Category: Strategies

In the most basic sense NLP is a way to map human behavior elegantly. What comes out of this mapping process is a NLP strategy.

C D E G M N P R S T

Strategies

NLP is all about learning. Basically what NLP does is find someone who is capable of something that is interesting to learn, map out what he is doing and learn it yourself to test whether it also works for you. And if it turns out to work for you as well, then you can pass it on to others. What is learned within NLP is called a NLP strategy. If a strategy is very useful, very versatile and often used, the NLP strategy is generalized into a NLP technique.

Grades of traveller. – We can distinguish five grades of traveller: those of the first and lowest grade are those who travel and, instead of seeing, are themselves seen – they are as though blind; next come those who actually see the world; the third experience something as a consequence of what they have seen; the fourth absorb into themselves what they have experienced and bear it away with them; lastly there are a few men of the highest energy who, after they have experienced and absorbed all they have seen, necessarily have to body it forth again out of themselves in works and actions as soon as they have returned home. – It is like these five species of traveller that all men travel through the whole journey of life, the lowest purely passive, the highest those who transform into action and exhaust everything they experience.

Human, All Too Human, book 2, paragraph 228

Submodalities

All NLP techniques consists of the manipulation of submodalities. Submodalities, or qualities as they are called in philosophy, are properties of the five modalities. So if you see something what you see is either in color or black & white, two dimensional or three dimensional, it has a size etcetera. The same goes for hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling something. Submodalities are they way meaning is coded in our brain. For each different meaning we know there is a specific combination of submodalities that represent that meaning inside our brain. The most important submodalities are visual, auditory and kinestetic.

Qualities are our insurmountable barriers; we have no way to stop ourselves feeling mere quantitative distinctions to be something fundamentally different from quantity, namely to be qualities, no longer reducible to one another. But everything for which the word ‘knowledge’ makes any sense refers to the realm where there can be counting, weighing, measuring, refers to quantity – while conversely all our feelings of value (i.e., all our feelings) adhere to qualities, that is, to the perspectival ‘truths’ that are ours and nothing more than ours, that simply cannot be ‘known’. It is obvious that every being different from us feels different qualities and consequently lives in another world from the one we live in. Qualities are our real human idiosyncrasy: wanting our human interpretations and values to be universal and perhaps constitutive values is one of the hereditary insanities of human pride, which still has its safest seat in religion. Need I add, conversely, that quantities ‘in themselves’ do not occur in experience, that our world of experience is only a qualitative world, that consequently logic and applied logic (such as mathematics) are among the artifices of the ordering, overwhelming, simplifying, abbreviating power called life, and are thus something practical and useful, because life-preserving, but for that very reason not in the least something ‘true’?

Notebook 6, summer 1886 – spring 1887 paragraph 14

Might not all quantities be signs of qualities? A greater degree of power corresponds to a different consciousness, feeling, desiring, a different perspectival view; growth itselfis a craving to be more; the craving for an increase in quantity grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world all would be rigid, unmoving, dead. – Reducing all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what follows is that one thing and another stand side by side, an analogy.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 157

TOTE

The TOTE model is the basic unit that NLP uses for strategies. TOTE stands for Test Operate Test Exit. It takes any procedure as a black box. The first test is to see whether it makes sense to start the procedure. The final test is to check whether the outcome is correct of faulty. In the latter case the TOTE model uses feedback to let the Operation know that something has gone wrong. For that reason is feedback always negative in NLP. If the outcome is correct control is passed on to a different Operation through the Exit. One can praise such an outcome and give a compliment, but that has nothing to do with feedback. As you can combine a single TOTE unit with another, one can see a person as a single TOTE black box.

What we do. — What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.

Gay Science paragraph 264