Neuro-Linguistic Programming Models Summary (04 of 14)

Distracter

Virginia Satir suggested that .5% of people will typically use the satir categories distracter attitude. They act as though yes, no or anything was irrelevant.

The distracter is someone who bounces between all three of the previous stances. They deflect responsibility from their self, other people, and the situation! They can be silly to talk to, as well, and may come across as funny or confusing. In speech, the distracter can be used for getting the attention of the audience or causing laughter. A distracter’s gestures will typically be unbalanced, like one arm up, on arm down, and their head cocked.

Think flirting and young children. One of the major things about flirting is the asymmetrical body posture (like standing on one leg or leaning against the wall). There is not so sexy to stand straight and tall with arms and legs in a symmetrical position. Most of us take on this stance occasionally – or we would hope so, unless you are terrible at flirting and playing.

There is a tendency to change the topic to seemingly irrelevant things and for different parts of the body to be moving in different directions. There is a kind of unpredictability about this posture – a readiness to pounce on the object of your desire maybe. This can be a powerful strategy in negotiation if the other party is playing hardball.

A distracter attitude can trigger another person’s Computer (or Super Reasonable) posture. Maybe you’ve noticed when kids get excited; a parent can want to rein them in. “Stop being so silly!

While this attitude is great when flirting and having fun, it’s not so useful when you want to be taken seriously, like in a job interview. It can feel purposeless.

Example

Using a distracter stance, if you were late to a meeting, you might breeze in, lounge in a seat, promptly spill the contents of your bag and say.

“Damn, I’ve got a hole in my sock. Did everyone hear about Mr Smith in accounting – got caught with his pants down in the photo copier room? Ooh I love the new painting. I went to the fireworks display on the weekend – got so sloshed I couldn’t find my way home.”

LevelLer

Virginia Satir suggested that 4.5% of people will typically use the satir categories levelLer attitude. Many thought this was an optimistic view.

LevelLers are congruent in their beliefs, respecting their own view, other people’s views, and the context of a situation. They show no symptoms of the other stress stances. The levelLer appears knowledgeable, and speaks in facts. Their gestures are symmetrical, and particularly around mid waist. This stance shows credibility in speech giving. What do we mean by congruence – that the messages from body language and verbal communication match.

It is actually quite a feat to be in touch with your real feelings, thoughts and body. Intimacy takes a great deal of courage – to actually say what you feel honestly. To express your fears and discomforts about others behaviours and situations, especially if everyone else is saying what wonderful robes the naked emperor is wearing. The world and its humans aren’t necessarily going to reward you for speaking the truth when that’s not what they want to hear.

What about a man’s most feared question – “Does my bum look big in these pants?” A leveller might say “I don’t think these are the most flattering” A chicken might say “They look great”

Leveller is about win/win. It is the solution based problem solving stance. It focuses on solutions. In negotiation, this attitude focuses on the facts and the basis for the negotiation.

• They apologiSe when they are in the wrong (rather than to placate).
• They can evaluate a situation (rather than blaming a person).
• They know when abstract language is appropriate, like when talking to other experts or when they truly need to be objective (rather than to avoid feelings)
• They know when it’s useful to be asymmetrical and playful (hi cutie) without being dishonest or to divert.

Example

Using a leveller stance, if you were late to a meeting you might walk in and say.

“I’m late, I’m sorry. Have you been inconvenienced? Where are you up to and what do you need?” The attention would be on the outcomes of the meeting, while acknowledging and dealing with the feelings of the people involved.

Chunk Up / Chunk Down

‘Chunking up’ refers to moving from specific, or small scale ideas or pieces of information to more general, larger ones.  ‘Chunking down’ (obviously) means going the other way.

To chunk up from something, ask one or more of the following questions:

• what is this a part of?
• what is this an example of?
• what purpose does this have?

To illustrate the concept, consider a supermarket. Examples of chunking up from supermarket are:

• buildings (a supermarket is an example of buildings)
• or a district (the supermarket forms part of a district)
• or a chain of supermarkets (like Sainsbury’s)
• or ways people can buy food (others being open market, corner shop, online).

If we move from supermarket to district, we could continue upwards to city, county, country… If we move from supermarket to supermarket chain, we could continue to retail sector, trade, economy…

To chunk down, use one or more of the following questions:

• what is an example of this?
• what is a component of this?
• who/what/where specifically?

Examples of chunking down from supermarket are:

• a supermarket in Birmingham
• a department of a supermarket
• a floor of a supermarket.

