Living Well NLP

From an article in the NY Times:

In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For me, brain research provides a fascinating peek into what goes on “under the hood” when we do NLP. Sometimes the information is useful for doing NLP. Often it verifies what NLPers have known or suspected for years. Sometimes it’s just interesting or fun.

Abstract thought prompts literal physical responses

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html

Researcher subjects literally lean forward when thinking about the future, backward when thinking about the past. According to Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam, “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

Imagine that you are about to learn to drive race cars or speed boats. You probably wouldn’t pick as your driving teacher:

• 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.

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Definition of NLP modeling

NLP modeling is a methodology for turning a skill that one person can do into a “recipe” that other people can follow to achieve similar results.

For instance, Richard Bandler famously developed the NLP Fast Phobia Cure by modeling people who used to have phobias, but had gotten over them. Many of NLP’s therapeutic techniques were modeled from successful therapists — most famously Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erickson.

An NLP “recipe” for a skill is called a model.

Researchers from Purdue University recently discovered that visual perceptions change depending on how well people perform a goal-oriented task:

Missed kicks make brain see smaller goal post

Flubbing a field goal kick doesn’t just bruise your ego — new research shows it may actually change how your brain sees the goal posts.

In a study of 23 non-football athletes who each kicked 10 field goals, researchers found that players’ performance directly affected their perception of the size of the goal: After a series of missed kicks, athletes perceived the post to be taller and more narrow than before, while successful kicks made the post appear larger-than-life.

When you studied NLP, did you learn about “the” kinesthetic modality?

The standard NLP model lumps all “feelings” together as one kinesthetic modality, with one set of accessing cues. These cues include belly breathing, slow speech, use of kinesthetic words and phases (such as “touching base,” “off-balance,” and “warm”), and eye accesses to the (usually) lower right.

This model is simple and easy to learn and use. It’s also obviously inaccurate. Dizziness is not the same kind of “feeling” as happiness, hunger, or warm velvet rubbing across your skin.

That wouldn’t matter to NLPers if kinesthetics all functioned identically when communicating or doing change work. But in fact, subtle distinctions between kinds of kinesthetics often determine whether an intervention will work for a particular person.