About NLP
This essay was written by my main NLP trainer, Carl Buchheit. He is
the founder of the Marin style NLP (or Transformational NLP) in which I
am trained. This style can be difficult to characterize, especially
when it comes to explaining how it is different from other NLP. It has
much in common with conventional NLP, yet it is tremendously not like
that at the same time. (This essay is edited slightly for ease of
reading.)
History
Marin-style NLP’s foundation is solidly in the amazing work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s. After all, even when the work gets very cosmic, it becomes regrounded very quickly in the simple pictures, sounds, and feelings inside one’s brain and experience. We never get too far away from this awareness of the literal, minute happenings inside one’s experience, and when we do we return to it pretty quickly.
Although Marin style NLP 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
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. 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, something we owe in great part to
Jonathan’s persistence and creativity is our ability to notice the
representational physiology of unconscious safety patterning. In the
earliest day’s, some NLP questions were just asked to gather
information about content. But Johnathan was able to use his training
& expertise to access even deeper information from the same early
NLP questions by calibrating physiology very closely.
“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 if you’ve
ever experienced other forms of NLP.
The Essential Reframe: Intended
Positive Outcomes
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.
[From:
http://www.articledirectorycentral.com/Art/82162/501/The-Therapeutic-Roots-Of-Sitting-Down-NLP.html]
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