If we move form supermarket to department, we could continue product range, product, size of product and so on.

Application of chunking

Whether we think in big chunks or little chunks is, like everything else, a matter of nature and nurture.  People who see ‘the big picture’ may often be regarded as superior, but this is a cultural judgment, not a psychological one.  Clearly people who can see the detail are essential in many areas of work.

There is no fundamental difference between people who tend to think in big chunks and people who tend to chunk down.  It’s just a preference. But our preference determines whether we automatically chunk up or chunk down, as is revealed in the questions we ask:

“How does this fit into the plan we’ve been following?” is a chunking up question.

“How does this affect the way I report my work?” takes you down to a particular detail.

You can also chunk sideways, eg,  “What is similar to this?”

It’s very useful to develop an awareness of your and others’ preferences and to practise up, down and sideways chunking.  If someone’s preference is different from yours, then matching theirs for a while is one strategy for building rapport with them.

In negotiation, when conflicts arise, an essential technique is to deliberately chunk up in order to find common ground.  So, for example, you might think we should buy cheaper paper and I might think that would give our clients a poor impression of us.  A mediator would ask you, “What would cheaper paper give us?” and then ask me, “What would a good customer impression give us?” The answers might be “reduced costs” and “more sales”, respectively.  This is chunking up. Chunking up another step makes us both answer “more profit”. We now have a common objective and we can both address it (“what ways that we agree on will deliver more profit?”), moving away from our area of conflict.

This sequence is also a key part of several techniques for resolving personal internal conflict;  that is, when an individual wants two things that seem to be mutually exclusive. A common example of these conflicting wants is the pair career and family.  You want to progress at work but you also want to spend more time with the family. Chunking up might go: career gets me money, which gets me freedom, which gets me fulfilment.  Family time gets me sense of belonging, which gets me comfort, which gets me fulfilment.

Recognising that both of the conflicting parts ultimately want the same thing opens the door to co-existence, because whichever of the two you’re pursuing at any moment, you’re always moving towards the common goal. You still have to accommodate both in your life but it doesn’t feel like a conflict any longer.

Match / Mismatch

For most of my life I busily tried to match with everyone I met. Matching seemed to me to be the logical and socially acceptable way to behave.

It came as a big shock to me when I discovered how powerful mismatching could be when coaching someone to improve their performance.

I had spent most of my life looking for similarities, looking for what was the same, not what was different. When I met someone new I would look for ways that they were the same as me. Did we share any interests, common backgrounds, or had we taken holidays in similar resorts, or could I find any friends that we had in common. My whole strategy for creating rapport, empathy and friendship was based on matching with other people. I found these skills valuable in making friends and in making sales.

Conversely mismatching felt uncomfortable. I instinctively felt that a person was not the sort of person that I would like. As a result I must have missed thousands of opportunities to make new and possibly interesting friends.

What I failed to appreciate until quite recently was the value of challenging thinking patterns. I had always done this when looking for business solutions, but only very rarely employed the same mismatching tactic in social, sales or coaching situations.

The key to mismatching is in the phrase: “yes, but….” This phrase challenges the other person to think, to reexamine their presuppositions and their entrenched positions. It can lead to arguments and disagreements. But it can also cause a lot of rethinking and reevaluating which can be healthy.

Representational System Sort

‘Rep Systems’  as we use them in NLP

In NLP we use the term Representations Systems, or Rep Systems instead of the ‘five senses’ because this emphasises the fact that we are using our senses to process and to represent information i.e. to think.

So we think in a blend of self-talk, sounds, images, and feelings – plus, to a limited degree, smells and tastes.

We each use a different blend and most of us will favour one of these of the systems more than the other.

Clues to a person’s inner activity

NLP is renowned for the attention we give to how a person demonstrates their use of their five senses – their representational systems. This is because everything we experience is ‘represented‘ internally in our nervous system. Without our being consciously aware of it our five senses are constantly receiving and processing information about the world about and within us.

And, since the mind and body are part of an interactive system, anything that happens in one part of the system affects all parts of the system. We cannot, for example, have a thought without having a physical response to that thought.

For example, iIf I remember a feeling, or talk to myself about something or imagine a forthcoming event I will use my senses – or representational systems – and a skilled NLP-er will be able to recognise which of these senses I am using and in which sequence I am using them.

The NLP-er will recognise this from external cues such as the words I use or the way my eyes move or even by the =sounds of my voice. or how I am breathing.

In NLP we recognise that people are continuously communicating information such as this about what they are doing internally – their inner processing. And this information is available for those who have spent time developing this skill.

