down. We won’t feel as good inside as we’d hoped we would. It’s about here that we give up.

So, the trick is getting to a solution that doesn’t create an internal battle. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provides excellent tools for assisting with this process.

Present and future oriented, NLP starts with very positive assumptions about human beings and the behavior they engage in. For example, NLP assumes that people naturally make the best choice available from those they believe to be possible. Given a better choice, people will use it—automatically. Starting from these assumptions, the NLP model has developed into a very rich collection of perceptual and behavioral skills and tools for understanding and changing human behavior. Over the years, it has demonstrated an amazing ability to assist people to make the changes they want and have them last. Some call it magical.

True “re-solution” comes when you get to know yourself well enough that you see how every aspect of you is doing its best to work in your favor. It is when you come to respect all aspects of yourself that lasting change is possible and effortless. When all of you is respected, included, and engaged in contributing to what you truly want, the internal battles and self-sabotaging behavior melt away. Life begins to look more the way you want it to look. You begin to feel whole again—and isn’t that really at the heart of any resolution you make?

By now most of us have at least had an introduction to the operating principles of the “law of attraction.” Essentially, the premise of this “law” is that there are only two kinds of information in this universe: energy and matter. If something is not one, it is the other, and each influences the other. At a personal level, the most useful aspect of this premise relates to the quality of our life experience: our thoughts are energy and as such, they influence our matter, a.k.a. our reality or experience. If we want another experience, a better experience, then all we need to do is change our thoughts and we will attract a different matter/experience. In theory, this sounds fine, however it occurs to me that asking someone to change their thoughts can be like asking them to shift into third gear when they’ve never driven a stick shift.

At NLP Marin, we work with the change model known as neuro-linguistic programming, and the process generally begins with some basic questions. As expected, the first question asked is, “What do you want?’ or, “What is it that you would like?” If the client were to reply, “I want to change my thoughts,” we would then work with the client to “chunk down” this desire. In other words, we work with the client to articulate their want as a manageable size—not to change their wish, but to put it into a relevant context so that we can introduce more immediate resources toward achieving their want.

So, how does one “chunk down” thoughts? It’s really quite simple, however, first we have to understand that our thoughts are a conglomerate of the senses. We humans experience the world primarily through images, sounds and feelings, or in NLP terminology, the V’s, A’s, and K’s (visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses). Our conscious mind works primarily with language, however it is our unconscious mind that communicates in images, symbols and feelings. In addition, the unconscious mind takes things literally and does not process negatives. It also is primarily concerned with our health and well being—our survival. The conscious mind is what makes meaning from these images and symbols, and gives expression to that meaning through language and behavior.

As an example, if I were wanting to control my eating binges I might say to myself, “I don’t want to be a pig, so I’ll just eat half of that cake.” Unfortunately, the unconscious mind will quite happily make a picture of self as pig, eating cake.” Period. If I am unhappy in my work and I continually say to myself, “ This is such a pain in the neck,” my unconscious mind will very obligingly generate a feeling of pain in my neck. So, the process of understanding the structure of thoughts filters through the ranks of brain hierarchy and culminates in conscious awareness, with thoughts and actions that we broadly term as “experience.”

In order to change our thoughts then, it can be much more amenable to begin by chunking down and changing our words. Naturally, when we change our words, we will also affect our imagery and feelings—and that is the ultimate goal. However, keeping things simple is the key. All that is required is to change our words is imagination. What might happen if I were instead to say to myself, “It’s easy for me to choose foods that support my health?” Imagine that you have the inner resources available right now to choose your words so that they support you in your highest good, and you do!

If you feel that life is constantly a struggle, chances are good that you have an internal dialogue that sounds something like, “Life is hard…no one gets a free lunch…I never get a break…” and so on. Imagine that you can turn those negative words into positive ones and you’ll immediately put some high energy into your life. To begin with, an internal rewrite might sound something like, “ Life’s not easy.” (Remembering that the unconscious doesn’t process negatives, so the unconscious only hears, “Life’s easy.”) Eventually, you can work your way up to, “Life is great!”

The challenge to changing our words lies in our beliefs and identity. Our system has developed some highly effective and useful ways of ensuring that our identity remains stabilized, regardless of how much we say we want something different. Neuro-linguistic programming calls this the “ecology.” In other words, all of the “parts” function together (although sometimes not very harmoniously it seems) to preserve the overall environment.

Practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming are trained in the art of “talking” to the various parts, via the senses, so that more resource and choices are available to the client. And, although there are numerous skills that NLP practitioners use, the art of changing our words in NLP-speak is called “reframing.” Reframing literally wakes up both the conscious and unconscious minds by evoking a different set of V’s, A’s, or K’s.

Try it for yourself. Notice how you feel and what pictures you make when you say to yourself, “I’m sick.” Now try, “I’m not feeling well.” Now try looking up and saying, “I’m feeling better all the time.” It’s a different experience each time, isn’t it? Of course, reframing can be much more sophisticated than that, and one can become quite the word connoisseur. However, why not keep things easy, at least to begin with?

So, the next time you want something different in your life, imagine that it’s already yours. Then say the words and notice the feeling that comes with it. And, like the shampoo bottle directions say: wash, rinse, repeat.

Have you ever wondered why you have to work so hard to get the things you want, when the things you don’t want in your life seem to occur and recur without any effort at all? Do you know that for many adults, our biggest secret fear is that we will be discovered to be a “fake,” to be less than we present ourselves to be? How is it that we can be so seemingly “successful” in many ways and yet we remain unsettled by feelings of inadequacy or by the events in our life experience that seem flawed?

We carry on wars within ourselves, inner contortions of conflict and fear: things from which we have been running away all our lives, or dreams that we’re always moving toward and never quite achieving. For some, life is an endless stream of personal crises, while for others life is mostly good, except for that occasional feeling that we’re not quite fulfilling our potential, or our embarrassing addiction to daytime soap operas.

But what if those nagging under-achievements or prevailing maelstroms were not a problem? What if what’s “wrong” is actually a positive by-product of an overzealous and outdated system for survival, and could easily be updated? What if we truly have all the resources we need to move from duality to wholeness?

Many of us are exiles from our childhood. In the moment of wounding our very survival is at stake, and how we adapt to survive the experience becomes trapped deep in our unconscious mind—not to traumatize us, but to preserve the learning. Courtesy of the reptilian brain (whose only concern is for creature-level safety and physical survival), our wounding becomes a survivable event, and hence we have no need to avoid future iterations. Our mammalian brain, next up on the brain food chain, adds strong emotions that support our well being. Our reptilian and mammalian systems together code our wounding as not only survivable, but as a prerequisite for survival. They’re just doing their job.

Neurologically speaking, inner conflict occurs when the frontal and pre-frontal human brain, which is a much more sophisticated driver for our experience, desires something that seemingly contradicts our reptilian brain’s functions. (We really do want to have a lasting intimate relationship, even though our four previous marriages lasted only two years each.) Neural patterns of long-term happiness and desire crash in to reptilian patterns of survival. Since survival is the number one impulse for staying alive, the outdated programming invariably reigns. The content of survival is perfect; it is the context that is misplaced or outdated.

Working with some fundamental yet powerful presuppositions, Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) delivers the good news: we are not broken! In fact, by understanding how the system works we can realize that there is a positive intention behind every behavior, no matter how incongruent it appears on the surface. This can be a challenging basis from which to function, especially if you’ve experienced some particularly malicious behavior. However, to continue the hypothetical example, let’s say that your wounding was around intimacy, then those “failed” marriages were actually the system’s best effort at keeping you safe and alive.

Just as importantly, it is useful and respectful to make a distinction between behavior and “self.” When we really get this, we stop judging others and even more so, stop judging ourselves. Sometimes, self-judgement has become inappropriately coded as a substitute for belonging, or other basic survival needs. For example, if a parent was overly critical we may have taken this on for ourselves as way of maintaining our place in the family system.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in its “pure” form is an awkward name for an elegant competence model of change that “rewires” the system. Unlike other models for change, NLP is more concerned with the context of our stuck patterns and less concerned with the content. Understanding how we create our experience is more useful than understanding why, because for every behavior, there is a discernable neurological pattern that occurs. We can track this pattern through the senses by “noticing:” where our eyes move, the language we use, our physiology, and our overarching patterns of relating to the world.

