At the end of the evening, an attractive young woman said she is usually shy because she cares too much about what other people think. During some of the workshop exercises, she was able to not care what others thought of her, and found it liberating. She wanted the ability to not care what others think in the rest of her life.

I gently pointed out that while not caring what others think can be liberating, it can also be problematic. Would you really want ignore how your actions affect other people to the point that you hurt or offend them? Or maybe suffer serious consequences, such as getting fired? Probably not.

Do you focus on failure or success, or notice both?

“Caring too much” about what others think often means focusing on what doesn’t work, even if it’s 1% of interactions, and ignoring what does work, even when that’s 99% of what you do.

People in the U.S. are taught that they should be “independent” and “autonomous,” which often means not caring what others think. At the same time, we’re supposed to be nice, caring, kind people, treat others well, and conform to social norms. The result is often oscillation between over-concern with others think, and exaggerated lack of concern.

Rather than thinking in digital, black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms — either focusing obsessively on what others think (strong external reference ), or ignoring their responses (strong internal reference) — it’s often more useful to think in analog terms. How much does it benefit you and others to consider other people’s preferences and responses in situation X? What ratio of attention do you want to give what is working (so you can do more of that) vs. what isn’t working (so you can adjust your behavior, if appropriate)?

Some years ago I shifted my own focus from what others thought of me (or rather, what I imagined they thought of me) to noticing how well what I do is working. That greatly improved my comfort in social situations. My social skills got a lot better, too.

For improving your own and your clients’ responses to other people, I recommend Steve Andreas’s excellent book Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be. Written so non-NLPers can use it, the book is loaded with useful distinctions and exercises. You’ll find detailed instructions for adjusting perceptions in ways that will help you and your clients notice and correct behaviors that cause problems with others, while maintaining a strong and appropriate sense of self.

Tabitha gets trauma flashbacks. She re-experiences events so vividly that they re-traumatize her. Afterward fear, anxiety, depression, and crying jags can debilitate her for days, and affect her mood for weeks.

Emotionally loaded recall is especially common in people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a learned trauma response. It’s also common among people with Asperger syndrome. Like Gary, Aspies are prone to obsess over negative emotions and make them worse.

Of course, re-experiencing remembered emotions can be an asset when you recall pleasant memories. But with negative experiences — especially traumas — it’s usually preferable to get the useful life lessons from less-than-positive memories, without getting upset or re-traumatized.

How to help clients who do traumatic recall

Doing NLP processes to remove emotional charge from problem memories is particularly useful when a client has a few traumatic or upsetting memories. What if your client has many problem memories, like Tabitha? What if your client’s recall strategy makes any negative memory into a potential problem, like Gary?

You can dramatically help clients with problem recall strategies by teaching them to:

1. Associate into pleasant memories. (Exceptions: addictions, compulsions, and obsessions.)
2. Disassociate from unpleasant memories.
3. Use partial disassociation to get additional information from unpleasant memories. For instance, the client might associate only into physical sensations (external auditory and visual; tactile and body position K), while remaining disassociated from their past emotional state and thoughts.

Installing an improved recall strategy

1. Determine whether the client knows how to associate and disassociate. Some people associate so automatically and consistently that disassociation is a new experience for them! Teach these clients to disassociate using 3 neutral memories.

A client who is new to disassociation or has trouble disassociating may benefit from Connirae Andreas’s process for Aligning Perceptual Positions before proceeding further.

2. Model how the client recalls neutral, mildly pleasant, and mildly unpleasant memories. Which are associated, which disassociated?

3. Have your client practice associating into 3 or more pleasant memories. Include at least one mildly pleasant memory, so they learn to enjoy recalling small pleasures, and one or more intensely pleasant memories. (If your client consistently associates into pleasant memories already, you can skip this step.)

4. Have your client practice disassociated recall of 3 or more unpleasant memories. Once they can do that,

5. Have your client practice disassociated recall of 3 more intense unpleasant memories. Gradually increase intensity. If your client encounters a memory they can’t disassociate from, use a reverse-time trauma resolution process to remove the emotional charge, then try again.

6. Teach your client partial disassociation. At times a client might need additional information about an unpleasant experience — information that can only be accessed via association. Fortunately, association is analog rather than digital: you can associate into some aspects of a memory (such as tactile sensations, body positions, and smells), while staying disassociated from the most troubling parts of the experience (remembered thoughts and feelings).

I have clients learn partial disassociation using neutral memories. It’s often useful to have the client make a movie screen that shows their emotions and thoughts, or a soundtrack with a neutral observer voice that describes them, so that client knows what is there without associating into that part of the memory.