The types of cue/clue

As mentioned above, there are a range of external ‘cues’ which we can pay attention to to identify how a person is thinking i.e. whether they are remembering mental images or mental images, talking to themselves, remembering or making sounds, or attending to their feelings.

The two most commonly used indicators are

1. The Predicates

The give-away words and phrases which they use most. 

These the adverbs, verbs, and adjectives which they use and which indicate which of their representational systems they are more consciously aware of utilising at that moment. Words include see, hear feel, sound it out, get a grip on things, talk things over, add things up, get the picture, and so on.

2. The NLP eye accessing cues

How a person’s eyes move when they are thinking

These eye accessing cues are the directions in which they habitually look when they are thinking – or ‘processing’ information.

Non-verbal accessing – other

The eye movements patterns are the easiest accessing cues to observe. However you can also gain information about a person’s inner processing from their voice rate and tempo and tone, breathing patterns, and even gestures.

Knowing about these cues is interesting.  But to be able to use them in everyday conversation, or in coaching or appraisal sessions, does require skill.  And this skill needs to be practised so it is automatic or unconscious. In this way we can recognise the representational systems a person ‘naturally’ and this doesn’t intrude into the other person’s awareness nor get in the way of our conversing easily with them.

Agree/Disagree

One of my favorite exercises when teaching NLP is the agree/disagree rapport exercise. It shows the influence physiological rapport techniques have on us. Plus, it shows how unconscious processes drive the way we feel, much more powerfully than many of us realize.

In case you don’t know, NLP rapport techniques involve matching behavior. When generating rapport, we might position ourselves to have similar posture, breathe in rhythm, use similar language, speak at a similar rate and with similar tonality etc. In general, the more similarly you can act (without imitating), the more rapport you can generate. But the agree/disagree exercise is different…

The Agree/Disagree Rapport Exercise

In this exercise, you match behavior and try to disagree. Then you mismatch behavior and try to agree. For the exercise, two people pick two subjects: one that they agree on and one they don’t. It’s best if they are polarizing issues; religion, abortion, politics — anything that typically elicits strong emotions.

The two subjects match behavior (they’re both responsible for matching each other) and talk about the subject they disagree on.

Then, they deliberately mismatch behavior as much as possible and talk about the subject they agree on. If there’s a third person, they can give feedback on the matching or mismatching.

The Results

It’s weird. Most people report that, when matching and disagreeing, they felt like they really didn’t disagree. “We agreed to disagree,” is a comment I often hear about it. When they agree and mismatch, they often felt like they were arguing or didn’t want to agree.

A few people report that they have difficulty maintaining the behaviors they’re supposed to. In other words, their feeling drives their behaviors and it’s difficult to stop.

Grab a partner and do this. It’s a lot of fun and gives you a tangible idea of how much these unconscious processes affect us emotionally. And once you recognize the influence rapport has, there’s no going back

Sensory / Intuitive

People who are over focus on either behaviour type will not see other advantageous.

Black & White / Continuum

Black-and-White thinkers see things in a digital way i.e. it is either on or off, one or zero, and nothing in between. President George Bush's attitude that you are "either for us or against us" is an example of black-and-white thinking.

Continuum thinkers are able to discern shades of grey. President Clinton who has been described as "the master of nuance" is an example of a continuum thinker.

Pessimist / Optimist

Pessimist To Optimist – Change The Wiring

If you are a pessimist, you see the world to be as bad as it can possibly be. It is a negative view of life, which is harmful to your health. So, develop a new “explanatory style” to change your gloomy view into a vision of a bright and cheerful world.

That view needs an understanding that your happiness comes from within you and that events follow a universal pattern with a stable order. Pessimism is based on an internal conviction that you have no control over events, which occur erratically, without any universally applicable pattern.

A change in your convictions will rewire the neural circuits, which support that view. Your mind and its responses will improve. Your habitual patterns of thought will become brighter.

Pessimist To Optimist – Optimism Is Healthy

Both optimism and pessimism originate from subconscious pattern recognition. Those attitudes may partially be inherited, but are acquired largely through experiences in life. Extensive research on groups of optimists and pessimists show mixed results. Among those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, or asthma, optimists were not more likely than pessimists to report pain alleviation, or to be psychologically better adjusted. But, optimists emerge from difficult circumstances with less distress than do pessimists.

Optimism has links to good health, including preventative health. An optimist is less likely to experience illness. Optimism reduces the severity and duration of an illness and reduces the possibilities of relapses. Sadly, while it is nice to be an optimist, the attitude is subconscious and a pessimist cannot just “will” himself to be an optimist. A change requires your inner wisdom to absorb a few important insights.