This noticing is part of the NLP “toolbox” that one can master as a client or a practitioner. However, the tools are just that—tools. What NLP really does, through updating and communication, is change our relationship to the events in our life. What’s wrong becomes part of a larger map of reality that is subsumed within what’s right. Our experience remains the same, but how we perceive it, the stories we tell ourselves, or the emotional charge, is all available for revision. Once revised, we have more choices, more resources, and more behavioral flexibility. It’s really that simple—and that effortless.

by Volker Frank, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate. Volker supports organizations with strategic planning, organizational consulting and leadership coaching. Visit him at www.VolkerFrank.com
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2008)

When we think about issues of conscience, we quickly go into the large moral and political questions of our times, like a woman’s right to choose, fighting a good or evil war, economic exploitations, and so on. And yet, our conscience is hard at work every day supporting us with our choices and decisions having our best interest at heart. We know we’ve chosen “right” by the immediate sense of comfort – the signature signal from our conscience. Are we in line for happiness if we follow our conscience, if we are “good” and do the “right” things? Then where do the difficulties and suffering enter the picture? Is it that we are flawed and full of sin?

Our decision-making processes are complex, mysterious and, from a right/wrong perspective, error-prone at best. There are so many conflicting values and beliefs pushing and pulling us that it is often preferable not to think about it too much. Could that contribute to the fact that lasting happiness is so elusive?

What if our conscience is not the moral barometer most of us were taught it is? What if it tells us little about good and bad, right and wrong? What happens when we look at it from the perspective of relationships and our sense of belonging? When a choice intensifies our sense of belonging, we feel good and innocent; when it threatens our sense of belonging, we feel bad and guilty.

The German psychologist, Bert Hellinger, offers us this new perspective. He developed a way to experience first-hand how powerfully our conscience rules our lives and choices together with an appreciation for the mixed results we are getting. His approach, Constellation work, also offers us the felt sense of what it’s like to re-choose for a different experience – a happier one if that’s what we desire. We can see the dynamics of conscience play out in three ways, which are well designed to support the strength of tribes, families and groups of all kinds.

1) Balancing giving and taking

Let’s consider two friends. When one of them helps the other, the helper experiences a sense of comfort and entitlement – signals from the good conscience. The one receiving the support experiences a sense of guilt and obligation. It’s the bad conscience nudging us to restore the balance. Now, many of us know people who love to help and give. They live in the comfort of innocence/giving and manage to avoid the guilty feelings of receiving. Unfortunately, the imbalance creates isolation. The people they treat so well, who are unable to reciprocate, withdraw from the helper after awhile. The helper ends up alone, often with a righteous anger about thanklessness that further supports the sense of innocence and good conscience.

2) Respecting membership

Our conscience tracks that all members of a tribe are fully acknowledged and included. In families, that means that everybody has the same inalienable right to belong. When somebody is excluded, the conscience creates a balancing movement, which compels another person to unknowingly represent and remember the excluded one. Take the example of Eric (name changed), who experienced exclusion and isolation at work. A Constellation revealed for him that he had identified with an uncle who died young. Because of the tremendous grief, the family stopped talking about the dead uncle and he became virtually forgotten (excluded). Out of love and following their conscience, new members of a family will do everything they can to restore the balance. In this case Eric attempted to “re-member” his excluded uncle by unconsciously recreating a similar kind of exclusion in his life. Eric has the comfort of innocence and a good conscience by doing the “right” thing, unaware that he is also accepting the suffering for himself. Knowing about the connection, Eric can consciously include his uncle as part of the family, fully step into his own life, and his rightful place at work.

3) Respecting order

In a tribe, those who come before have precedence over those who come later. When we respect seniority, we experience loyalty and pride, as we often do with teachers and mentors. When we don’t, we experience fear of retribution. This is an important dynamic between parents and children. When a child judges or dismisses a parent, the child, in effect, takes a stance of being “bigger,” which has a weakening effect. In Eric’s example, he interfered with the affairs of his grandparents by wanting to fix the exclusion through creating the same dynamic in his life. However, when he accepts and respects their choices without judgment, his conscious inclusion of his uncle strengthens him.

In our Western culture, we are essentially blind to these tribal dynamics and the ways our conscience guides our behavior and affects our quality of life. Constellations reveal these dynamics, which leads to new choices, away from the old suffering. It turns out that when we re-choose to step more fully into our lives, we often face temporary guilt feelings with the fear of exclusion. If we want to gain strength, personal weight and step into our own happiness, we must give up the comfort of our “good” conscience that comes with a blind sense of belonging and the feeling of innocence. It’s a tough spot, but hardly a choice

All over the universe, or so it seems, human beings are famous for routinely experiencing what they most don’t want to have, and for not being able to experience that which they most really do want. As human beings, all of our most stuck patterns of experience, from the slightly embarrassing ones (I always end up watching more TV than I want), to the ones that are actively life-destroying (I just can’t help disrespecting all the people I’ve tried to be partners with) have their source in our brains’ ongoing efforts to keep us well and safe. For us at NLP Marin, this is the most remarkable and amazing thing about humans: that everything we do that doesn’t work is actually the consequence of our brains’ patterning to make sure that we are all OK—both ourselves and the people we care about. But then, how can it be that something so positively and beautifully intended—our natural patterning to be well and happy—can go so terribly, terribly wrong so much of the time?

