Números y Álgebra (9 semanas)

Anybody with a third of an interest in hypnosis will be hard pushed not to have heard of NLP. When I began reading about and practising hypnosis as a student I became quite enthused about NLP, mainly due to the narrative style and astonishing content of the books written by or about its founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They are quite addictive reading, especially to one without scepticism, and I started to incorporate NLP into my hypnosis shows and any low-level therapeutic help I might offer someone, such as giving up smoking.

After about six years of familiarity with the techniques and attitude of NLP, and in a moment of unpleasant madness, I thought I might become a hypnotherapist full-time, and it seemed proper that I obtain some relevant qualifications. To do so, I attended an NLP course, given by Bandler and others, and achieved the relevant ‘Practitioner’ qualification. The course, perversely, put me off that career rather than cementing my ambition. I now have a lot of NLPers analysing my TV work in their own terms, as well as people who say that I myself unfairly claim to be using NLP whenever I perform (the truth is I have never mentioned it). To confuse things even further, it has recently made a home for itself as a fashionable conjuring technique of dubious efficacy.

‘What is it?’ I literally hear you, the frightened novice, ask. Well, you clever sausage, that is a show-off question and no-one’s going to give you a straightforward answer. ‘What is it?’ indeed. Honestly. This isn’t America. The words ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ suggest that it has something to do with language and the brain programming each other. However, it has been said that Bandler may have made the term up when a traffic policeman asked for his profession, so perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much about the complicated title. If you’re after a complicated definition instead, here is NLP as defined by Bandler on his website at the time of writing: ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ (NLP™) is defined as the study of the structure of subjective experience and what can be calculated from that and is predicated upon the belief that all behaviour has structure.’

It is fair to say that NLP is a large training programme dealing with communication and personal change. It is taught in courses and seminars, and can apply to businesses as well as being offered as a therapeutic tool. It stands as one of many similar enterprises, though it seems to be one of the most successful, along with the larger-than-life self-help guru Anthony Robbins, who credits NLP with changing his own life and starting him down a path of powerful personal change. At the heart of it lies the metaphor of NLP as ‘software for the brain’, or as a user-manual for experiencing the world in the most beneficial way. Another much-used phrase is ‘the map is not the territory’: in other words, our experience of the world reflects only how we represent it to ourselves, and this is not the same as the real thing. Undoubtedly this is a critical principle to remember when considering our beliefs.

Grinder (a linguist) and Bandler (a mathematician) started NLP in the mid-seventies by paying attention to how very successful therapists, such as Erickson, achieved their results. They ‘elicited the strategies’ of these top professionals, and later on others in different fields, so that the same strategies could be taught to others who wanted to achieve the same success. Over time they developed a model of how language is processed by the brain, and claimed that both affect each other all the time. Some of what we do in our brains (essentially, how we are representing the world to ourselves) is expressed in the language we use, and by paying particular attention to the language we use, we can have a powerful effect on the unconscious neurological processes of the listener.

Although the authors studied the work of many top professionals, they notably did not look at the work of neuro-scientists in formulating these ideas. Indeed, their approach was more pragmatic: to start with observed phenomena that seemed reliable, and then to set out teachable ideas based on what was useful o r seemed to work best, rather than trying to understand why or how something might work. The pragmatic approach of the originators has now been swamped in a huge industry of daft theories and

hyperbole, evangelical mind-sets and endless self-perpetuating courses, to the point where it resembles something of a pyramid scheme, with Bandler sat cheerily at the top. (Grinder, it seems, has a more careful view of what constitutes good NLP and is a little cynical of what it has become.)

I have seen Bandler at work and he undoubtedly appears quite extraordinary, in the way any good showman can appear. He is infectious and at once both charismatic and unpleasant. You love his world and adore his attitude while at the same time not quite believing him. It’s not hard to take people from a group of suggestible, enthusiastic believers and have them experience what appears to be powerful change in front of the audience. That comes down to understanding charisma and performance. He certainly excels in those areas, which makes it hard to tell whether he’s hugely effective or a great, brilliant, captivating con.

One aspect of NLP that will always make it hugely appealing is that it makes wild and dazzling claims, such as being able to make a genius out of anyone through a process called ‘modelling’. Though Bandler himself might baulk at some of the exaggerated claims made by practitioners (most of them his disciples), he makes plenty of very strong statements himself about what can be achieved, and is now only one voice in a massive industry. (As nothing in NLP is set in stone, and as Bandler is an intriguing but slippery fish when it comes to pinning anything down on him, it seems fair to criticize some of these claims where they are made, in the absence of clear alternatives or even a clear central body to defer to.) To ‘model’, we must first elicit the unconscious strategies of the person we wish to emulate by asking certain key questions that will have them setting out every stage of their inner processes. Normally these are things the person does not think about and will discover for himself as the questions guide him. Then we try those processes out for ourselves, and through an imaginative process have ourselves think and feel as the person we wish to learn from. We are taking on their skills as our own.

Perhaps it sounds a little complicated, but you’d probably agree that being curious about people whose behaviour we respect, and bothering to find out if and how we might learn from their example, is a positive and worthwhile thing. It would make sense to believe so, although it may not occur to some of us to think of behaviours in that way. We tend to think we’re stuck with our personalities and problems and that’s that: there’s certainly a lot to be learned from the self-help world which would have us learn how to put liberating new behaviours into practice. However, the problem for NLP arises when this is treated as something of a magical process. In one study, a group ‘modelled’ a sharp-shooter while another group were taught by traditional methods. Both were given the same amount of learning time, and both ended up with the same skills on the firing range. Modelling didn’t prove a magical tool when it came to such measurable, specific skills. Personally, I remember the delight I felt watching an NLP disciple I knew demonstrate the results of his session of ‘modelling’ a juggler. It was clear, as he hunted for the twelfth time under his sofa for a coloured ball, that he was not learning any more quickly than if he had been taught in a more traditional way.

Now, modelling skills might possibly be of more use with learning low-level, less ‘teachable’ (and less measurable) skills such as charisma, or how effectively to approach challenges, but this is a much more pedestrian image of modelling than that which NLP uses to appeal to people. The image is given that little old you can become a Pavarotti or an Einstein through some magical and brief brain-programming process. While this undoubtedly may not have been quite the original intention of the technique, it is certainly the misleading concept peddled nowadays. Such exaggerated claims as these, unchecked and unaccountable in a sprawling industry that affects personal lives and big business, are perhaps a little concerning.

Another issue suggests itself here. Can I not choose to learn from other people in this way without calling it NLP? Don’t we model ourselves on people or emulate mentors all the time? Of course, the answer is ‘yes’. Because NLP has its roots not only in Bandler and Grinder’s work but also in aspects of Freud, Jung and Chomsky, as well as all the therapists the originators were inspired by, and because it

aims to take as its starting point what already works, there is little in its roots that is unique. One of the many irritating habits of NLPers is to claim anything remotely concerned with looking consciously at one’s inner processes as NLP.

There have been attempts to study whether or not some of the more quantifiable claims of NLP do actually stand up. One such set of claims revolves around the notion of ‘primary representational systems’ and ‘eye accessing cues’.