From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP info wanted
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: It's not that easy.  
Keywords:  NLP  NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 08:01:08 GMT

In article <19921002.063808.397@almaden.ibm.com> HANKINS@PKEDVM8.VNET.IBM.COM writes:
>This is a long posting, so please bear with me.

Okay, but please bear with me if I only answer a few of your questions.
I'll send you some other things by email that may help.  

>5. Some acquaintances have mentioned that the charisma of the
>   facilitator may be a major factor in the success of NLP workshops,
>   due to a phenomenon where all kinds of things work in front of an
>   audience that don't outside.  In particular, a phenomenon was
>   mentioned where the participant will experience what the
>   facilitator is looking for in order to please or avoid embarassing
>   him.  Is this a significant factor?

One would certainly suspect that this would be one of the significant
factors.  However, I would say that the general tone of the seminars I've
been in and the relationship between the students and trainer is that
students are as a general rule not extremely concerned about
embarrassment for the trainer.  And I don't think that obtaining the
trainer's approval is one of their major considerations either.  The
approval of the trainer is important when one is being the therapist, not
when one is being the client.    

During the Master Practitioner training I went through this past summer
there were two demonstration subjects who made a point of saying at the
beginning "Look, this is a very important problem I want to work on and
I'm not going to be nice about it and say that you've been successful if
you're not."  One of these two subjects was myself, and I can say that I
had no concern about making the trainer (Connirae Andreas) look good.
The one concern that I did have was that the audience must be getting
bored, because the work took a very long time.  I did not think that I
was being a very cooperative subject but I made a decision that solving
my problem was more important than any inconvenience caused by the length
of the session.  

Afterwards, Connirae thanked me for being the subject and said that she
had chosen me from among the volunteers because she thought a difficult
subject would make for a better teaching demonstration.  

I consider the therapy she did with me to be extremely important and the
change I got was just not the sort of thing I could have made just by
trying to please her.  I learned important things about myself.  

I also witnessed an evening session done for the purpose of making a
videotape.  Robert McDonald demonstrated the technique for breaking
codependency and about half way through the session he made a major
blunder.  He had made an incorrect assumption about the subject's
codependent relationship and the subject's face turned ashen at that moment.
For a little while I wasn't sure that she was going to be able to
continue with the session.  Her feeling toward him at that point was
certainly not warm and I'm quite sure that her concern was not about
whether she might embarrass him.

Several days later I heard her saying that the work Robert had done with
her had been extremely successful.  

>CURIOUS:
>
>1. Why did John O. Stevens change his name to Steve Andreas?

When he and Connirae got married, they decided that neither would take
other's name but that they would invent a new last name for themselves.

>1. 5-step reframing - I have trouble identifying signals from
>   unconscious parts.  What am I doing wrong?  Is this common?  I ask
>   the questions, and I notice no real change in my kinesthetic,
>   auditory or visual internal experience.

Of all the NLP techniques, anchoring and five [or six] step reframing are
the hardest to do on oneself.  

>2. It seems to me that the idea of reframing is just too easy...  talk
>   to some unconscious parts for a while, they do all the work, I get
>   all the benefits.  Will my incredulity hamper the effectiveness?

Maybe, maybe not.  I've sometimes done some very effective reframing on
skeptical people.  

>3. The one thing I've tried to reframe is procrastination.  It seemed
>   to work for a while, but only in the environment where I originally
>   did the reframe.  Eventually the old avoidance-of-task behavior
>   returned.

Be aware that with some subjects reframing gets absolutely
incredible results.  And then there are other subjects with whom it's
not effective at all.  The process may go through just fine and a
change occurs but the change doesn't "stick."

Leslie Cameron Bandler is an example of a subject who is an excellent
hypnotic subject but with whom reframing has never been successful.  

In any case, I wouldn't think of using reframing for procrastination.
For one thing, I don't think of procrastination as a behavior.  It's more
like the absence of a behavior.  But it could depend on the individual
client.   

A submodality technique might be more useful to you.  Read HEART OF THE
MIND by the Andreases.  

>4. If, as B&G say in FiP, one can get any behavioral change one wants
>   with reframing ...  

See above.  You can't.  

>   ...  Why go to an NLP practitioner when one can reframe
>   oneself?  

See above.  Most people can't.  

>5. Can NLP be used for self-change, or is it strictly for
>   client-programmer relationships?  Or is it some mixture of
>   techniques, some of which are suitable for self-programming and
>   some which are not?
>
>6. Perhaps instead of always requiring outside assist-ance, perhaps
>   such assistance is only needed until the techniques are
>   well-learned, or until you've suc-cessfully modeled the outside
>   input to the point where you can have it without the assistant
>   being present, in much the same way that you hear your mother's
>   voice when you see that your bedroom is messy.

I'm a little confused about this last part here, but the more I learn NLP
and have experience using it with other people, the more successful I
become in using it on myself.  But for some reason, in lots of cases it
just doesn't occur to me.  Then one day something will happen and I'll
realize that I just keep suffering with this problem and I'll say to
myself "Hey, I know how to change that."  

I also have a hard time finding practitioners who are good at working
with me.  I'm a difficult client.  

>   Hmmm.  I wonder if a computer program could be written to help out
>   with this sort of thing.

Robert Dilts (I believe) was doing some work along these lines.
Apparently his success was somewhat limited.  

>   ....  
>   If this is the case, I should be able to create a part that knows
>   how to do six-step reframing.  After creating this part, reframing
>   anything should be as easy as identifying the pattern I'd like to
>   create or extinguish, and asking the reframe part to go and handle
>   it - and it would even be able to re-do the reframe if the new
>   behaviors didn't work!  And all this would be done without any
>   conscious awareness.

Bandler and Grinder talk about doing that.  Some people seem to be
successful with it.  I've tried creating such a part for a few clients
and my experience has been that it doesn't work as well as I hoped.  

>   I should be able to reframe myself into being a genius, or getting
>   the answers to math problems presented in consciousness, or solving
>   some programming puzzle, and getting all this with very little
>   effort and unconsciously.

Or reframe yourself into being able to speak Japanese?  That just doesn't
make any sense.  Sorry, go back and think about what reframing actually
does.  It overcomes an unconscious block.  Is there a part of you that
blocks you from being a genius?    

>   Thinking big, it seems to me that by means of strategy elicitation
>   and other methods of gaining information about a person's mental
>   organization, one could essentially download significant portions
>   of a person's entire mental program, and then do modifica-tions
>   where desired.
>
>   For instance, one could download a scientist and then program oneself
>   to essentially -be- her.
>
>   This could open up a whole new industry:  persona software, programs
>   designed to help you reprogram yourself into a desired persona.  Am I
>   being ridiculous enough yet?

That was the original dream for NLP.  It's the promise that was held out
by the book NEUROLINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING, VOL. I.  Unfortunately, things
turned out to be more complicated than that.  

--
It is a poor sort of skepticism which merely delights in challenging
those claims which conflict with one's own belief system.  
                                                          --Bogus quote 
lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet