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NLP Presuppositions
Neuro-linguistic programming is a really weird and interesting field. It’s yet another one of those disciplines that seems to recede when you try to define it. Which only makes me want to understand it more. Toward that end, I found an FAQ about NLP that has some interesting information in it. One of the things NLP seems to rely on is a set of assumptions or presuppositions about human behavior. The two this site lists are:
- Every behaviour is appropriate in some context.
- People always make the best choice they can (from their point of view) given the resources available to them.
From there, it says that people act in a given manner in a situation for a chain of three connected reasons:
(a) at some time or other, (b) in a situation they perceive to be similar to their current situation (c) when they used this behaviour pattern it brought about the required result (or something equally satisfactory)
People run into trouble with this rationale for the following possible reasons:
- the person is incorrect in their perception (i.e. if the situations aren’t really similar at all)
- the behaviour is, for whatever reason, no longer valid
- the original “cause and effect” weren’t really cause and effect at all
Based on the little I’ve studied so far, it seems that the goal of NLP is to help realign these three sets of concepts. They look at behaviors which are not resulting in success and figure out why. They look at when and where certain behaviors are appropriate in terms of achieving a specific result. And they use “modeling” to look at successful behavior patterns and imitate them. Seems to make a lot of sense so far, even if it is a bit mechanistic-sounding. That’s the thing that’s always turned me off about NLP, actually - is how some people talk about it in a way that almost sounds robotic. Maybe that just means it’s very concerned with proper functioning, though.
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July 26th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
How does inquisitive behavior arise out of that a,b,c process? What result do we get out of asking everything all the time? All I get out of asking is more to ask about. Curiosity can arise in any situation, and always leads to more curiosity. What is the cause of curiosity? If curiosity only spawns more curiosity, does that mean there had to have been a first curiousness? Maybe you can’t apply NLP to this context. Am I making sense?
July 26th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Actually, I think those are great questions. I don’t see why NLP doesn’t apply here. At some point we learned that questions are how acquire new information. If we’re successful at our behavior, from an NLP standpoint I don’t think they would say it matters how it happened. I might wager that other people who don’t like questioning as much had some kind of experience(s) that turned them off to it. It seems like NLP would sooner concern itself with helping the person with unsuccessful behavior examine the roots of it, and try to overcome it by modeling somebody with more successful behavior.
The question I think we might ask in this situation is simply: how do we know that questioning is a successful behavior?
To me, that’s the answer. That means we’re on the right track.
July 26th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
A tenet like “every behavior is appropriate in some context” is one of those maxim’s like “Do what thou wilt…” that can offer a tidy excuse for acting like a complete bastard. See this article on the Richard Bandler murder trial. [login req’d: lvx23@uranus.com/buddha]
July 26th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Oh cool, I’ll check it out. Thanks! I don’t know much about Bandler, as I just started studying this stuff. Be nice to have some perspective.
July 26th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Is NLP related to Neo-Tech? Your descriptions of it reminded me of some of the Neo-Tech suppositions. I have a feeling that one has at least borrowed from the other at some point.
July 26th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
Another interesting quirk of that trial- Bandler defended himself without an attorney and won. I have a friend who practices Hypnotherapy and Existential Psychology who studied under Bandler, and says that the man is an absolute wizard with words- the jury was putty in his hands.
I’ve read one of his books, “Trance-Formations”, and have a copy that my mentor gave me five years ago somewhere in my collection back in South Dakota… but the book honestly didn’t leave much of an impression on me. It’s a transcript of one of his seminars, and probably a case of “you had to have been there” to really grasp what Bandler was getting at…
July 27th, 2005 at 2:49 am
As the author of the website that triggered this discussion, a couple of observations.
LVX23 - your comment would be very much to the point IF the presupposition were being used as an excuse. BUT it isn’t. It doesn’t say “this makes it OK to behave in such and such a manner”, it just says “however destructive/negative/inappropriate someone’s behaviour may appear, if you want to understand it then you need to start from the precept that TO THEM it looks like the best option available.” This leads on to the presumption (right or wrong) that if you can offer someone an equally effective way of achieving their purpose, but in a way that doesn’t harm other people, then you’re likely to get better results than if you just bash them over the head shouting “bad person, naughty person, stop doing that!”
Occult Investigator - In fact NLP isn’t much interested in stuff like root causes. A basic tenet of NLP is that thoughts have structure, not just philosophically but inside the brain (this is Hebb’s Law stuff for anyone familiar with that branch of psychology).
So if you dig back into someone’s past, all you do is re-inforce the pathways that lie at the root of the problem. The more effective approach, according to the NLP problem-solving model, is “What do you have now? What do you want? How can you get from where you are to where you want to be? Before you set out, define some basic criteria that will let you know when you’ve achieved what you wanted” and so on. In other words, the emphasis is on building new paths rather than wasting effort on exploring or trying to destroy old paths.
I guess it’s maybe this link to the physical processes in the brain that give the impression that it’s like playing with robots. All I can say is that driving a car could be seen as being pretty mechanical. But did you ever go on two journeys that were EXACTLY the same and didn’t require any thought or attention?
Andrew - NLP started in the early 1970s, and most of the groundwork was completed before 1980. I know nothing about Neo-Tech so I can’t say anything about whether A borrowed from B or B borrowed from A.
Hope this is of some use.
Andy B.
July 27th, 2005 at 11:52 am
Thanks Andy, that confirms and clarifies lot of what I thought about NLP. Sounds very interesting.
July 27th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
sort of like “so?” versus “why?” . . .
July 27th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
touching the surface of nlp is like touching the surface of a pond. you get the tips of your fingers wet but not much else happens.
nlp did a number of things for me virtually immediately. it tought me to pay attention to what other people are doing. watch thier breathing, watch thier eye movements, changes in skin colour, hand gestures and the list goes on. what thier feet are doing as you talk to them, tightening of neck muscles, relaxing or tensing of facial muscles. these are clues to internal states. you can begin to mimick these physical processes and discover that they make you feel different things, giving you clues as to whats going on inside the head of another person. then you cheat and ask them a direct question about what they`re feeling and you can compare what you felt with what they said.
end of lesson one. the first morning of your practitioner certification course. after lunch we`ll explore some pre-suppositions and how they generate stuck states.
you know now that your life is never going to be the same. the veil is going to be lifted on human behaviour and you eyes are going to be opened in a profound way.
pre-suppositions are to be challenged. if they are foolish and are being used as a justification for staying stuck they have to go.
i had a client who believed that as she got older her metabolism slowed down and so she gave up working out and gained wieght. my challenge to that was simply that if what she was saying was valid then everyone who reached her age would be overwieght. then i asked who told her that and she said her doctor. i asked her since when did doctors become experts on diet?
her pre-suppostion began to disintegrate and we could then discuss the possibility of a new model for her successful wieght loss program.