One of the really important reasons this is still happening for us humans is that, courtesy of creative evolution, we all have more than one brain, and each of them has a different set of instructions and descriptions about what well-being really is. A simplistic but still decent analogy is the issue of “legacy” hardware and software that plagues the computer world. Computer designers and engineers are forever faced with the job of providing their end-users with better tools (more elegance, reliability and functionality, for example) while still making sure that all of the old software can still work with and through the newer hardware designs.

Mother Nature has had a similar task with us humans: how to add functionality, adaptability, and ease-of-use without disinheriting everything that came before, in terms of our neurobiology. The result is that nature always builds new brain components and functions on top of (literally, on top of) whatever the processes of interactive evolution have already perfected across eons of time. As a result of this rather conservative approach to designing our hardware and inner software, all of us have a least four brains, and each of the four seems to have its own orientation, goals, and success indicators.

Courtesy of the neurophysiologists and their new and amazing brain investigation technologies (scanners of various kinds), we can observe our four different brains at work.

The First Brain

First and oldest is the brain with the most seniority—our Reptile Brain. It is not much changed in function from that of the average garden lizard. It is responsible for the basics of physical survival—heart beat, blood pressure, respiration, etc. (An old neuroscientist joke says that the Reptile Brain is responsible for the “4 F’s”—Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing…..and reproduction.)

The Second Brain

The Old Mammal Brain. A later development that is on top of around the Reptile, our Old Mammal Brain adds in a wonderful capacity to generate strong emotions, and to use these emotions to promote creature-level safety and well being. The additions of greater emotional range give the creature that has them even stronger drivers to move toward or away from conditions and experiences that will affect overall survival.

Note: At NLP Marin, we refer to the First and Second Brains, collectively, as our Critter Brain. It is not human, and it does not operate with truly human criteria. It has no attention to things like happiness, fulfillment, justice, truth or beauty. It works to fulfill the Four F’s, and that’s about it.

The Third Brain

Our third brain is our Primate neurology. It occupies a large part of the top and back of the inside of our heads. The Primate brain is very sophisticated, with a wonderful capacity to understand the realities and rules of community—the so-called primate dominance dynamics. Compared with us humans, however, the Primate brain lacks much inertest in or capacity to make meaning about abstractions, values, and long periods of time. It is the brain of a remarkable ape, but an ape that is not concerned with 20 year plans about anything.

The Fourth Brain—the Human Brain

This is the newest and most human part of us, neurologically speaking—our frontal and pre-frontal lobes. These are the reasons we have foreheads that are vertical instead of slanted. This Fourth Brain, especially their pre-frontal aspects (located immediately on the other side of our foreheads) are where the “I-ness” of us resides. If life damages part of our motor cortex or a speech center, farther back in our heads, then we may have impaired movement or speech, but we are still “us.” Damage to the pre-frontals, however, changes who we are and how we create meaning in the world. Moreover, there are some who say that our pre-frontal lobes are one of our main connections into whatever it is that we are part of in terms of non-physical reality.

All of four brains are operating constantly. They rely on each other and usually coordinate themselves magnificently. There are a few bugs in the interfaces, however, and these bits of bad programming can cause us huge difficulties as humans.

Some of the biggest bugs in our multiple brains

Bug #1

The main driver for the Critter Brain is fear, with the goal of survival, and with no attention to changing anything that has already become associated with this experience of survival. In complete contrast, the main driver for the Human Brain is love, with goals of learning and, basically, nothing but change. Consequence: our Human is always imagining things being different and better, while our Critter simultaneously values it all staying the same, especially if we are not dead yet (see Bug #3, below).

Bug #2

The Critter Brain does not deal in time, at least not in Human time. The Critter does a truly good job of being here now. For the Critter, there is meal time and nap time, but not a life-time. Consequence: the Critter will happily run hugely unproductive or damaging patterning forever. For the Critter, forever is just for-now.