7. Have your client practice instant disassociation if they accidently associate into the problematic aspects of a memory. I also have them disassociate as soon as they have the information they want. The goal is to create a strategy where the client does the minimum amount of association to retrieve the information they want, then disassociates. This ensures that they won’t get stuck in — or triggered by — a problem memory.

I used to have thousands of traumatic and intensely negative memories. Like Gary and Tabitha, I had an associated recall strategy that often left me upset for hours or days. Doing NLP trauma resolution processes helped some, but I was still left with countless other memories that could trigger emotional upsets. Once I learned to do disassociated recall of negative memories, my life became a lot more pleasant.

• Make friends and keep them
• Become more popular and attractive to others
• Get dates and keep partners
• Reduce conflict and negativity in your life
• Get more support from others
• Keep people around you happier

You already know this skill. You learned it during NLP training, and use it during interventions.

But you probably haven’t generalized it to everyday life. (Most NLPers don’t.) This subtle shift in language can make a big difference.

Association and disassociation cues

What skill do I mean? Associating and disassociating people using language and other cues.

When doing change work, you can disassociate a client by telling them to “observe that younger you, over there.” To keep the client disassociated, you then describe the people in the representation as “that you,” “she,” “him,” or “they,” while gesturing toward the representation and away from the client.

When building a resource state, you use “you” language, present time, and associated sensory cues to associate the client into the experience: “And as you feel that good feeling, now, notice where the center of it is in your body.”

That’s great for change work, but what about the rest of life?

Avoid these association mistakes!

A couple years after my NLP training, I began to notice the ways my NLPer friends and I used association and disassociation cues in everyday life. Our casual language often associated people around us into negative states and experiences! We didn’t mean to do it; it happened automatically while we had our “talking to a client” filters turned off.

I also heard even skilled NLPers accidently associate and disassociate people during interventions. Several times I watched an NLP professional skillfully work a demo subject or client out of a deeply unresourceful state… only to accidentally plunge them back into it by using “you” language to talk about the person’s problem!

Do a language experiment

I decided to experiment with changing how I used association and disassociation cues in everyday interactions. No more “You know when you…” language for my negative stories!

Until then I had used a lot of association cues with negative content. I decided to do the opposite most of the time:

1. Help listeners associate into desirable, positive, and empowering experiences and resources. If you have something good to share, help your listeners experience it too.
2. Help listeners disassociate from negative, unpleasant, and disempowering experiences and attitudes. If you talk about hardships and problems, keep people disassociated. If they talk about problems in an associated way, help them disassociate.

I began by changing one thing: the way I used pronouns — words such as I, you, we, they, he, she, someone, and a person. Later I added other linguistic cues. Eventually I also added gestures and body language.

What happened?

1. My results with clients improved.
2. People feel good around me, so they like me more, find me more attractive, and give me more support.

Before I tell you how to quickly change your automatic association cues, let’s do a quick review.

How sensory cues affect association and disassociation

As you know, when you mention or describe an experience, people understand what you say by building mental representations of it. Association and disassociation cues tell your listeners how to represent point of view.

Association cues include:

• Referring to “you,” “we,” “us,” and “this.”
• Using the person’s name: “John, read this now.” (Sometimes naming a group the person belongs to will also associate them, especially if you also use other linguistic cues: “Like you, most NLPers enjoy learning.”)
• Specifying present time: “As you experience that now…” or “As you’re experiencing that now…”
• Spatially enclosing the listener in the context: “As you’re in that experience now…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is real; using words like “because” and “of course.”
• Using your listener’s experiences as examples. This works especially well if the experiences are sensory-based. Tip: specify some submodalities.
• Gestures that suggest something is in or on the person’s body, or surrounds them.
• Associated sensory cues: “Hear with your own ears, see with your own eyes, feel your body.”
• Specifying submodalities that require your listener to associate: “As you notice the temperature of the air around you now…”

Disassociation cues include:

• Referring to “they,” “he,” “she,” “someone,” “a person,” “one,” “it,” and “that” in representations, and to yourself and your own experiences as “I.”
• Using names to specify people other than the listener, and groups they don’t belong to.
• Specifying past or future time, especially if qualified as not happening now: “You used to do that.”
• Spatially distancing the listener from representations: “As you see and hear those people way over there…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is unreal; using words like “if.”
• Unreal and hypothetical examples: “If you listened to an elephant playing a piano…”
• Gestures that suggest that what you refer to is distant.
• Sensory cues for disassociation: “As you observe that from over here, notice how distant it seems.”
• Specifying only submodalities appropriate to disassociation: vision and hearing, but no tactile cues.