Pessimist To Optimist – Pessimism Is Not Your Choice

A pessimistic interpretation of an event is not your conscious choice. Your mind senses patterns and acts, before you know it. The famous experiments of Benjamin Libet demonstrated your essential helplessness. He showed that, even when you voluntarily press a button, your motor systems begin to act 350 milliseconds BEFORE you think you have pressed it. Subconscious processes make your decisions, way ahead of your conscious awareness.

Within the instant in which your eyes perceive a group of black and white pixels on this page, your mind interprets them as a set of characters forming a word and locates its meaning. As you read, myriad entities evaluate vast memories, compare your experiences, recall childhood images, and pass judgment on the validity of this paragraph. You merely become aware of the final conclusion. If you wish to change from pessimism to optimism, your vast subconscious mind has to become convinced that optimism is both justified and desirable.

Pessimist To Optimist – The Logic Of The Pessimist

Pessimists challenge a belief in the potential for endless progress as well as the general religious view that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Arthur Schopenhauer speaks for pessimism. According to him, human beings are motivated by hunger, sexuality, the need to care for children and the need for personal security and shelter. Driven by these needs, the selfish instincts of mankind generally overcome its rationality. This creates endless and pointless conflicts for earth's limited resources, which will continue till the extinction of the human race. For Schopenhauer, life presently exists with great difficulty. If things had been worse, the human race would not have existed. He reasons that, since a worse world could not exist, we live in the worst of all possible worlds.

Pessimist To Optimist – If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Will

Murphy's Law “If anything can go wrong, it will” is the refrain of the pessimists. Pessimists focus on the things that can go wrong. But, billions of things do not go wrong. Myriad neurons in your nervous system, the complex circuits of your monitor and computer, the worldwide circuits of the internet, power stations, distribution systems, all do not go wrong for you to be able to read these lines. The baser instincts of humanity did not prevent the progress of human civilization from famine and disease to the world of science and medicine. But, then, Hitler's gas chambers are also recent history. So, regardless of whether many, or a few things do go wrong, the world goes on. Optimism and pessimism are merely viewpoints. An optimist feels gratitude for the trillions of things that do not go wrong, while a pessimist moans over the things, which can and do go wrong. Optimism (and happiness) come from the convictions of your inner wisdom.

Pessimist To Optimist – LTP and The Amygdala

Pessimism is merely a habitual thought pattern. It appears to be reasonable as the world encounters Alvin Toffler's Future Shock – the shattering stress and disorientation triggered by “too much change happening in too short a time.” Civilization seems to be sinking into moral decay, where the cherished values of Christian/Greek/Hindu philosophy appear abandoned. Government encroachments into private lives appear to head into the “thought police” and “doublethink” narrated by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But, even for a pessimist, these are extreme views. But they are considered judgments.

Your judgments of the outcome of events is made by the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The organ evaluates the history of your successes and failures to make its decisions. ACC has strong links to the amygdala, the organ, which triggers fear and anger in the nervous system. Their oversensitive circuits trigger negative emotions, which influence ACC judgments.

The pain of a a failure, or a loss triggers persistent LTP circuits in the amygdala, causing it to become sensitive over a lifetime to threatening signals. Impulses from the organ to the brainstem trigger (typically jumpy) avoidance behaviors. They activate the sympathetic nervous system, raising blood pressure and heart beats. These impulses sent to the facial nerves generate expressions of anger, fear, or disgust. Those impulses release neurochemicals, which increase the intensity of fight, flight or freeze responses. Normally, the sensory inputs, which imply threats would only generate a momentary response from the system. But, LTP builds up during a crisis in life. Later, it generates persisting control impulses, which converts a momentary response into persisting distress.

LTP circuits in the amygdala influence ACC causing the negative thought patterns of the pessimist. ACC normally builds on current experience of successes and failures to frame its decisions. It decides whether a person will be optimistic or pessimistic about the outcomes of his efforts in life. Those judgments are dictated by the emotional LTP inputs from the amygdala of past failures. If ACC is dominated by memories of failure, you will be a pessimist. But, if you can build up memories of successes in the amygdala by changing its viewpoint and recalling past successes, ACC can decide to make you an optimist.

