I. Introduction

When a magician in top hat and cape calls for his beautiful assistant to lead an enormous elephant to center stage, we lean back in our chairs and prepare to enjoy the illusion. "Presto!" he shouts, and the giant Jumbo disappears, right on schedule. We smile to ourselves, knowing the "magic" was performed with mirrors, but feeling good just the same in deliberately allowing our perceptions to be fooled by a highly skilled entertainer. Were we to step onstage with the magician and his assistant, we would be entering another world — a world in which the mirrors themselves were visible and the elephant so near that we'd hear its breathing and feel the stage moving slightly as Jumbo shifted from foot to foot. There is something slightly disconcerting about being near the "source" of an illusion, but once we learn precisely how the "elephant disappearing act" is done, our enjoyment is enhanced rather than diminished — we learn to watch for and enjoy the skill with which the magician performs as well as retaining the option of taking pleasure in the illusion itself. We may begin to understand that the ability to make such distinctions is a very special and unique resource, one that extends far beyond the world of stages, mirrors and magicians in its significance.

Neurolinguistic programming is a model about the special world of magic and illusion of human behavior and communication — the study of the components of perception and behavior which makes our experience possible. The name neurolinguistic programming stands for what we maintain to be the basic process used by all human beings to encode, transfer, guide, and modify behavior.

For us behavior is programmed by combining and sequencing neural system representations — sights, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes — whether that behavior involves making a decision, throwing a football, smiling at a member of the opposite sex, visualizing the spelling of a word or teaching physics. A given input stimulus is processed through a sequence of internal representations, and a specific behavioral outcome is generated.

"Neuro" (derived from the Greek neuron for nerve) stands for the fundamental tenet that all behavior is the result of neurological processes. "Linguistic" (derived from the Latin lingua for language) indicates that neural processes are represented, ordered and sequenced into models and strategies through language and communication systems. "Programming" refers to the process of organizing the components of a system (sensory representations in this case) to achieve specific outcomes.

No matter what background or occupation you have, the reader has probably at some time or other had the experience of interacting with someone on the stage on which you perform, in a way that was particularly effective and allowed you to get some specific outcome that was of importance for you, the other person and/or a number of other people. This may have been the communication or learning of some important information, making a sale, solving a problem, or so on. Afterwards, though delighted with yourself, you may have had no real idea of what it was that characterized and distinguished that occasion, and the effectiveness, speed and elegance of your communication, from a normal situation.

Or perhaps you have met a person or had the experience of spending time with an individual who is eminently successful in the particular field they have chosen to accept and you have wondered what characterized the differences in their behavior from yours or from that of other individuals. You may have asked yourself what is it that allows them to do what may seem incredible or magical to others.

Or perhaps you yourself have a particular talent or ability that you would like to offer or teach to others, but have no real idea of what it is that enables you to perform your task with such elegance and sophistication.

This book is about how to unpack and repackage behavior, like that in the examples above, into efficient and communicable sequences that will be available to every member of the species. It will provide the reader with a set of tools that will enable him or her to analyze and incorporate or modify any sequence of behavior that they may observe in another human being.

1. Modeling

Down through the ages human beings have evolved many systems or models for understanding and dealing with the universe we live in. These models for organizing and coding the interactions of people in their environment have been handed such names as culture, religion, art, psychology, philosophy, politics, industry and science. Each model typically overlaps with other models and may include smaller models nested inside itself, just as science includes physics, biology, oceanography, chemistry, etc. and overlaps with industry in the area of research. Each model differs from the others in terms of that portion of human experience it represents and emphasizes and in terms of the way it organizes and uses its selected set of representations. All are similar in their ultimate concern with the outcomes of human behavior.

The purpose of each model is to identify patterns in the interaction between human behavior and the environment, so that the behavior of individual human beings can be systematized within the selected context to achieve desired and adaptive outcomes more efficiently, effectively and consistently. For example, scientists are trained to operate within a specific model to help them organize their behavioral priorities in gathering and interpreting data. They are taught to recognize and work toward specific desired outcomes — as are businessmen, artists, politicians and medical doctors.

1.1 The Map Is Not the Territory

As participant organisms within the universe,[4] we, the model–makers who devise, perpetuate and extend our cultural models, do not operate directly on the world. Rather, we operate through coded interpretations of the environment as received and experienced in our sensory representational systems — through sight, sound, smell, taste and feeling. Information about our external universe (as well as our internal states) is received, organized, consolidated and transmitted through an internal system of neural pathways that culminate in the brain — our central processing biocomputer. This information is then transformed through internal processing strategies that each individual has learned. The result is what we call "behavior." In NLP behavior is defined as all sensory representations experienced and expressed internally and/or externally for which evidence is available from a subject and/or from a human observer of that subject. That is, the act of skiing down a beautiful snow–covered mountainside and the act of imagining oneself doing so are equally to be considered behaviors in the context of neurolinguistic programming.

Both macrobehavior and microbehavior are, of course, programmed through our neurological systems. Macrobehavior is overt and easily observable, as in driving a car, speaking, fighting, eating, getting sick or riding a bicycle. Microbehavior involves subtler though equally important phenomena such as heart rate, voice tempo, skin color changes, pupil dilation and such events as seeing in the mind's eye or having an internal dialogue.

Obviously, not all culturally transmitted models for behavior have been incorporated into all members of the human species, but most of us have many of them available in our representational systems.[5] The development, then, of these models—and the behavior generated through them—form a significant statement about the neurological systems of those individuals who have adopted them as organizational strategies for their behavior. That is, the variety and range of human behavior, viewed in the context of the models that generate those behaviors, tells us much about human neurological organization. The state of these models today —the most current point in their development—represents the evolution of ideas, the surviving wisdom of our predecessors. Ultimately, after the uproar of economic, religious and ideological disputes has subsided, models are kept or discarded on the basis of their adaptiveness or usefulness as guides for the behavior of members of the species. The acceptance or rejection, the elaboration and expansion of these models reflects the evolution of human thought and behavior.[6]