Fortunately, you don’t have to consciously keep track of any of this if you use my strategy and…

Create a “mental movie screen” over each listener’s head

You can’t know exactly what representations other people will build in order to understand what you say. However, you can approximate their representations, and get a pretty good idea of whether your words and gestures will trigger association or disassociation.

I didn’t want to spend weeks or months retraining myself, and you probably don’t either. Instead, use the fast process below to drastically improve your awareness and cue choices within days.

Creating awareness of association cues

1. Imagine talking with a friend.
2. Create a small movie screen over your friend’s head. You will use it to display your friend’s internal representations. (Note: People who visualize less clearly can pretend they see the movie screen, knowing their subconscious mind sees it clearly. Or they can substitute a “sportscaster” voice that will describe their friend’s representations, and adjust the rest of these instructions accordingly.)
3. Say something that includes association or disassociation cues. I suggest pronouns — “I,” “you,” “them” — because they so strongly evoke point of view.
4. Have the screen show the mental movie your friend will probably make in order to understand what you say, and include the soundtrack.

   You want a movie that will give you the information you need, without associating you into the content. To do this, see and hear the movie from Observer position (so you see your friend, their movie, and how the two relate), put a frame around the movie screen, distort the sound so it seems to come through speakers facing your friend, or use whatever tricks work for you.

5. When you use associating language, have the movie screen show your friend associating into their representation of what you say. When you use disassociated language, have the movie screen show your friend disassociating from their representation. At this point, don’t try to change anything. Simply notice the new information. Practice with both positive and negative content, and adjust as needed.
6. Imagine utilizing the information you get from the screen to improve your word choices. How do you want your friend to receive your communication? If your intent matches their movie — if you want your friend disassociated, and they make a disassociated mental movie — you already chose appropriate cues. If your intent mismatches your friend’s movie, change your language cues.
7. Do imaginary practice with more people and varied content. To have a client to access a traumatic memory, or to get rid of an obnoxious person, you might want to associate someone into negative content, or disassociate them from positives. Build in flexibility and choice!
8. Once you like the results, use New Behavior Generator to install the pattern:
   • Create a disassociated movie of you using your new skill successfully. Your movie should show the screens over people’s heads, their movies, and your responses.
   • Adjust your disassociated movie until you like it.
   • Step into your movie and experience it associated from beginning to end. Do you like it? Do you feel confident and congruent? Do you want to change or improve anything?
   • Step out to make adjustments, step in to check how they work.
   • Continue until the whole movie works the way you want it to.
   • Repeat the New Behavior Generator pattern with 2 more examples.

Initially, you will probably simply notice when you use pronouns in ways that mismatch your intent. Soon your mind will start to anticipate people’s likely responses before you even open your mouth. You’ll notice mismatches between your language and intent, and make corrections before you speak.

For most of us who know NLP, most interactions happen in everyday life outside NLP interventions. How we use everyday language affects our important relationships, our interactions at work, even who likes and dislikes us. We can use association and disassociation cues to uplift and empower people, separate them mentally from their problems, and help them feel good. That benefits the people around us, and it benefits us as well.

Want to experiment?

1. Calibrate how you us associative and disassociative cues in everyday interactions now. How do people typically respond to you?
2. Switch to using cues that associate people into good experiences, disassociate them from bad ones.
3. Calibrate how people’s responses change, immediately and over time.
4. Post your results in the Comments below.

What makes an expert?

To find good exemplars (examples of a skill or ability) to learn from, evaluate their results. Ask:

• How good are the person’s actual results? It doesn’t matter if Rowena thinks she is the world expert in good relationships; it matters whether she has good relationships. Judge only by results, not by what you, she, or other people think will work, does work, or should work.
• Does this exemplar get consistently great results? Someone who has excellent relationship skills will tend to have lots of good relationships: with their spouse, parents, children, friends, neighbors, etc. They’ll also have minimal problems with bad relationships, quarrels, firings, and people doing nasty things to them.
• Do the good results last? Millions of people with excellent strategies for shedding excess weight lack strategies to stay slender. Some people’s relationship skills work well for short-term acquaintances, but prevent deeper long-term relationships.
• Does this exemplar deal skillfully with problems? Some people can accomplish anything in favorable circumstances, but fall apart when things get rough. Pick an exemplar who can deal with problems, but doesn’t generate them.
• Does this exemplar skillfully avoid, defuse, or prevent problems? People who are great at fixing problems often have excellent strategies for generating problems to fix! People whose strategies work best may seem like they do almost nothing, because most issues get handled before they turn into problems.
• How well does this exemplar match you? Find someone whose skill matches your learning and thinking styles, your meta-programs — and if applicable, your values. If you have to turn into someone else to learn a skill, or adopt a learning method that works poorly for you, find another exemplar.
• Can I learn from multiple exemplars? NLP modelers consistently find that even excellent exemplars usually use half or less of the possible skills for getting a great result. By modeling 2 or 3 people, you will gain a much broader range of strategies that work. Once you have finished, repay each exemplar by teaching them the additional skills they don’t have.