Pessimist To Optimist – The Wrong Goals

Pessimists should reexamine their expectations from life. A person's goals decide whether good, or bad things happen. Optimists expect to meet their goals and pessimists expect to fail. The pessimist cannot meet his goals, because his goals have unreasonable expectations. Pessimists expect to discover a larger meaning for their life. They expect a benevolent outcome for life in the long march of history. They expect human beings to behave with nobility and altruism. They expect that fate will not deliver nasty surprises. The gloom of the pessimists rests on their inner conviction that such expectations will not be met. Pessimists need to understand that finding cosmic meaning, the arrival of utopia, the operation of an altruistic world, or the expectation of a benign fate are all irrational goals in life.

Pessimist To Optimist – A Meaningful Contribution?

Do you worry about the meaning of your life? The deeply religious believe that their lives meet a divine purpose. But, the pessimistic skeptic will never discover a cosmic meaning for his life. Individual contributions to history have always been irrelevant. The vast empires, grand civilizations and the struggles of untold generations have vanished into the misty past without a trace. Like a grain of sand in the desert, earth circles one among billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy - one lone galaxy, among billions of such galaxies. In the vastness of cosmos, the pessimist vainly searches for the meaning of his life. Without such worries, the optimist discovers satisfactions within the boundless spaces of his own mind. His joy comes from his awesome capacity to grasp the immensity of space and the vast depths of history. The true optimist is self sufficient.

Pessimist To Optimist – Self Awareness

Like a glass, which can be both half full and half empty, both pessimism and optimism are justifiable. It is only that the optimist lives in a happier world. If the pessimist wishes to relocate, he has to see his one sided reasoning. The meaning of his life is irrelevant. Only self awareness can educate the pessimist of his habitual focus on gloom and doom. He has to become aware of the rise of negative thoughts. The immense capacity of his mind should focus on discovering the brighter side of his world.

Improved education, health and prosperity are spreading to billions of people. Each day brings amazing products and services to improve the quality of human lives. The pessimist should consciously search for hopeful events and headlines. Actively discover silver linings around dark clouds. While initially difficult, the pessimist will become skilled with practice. New LTP “speed dial circuits” will grow in his mind. Soon, he will begin to see real change within. His creativity will grow and the world will look brighter. Actually, the world will not have changed. But the vast internal worlds within the pessimist will have taken a brighter hue.

Pessimist To Optimist – The Fear Of Disappointment

Pessimism often follows a serious disappointment in life, like the loss of a loved one, or a career setback. Since such events occur unexpectedly, usually just following a happy view of the world, pessimists fear that optimism could be a harbinger of disaster. Imagining an optimistic solution to their problems fills them with disquiet. But, optimism does not presage trouble. It favors a happier outcome. An expectation of victory triggers more successful strategies than a fear of defeat. An optimistic leader transmits enthusiasm. Alert optimism is the best approach to life. But, the pessimist must deal with his fear.

Self awareness can make a person familiar with the fears, which rise up in his mind. This website suggests that emotions disappear, when you sense their physical symptoms. Identify the negative thoughts, which rise in your mind, when you visualize the future of your venture. Sense the symptoms of the fear, which accompany such thoughts. The emotion will be stilled. Even the fear that optimism will bring disappointment will disappear. It is a process, which takes a little practice. Freed from fear, the pessimist should focus on visualizing successful options in life. Such an approach too will soon become a “speed dial circuit” - a matter of habit.

Pessimist To Optimist – Unpredictable People

Pessimism often follows an inability to understand the intentions and desires of other people. Some people are blessed with a mature “Theory of Mind,” which understands the attitudes and behavior of people during their interactions. That creates an order in their lives by giving surrounding events purpose and meaning. When you know why something is going to happen, you can adjust better to the situation. An effective Theory of Mind is a valuable leadership skill, which grants leaders the empathic ability to imagine being in the shoes of their followers. When this skill is lacking, rude sales clerks and aggressive drivers on the road make the pessimist see a dark world. An awareness and understanding of the underlying issues of such behavior will prevent needless pessimism. Life has to be accepted as it comes, with its inevitable potholes.

Pessimist To Optimist – The Slings And Arrows Of fate

“Explanatory Styles” are decided by emotions. Pessimists wince with each negative turn in life. “It is all my fault.” “These things always happen to me.” “Why did this have to happen to me?” “I knew this would happen to me.” Such explanations of an event are triggered by persisting negative emotions. Over the longer term, such feelings can even trigger depression. If you have been a habitual pessimist, escape such torture by becoming intensely self aware. As thoughts rise, do not focus on the event, but on the nature of thoughts and feelings. Become aware of physical symptoms of the negative feelings as and when they arise. Such awareness will still emotions over time. Stilling such emotions will transfer controls to a rational nature. Your explanatory style will change. Your mind will comfortably accept the usual setbacks in life. “What can I do now?” will then be the simple unemotional response to such events, which will prevent needless stress and illness.

