Most books in rapidly developing fields are five or ten years out of date by the time they are printed. Most of the material in this book is about three years old. There are many other newer submodality patterns now being taught in advanced NLP seminars, and Richard continues to develop more patterns.

One of the basic principles of NLP is that the order or sequence of experiences, like the order of words in a sentence, affects their meaning. The order of the chapters in this book has been carefully thought out. Since much of the material in later chapters presupposes that you have the information and experiences presented in earlier chapters, you will have a much fuller understanding if you read them in order.

Another basic NLP principle is that words are only inadequate labels for experiences. It is one thing to read about hammering a nail into a board. It is quite a different experience to feel a hammer in your hand and hear a satisfying "thunk" as the nail sinks into a piece of soft pine. It is yet another experience to feel the vibration and twist in the hammer and watch the nail bend as you hear the "pinggg" that tells you about the hidden knot.

The patterns in this book are tools. Like any tools, they must be used to be understood fully, and they must be practiced to be used with consistent effectiveness. You can skim through this book rapidly if you just want to get an idea of what's in it. But if you really want to be able to use this information, be sure to try it out in your own experience and with others, or your knowledge will only be "academic."

Connirae Andreas

Steve Andreas

April 1985

I. Who's Driving the Bus ?

Neuro–Linguistic Programming is a word that I made up to avoid having to be specialized in one field or another.; In college I was one of those people who couldn't make up my mind, and I decided to continue that way. One of the things that NLP represents is a way of looking at human learning. Although lots of psychologists and social workers use NLP to do what they call "therapy," I think it's more appropriate to describe NLP as an educational process. Basically we're developing ways to teach people how to use their own brains.

Most people don't actively and deliberately use their own brains. Your brain is like a machine without an "off' switch. If you don't give it something to do, it just runs on and on until it gets bored. If you put someone in a sensory deprivation tank where there's no external experience, he'll start generating internal experience. If your brain is sitting around without anything to do, it's going to start doing something, and it doesn't seem to care what it is, You may care, but it doesn't.

For example, have you ever been just sitting around minding your own business, or sound asleep, when suddenly your brain flashes a picture that scares the pants off you? How often do people wake up in the middle of the night because they just relived an ecstatically pleasureable experience? If you've had a bad day, then later your brain will show you vivid reruns, over and over again. It's not enough that you had a bad day; you can ruin the whole evening, and perhaps part of next week, too.

Most people don't stop there. How many of you think about unpleasant things that happened long ago? It's as if your brain is saying, "Let's do it again! We've got an hour before lunch, let's think about something that's really depressing. Maybe we can get angry about it three years too late." Have you heard about "unfinished business"? It's finished; you just didn't like the way it came out.

I want you to find out how you can learn to change your own experience, and get some control over what happens in your brain. Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It's as if they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is driving. I want you to learn how to drive your own bus. If you don't give your brain a little direction, either it will just run randomly on its own, or other people will find ways to run it for you — and they may not always have your best interests in mind. Even if they do, they may get it wrong!

NLP is an opportunity to be able to study subjectivity —something that I was told in school is a terrible thing. I was told that true science looks at things objectively. However, I noticed that I seemed to be most influenced by my subjective experience, and I wanted to know something about how it worked, and how it affected other people. I'm going to play some mind–games with you in this seminar, because the brain is my favorite toy.

How many of you would like to have a "photographic memory"? And how many of you vividly remember past unpleasant experiences, over and over again? It certainly adds a little juice to life. If you go to see a terrifying movie, and you go home and sit down, the act of sitting down will tend to put you right back into the theater seat. How many of you have had that experience? And you claim that you don't have a photographic memory! You've already got one; you're just not using it in a directed way. If you're able to have a photographic memory when it comes to remembering past unpleasantness, it seems like it would be nice if you could deliberately harness some of that ability for more useful experiences.

How many of you have ever thought about something that hadn't even happened yet, and felt bad about it ahead of time? Why wait? You may as well start feeling bad now, right? And then it didn't actually happen, after all. But you didn't miss out on that experience, did you?

That ability can also work the other way. Some of you have better vacations before you actually go, and then you get to be disappointed when you arrive. Disappointment requires adequate planning. Did you ever think about how much trouble you have to go to in order to be disappointed? You really have to plan thoroughly for it. The more planning, the more disappointment. Some people go to the movies and then say, "It's just not as good as I thought it was going to be." This makes me wonder, if they had such a good movie inside their heads, why did they go to the theater? Why go sit in a room with sticky floors and uncomfortable seats to watch a movie, and then say, "I can do better than that in my head, and I didn't even have the screen play."

This is the kind of thing that happens if you let your brain run wild. People spend more time learning how to use a food processor than they do learning how to use their brains. There isn't much emphasis placed on deliberately using your mind in ways other than you already do. 'You're supposed to "be your–self — as if you had an alternative. You're stuck with it, believe me. I suppose they could wipe out all your memories with electroshock, and then make you into someone else, but the results I've seen haven't been very enticing. Until we find something like a mind–blanking machine, I think you're probably stuck with you. And it's not so bad, because you can learn to use your brain in more functional ways. That's what NLP is all about.

When I first started teaching, some people got the idea that NLP would help people program other people's minds to control them and make them less human. They seemed to have the idea that deliberately changing a person would somehow reduce that person's humanity. Most people are quite willing to change themselves deliberately with antibiotics and cosmetics, but behavior seems different. I've never understood how changing someone and making them happier turns them into less of a human being. But I have noticed how many people are very good at making their husbands or wives or children — or even total strangers — feel bad, just by "being themselves." I sometimes ask people, "Why be your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?" I want to introduce you to some of the infinite possibilities for learning and changing that are available to you if you start using your brain deliberately.