Category: Reviews

I have always found Tad James to be one of the clearest writers in the field of NLP and recently I reread his wonderful book, Timeline Therapy and the Basis of Personality. In Chapter 14, he gives a fine description of what he calls complex meta programs. These are in addition to the four basic meta programs which emerged out of Jung’s work on human archetypes and which are used in the Myers Briggs personality testing system. Below, an elicitation question is given for each of the complex meta programs. Just using the questions on yourself or with other people is enough to help you understand how people work in different ways, but for fuller understanding of the ideas presented here, I highly recommend getting a copy of the original book. The questions here are phrased for the workplace, but you can easily tailor them into other areas of life.
Tad James believes that the four most important complex meta programs are:

• Direction Filter (1)
• Frame of Reference Sort (3)
• Relationship Filter (12)
• Attention Direction (16)

1. Direction Filter
“What do you want in a job?”
This expresses the type of motivation and could be Towards (moving towards desirable things like money), Away (moving away from undesirable things like poverty), or somewhere in between these extremes.
2. Modal Operator Filter (Reason Filter)
“Why did you choose your current job?”
Answers can reflect Possibility (they look for new opportunities), Necessity (they do what needs to be done), or Both.
3. Frame of Reference Filter
“How do you know when you’ve done a good job?”
Possibilities are Internal Frame of Reference, External Frame of Reference, Balanced, Internal with an External Check, and External with an Internal Check.
4. Convincer Representational Filter
“How do you know when someone else is good at what they do?”
Possibilities include See it, Hear it, Deal with them, and Read about it.
5. Convincer Demonstration Filter
“How does someone have to demonstrate competency to you before you’re convinced?”
Possibilities are Automatic, Number of Times, Period of Time, and Consistent.
6. Management Direction Filter
There are three questions which can determine how effective a person would be as a manager. As with all these questions, the original book offers much more information and is highly recommended.
a) Do you know what you need to do to increase your chances for success on a job?
b) Do you know what someone else needs to do to increase his/her chances?
c) Do you find it easy or not to easy to tell him/her?
Possibilities include:
Self & Others (answered yes, yes, yes)
Self Only (answered yes, no, yes/no)
Others Only (answered no, yes, yes/no)
Self but not Others (yes, yes, no)
7. Action Filter
“When you come into a situation, do you usually act quickly after sizing it up, or do you a detailed study of all the consequences and then act?” Possibilities for this filter are Active, Reflective, Both, or Inactive.
8. Affiliation Filter
“Tell me about a work situation in which you were the happiest (a one-time event).” The person is likely to be one of: Independent Player, Team Player, or Management Player.
9. The Work Preference Filter
This is best elicited through more general questions about a person’s previous experiences. It indicates a person’s preference for working with Things, Systems, or People.
10. Primary Interest Filter
“Tell me about your favourite restaurant.” People will talk about People, Place, Things, Activity, or Information.
11. Chunk Size Filter
“If we were going to do a project together, would you want to know the big picture first, or would you want to get the details of what we’re going to do first?”
You will generally find that people fall into one of Specific, Global, Specific to Global, or Global to Specific. Of course, people may change from one context of their life to another.
12. Relationship Filter (Matching/Mismatching)
“What is the relationship between what you are doing this year, and what you did last year?” A Matcher will tend to notice similarities. A Mismatcher will tend to notice differences.
13. Emotional Stress Filter
“Tell me about a work situation (a one-time event) that gave you trouble.”
Notice if the person is Dissociated (no access to Kinesthetic), Associated (access to Kinesthetic), or Choice (first accesses Kinesthetic and then comes out of the feelings).
14. Time Filter
This is usually best elicited by observation, but you could potentially use a question like “Do you have your attention on the Past, Present, or Future? Or are you not concerned with time (Atemporal)”
15. Modal Operator Sequence
This is how a person motivates himself/herself. This is best discovered by observing words used over time. Notice which modal operators they use including I can’t, I should, I have to, I mustn’t etc.
16. Attention Direction
There is no specific question – simply observe. Is the person paying more attention to Self or to Others.
17. Goal Filter
There is no specific question. Just look at the person’s goals and see if they are aiming for Perfection or for Optimization.
18. Comparison Filter
“How are you doing on your job? How do you know?”
e.g. Quantitative (numbers) vs. Qualitative (good, bad, etc.) vs. Nature of comparison (comparing to others, to self in past, etc.)
19. Knowledge Filter
“When you decide you can do something, from where do you get that knowledge?”
20. Completion Filter
“If we were going to do a project together, would you be more interested in the startup phase, where you were generating the energy for the BEGINNING of the project, or in the MIDDLE of the project, where you were involved in the maintenance of the project, or in the END, where you were involved in shutting it down?”
“Is there a part of the project that you’d rather not be involved in?”
21. Closure Filter
“Once you have started receiving information that has, for example, four steps, how important is it to you that you receive all four pieces?”

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Have fun exploring these questions and meta programs with yourself and other people!