Bug #3

The Critter has only one success indicator it uses to know if it is doing a good job for us. The Critter cannot actually speak, but this one success indicator comes down to a simple question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, then the Critter gives itself full marks, gold stars, and many thumbs up for doing a great job. The Human who is sort of riding along on top might be in life agony—doing their third failed business or fourth alcoholic marriage, for example, and the Critter will regard this as continuing a high-quality outcome. After all, these difficult or tragic experiences are no trouble for the Critter. It values a heart that beats; it has no attention to whether or not that heart is open or closed in more non-physical terms.

Whether our heart is open or closed, for example, is well above the Critter Brain’s pay grade. It does not know how to make meaning at this level. It can only create associations, and if a “broken heart” becomes associated with not-having-died, then the Critter will value “broken-heartedness” highly, and it will promote and foment the experience throughout the Human’s life. The more the Human tries to change things, the more the Critter operates to set them back to original conditions, to the ones with the most “survival value”—the experiences that we learned to survive and that, unfortunately for us humans, our Critter Brains then associated with continued survival. And because the Critter Brain is the one that generates most emotions, it knows how to create the feelings within us that will allow it get its way. Bug #3 is a serious bug indeed.

About thirty years ago, the founders of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) invented a description for their then newly synthesizing discipline, a new way of understanding and changing human experience. They described NLP as “the study of the structure of human experience and human excellence.” The important word here is “structure.” NLP is a terrifically good toolbox for helping us to understand how we create and maintain our experience as humans. The question that usually gets a session of NLP-based change work rolling is, “What would you like?” NLP change work is designed to locate and revise just exactly those kinds of Critter/Human communication problems that generate almost all of our unwanted experiences, the ones that go in the unwanted-yet-impossible-to-stop-or change category.

And working with the NLP toolbox promotes Critter/Human coordination and harmony. Our goal is to have what we want, based on our most truly human desires and standards, and to do so in actual present time. Neuro-Linguistic Programming can do this superbly well because it speaks English (or another language) to the Human Brain, but it speaks to the Critter Brain in the programming language of creature neurology, which is a language not of words, but of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes. It’s like plugging a keyboard into the Critter wiring. When we reprogram or re-pattern the Critter in its own programming language, it accepts updates easily and, if desired, permanently.

In fact, at NLP Marin, we describe NLP as “a toolbox to help our creature neurology to better support our most human and spiritual goals.”

© 2006 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

For our first “Evenings with Carl” event we invited the students and friends of NLP Marin to a insightful presentation on the topic. We are sorry that we could not accommodate all of you who wanted to come. The evening was a great success and we offer you these audio recordings so you can find out what Carl is paying attention to when it comes to the concept of free will. Thank you for all your interest.

Carl Buchheit is the co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Listen to the first part of the evening (70 min)

link

Listen to the second part of the evening (55 min)

link

Read the article…

Most of us are mostly inclined to assume that most of our actions and decisions, or at least most of our more private and intimate choices, are the result of some kind of free will process.  Or, if we can no longer convince ourselves of this, we at least want to assume that it is our inner patterning for making meaning and selecting behavioral options that is the source of most of what we decide and do.

One of the main presuppositions of NLP is, “Choice is better than no choice.”  We routinely assert that one of the objectives of good training in NLP is to expand the experience of having more choices on our “maps of reality.”  However, there are many other points of view, some of them quite elegant and compelling, which argue that this “free choice” frame is illusory and counter to the experience of happiness and well-being.

What interests me are some of the alternatives to Bert Hellinger’s immensely convenient concept/creation that we usually call “The Family Soul.”  Within Hellinger’s frame, descendents in families seek to take possession of the pain of ancestors because of motivation that is mainly based in three things: the emotion of love; the desire to assert innocence; and the need to avoid or deny guilt.  At NLP Marin, we have developed some remarkable ways to utilize family constellations, to reveal and revise the beautifully intended but pointless transgenerational suffering that flows naturally from these three primary needs.

Whereas Bert Hellinger’s model of transgenerational suffering involves descendant’s seeking to locate and heal the unresolved pain of ancestors, there is another viewpoint that maintains just the opposite.  This concept is usually summarized as “cellular memory.”  Within this frame of “cellular memory,” the unresolved problems of the ancestors ask the following generations to find solutions.  ‘Souvenir albums’ containing memories of unsurvived trauma and unresolved loss are handed down from one generation to the next for this purpose.  In this way, perhaps, our “creature consciousness” seeks to perfect its relationship with a threatening and dangerous physical universe.  Or, perhaps, the “preconscious collective” of our hominid ancestors demands that it’s future expression – in our time, in our lives – prepare a future paradise or promised land, in which pain, loss and death will threaten no more.