Joy

• The town drunk
• A blind person
• The neighbor who has crashed their car into every trash can and sign pole in the neighborhood.

And yet most people learned at least one important life skill from someone that unqualified to teach it.

For instance, my parents taught me some excellent money management strategies. But they had zero business or entrepreneurial skills, and held business and businesspeople in contempt. So who do you think I learned my attitudes about business from? That’s right: my parents — people who were completely incompetent to teach anyone success in that area! Worse, I didn’t learn business skills from my entrepreneurial uncles.

Learning from incompetents

This problem isn’t just common; it’s almost universal. As children, most of us learned basic life skills, behaviors, values, and beliefs from whoever was around, whether or not these role models were competent in those areas.

Think about it. How many individuals have you met who learned:

• Relationship skills from people who had lousy relationships, or whose relationships didn’t last…
• Beliefs about wealth and money from role models who were poor or had money problems…
• Beliefs about work from people who felt unhappy at their jobs, or who hated work and working…
• Social skills from people who had few friends, many enemies, lousy friendships, or were shy, rude, or socially inept…
• Judgment and decision-making skills from role models who had serious judgment problems…
• Parenting skills from inept or inexperienced parents…
• …or how to be happy and successful from unhappy, unsuccessful people?

How well did that work?

Many times a person we learned from was competent in part of a skill (Uncle Ed was good at his job), but lacked competence in  other aspects of it (Uncle Ed lacked skills for liking his job, or picking jobs he liked).

“Course correction? We don’t need course correction!”

None of this would be much of a problem if we humans noticed when we had learned skills from incompetent teachers. Or if we noticed that our skills didn’t work, and then made corrections.

Instead, people cling to mistaken ideas of what’s “right” or “should” work, even when it doesn’t. For example,

• Millions of people are convinced their way of doing relationships in “right,” despite ongoing conflicts and repeated failures. The problems must be the other person’s fault — even if the other person has a much better track record of relationship success!
• I have known numerous chronically impoverished people who were totally convinced that their beliefs about money were correct. They even used their money problems as evidence that their money beliefs were correct! Counter-examples, including similar people who succeeded financially, didn’t disprove their beliefs. Instead, successful people “obviously” succeeded because of  luck, personal connections, or fewer problems with prejudice… and not because they have better strategies.
• Millions of people are convinced they are bad, wrong, flawed, and inadequate because they adopted other people’s negative judgments of them. Once someone believes such a judgment, they will tend to gather evidence to support it, rather than questioning the competence and judgment of the judges, or searching for counter-examples that disprove the belief.

Programmed for failure

“That didn’t work. Do it harder!” is one of the world’s most counterproductive strategies.

Before I learned NLP, I spent decades making myself miserable attempting to succeed with strategies that didn’t and couldn’t work. So did my friends. Even after our strategies failed repeatedly, we kept trying to do what hadn’t worked. In those days, our beliefs about what “should” work were more powerful than the abundant sensory evidence life gave us that our strategies really didn’t work.

Reprogramming for success

Getting people to question times they learned from non-experts often proves very empowering. Unuseful old beliefs and strategies often persist only because the person hasn’t questioned them.

I encourage people to question two main categories of experience:

1. Skills they learned from others, and
2. Judgments and beliefs that came from other people.

I find this particularly useful while or after the client does a process that gives them an overview of their life: timeline work, regression, or anything that creates a “big-picture” meta-position. Now the client can see their past as a whole, notice the patterns, and see the cumulative effects of bad decisions. From meta-position, the client can get to and fix problems easily, and has lots of motivation to do so.

I do this very simply, using hypnotic language. For instance:

You might notice that there were times in your past when you learned skills and beliefs from people who weren’t very good at something. You might have learned relationship skills from people who weren’t very good at relationships… or money skills from people who have money problems… or maybe some parenting skills from people who weren’t that great as parents. And sometimes the person you learned from was very good at part of the skill… but not so good at other parts of it.