Pessimist To Optimist – On Becoming An Optimist

Optimists emerge from setbacks with less stress than pessimists. They face problems head on and take active steps to solve problems. They are also less likely to abandon their efforts to reach their goals. But, optimism is a frame of mind, an “explanatory style,” outside your conscious control. The deep intelligence within your mind has to develop new optimistic “speed dial circuits.” by dwelling on the memories of your successes in life.

Dig deep into your memories and discover the times, when you succeeded, when others acknowledged your skills, or abilities. Dwell on those events. If possible, take responsibilities for the things you can do well. Deep inside, you need to become convinced of your ability to do well. Expect to discover something new and advantageous, even when you face boring, or depressing situations. A change from optimism to pessimism requires regeneration of new “speed dial circuits,” which create a new explanatory style.

Certainty / Uncertainty

The following is a very interesting exchange between Richard Bandler and someone who is very sure about something.

B: Are you sure?

P: Yes.

B: Are you sure you’re sure?

P: Yes.

B: Are you sure enough to be UNSURE?

P: Yes.

B: OK, Let’s talk.

A Journey Through Logical Levels

Before reading further, I strongly recommend that you think of something that you are very certain about, and find someone else to ask you this set of questions about your certainty, so that you have a concrete personal experience of their impact. At the very least, close your eyes and imagine that someone else asks you these questions, and take the time to carefully notice your response to each one, so that you can experience their effect on you.

And for those of you who teach modelling, or do modelling, this is an excellent small opportunity to do some of it. Although Bandler’s exchange is brief, and concise, it is quite interesting to explore its structure.

Now that you have an experience of it, I would like to characterize this pattern as I understand it, which requires a short journey up through logical levels.

Level 1

There is a situation X. X is an event in more or less sensory-based, “reality,” what Paul Watzlawick has called “first-order reality.” This is something that everyone can usually pretty much agree on, such as a job interview, or a critical comment. This level is often called the environment, and it is something that often we don’t have too much control over. Certain unpleasant events happen to us from time to time, and we don’t always have the choice of avoiding them or ignoring them.

Level 2

The person then thinks about the situation X in a particular way and characterizes / evaluates it, for instance, “This X is scary.” This is a meta-response, and the state is a meta-state about X. This is what Paul Watzlawick has called “second-order reality.” This is where people may differ wildly, particularly if they are from different cultures, and it is at this level where many conflicts and problems (and many solutions) exist.

The person could just as well conclude that X is “boring” or “exciting,” or “challenging,” or is an opportunity to “learn more about their Buddha nature,” etc. The person’s response will depend on the understanding that they apply to the event, and changing this understanding through content reframing can make a huge difference in the person’s experience.

Level 3

The person has a degree of certainty about the meta-response. “I know this is scary.” This is a meta-response about a meta-response (a meta-meta-response, with corresponding meta-meta-state). We could call this “third-order reality,” which is even more distant from sensory experience than second-order reality, and even more troublesome and dangerous. Plenty of problems (and solutions) also occur at this level.

Many people who come for therapy appear to suffer from uncertainty: “I don’t know what to do”. “I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do”. “Life has no meaning”. But you can also think of this as resulting from other certainties. “I know that wouldn’t work”, “I know she hates me”, “I know I can’t succeed”, etc. Since these certainties will make it difficult for the person to consider other understandings at level 2, it can often be very useful to reduce certainty.

Someone who is phobic of airplanes, and someone who is not, may be making exactly the same images of flaming death and destruction. The difference is that the images of the non-phobic include some representation of the small probability of the crash, as well as its possibility. This could be either a certainty of its unlikeliness, or a very great uncertainty about its happening. However, a phobic person is experientially certain that it will happen, no matter what s/he says intellectually.

What makes it difficult to work with a paranoid is not just that s/he thinks that others are plotting against him/her, but that s/he is certain that this is occuring, and is unwilling to question it and consider other possibilities. Another aspect of a person’s certainty is that others may suffer from it as much or more than the person who is certain. Think of all the deaths, persecutions, misery and destruction around the globe that have resulted from the certainty of religious prophets and institutions, revolutionaries, and politicians – all of whom are totally convinced that they were right.

