A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V W

Certainty

If NLP is applied wrongly then NLP practitioners try to give people certainty on positive things. NLP becomes positive thinking.  Or worse, positive believing. It leads to wrong ideas like: “if you believe it strongly enough it is true”. What follows are the horrors of NLP. For instance arrogance without competence. “I believe I can do it, therefore I actually can do it.” Or blaming the victim: “you are still ill because you didn’t believe strongly enough you would become better”.

Such bad NLP practitioners overlook the fact that certainty closes off other possibilities and therefore limits someone’s world model. In fact when NLP is applied correctly it teaches how to deal positively with uncertainty. Only because a situation is uncertain doesn’t mean you ought to feel bad about it. You can have good feelings in uncertain circumstances. Your feelings are independent of your current situation. If you are ill there is the possibility that you get better. Feeling relaxed and promoting the chance of getting better are smart strategies without the need to believe with absolute certainty. If you want to do something, but you can’t do it yet, there is the possibility that you may learn to do so in the future.

To him who feels himself predestined to seeing and not believing, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 112

Change

Besides the basic NLP presuppositions, there are also the presuppositions of the metamodel and the Miltonmodel. The presupposition of change is one of them.

These divorces of doing and doer, of doing and being done to, of being and becoming, of cause and effect, belief in change already presupposes the belief in something which ‘changes’. reason is the philosophy of what appears obvious.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 141

Chunking

Chunking is based on David Boyd’s hierarchical analysis. Chunking is way of determining where the boundaries lie of whatever has our interest. A chunk is a  piece of information at a particular level of details. Up chunking means getting less detail and more abstraction by figuring out of what set the subject is part of. Down chunking is the opposite: getting more details and less abstraction. Lateral chunking is getting more similar informational pieces at the same level of detail/abstraction. Finally there is a metaprogram called chunk-size where people filter out information that differs from their preferred level of details and abstraction.

Order of rank. – There are, first of all, superficial thinkers; secondly, deep thinkers – those who go down into the depths of a thing; thirdly, thorough thinkers, who thoroughly explore the grounds of a thing – which is worth very much more than merely going down into its depths! – finally, those who stick their heads into the swamp: which ought not to be a sign either of depth or of thoroughness! They are the dear departed underground.

Daybreak paragraph 446

Clarification

It is interesting to replace “teacher” with “NLP trainer” in the quote below and try to figure out what would follow. It suggests that there are at least three different kinds of NLP trainers. The first one is already satisfied if there are people in the training room. The second one is only happy if he is able to influence the audience. The third one wants to clarify NLP and openly show the good, the bad and the ugly of NLP and only then influence his audience.

Within NLP there is a clear division between the metamodel and the Miltonmodel. The metamodel is for clarification while the Miltonmodel is for influence.

The difference among men does not manifest itself only in the difference of their lists of desirable things — in their regarding different good things as worth striving for, and being disagreed as to the greater or less value, the order of rank, of the commonly recognized desirable things: — it manifests itself much more in what they regard as actually having and possessing a desirable thing. As regards a woman, for instance, the control over her body and her sexual gratification serves as an amply sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the more modest man; another with a more suspicious and ambitious thirst for possession, sees the “question mark”, the mere apparentness of such ownership, and wishes to have finer tests in order to know especially whether the woman not only gives herself to him, but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have — only then does he look upon her as “possessed.” A third, however, has not even here got to the limit of his distrust and his desire for possession: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a fantasy of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no
longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality. One man would like to possess a nation, and he finds all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Catalina suitable for his purpose. Another, with a more refined thirst for possession, says to himself: “One may not deceive where one desires to possess” — he is irritated and impatient at the idea that a mask of him should rule in the hearts of the people: “I must, therefore, make myself known, and first of all learn to know myself!” Among helpful and charitable people one almost always finds that clumsy deceitfulness which first adjusts and adapts him who is to be helped: as though, for instance, he should “merit” help, seek just their help, and would show himself deeply grateful, attached, and subservient to them for all help. With these conceits, they take control of the needy as a property, just as in general they are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property. One finds them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled in their charity. Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children — they call that “education”; no mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that the child she has born is thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to his own ideas and notions of worth. Indeed, in former times fathers deemed it right to use their discretion concerning the life or death of the newly born(as among the ancient Germans). And like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a new possession. And it follows from this . . .

