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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.

An oft-heard refrain in certain NLP seminars is, "Don't worry if you don't understand—your unconscious mind is getting it." I've long been a skeptic of this statement. Here's a Usenet thread on the topic. (For copyright reasons, I have only included my postings.)

[Please also see the essay on the use of unconscious training techniques in NLP seminars.]

On Fri, 06 Apr 2001 16:37:25 -0700, in alt.psychology.nlp gturner@hypersurf.com wrote:

You talk about a smart unconscious mind. That implies the possibility of a dumb unconscious mind. Then the 2 questions immediately spring to mind; how does one determine if ones own or another's unconsious mind is dumb or smart? Or is it a matter of the hypnotist very, very congruently assuming that one's unconscious mind is smart and proceeding from there.

Thanks

Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 16:45:12 -0400
To: Stever Robbins 
From: Stever Robbins  (by way of Stever Robbins)
Subject: Re: Teaching directly to the unconscious mind
Status: RO

It's actually not a matter of smart or dumb. It's a matter of whether your unconscious mind would happen to develop a successful strategy for accomplishing a vague hypnotic instruction, given your unique personal history.

For example, you could do all the hypnotic instructing you want to tell me to wake up and magically be a good speller. Even if my unconscious mind developed a strategy with a high probability for success [e.g. visual eidetic memory] for spelling, if my personal history didn't include acquiring visual representations of properly spelled words, my unconscious mind wouldn't be successful at making me into a good speller.

There seem to me to be two reasons a person's unconscious mind might not be able to create the skill: it might happen to develop a strategy that's not optimal for that skill, or it might develop an optimal strategy but not have certain unique content to put through the skill. If you're "teaching directly to the unconscious" as I define it, it's probably important that you help people's unconscious mind develop an effective strategy AND access relevant content.

Using myself as an example, I've never had depth perception. My right eye has never worked properly, and I don't experience the world in three dimensions [can't say that I miss it, though it *would* be nice to be able to catch a ball]. As a result, it's highly unlikely that any amount of practitioner congruence will help my unconscious mind develop a cognitive strategy that depends on 3D perception, simply because my brain hasn't even developed the wiring.

- Stever

P.S. On a less politically correct note, I also find that the NLP presupposition that "if one person can do it, anyone can" is great for getting trainer/therapist and client to use every resource at their disposal to help someone get a result. But even giving it one's all, in my experience, is only one piece of acquiring a skill. I've met people who would require so much retraining [identity, beliefs, skills] to learn something that even if it's possible, there's no practical way to do it in a lifetime.

There's a lot of recent research in the last few years that suggests that the people who get the most of what they want in life and are the best at what they do tend to concentrate on hyper-developing their inborn strengths rather than ramping up in areas that don't come naturally to them. They compensate for their non-strengths by building support networks, rather than trying to learn/do everything themselves.

So to address your implication head-on [that I'm violating the NLP presupposition of "a congruent therapist can lead anyone to learn/do anything"], I do believe that some people will never be smart in some areas(*), no matter how much the practitioner and client congruently believe otherwise. Congruence will help them get the most out of what they have [which may be more than is first obvious], but they'll eventually reach a wall.

Conventional wisdom in the music world is that a First Violin is born, not made. That just may be a more accurate description of reality than "anyone can learn the strategies of a First Violin and execute them perfectly." But the latter belief is still MUCH more useful in a learning context. Teachers and students will get much better results by giving 110% and striving for First Violin. But in terms of results, having the belief won't create first violins at will. I've never been in a teaching or learning environment--NLP or otherwise--that was able to bring all students to a high level of mastery(**), even in the presence of fervent, congruent belief. Individual variation of minds seems to exist and that makes the world a far richer, more intriguing place than it might otherwise be!

(*) This very medium--internet newsgroups--is famous for attracting certain folk who are systematically unable to communicate constructively in writing. In 18 years of participating in online forums, I've seen evidence suggesting that some folks, no matter how hard they try, remain a**holes. I sincerely hope it's an innate limitation, because it would be horrible to think they do it voluntarily :-)

(**) If anyone knows of such a learning environment and can provide contact information or research information, please let me know. A few years ago I spent a couple of years surveying everything I could find on human performance and was unable to find very many learning technologies that could produce consisent, repeatable results over a non-homogeneous student population.

On Fri, 06 Apr 2001 16:37:25 -0700, gturner@hypersurf.com wrote:
>how does one determine if ones own or another's unconsious mind is dumb or smart?

Sorry for not addressing this question in my prior post. I don't think it's useful to think in terms of "smart or dumb." Rather, ask what kinds of strengths you have and how you might best use them.

Psychological profiles and assessments can help. I happen to be very taken with the recently released book and skills assessment, "Now Discover Your Strengths." It's an assessment developed with a very large statistical base (almost 2 million people) and the skills they identified may in fact be a good way to look at your capabilities. Knowing those strengths can be a good first step to figuring out what you'd be especially good at.

In terms of developing the greatest learning flexibility even for non-strength areas, I recommend spending a lot of time on the basics: training your mind to work in all sensory systems. In college, I used to walk around blindfolded for an afternoon to develop the ability to make auditory and kinesthetic distinctions [I was so visual that I hardly knew anything else existed]. These days, I have picked up certain kinesthetic skills surprisingly rapidly--yoga, dance, and massage. But it's become clear to me that high-kinesthetic skills are NOT natural to me. Rather, I learned to make good K distinctions and that's resulted in my being able to go up a kinesthetic learning curve pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, there are a LOT of kinesthetic learning curves, and I have to go up each one consciously. It seems to take me about a year to get really good at one. Since "putting up blinds" and "installing my own shelves" are kinesthetic tasks that I haven't even put on my "Things to Learn" list, my guess is that I will continue to compensate for certain kinesthetic shortcomings by hiring someone who can use a hammer without flattening their thumb... :-)

Cheers,

Stever

>
>Stever Robbins wrote:
>
> And there's where I get skeptical. Ericksonian hypnosis is pretty
> non-directive and content-free. It relies on the client having a smart
> unconscious mind that can solve problems. While that's a great frame
> for therapy, in which the unconscious is being asked to solve problems
> that largely involve the unconscious, I don't quite get how one would
> apply that to teaching a specific behavioral skill.
>
> Ericksonian approach: put someone in a trance and say "Wake up and be
> Einstein." They'll wake up and do their best, bringing all their
> resources to bear.
>
> My understanding of "teaching the unconscious": say "You're now
> Einstein" but they actually now have the strategies and information
> needed to process info the way Einstein did, _even if their
> unconscious mind had no representation of Einstein or his skills to
> begin with_.
>
> I haven't read Training Trances, but it sounds worth a read...
>
> - Stever