Young Understanding NLP

Principles and Practice (second edition)
1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-1-84590-669-6
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Understanding NLP opens a doorway into a more imaginative and coherent way of understanding and using NLP. This completely revised edition unites the many strands of NLP using an elegant paradigm which Peter Young calls the Six Perceptual Positions model. The book provides numerous examples of the paradigm in practice.

Peter Young studied Psychology at the University of Hull, researched brain function at Adelaide University and studied Drama at the Flinders University of South Australia. He is an innovative thinker, with a talent for making connections between different forms of knowledge, and identifying underlying patterns, metaphors and stories. Peter is a creative and humorous writer with an extensive knowledge of NLP, psychology and drama, who is able to explain complex ideas in a clear language.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Peter

Leseproben

Chapter One Understanding NLP
A story is a doorway through which the imagination enters another reality. Every book or film offers the reader or viewer an opportunity to visit a different world, to see what is familiar from an alternative point of view. Some children’s books and films show this transition quite explicitly. For example, Alice finds her way to Wonderland down the rabbit hole; the Bastable children discover Narnia through the back of a wardrobe. I can remember a story I once read as a child, in which a travelling theatre arrives at a town. The protagonist of this story, whose name I have long forgotten, is initially entranced by the performance, despite the crudely painted scenery, the tawdry costumes, and so on. At the end of the show our principle character decides to explore this theatrical world, climbs up on to the stage and discovers the false nature of the cardboard cut-out trees and bushes. However, by going deeper into the recesses of this particular stage, it transpires that there is no back wall to this theatre so that this imaginary world goes on forever. As it does so the scenery becomes increasingly realistic and transforms into a reality somewhat different from the one in front of the curtain. Somehow our hero has made a transition into an alternative universe. My interest in drama sometimes means I find myself performing on stage in a theatre. I feel at home with the technology of that magical space, the mechanics of illusion. The fabricated plywood flats, the shabby drapes, the painted scenery—nothing is quite what it seems to the eyes of the audience. Scenery is frequently reused, repainted, repositioned. I prefer minimalistic sets: a platform, a ramp, a flight of stairs. If the setting has been constructed in a neutral way it can represent whatever the director of the play wants it to be, and in this way the actors and the audience have to do the work in providing meaning. A trapdoor can lead to a dungeon, a nightclub or an air-raid shelter. A flight of steps can lead to a throne, to a tower or to the top of a mountain. In this way you create your own world in which the story can unfold. As a way of exploring some of the complexities of human understanding, remember a time when you had just finished seeing a play or movie, or reading a book that you enjoyed, and a friend asked you, “What was it about?” What happens in your mind as you seek to answer that question? It seems straightforward, and yet it may lead your thinking not forward but off in all directions or around in circles. My guess is that you engage in a frantic search for anything that will allow you to formulate an appropriate answer. Finding such an understanding often takes a little time, and it may seem remarkable that you can do it at all. Think about what you have to do. You are confronted by a complex assemblage of words, pictures, sounds, which were probably worked on, refined, transformed into the finished book or film for a year or more. You have to extract the essence of this so that you can arrive at a succinct yet relevant description, and all in a sentence or two. Of course, the quest may be easier if you have some way of directing your thoughts. How well you do this will be helped by your existing understanding of how books, films or, indeed, human life works. This will be influenced by your previous experience of similar stories, the level to which you can see beyond or beneath the surface details of the experience and identify some kind of pattern, theme or familiar plot that enables you to classify this story according to some kind of criteria. If you are not used to thinking this way, such a task could be well nigh impossible. The story of NLP
Now turn your attention to another complex accumulation of information about how people change themselves and their behaviour in order to improve their ability to achieve the results they want: NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Historically, the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, noticed that some therapists were achieving outstanding results and so they inquired into what they were actually doing that produced significant change in their clients. Having found contemporary theories and explanations somewhat lacking, they began asking questions that no-one had asked before. As a result, they formulated a series of principles, working practices, models for change, and so on, which they called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Since the advent of NLP in the 1970s, it has been expanded to include a vast amount of knowledge about the different ways in which people perceive their reality and how they change. However, all this accumulated information about NLP currently appears more as just a collection of ideas rather than having any obvious unifying theoretical model or paradigm. So what is NLP about? Is it possible to organise it into a recognisable story? Understanding NLP seeks to answer these questions by taking you on a journey through the realms of NLP, using a set of guidelines that will enable you to interpret your experience in a new way. The puzzle
Imagine NLP as a jigsaw puzzle. You open the box and tip the pieces out onto a table. You look at the jumbled heap and contemplate your strategy for arranging them into some kind of meaningful whole. Some pieces show bits of a picture, whilst others are face down and show nothing at all. Even with the picture on the box, it is not always possible to unerringly fit each fragment into the whole. Now NLP is far more complex than that. With a jigsaw puzzle you know ahead of time that there is actually a way of putting the pieces together. However, with NLP, you do not have this certainty. And what would the picture on the box be? Perhaps some kind of impressionistic image, a sketch or a diagram rather than a finished composition. Maybe there is no coherent picture at all! Nevertheless, you set yourself the goal of understanding how NLP works; you are going to put the puzzle together as best you can. It would make the job easier if you could devise some general principles for sorting and connecting the pieces. For example, you could find pieces with similar themes—whatever similar means in this context. Once you have clarified that, you could, by joining similar areas together, create small sections with a broader meaning. Eventually, you have enough of these sections to give you an idea of the big picture. Having a preliminary sketch enables you to test your ideas against it, and to modify the picture accordingly. Once you find a pattern, it immediately tells you how to incorporate other sections and to fit new material into that design. My intention in this book is to demonstrate one way of transforming the jumble of pieces into a coherent and structured pattern. This will give you not so much a picture on the box but rather a plan or set of guidelines to help you make your own picture. Although this might seem rather vague, it will serve you well enough, and, importantly, it will help you deal with the continuing growth of NLP. Unlike a real jigsaw puzzle, even as you are fitting existing parts of NLP together, other people are adding new pieces, developing new areas outside of the original frame. This puzzle is forever changing its size and shape. Fortunately, you are well-practised in creating order out of chaos. Understanding
When things are going well, you have the feeling that you understand what is happening, that you are somehow on top of events, or in control of your life. Understanding is more an emotional response that lets you know that your interpretation of events—the story—makes sense, and that, for the moment at least, issues are being resolved satisfactorily. However, just because a story is reassuring, there is no guarantee that it has greater applicability to life in general. Think of all the obsolete notions of how the world works that have been abandoned over the centuries. All of our stories and theories about human existence are only ever our best attempts so far. At some point they will be challenged and possibly improved. However, if you have a set of procedures or processes that consistently deliver results, there is no urgent need to change them. It is when you become dissatisfied, believe there has to be a better way, want to enhance your expertise, find new ways of intervening to create change, and so on, that you will need a greater depth of understanding in how things work. Understanding is more an ongoing process of interpreting and reinterpreting your experience, rather than a once and for all ‘truth’. Therefore, understanding is paradoxical in that instead of moving towards an ultimate truth, you are developing the mental flexibility to entertain multiple, sometimes contradictory views about the nature of your reality. Understanding NLP not only means you will be able to enhance your own competence and achieve excellence in those areas of life that you choose to develop, it also means that you will gain a sense of many alternative worldviews and beliefs about the nature of human existence. You will be able to intervene more appropriately and effectively in helping other people deal with the problems and issues in their lives. To do that, you first need to be sufficiently in rapport with them so that you may gather information about their model of the world and about how they are stuck. Your flexibility of thought will then suggest ways for them to move beyond their...