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 194

Coaching

One of the most well known applications of NLP is life coaching. NLP has a very good program to make sure that you learn how to make great decisions, feel good no matter what the circumstances, learn to communicate well with others and achieve your goals. In short, it covers the most important aspects of one life.

Where are the needy in spirit? – Ah! How reluctant I am to force my own ideas upon another! How I rejoice in any mood and secret transformation within myself which means that the ideas of another have prevailed over my own! Now and then, however, I enjoy an even higher festival: when one is for once permitted to give away one’s spiritual house and possessions, like a father confessor who sits in his corner anxious for one in need to come and tell of the distress of his mind, so that he may again fill his hands and his heart and make light his troubled soul! He is not merely not looking for fame: he would even like to escape gratitude, for gratitude is too importunate and lacks respect for solitude and silence. What he seeks is to live nameless and lightly mocked at, too humble to awaken envy or hostility, with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experience, as it were a poor-doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud of the fact! To be like a little inn which rejects no one who is in need but which is afterwards forgotten or ridiculed! To possess no advantage, neither better food nor purer air nor a more joyful spirit – but to give away, to give back, to communicate, to grow poorer! To be able to be humble, so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have much injustice done him, and to have crept through the worm-holes of errors of every kind, so as to be able to reach many hidden souls on their secret paths! For ever in a kind of love and for ever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time concealed and renouncing! To lie continually in the sunshine and gentleness of grace, and yet to know that the paths that rise up to the sublime are close by! – That would be a life! That would be a reason for a long life!

Daybreak paragraph 449

Command

The most important language pattern in NLP is from the Miltonmodel the Embedded Command. People nowadays don’t like to be commanded. Nevertheless, the strongest form of suggestion is the command. People unconsciously still want to be led. You embed a command by putting at least one word in front of it. That way you overcome people’s dislike of being commanded while at the same time satisfy their desire to be led.

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of logical argument. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, argumentative conversation was repudiated in good society: it was considered bad manners, compromising. The young were warned against it. Furthermore, any presentation of one’s motives was distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the logician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

Twilight of the Idols, The Problem of Socrates, paragraph 5

Communication

As NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming it is obvious that communication plays a central role in NLP. In the most basic sense NLP is a way to map human behavior by communicating to someone who does something worth mapping. This map is then tried out by the NLP practitioner and if it works for him is than passed on to other people. Through communication again of course.

The “Genius of the Species” — The problem of consciousness (or more correctly : of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibnitz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise “act” in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all need necessarily “come into consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror : as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, — and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous? — Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if It were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, “late-born” always, in the best sense of the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature). Granted that this observation is correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication – that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man,— it is only as
such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it. The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness – at least a part of them – is the result of a terrible, prolonged “must” running man’s destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood — and for all this he needed ” consciousness ” first of all : he had to “know” himself what he lacked, to “know” how he felt, and to “know” what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part: — for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures ; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself, — he is doing so still, and doing so more and more. — As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed ; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of “knowing himself”, will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his “averageness” ; — that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness — by the imperious “genius of the species” therein — and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual — there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer. . . . This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it : the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalized and vulgarised world ; — that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meager, relatively stupid, — a generalization, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd ; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalization. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned : I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of “thing in itself” and phenomenon, for we do not “know” enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowings or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species ; and even what is here called “usefulness” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

Gay Science paragraph 354

Complex Equivalence

The complex equivalence is a language pattern of the metamodel (and due to the reversed metamodel also of the Miltonmodel of course). The complex equivalence is a distortion as it equalizes two things by stating “A = B”. It is important to note that A and B have to be two different “complexes”, i.e. things, activities or processes. If B is a property of A then there is only one complex and for that reason no complex equivalence.