Still another point of view, this one popularized by several noted interpreters of “A Course In Miracles,” maintains that time is a “vast illusion.”  Within this point of view, which is vastly difficult to comprehend adequately, all of our experience – both physical and non-physical, both in time and beyond time – is an entrancing replay of events and choices that were determined at the moment of creation (of the universe).

So, considered in these very broad terms, some of our options seem to be: 1) we voluntarily suffer for our ancestors in an unworkable effort to correct their pain, so that this pain will not be able to reach us in time.  This is the Hellinger description based on the emotion of love.  2) That it is not love, but fear that directs us to recapitulate family suffering–generation upon generation.  Within this frame, DNA has direct control over our choices; it compels present conformity with past family calamity.  3) Everything is predetermined until we wake up from the trance of time and non-time altogether.  (It is important to note that within this frame, the process of dying and the experience of death do not actually help us understand anything more about what’s really going on.  In this frame life is an illusion and death doesn’t help.)

So, do we actually have free will or not?  As practitioners and teachers of NLP, all we can know for sure is that the only really important question is “What would you like?”

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

7. That now is the only time there is.

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

When we act to improve our lives by defeating some aspect of ourselves (for example, “an old, unwanted behavior pattern,” or a recurring issue of “self-sabotage”) who is it, exactly, who wins?

One of the most enduring and unfortunate delusions to come out of the personal growth movement (especially the “monster power growth” version of it) is the idea that we all contain a “strong self” that can be trained to compel the subjugation of our “weak self.” It is completely understandable that almost all of us develop this impression. Human beings have been trying to make meaning out of their internal conflicts, their affinity with the light or dark sides of things, with their distresses related to virtue and guilt, for tens of thousands of years—long before the invention of the personal growth weekend seminar, as far as we know.

The easiest way to allow personal change and growth is to include—not to exclude or defeat—whatever it is that is not working in our lives. We can recognize that unwanted patterns of behavior are simply old solutions that have unwittingly outlasted their usefulness. Actually, when we go beyond this—when we seek to actively respect whatever it is that seems to be causing us the most pain and frustration—the experience of including and changing even long-standing patterns becomes safe, fun, and rewarding. Our old patterns are much more available for easy, comfortable change when we do not fight against them. In fact, when they are respected properly, we find that old, unwanted behaviors usually seek to change themselves. It’s as if they want to catch up with the rest of us, and that makes for a wonderful, and defeat-free, reunion.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

Everything in the Universe is coordinated to move and change along paths of least resistance. Everything—electrons, inter-galactic clouds of hydrogen gas, white mice, and melting ice. There are no exceptions. So, it is curious and weird that, for humans, the words “taking the path of least resistance” are usually tossed out as in insult. Now, we are all getting gradually better about this. One is rarely congratulated about the pointlessness and intensity of one’s struggle any more. Still, who do we think we are, anyway?

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

Some of the saddest words are, “At least I respect myself enough to despise myself.” Proper self-regard is always the most courteous way to be in life and the universe. It invites the best for and from others. Too little self-respect provokes other humans to want to withdraw their care and support. They can’t help but feel this at some level. It is an ancient instinct in our hunter-gatherer DNA, a not-quite-knowing designed to protect the well-being of the whole troupe. The instinct can be overridden, and it often is, but to do this requires some energy and work. Proper self-respect is never costly or inconvenient for anyone. And, it is hardly ever fatal.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

Almost all of western psychotherapy seeks, in one way or another, to separate clients from their parents. This movement is in exactly the wrong direction. If we want to know what would come out of the mix if we put our parents into a giant blender and then hit the frappè button, the answer is—we would exist. We are exactly, precisely that combination.

Our broadband connection to the flow of life—the cable sockets themselves, so to speak—happens to be them. Not personally, necessarily, but certainly energetically, the sockets are where they are. We can deny this, but then we have to live on dial-up. When we deny parents, we deny ourselves and cut ourselves off from the sources of strength in life. This never has a good effect. If our parents are dangerous, crazy, or lethally boring, it is probably a good idea to stay away from them physically, but this is not the same as disrespecting them.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

As it turns out, this seems to be exactly what all of us humans value doing more than anything else. We are—all of us—driven to make sure that we experience some version of the tragedies and unresolved losses of the family members who came before us. As long as we experience their pain, or something closely like it, we have hope to provide our families with a better past, which, it follows very [il]logically, will allow us to experience a better present and future for ourselves. This is complicated business, and highly seductive. When our pain now signals us that we are on track toward past and future happiness, we go into a deep, deep trance of secure and loving family salvation. As crazy as this sounds, this is what we do, and are pretty much screwed until we start to catch on. Messing up our own life is never a good way to show respect for anyone.