Each of us has a way to assess experience and provide us with a measure of how certain we are about it. This has often been called a person’s “convincer strategy”. The exploration of the variety of ways that people use to convince themselves of something is also relevant to the topic of certainty, but this article will only discuss the result of the operation of the convincer strategy.

Every evaluation that someone makes at level 2 has some degree of certainty/uncertainty about it at level 3, and this will be on a continuum from zero certainty to absolute certainty. There are basically three possibilities:

A. Zero certainty

If a person has zero certainty, they have no firm conclusion whatsoever about the meaning of X, so they are completely open to considering new understandings when they are offered, and they will be very easy to work with in exploring other ways of thinking about the situation X. This is an “easy client,” because their understanding of a situation is very fluid, and they have no, or very little, certainty about their understanding to lock in the understanding, and make it hard to change.

B. Partial certainty

If someone is somewhere in the mid-range of certainty, they are at least somewhat open to considering other possible understandings (on level 2) of a situation X (on level 1). If they are very certain, it will be harder for them to consider other understandings, but at least it will be possible. These clients are somewhat harder to work with than those with zero or very little certainty, and those who are more certain will be harder to work with than those who are less certain.

C. Absolute certainty

If a person is totally certain about their understanding, they will be closed to even considering other understandings, because their certainty about their understanding locks up the ability to consider alternatives. These are the really tough clients, and this is the situation where Bandler’s pattern is particularly useful–to move someone from the absolute certainty (which has only one representation) to the partial certainty (with more than one representation) in which a dialogue is possible. (I think it is very significant in this regard that at the end of the exchange, Bandler says “OK, Let’s talk.”) In other words, this pattern is not useful to solve a problem, it is useful to make it possible to solve a problem on level 2 by decreasing certainty on level 3.

Understanding the pattern

To understand how the pattern works, we will need to enter the realm of paradox, which is very difficult for most of us to think about. (It was also hard for Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, two very brilliant professional logicians to think about, so there is no shame in this, but the faint of heart may wish to consider turning to simpler recreations.)

“Are you sure?” asks if a person is in state of certainty. This is a question that asks for a digital yes or no answer, but permits answers which are qualified in some way.

If the person says, “No, not really,” then they are uncertain (A) and are already open to other understandings.

If they respond, “Well, I’m pretty sure,” they are somewhere in the intermediate range of partial certainty (B) and will be at least somewhat open to considering other understandings.

If they simply respond “Yes,” we need more information. (As usual the nonverbal messages in voice tone, posture, hesitations, etc. will be much more useful than the words in assessing the actual degree of certainty the person is experiencing.)

“Are you sure you’re sure?” applies certainty to itself recursively, in essence asking if the person is absolutely sure. Answering this question requires the person to go to a 4th level, applying certainty to itself. Again this is a question that asks for a digital yes or no answer, but permits a qualified answer.

If the person says. “Well, I’m pretty sure,” or qualifies it in any way, then the person is somewhere in the mid-range (B), and can already be talked with usefully.

If the person replies with an unqualified “Yes,” they are saying that they are absolutely certain ©. (Again, the nonverbals will tell you more about the absoluteness of the certainty than the words.)

This condition of absoluteness (or near absoluteness) is required for the next step of the pattern to work. However, if the condition of absoluteness is not met, it means that the next step is unecessary, because in a condition of partial certainty (B) you can proceed to usefully explore alternative understandings.

A very important aspect of this question is that it asks the person to recursively apply their certainty to itself. This requires the person to go to a fourth logical level, and this is something which is also necessary for the next step in the pattern. A “Yes” answer is a confirmation that the person is willing and able to do this recursion or “apply to self,” as it is usually called in the “sleight of mouth” patterns. Recursion is a precondition for the next question, which also asks the person to apply certainty to itself, but in a different way.

Another way of describing this is that the first two questions can be used both to gather information about the client’s degree of certainty, while at the same time beginning to assemble pieces of a puzzle which will be put all together in the third step.

“Are you sure enough to be UNSURE?” applies certainty to its negation, and is a form of logical paradox, equivalent to the statement “This sentence is false (not true),” or “I am a liar (not truth-telling).” (The word paradox can also used in a more general way to mean contradictory or unexpected, but the meaning here is restricted to logical paradox.)

Three Essential Ingredients

The three essential ingredients of a logical paradox are:

1. An absolute statement,
2. Recursion,
3. Negation.

In paradox, an absolute statement is recursively applied to its own negation, bridging two logical levels. If the statement is true, then it is false, and if it is false, then it is true. This perpetual oscillation between truth and falsity challenges all our ideas about certainty and reality, and this is at least one reason why we find it so difficult to think about paradox.

