Strategies in NLP

8/11/2019 Strategies in NLP

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Richard Bandler might ask Whos driving the bus? and the answer is You are!

The presuppositions of NLP tell us that we are in charge of our own mind and hence our own results, so we each needto recognise that we are driving our own bus.

Once we accept responsibility for our own results we move ourselves from the effect side of the equation to the causeside of the equation and we are empowered to make useful changes to our behaviours. The ways in which we can

modify our strategies to enhance the results that we produce is limited only by the imagination.

Early strategies

When working with strategies in NLP it's important to break the strategy down intoappropriately sized and organised chunks.

Most strategies operate below the level of awareness and people perform what cansometimes be quite complex sequences of behaviour without any consciousrecognition that they are doing so.

To begin to understand why this is so let's consider some of the strategies which youyourself employ just to understand the words on this page.

When you were a baby you didn't even know what words were, let alone how to speak or read them. Your mainmethod of communication was your in-built ability to cry in order to let the world know when you were unhappy withsomething.

Air from your lungs passed over vocal chords resulting in a noise designed by nature to elicit the immediate attentionof your care givers.

In many ways that first strategy - cry until attention is received / needs are met was the seed of subsequent strategies

for communication.

Gradually you became more aware of your surroundings and of other people. You began to listen to the sounds otherpeople made and to pay close attention to the shapes and movements of their mouths as they made these sounds. Youbegan to practise making other sounds with your own mouth, developing strategies for using particular configurationsof lips, teeth and tongue to make particular sounds. You learned how you could vary your breathing and change otheraspects of the sounds you were making such as the loudness, speed and pitch.

You began to understand that particular groups of sounds put together in particular combinations were associated withthings around you, and developed strategies for putting the sounds together in the correct sequences (words) andassociating them with the correct objects, and for retrieving from memory and vocalising those words when presentedwith the connected object at some later time.

You came to recognise that other people (usually bigger than you) would present an object to you and repeat the wordassociated with the object and you could then use all the strategies you'd developed so far to speak that word,remember it and to remember the object that was linked to that word. Gradually over time you learned to do thesethings with greater speed and precision, building up your vocabulary all the time. By age 18-24 months you probablyhad around two hundred words in your vocabulary.

You spent two years of your life developing some of the strategies required to communicate verbally and linguisticallywith another human being. Now, take a few quiet moments to consider the following question.

Cast your mind back to the last conversation you had with another human being. As you go back to that time now step

into your body, see what you saw at the time, hear the sounds around you and feel the feelings of being right therehaving that conversation. Notice the expressions on the face of the person you're having that conversation with. Here'sthe question - while you are having that conversation now, how much conscious awareness do you have of using thestrategies you spent two years learning?
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The likelihood is that in the normal flow of conversation, even though you're still running the strategies describedabove, you have no conscious awareness of them whatsoever.

Those strategies have become so integrated into your neurology that they've dropped below the level of awarenessand you execute them with the unconscious competence referred to in the four stages of competence .

If you're not convinced, next time you have a conversation with another person try to think consciously about how

you're going to use your lips, teeth, tongue, breathing etc. to make each of the individual sounds required to speak thewords you're going to use to respond to that person.

Can you do that, and maintain the conversation at a regular speed and keep abreast of what the conversation is about?Probably not as it's been shown that the maximum number of chunks of information that a human being can payattention to consciously at any one time is seven, plus or minus 2. Which is why it's a good thing that the human brainis capable of processing a whole bunch of stuff, like running our behavioural strategies at the unconscious level.

Early strategies (2)

By the time they reach two years of age the average human being has mastered thestrategies required to communicate using spoken language.

At around the same stage of our development we are introduced to a collection oftwenty six symbols built up from collections of lines both straight and curved.

When a person draws our attention to one of these symbols they usually alsomake a particular sound with their mouth. We make use of the listening andspeaking strategies we've already learned to associate the sounds with thecorresponding symbols and to speak the sounds ourselves, until the symbols andsounds become anchors for each other - thinking about the symbol makes us thinkof the associated sound, and vice-versa.

We go on to learn that these symbols and their associated sounds form the building blocks of the strings of sounds(words) we've already learned to speak - A is for Apple, B is for Ball, C is for Cat...

With strategies in place for recognising letter shapes and their associated sounds (phonemes ) and that some phonemesconsist of multiple characters (i.e. ch , sh , ph ) we go on to develop strategies for decoding strings of characters (words)into their corresponding auditory representations (sounds). At first we read out loud so that those who are teaching uscan assist us as fully as they are able. As our reading strategies and skills mature we find that we need not vocalise thewords as we read unless we are reading to other people.

And I'm very glad that you learned all of those strategies because now you are able, to read all the words on this page,and every other page on this website and to learn, really learn and integrate now all of this knowledge in ways that willassist you usefully in the days and weeks ahead.

Strategy techniques

So now we are aware that people have particular unconscious strategies which organise their behaviours, we'vearrived at the second stage of competence - conscious incompetence - and now weknow that there's something we don't know and that's a good thing becauseconfusion always precedes understanding.

A useful question to ask ourselves at this point is What can we do with

strategies?

Conveniently there's an acronym that assists us in remembering the four mainthings that we can do with strategies - Detect, Utilise, Change and Install - D.U.C.I .
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This is pronounced duckie as in rubber duckie .

D - Detect

We can detect or elicit our own strategies or those of other human beings. When we become aware of another personwho is able to consistently achieve a particularly useful outcome easily and with high degrees of skill, precision andelegance we may choose to detect the strategies that they use in doing so.