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

The future is not a perfected or improved past. Our experiences as human beings, whatever this involves in the moment, always represent the very best life solutions that our systems have been able to achieve. We all deal with utterly mysterious and painful inherited patterns, which we then combine with the bafflingly elusive meanings and beliefs we invent for ourselves. However huge the resulting mess might seem to be, it is truly the most creative, positive, and loving solution we could find for ourselves (and for everyone else who was involved) at the time that the unwanted patterning became hyper-stabilized and hard to change. Truly, we are all doing the best we can with what we have, and with what we had.

7. That now is the only time there is.

Being present in the present is wonderful and useful. It’s an indispensable art, an essential part of changing our relationship with ourselves and with life itself. However, for humans who live in time/space, the future and past are real too. Properly created, a good future activates our choosing of it, so that it comes into manifestation against a supportive backdrop called the past. There is no substitute for having a good relationship with our future and our past. After all now, we are now our future’s past, are we not?

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

Our brain’s main function is to filter out everything that doesn’t fit its own ideas about what fits with its ideas. Consequently, it is always very busy not noticing things. However, the good result of this is that it provides us with a stable, more-or-less predictable world in which to live.

To make the experience of being human even more fun, the older, most reliable parts of our brains—our creature brains, which don’t even know that they are parts of human beings—have only one important success indicator, one way to tell if they are doing a good job. This part of the brain doesn’t think, analyze, create, synthesize or talk. It is simply there to establish and maintain associations between this and that. It doesn’t care what this and that are, as long as the associations are intact. Thus, it does not care about the content of our human experience; it only cares that that content (the associations between this and that) do not change. Consequently, its most important success indicator is the answer to the question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, it knows to keep on with whatever it has been doing. If this happens to involve our being miserable in life, at the human level, that is not its problem, nor even its concern.

Our brain is not supposed to care how we feel. We are supposed to care how we feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

Most really wonderful, positive change can eventually lead to feeling bad again. There are some beautiful ways of working with this unfortunate aspect of being human, so that it is not actually always true good change leads to feeling bad. However, for most of us, learning to allow wonderful change to stay positive takes a little practice. This is what we call “the ecology of personal growth.” It is quite an art form, and an extremely valuable thing to learn.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

Everything we think and feel affects all the space, all the time. We really do have this kind of huge effect. Having power like this is never a bad thing. Learning to recognize and use this power is a many lifetimes’ respectfully creative journey. Overall, this is pretty good news.

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

Part the First

Marin-style NLP has always been something that is difficult to characterize, especially when it comes to explaining how it is different. It has much in common with conventional NLP, yet it is tremendously not-like-that at the same time. So, from time to time I would like to share a little with you about where our forms of this wonderful work come from.

Their foundation is solidly in the amazing work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s. After all, even one of our Holographic NLP-level presuppositions is: “No matter how cosmic it gets, it’s still all V’s, A’s and K’s.” We never get too far away from this awareness, and when we do we return to it pretty quickly.

Although it is based in the NLP of the 1970s (what Robert Dilts calls “1st generation NLP), Marin NLP is not about techniques and procedures for techniques. Marin NLP is greatly filtered through my (Carl’s) experience of Dr. Jonathan Rice. Jonathan was my main teacher. He was the only one of Richard and John’s early students to be a credentialed therapist and Ph.D. psychologist. Jonathan added 1970s NLP into the work he was already doing with his clients in his practice in Carmel, just down the road from Santa Cruz. He studied with and stayed around John and Richard not because of their great charm, but because he watched them get results with people that were beyond what he knew how to do. However, Jonathan did not throw away his training and experience as a psychologist.

“Jonathan-style NLP” is heavy on attention to hypnotic language, elegant use of the outcome frame, and close calibration of physiology—especially!!—physiology. Jonathan was determined to teach himself to use Richard and John’s remarkable discoveries about accessing cues to observe and understand the structure of his own clients’ experience. Jonathan never stopped refining and extending this part of the NLP model. For example, the “what stops you” question is something we owe in great part to Jonathan’s persistence and creativity. In the earliest day’s, “what stops you?” was asked for information about content (as in, “Just ask the question and write down what they say”), not for the representational physiology of unconscious safety patterning. “What are the V’s and A’s that are making the K’s?” is Jonathan’s question also. (He didn’t remember saying it, but he thought it was a great one when I brought it up, years later.)