Take a moment to notice the skills you learned from people who weren’t experts… and notice how you would have gotten different results if you learned from people who were really good at those skills. [At this point the client has taken skills they hadn't questioned until a moment ago, gotten meta-position on them, and imagined learning them better from another teacher. That's quite a shift in itself!] Perhaps you might want to fix and improve some of those skills now… and give your younger self access to the people you’ve met since then, who know how to do this better… [Here I pause until they have processed and give me a signal, such as saying, "Okay."]

And you might also notice some times where someone made negative judgments about you. A lot of times, especially when we’re kids, people take those judgments on as if they’re true. But you can notice now how the people who judged you probably weren’t world-class experts on human potential… And they certainly weren’t experts on your potential… because if they had been, they wouldn’t have made judgments that caused you problems later…

And even if some of their judgments were true then, a lot of things have changed since then, and you’ve changed, and those judgments probably aren’t true now. So instead of taking on those judgments as if they were true, now you can notice now how your life would have been different and better if you had gotten more useful evaluations from people who knew just what to say… people who would help you develop your skills and strengths, and have the best possible life… And perhaps you might want to change those negative judgments now, and give your younger self access to people who will help the younger you flourish… so you have the best life from now on…”

Some clients will benefit from having you walk them through changing one or more specific examples. Most people I have worked with didn’t need that. Of course I waited until late enough in the session that the NLP processes they did had put them into a fairly deep in trance before I made the suggestions.

Most clients also benefit from a verbal walk-through of how to pick good exemplars (people to learn skills from). I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Joy

###

Science news related to NLP:

• Noninvasive technique to rewrite fear memories developed. It depends on (a) reactivating the memory of trauma, then (b) immediately retraining the brain — the very process used in NLP’s phobia and trauma cures. Surprise, surprise!
• In the brain, 7 is a magic number — the physiological origin of the 7-plus-or-minus-2 rule. AGE6UE4T8WVP

• If they are in time, with their timeline running through their body (or they stand inside a “time tube”), they are probably good at being present in the moment. However, they may stay so in the moment that they have trouble keeping appointments or planning ahead.
• If they observe time, standing outside the “now” so they have perspective and can see the future from now, they can probably remember appointments and plan ahead. However, they might find it difficult to enjoy the moment because they always see, hear, and think about their future and/or past.

Each option has useful elements, and it would be nice to have them all, rather than having to pick one or the other. That’s why I developed the following technique.

Creating a both/and “now”

My frame for doing timeline tune-ups is that the client and I are going to provide their brain with a bunch of options for how to work their timeline. Their brain will then automatically choose those options that work best for them.

After eliciting their timeline and determining whether they are in time or observe time, I have them try the other version.

I then have them compare the two, pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Next I suggest that it would be useful to have both options. I have them double their timeline at “now.” The “in time” section goes through their body; the “observe time” section goes in front of them where they can see it. Visually, it’s rather like a river splitting to go around an island.

Once they have both options, I instruct them to vary how much of the timeline goes through each pathway. If they want to be present in the moment, they can have most of their timeline go through their body. I suggest they keep only enough observe time to remind them of upcoming events, and to make sure their current behavior supports their future plans and goals. If they want to plan ahead, they can have most of their timeline in observe time, with just enough in time that they can be present when that’s appropriate.

Now I talk them through practicing and future-pacing various examples. If they are relaxing on the beach or hanging out with their children, they might want 99% of their timeline to be in time. They can retain just enough observe time to remind them of an appointment later. If they need to do planning at work, they might want 95% of their timeline to be observe time. They can stay just enough in time to respond appropriately when a colleague or customer needs to connect with them. At a business dinner they might want to be 50% observe time, so they can plan ahead and notice the future implications of their current actions and decisions, and 50% in time so they can enjoy the food and conversation, and bond with their colleagues.

I have them pick several examples in the near future where each option might be useful. In each, I have them practice adjusting how much of their timeline is in time and observe time. Finally I suggest that from now on, their mind will automatically adjust their timeline to make it appropriate to what they’re doing.

So far, every person I have done this with chose to keep their adjustable in time/observe time “now.” Including me! It is delightful to be able to be thoroughly in the moment, knowing that at the appropriate time, I’ll remember other tasks and appointments. It’s also nice to go deep into abstract thinking mode, and still notice and appreciate delicious food, beautiful sunsets, and great people.

So much of NLP is about adding choices. Adding both/and options to what many people assume are digital either/or choices can do a lot to improve quality of life — for both you and your clients.

Want to experiment?

This is an NLP development blog, and you can participate by testing NLP patterns and suggestion improvements. Try today’s intervention on yourself or a client, and report the results in the Comments section below. Thanks for participating!