This post is based on the wonderful TED talk by Julian Treasure. Much of the text below is directly from the video. I heard about this talk on an NLP mailing list, and apart from its value in developing sensory acuity and rapport skills, it is also of interest to me in a university course that I teach called “Sound and Education Media.” For years, I have been teaching students about the value of listening and doing various exercises based on the work of Barry Truax and R Murray Schafer. I am delighted to see that some of this earlier work is being pursued and extended by people like Julian Treasure. Incidentally, Treasure’s use of language is excellent and from his words it sounds like he would be a fine hypnotist!

Treasure starts out by claiming that “We are losing our listening.” People retain just 25% of what we hear. Listening is the extracting of meaning from sound.
Techniques Used by the Brain
1. Pattern Recognition
We recognize patterns (e.g. our names) in order to distinguish noise from a signal.
2. Differencing
In the video, he gives the example of ‘pink noise’, If ‘pink noise’ is on for a few minutes, we literally cease to hear it. Pink noise is a type of artificially created regular noise which covers the entire spectrum of human hearing.
Filters
Treasure also talks about the other filters that we use at an unconscious level to listen to sounds. These include:

• Culture
• Language
• Values
• Beliefs
• Attitudes
• Expectations
• Intentions

5 Ways to Listen Better
These are the five simple tools that I will be sharing with my university students in the second semester when it begins in October.
1. Silence
Just three minutes a day is a wonderful way to recalibrate your ears.
2. The Mixer
Identify how many channels of sound you can hear in a place. This improves the quality of listening.
3. Savoring
Listen to a mundane sound and recognize its beauty. For example, a clothes drier can have a waltz rhythm. ‘The hidden choir’ is around us all the time.
4. Listening Positions
Start to play with your listening filters. Here are some examples that you can start to play with:

• active vs passive
• reductive vs. expansive
• critical vs. empathetic

5. An easy mnemonic to remember how to listen more effectively:
Receive (Listen to the person)
Appreciate (Make little backchannel sounds to show you appreciate it
Summarize
Ask questions
Treasure reminds us that every human being needs to “listen consciously in order to live fully, connected in space and in time to the physical world around, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected …”
And I agree strongly with his conclusion that we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill. With the rise of technological background noise, personal music players, shrinking personal space in noisy cities, and a general overload of information, listening is an endangered art and one that needs attention.

This is a wonderful short talk by RIchard St. John on how to achieve success. He interviewed and modelled hundreds of TED speakers, people who had achieved success in their lives. It’s only three minutes long and well worth watching. You may have heard it all before, but he puts it together in a very concise persuasive way. Below, I’ve taken his eight tips for achieving success and showed how they are all inherent in the NLP model of the world.

Have passion in what you do

In NLP, we talk about congruency and values. In the Value Elicitation exercise, we identify what is truly important to a person using questions such as “Is money more important to you than helping people or is helping people more important to you than money?” We then try to support congruency to make sure that the person is congruent in their values throughout their activities.

Work hard!

It’s pretty obvious, but success requires hard work, no matter what field of endeavor you are in. You need to practice your skills and develop your craft to a high level. NLP facilitates this dedication to a goal by allowing people to change their motivation strategies or design more effective work strategies that will achieve results most effectively.

Focus

Focus allows us to devote our energy to carrying out specific goals that we have chosen as being important. NLP offers goalsetting activities which promote focus such as Well-Formed Outcomes (SPECIFY process). It also offers powerful language techniques such as the Meta Model which allow us to define clearly what it is that we are looking for.

Persist

Related to working hard and having focus, the ability to persist is a powerful tool in achieving success. One useful tool in NLP is future-pacing, asking someone to consider the effect of a change at a future time. For example, questions like “when you imagine yourself achieving those results in one year, and continuing to persist in your practice, how does that feel now?”

Ideas

Ideas are generated by simply being aware of circumstances, paying close attention, and linking ideas from different domains. NLP helps us to be more aware by training our sensory acuity and helps us to link ideas from different domains through techniques such as metaphor development.

Good

Doing something good or useful is also a key to achieving success. Again, NLP achieves this using exercises like Value Elicitation or Core Transformation to identify the core values that are important to us. NLP also reminds us to check the ecology of the system, for example, “what effect will this change have on the people around you?”

Push

To be successful, you’ve got to push yourself. And NLP is all about pushing the boundaries of what you are currently able to do. One way of defining NLP is as the modelling of excellence. We push our current boundaries by studying the excellent performance of an expert, both consciously and unconsciously. There is no finish line in NLP or in success – we just keep pushing the boundaries to allow people to achieve their highest potential in a way that is congruent with their values – to achieve both success and a happy inner life.

Serve something beyond yourself

This corresponds to the NLP idea of mission. In the Logical Levels model, mission can be seen as the bridge between Identity and Spirit and is elicited by questions such as “What bigger community or system are you part of that your work and being are contributing to?”

This audio program is an old Richard Bandler session recorded live in New York in the early 1990’s. The image pictured here seems to be the original packaging and the CD package is on sale from Excel Quest.

Bandler was on top form on this occasion as he presents an introduction to DHE (Design Human Engineering). In Bandler’s terminology, NLP is about replication (modeling) while DHE is about creation, and the constantly repeated theme in this program is that “evolution is not over.”
Bandler could probably have made a living as a stand-up comic if he hadn’t gone into the worlds of therapy, self-help and all the other worlds that he has entered. He weaves a series of very tall stories about his own experiences together with his pragmatic philosophy and very effective exercises. One of his stories involves helping a schizophrenic patient by projecting a 150 feet-high image of Jesus on clouds using lasers and accompanying the image with a message from our Good Lord over Marshall amps. While his stories are not altogether believable, Bandler is a larger-than-life character and it is clear that the stories are carrying important messages for people who want change in their life. Bandler is a fine communicator at many levels, simultaneously crafting his stories and commentary to the conscious and unconscious minds, and to people with very different needs.
The practical exercises of DHE can be mainly seen as extensions of his earlier work in submodalities. Notice where a good feeling begins and where it exits the body; Then recycle the feeling from the exit point back into the place where it begins and let it grow. Or explore the effects that a drug had on your body and learn how to replicate those effects without the drug. These are simple concepts, but they work. Unlike Robert Dilts, Michael Hall, and others in NLP who provide valuable analytical frameworks for NLP, Bandler is all about the practical business of getting good feelings right now. Both approaches are definitely useful, but listening to a very funny and charismatic Bandler this evening was certainly a whole lot of fun.

The first five chapters of the book deal well with the process of NLP modeling. In fact, they form the clearest description of modeling that I have seen anywhere. Robert Dilts tends to write in a very cognitive style and the analytical description of modeling does not quite match John Grinder’s focus on unconscious processes in modeling. In addition, the use of Dilts’ Logical Levels (Environment, Behaviours, Capabilities, Beliefs and Values, Identity) is not necessarily in agreement with Grinder’s view of modeling. Grinder has specifically questioned how these levels constitute NLP. With this caveat, these five chapters are an extremely useful guide for anyone interested in carrying out NLP modeling, especially because there is such a dearth of published material for this important area, and the writings of John Grinder tend to be very metaphorical which can sometimes get in the way of learning the process.
The remainder of the book after chapter 5 details Dilts’ modeling of leadership skills at the automobile company, Fiat. The objective of the modeling was to model the leadership skills of the successful company managers and to eventually teach those leadership skills to future managers.
While the first half of the book is very well laid out, readable, and accessible to non-academic readers, the second half of the book takes a much more academic research writing style. The signalling of ideas within the text is often not as clear as it could be, and I constantly found myself re-reading sections to find out the main point that the author was trying to make. In addition, while the presentation of an in-depth modeling study seems like an excellent idea for the book, the terminology used to explain the process of modeling in the first half of the book is not used much in the example in the second half and so the reader may not be able to see the connections. Additionally, in the second half, there is sometimes an overemphasis on the content of leadership rather than on the modeling process.
I would love to see a new edition of this book with a number of case studies presented in the second half which demonstrated the principles of modeling more clearly.
 

This is the first book that I purchased for my new Kindle and it was an interesting experience reading on the screen rather than in paper form. I found myself wanting to jump back to the contents continually and being unable to do it easily with the Kindle. Another drawbook is that it isn’t really clear how much of the book or the current chapter remains unread. Although there is a progress bar which shows the percentage you have read through the book and the remaining number of electronic pages, it is certainly not as intuitive as feeling the pages. Still, the ease of carrying the Kindle everywhere is definitely a great feature and it allowed me to read this book much more quickly than if I were relying on the paper version.
And onto the review of the book (rather than the Kindle)…
The content of this book is best described by listing the actual chapter titles which are precise descriptions of each chapter.

• Overcoming stage fright
• Learning to spell
• Becoming more independent
• Healing traumas
• Eliminating allergic responses
• Responding resourcefully to criticism
• Parenting positively
• Asserting yourself respectfully
• Resolving grief
• The naturally slender eating strategy
• Resolving internal conflict
• Recovering from shame
• Positive motivation
• Making decisions
• Dealing with disaster
• Intimacy, safety, and violence
• Personal timelines
• Engaging your body’s natural ability to heal
• Knowing what you want

These chapter titles read like a list of NLP applications and do highlight that this book is very much about applied NLP rather than a theoretical approach. Each chapter has several clearly described case studies which illustrate how the authors were able to help the people in that particular area.
Most chapters also give clear instructions for carrying out the relevant processes and even someone who was unfamiliar with NLP could gain a lot from following the instructions.
What I enjoyed most about this book were the case studies which gave much fuller insight into the realities of using NLP processes than most NLP books. I also enjoyed the authors’ honesty in admitting their own failures as well as their own successes, and how these failures eventually led to success by causing a rethink.