“Jonathan-style NLP” is also something that is usually done seated, not standing, and it expects the practitioner to improvise and constantly adapt, so that no two sessions are identical, and the techniques, if they can be called that, are generally hidden in the flow of life-revising rapport. Moreover, the practitioner seeks to serve the client, not to impress him or her with the practitioner’s amazing personal power. This should all be instantly and hugely recognizable to our NLP Marin students.

I spent years switched with Jonathan. Anyone who knows Jon can sense this in me, any time I am teaching or working with clients. I am greatly indebted to him.
Part Two

The Essential Reframe
“From Intended Positive Outcomes to IPO’s”

In the spring of 1979, when I first encountered the very new field of knowledge called NLP, I was immensely relieved to find within it a wonderful “presupposition” about human experience:

“All behavior has an intended positive outcome,”
(which was/is also stated as)
“Behind every behavior is an intended positive outcome.”

From here in 2008, almost thirty years later, I don’t remember if this statement about intended positives was formalized yet, as a presupposition, or even if “The Presuppositions of NLP” existed in codified form. I heard that the idea seemed to come from John and Richard’s exploration of the work of Virginia Satir, and I remember thinking, “Virginia Satir, whoever you are…way to go!”

All by itself, this one line about intended positives was enough to make it worth my while to learn a lot more about NLP. It directly condensed an entire worldview into seven or eight words. Even better, the idea gave all of us human beings credit for knowing what we are doing—even though our lives are so often so weirdly sad and compellingly hopeless. The presupposition resonated persistently with a thought that had appeared in my mind, elastic and sticky, some years before: “Being human is not a fallen condition!”

For years, I had been becoming increasingly cranky with a variety of “growth” methods and “spiritual” movements in which the main order of business was “purification” of some sort. It was as if the short-format version of these schools was, “Welcome to physical reality. Big mistake! Now, here’s how to recover and become worthy of something better.” There was something so intrinsically and intensely disrespectful about this that I really couldn’t help but think, “That has got to be nuts.”

During this time, I was also still voraciously consuming the work of Jane Roberts and her co-conspirator, the channeled entity, Seth. Jane’s writing was about “the eternal validity of the soul,” but what came through equally strongly was the intense “validity” of physical experience. Years before, Seth/Jane had flattened me with the line, “Within your physical atoms, the origins of all consciousness still sing.” Jane often wrote about the amazing creativity that goes into the achievement of being “securely couched” in physical reality. Since that’s pretty much where I happened to be noticing myself securely couched at the time, I thought that was great.

So, we might begin to imagine my dismay as I discovered that much of the NLP world, which I would come to regard as the place where “they” do conventional NLP, didn’t take the frame of intended positives all that seriously. It was more like, “Behind every behavior there is an intended positive outcome, except for…(except for when the person’s life is too awful…except for when they had really cruel parents…except for when they were misdiagnosed in the second grade…except for when, surely, they have nothing to do with what’s gone so wrong…except for, essentially, they are—surely—the victim, not the source, of their experience”) Out of this kind of nonsense have come “change patterns” that are beyond ugly, “techniques” with names like “Belief Crusher” and “Parts Annihilator,” and so on, and on, in the ceaseless, in-bred plague of “techniques” that is what NLP is for most of the world.

I have purposefully made a completely hardball interpretation of Intended Positive Outcomes the foundation of our Marin-style NLP. I have even extended the presupposition just a little: “All behavior, and all experiences, have intended positive outcomes—no exceptions, ever.” For me, this presupposition is the essential reframe that NLP offers the world. It is an important and powerful assertion. It is far more important than telling people about cybernetic this-and-that, for example. It is the idea that sets us apart.

Because it preserves our proper dignity as conscious beings, by requiring respect for the legacy of our personal ecology, the hardball IPO frame (somewhere I began to abbreviate Intended Positive Outcomes into the acronym IPO’s) hugely eases the experience and processes of change. It allows us all to begin from where we are, without having to pour energy into fighting where we’ve already been.

By adhering to the universal validity of IPO’s, we have been able grow the unique expression that is NLP, Marin-style. Our forms of NLP, so fundamentally rooted in the amazing work of Bandler, Grinder, Robert Dilts, Jonathan Rice, and many wonderful others, yet so completely different in tone, are able to further the soul’s fulfillment without dishonoring the life’s intentions. And that is just the beginning of the story.
Listen to Carl telling the story in more details (70 min)