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NLP was developed in the mid-70s by John Grinder, a Professor at UC Santa Cruz and Richard Bandler, a graduate student. NLP, as most people use the term today, is a set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. It's more a collection of tools than any overarching theory.

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, hypnotist.

I have just been reading your articles questioning a couple of the basic premises upon which NLP Practitioner training seems to be built. 'Don't worry if you're not getting it...your unconscious mind will understand'. As much as I would LOVE to believe this idea (and boy, wouldn't life be easy) I stuggled with it at my prac training.

[In addition to this essay, please check out my previous essays on unconscious teaching.]

Hi,

You've hit one of my hot buttons about NLP and NLP training. It's especially funny because NLP was founded on the premise that one’s unconscious mind doesn’t always magically “get it.” In one of the original NLP books (I believe it was Trance-Formations), Grinder and Bandler point out that hypnotist Milton Erickson would tell students to "trust their unconscious mind." That was great advice, they say, as long as you had Erickson's unconscious mind. NLP was created to help people acquire the unconscious strategies of the Ericksons of the world.

In any training, NLP or otherwise, you'll be picking up a lot unconsciously in addition to the conscious material*. The difference is that a trainer who claims to be teaching directly to the unconscious should be methodical about controlling the unconscious parts of the experience.

What are those unconscious parts of the experience?

For one, the emotional states you go through as you learn material becomes connected to the material ("state conditioned learning"). A good NLP trainer will manage your emotional state so when you're using certain material, you're having emotions that are most likely to create success. For example, when finding out someone's unconscious process for performing a task ("strategy elicitation"), a certain amount of impatience is useful--if you do strategy elicitation too slowly, the person loses their place, starts thinking consciously, can get distracted, and can start bringing in all kinds of responses that muddy the results.

Another example is the sequencing of how the trainer uses gestures and metaphor when explaining material. If they are rigorous about their use of space, stage, and metaphor, they can build a very coherent, consistent representation that you'll come to use unconsciously. Imagine a college marketing professor who always uses the board a certain way, putting "channels of distribution" in the upper left, and "promotions" in the lower right. After taking that class and experiencing that visual sorting of information consistently for a semester, you'll probably arrange your own notes that way and even organize your thoughts that way internally. A good NLP trainer creates mental representations through their use of space and metaphor so you walk away with good ways to visually, auditorially, and kinesthetically sort the information.

One of the most popular NLP "teaching to the unconscious" techniques is when a trainer demonstrates as they teach. While discussing stimulus/response conditioning, they would actually be using it to reinforce the concept. The audience would be getting the words and an experience of the concept all at once. If you think about it, this is how we learned language to begin with--our parents pointed to a chair and said, "CHAIR" until we finally "got it."

There are other unconscious communications as well: communicating cognitive strategies through gesture and word choice, bringing up sequences of emotional states to "chain" from one emotion to another (e.g. "helpless" to "powerful"), the use of metaphor to leverage existing knowledge bases without mentioning them explicit, "semantic priming" (a cog. psych term), the use of "nested loops" to lead someone through several unconscious processes at once without getting them muddied, and still others.

So... is your unconscious mind getting it?

Probably, if there's an "it" is there to be gotten. Most training design in the mainstream world (and *all* training design in academia) centers around the conscious elements and leaves the unconscious elements completely to chance. In those trainings, paying attention to the conscious elements is most important.

A lot of NLP trainers demonstrate as they train and consider that to be unconscious teaching. While that's certainly one piece, I am not convinced that that's enough to give their training much more impact than normal, conscious teaching. Which means if your conscious mind isn't getting anything and the trainer is only using demo-as-teach, you're probably getting almost nothing.

One thing I would do is to ask the trainer to walk you explicitly through the elements of the training that are teaching you unconsciously. What you're listening for in their answer is a definite lesson plan of the unconscious elements. Here's a very contrived example: "one thing we're teaching is taking initiative in building your own mental maps. We've mixed up the furniture and every time you get up, we ask you to stop and design a new way to leave the room. Doing that design requires you to design a map that's different from any you've done so far. Over the course of the training, you'll develop the habit of continually developing new maps that are arranged differently from your old ones. On the last day, we will tell a series of metaphors to help you connect that strategy to your general problem solving strategies, so you become able to generate many more solutions to problems on an ongoing basis."

It takes a lot of skill as a trainer to manage both the conscious material and at the same time design a truly impactful, coherent unconscious underpinning. Notice that in my above example, the trainer never needs to tell the trainees about the unconscious agenda. He/she need only do it, while teaching other material to the trainees' conscious minds, and the trainee will walk away with new conscious and new unconscious material.

So it's very, very possible for an NLP trainer to be teaching to your unconscious mind and really be producing profound results on that level. That's one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Richard Bandler--he teaches to the unconscious and I've gotten powerful results from attending his workshops, down to the level of demonstrable new skills that just appeared suddenly after taking a class with him. (And we'd never practiced those skills in the workshop.) That said, I would often be happier if he spent more time filling in conscious material as well. Some of his teaching videotapes from the late 1980s, where he's being very explicit about what he's doing, are absolutely brilliant and useful to the conscious mind.

I believe that Richard's co-trainer, John LaValle of NLP Seminars Group International, also does a lot of unconscious teaching in his trainings.

Beyond the two of them, however, I don't have much direct experience with trainers who have sophisticated unconscious curriculae in addition to their conscious material. There probably are several out there, I just haven't experienced them directly. When in doubt, when someone says "Your unconscious is getting it," use the NLP meta-model and ask: "What, specifically, is my unconscious mind getting it, and how, specifically, have you communicated that information at an unconscious level?"

Best of luck,

Stever Robbins

(*) For excellent, further reading on the brain mechanisms behind implicit learning (e.g. the "locale" memory system), check out the book on brain-based learning by Caine and Caine, entitled "Making Connections." back