There are two more very important elements in the word “enough.” “Enough” presupposes some point on a continuum, while the person has been using an absolute either/or (sure/unsure) distinction with no middle ground. No matter how the person answers, if they accept this presupposition, they are agreeing to a frame in which certainty is on an analog continuum rather than an absolute, digital either/or, and consequently other alternative understandings can be considered. Unless they challenge this presupposition, either answer to this question moves them to an experience of partial uncertainty.

There is yet another important element in the word “enough”. It presupposes reaching a threshold, in this case a threshold of certainty. If the person replies “No”, they are saying that their certainty is something less than the threshold. If they reply “Yes”, they are saying that their certainty has reached (or exceeded) the threshold, and is “enough” to be uncertain.

Are you sure enough to be unsure? is the question form of the statement, “If you are sure enough, you will be unsure”, and this is presupposed when asked as a question. This presupposition states that great certainty includes within it the ability to be unsure, taking two experiences that have been experienced as polar opposites, and nesting one within the other.

I have already mentioned that it is very difficult for most of us to process logical paradoxes. When we hear this paradox, stated as a question, (with the “enough” presuppositions packed inside it), most people simply give up and respond yes or no.

If a person answers “Yes,” they are agreeing to a state of unsureness (the “unsure”), and if they answer “No,” they are also agreeing to a state of unsureness “not sure enough.” Whichever response is given, they are agreeing to a degree of uncertainty, and consequently the willingness to consider alternative understandings.

This pattern has the same form as a paradoxical challenge that the devil supposedly once offered to God in regard to God’s omnipotence. The devil challenged God to create a rock so large that even God could not move it. If God cannot create a very large rock that he cannot move, he is not omniptent in his ability to create rocks, and if he does create such a rock, he is not omnipotent in his ability to move rocks. Either way the absoluteness of God’s omnipotence is destroyed.

To summarize, this pattern is very useful in situations in which a person is very certain about how they understand something, this understanding causes them difficulty, and their certainty results in their being not willing to even consider alternative understandings. Using this pattern can open them to considering other models of the world.

Learning how to sort out levels of experience in this way is a very useful skill that can help us understand the structure of problems, and decide which level of understanding could use some improvement. This makes it much easier to find our way through the twisting corridors of another person’s mind, in order to help them find their way out of their predicaments–and also keeps us from wasting our time solving problems that they don’t have!

Confusion about levels of thinking, the recursion which transcends levels, and particularly recursion that includes negation, are present in many human problems. It is a little-explored realm, and one that often creates paradoxical traps for us. Knowing the three essential elements of paradox (absolute statement, recursion, and negation) can help us identify these traps, and avoid them.

We can’t avoid logical levels, or recursion, and we wouldn’t want to–that would keep us from thinking about thinking, and having feelings about feelings, thinking about feelings, and many other valuable and unique aspects of our humanity.

But we can learn to use positive statements whenever possible, rather than negations, and learn to be very careful when we do use negation.The NLP emphasis on positive outcomes is one example of the value of this, and the benefits that can result from this kind of care in thinking.

And we can be doubly careful when recursion is also present, which is much more often than we usually think. To give only one example, when someone says, “I am a bad person”, they are saying that everything that they do is bad, and one of their behaviors is the sentence that s/he just said to you, so “badness” applies to the sentence about badness.

And finally, we can also learn to be very cautious about making absolute statements, realizing that all knowledge is relative, contextual, and based on our very limited experience and understanding. Paradoxically, that is one thing we can be very certain about!

I think it is truly amazing that with the three pounds of jelly between our ears we can imagine and think about an infinite universe, but it would be useful to have a little humility all the same.Let’s start with some humility about our knowledge and certainty.

In case the reader at this point is still insistent that there is such a thing as absolute certainty, I offer the following quote from Warren S. McCulloch’s 1945 article “Why the Mind is in the Head”, now included in his marvelous book Embodiments of Mind, MIT Press, 1965. McCulloch was one of the first and the best to apply mathematical analysis to the functioning of the nervous system.

“Accordingly to increase certainty, every hypothesis should be of minimum logical, or a priori, probability, so that if it be confirmed in experiment, then it shall be because the world is so constructed. Unfortunately for those who quest absolute certainty, a hypothesis of zero logical probability is a contradiction, and hence can never be confirmed. Its neurological equivalent would be a neuron that required infinite coincidence to trip it. This, in a finite world, is the same as though it had no afferents. It never fires”.