Also it is a mistake to think of complex equivalences as being about “A means B”. Meaning something is quite different than being equal. For instance a specific rain can mean that the rain season has started, yet a single rain storm is quite something different than the rain season.

Complex Equivalences replaces reframing. Rather than accept multiple points of view as reframing does, using Complex Equivalence destroys the point of view you want to get rid of and replaces it with the one you want. You do this by using the formula: A is not a B. A is a C!

Judgment: this is the belief that ‘such and such is the case’. Thus, judgment involves admitting having encountered an identical case: it thus presupposes comparison, with the help of memory. Judgment does not create the appearance of an identical case. Instead, it believes it perceives one; it works on the supposition that identical cases even exist. But what is that function, which must be much older and have been at work much earlier, that levels out and assimilates cases in themselves dissimilar? What is that second function which, on the basis of the first, etc. ‘What arouses the same sensations is the same’: but what is it that make sensations the same, ‘takes’ them as the same? – There could be no judgments at all if a kind of leveling had not first been carried out within the sensations: memory is only possible with a constant underscoring of what has been experienced, has become habit – – Before a judgment can be made, the process of assimilation must already have been completed: thus, here too there is an intellectual activity which does not enter consciousness, as in the case of pain caused by an injury. Probably, all organic functions have their correspondence in inner events, in assimilation, elimination, growth, etc. Essential to start from the body and use it as a guiding thread. It is the far richer phenomenon, and can be observed more distinctly. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind. ‘However strongly something is believed, that is not a criterion of truth.’ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief which has become a condition of life? In that case, its strength would indeed be a criterion. E.g., regarding causality.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885, paragraph 15

Compliment

Central to NLP strategies is the TOTE model. TOTE stands for Test Operation Test Exit. It is a basic model from cybernetics that shows how to control man and machine. The first Test is to check whether it makes sense to start the Operation (any procedure). The second Test is to check whether the Operation has succeeded in outputting what we want. If not this data is passed back to the Operation. This is called feedback. All feedback is negative in the sense that it notifies the Operation that the output is wrong.

Only when the output is right we get an Exit, i.e. the Operation is done and control is passed on to another Operation. Most people think that there is something called positive feedback. This idea is wrong as all feedback is negative. You can however present feedback more positively by combining it with praise and compliments. Also, sometimes people want to praise good output and have the Exit accompanied with a compliment. There is no need for this, but there is also nothing wrong with it.

It shows both subtle and noble self-control when you reserve your praise (assuming you want to give praise at all) for things you disagree with: – otherwise you would certainly be praising yourself, which offends good taste. Of course, this type of self-control offers people a handy opportunity and excuse for constantly misunderstanding you. In order to allow yourself this real luxury of taste and morality, you cannot live with fools of the spirit; you have to live among people whose misunderstandings and mistakes are subtle, and for that reason still amusing – or else you will have to pay dearly for it! – “He praises me: that’s why he agrees with me” – this asinine inference ruins the better part of life for us hermits, because it brings asses into our neighborhood and friendship.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 283

Congruence

Many NLP practitioner try to be congruent. Congruence means that how people feel is in line with what they say. Although congruence is, at times, important as people tends to dismiss your message if you are incongruent.  At the same time, being incongruent on purpose often works wonders too. So the correct application of NLP entails both.

Rough consistency. – It is considered a mark of great distinction when people say ‘he is a character!’ – which means no more than that he exhibits a rough consistency, a consistency apparent even to the dullest eye! But when a subtler and profounder spirit reigns and is consistent in its more elevated manner, the spectators deny the existence of character. That is why statesmen with cunning usually act out their comedy beneath a cloak of rough consistency.

Daybreak paragraph 182

Hint for party leaders. – If you can bring people to declare themselves in favor of something publicly you have usually also brought them to declare themselves in favor of it inwardly; they want to be regarded as consistent.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 548