U - Utilise

Once we've detected another strategy for achieving a desired outcome we can learn to utilise that strategy ourselves inorder to achieve that same outcome in the same way. By utilising the strategies of others we can learn to replicatetheir behaviours and achieve those outcomes in a fraction of the time it took the 'expert' to learn how to do it.

C - Change

We can change our own strategies or assist others in changing their strategies in order to achieve more usefuloutcomes or to achieve the same outcomes in more effective and elegant ways.

I - Install

We can install new strategies in ourselves so that we can replicate excellence that we see in other people. We can alsoassist other people in installing new strategies in themselves which will assist them in achieving their goals in new andmore effective ways.

Imagine you could replicate the creative strategies of Walt Disney, or the wealth building strategies of Bill Gates orWarren Buffet or the genius strategies of Albert Einstein.

These things are humanly possible using the methods described briefly above and in more detail on the followingpages. To learn, all you have to do is read on!

Strategy chunking

When working with strategies in NLP it's important to break the strategy downinto appropriately sized and organised chunks.

If you chunk too small when detecting / eliciting strategies you'll get bogged down indetail and complexity.

If you chunk too big the level of detail will be insufficient to successfully elicit and

replicate the strategy.

How then do you know when you've chunked at the right level? That's a very good question!

As a rule of thumb most strategies can be described elegantly in about four or five steps. So if you have more than fivesteps/chunks the chances are that you chunked too small.

Say, for example, that you had been in the company of a person whom you considered particularly skillful in the art ofpublic speaking and that you wished to elicit their strategy for doing this. Would the starting point of your strategyelicitation be to find out how this person uses their breath, lips, teeth and tongue to form the individual sounds whichcombine to form the words they speak, as discussed earlier in the Early Strategies section?

If it were you'd be chunking too small because:-
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You already have an adequate strategy for that behaviour which you run at the level of unconsciouscompetence

The key aspects of the strategy that this person uses in order to communicate so eloquently are probably at amuch higher level of abstraction i.e. a much larger chunk size

As we come at this from the opposite perspective things will become clearer.

If a strategy that you've elicited fails to produce the expected outcome when you run it, and that strategy has fewerthan four steps, it's entirely possible that you chunked too big and thus missed details or steps vital to the effectiveoperation of that strategy.

Using the example above let's say that you'd asked this person the very important question - ' How do you do that? ' andthat their response was something like:-

I think of some stuff to say I say it I bow when people applaud

Given these three pieces of information could you successfully utilise this person's strategy to replicate the sameresults that they produce? You could try. You could be very lucky and produce the same results which would suggestthat the chunk size (3 chunks) in this instance was just right.

On the other hand the results that you get could differ greatly from what you expected which would suggest that thechunk size is too large and more detail (in smaller chunks) is needed. In cases such as these Meta Model questions are agreat tool for recovering the required level of detailed information.

Strategy chunking (2)

For reasons of clarity in describing further how strategies work in NLP it's useful to consider a common example andbreak that down into it's component parts so that we can understand it more fully.

The example that we'll consider here is a person's Buying Strategy purely because the buying process is likely to be onethat most people are familiar with.

At the top level the Buying Strategy is broken down into four chunks:-

1. Motivation2. Decision making3. Convincer4. Reassurance

At step 1. a person becomes motivated to make a purchase.

Step 2. involves investigation of and selection from the available options.

The Convincer (step 3) let's the person know that this purchase meets their criteria at the point of sale.

Finally, step 4 is the means by which the person is subsequently reassured that they made a good purchase (or fromanother viewpoint, avoids 'buyer's remorse ').

At this level of abstraction these four chunks provide labels for the steps typically included in the buying process, butreveal very little detail about the underlying processes involved.
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More detailed information is available by ' chunking down ' one level to reveal that the four chunks which constitute the'Buying Strategy' are themselves composed of a number of chunks in the form of distinct, sequential steps. At thislower level the original four chunks, Motivation, Decision Making, Convincer and Reassurance, can be treated asindividual strategies in their own right. These four lower level strategies are nested inside the higher level BuyingStrategy.

The results obtained from the elicitation of a person's Buying Strategy are therefore likely to be more useful if chunked

at the lower level of their strategies for motivation, decision making, convincer and reassurance.

Modalities and sequencing in strategies

So far in this section on Strategies in NLP we've covered a number of things - the meaning of strategies in NLP, howstrategies might be used, what we can do with them ( Detect, Utilise, Change and Install)and, on the previous page , howto chunk for strategy elicitation in the Detection phase.

Here we're going to chunk down one level to assist your understanding further by examining strategies in a finer levelof detail.

To make this part easier for me to explain I'm going to use a metaphor and ask you to imagine that strategies are like atelephone, with each of the telephone's keys being linked to one of your various sensory modalities / representationalsystems - Visual, Kinesthetic, Auditory, Olfactory and Gustatory.

Just as different sequences of numbers punched on a telephone keypad will get us different people in different places,the order and sequence in which we use our representational systems will get us different outcomes.

A telephone number, like a strategy, is a means to access resources. One must dial the appropriate number to accessthe appropriate resource.

If we wish to call an ambulance, find out about getting our car fixed, book tickets at the cinema or buy garden furniture

we must know the right numbers to use.

Changing or omitting even one digit will lead us to an entirely different outcome. Some places have more than onetelephone number and so it will be possible to dial several different sequences to reach them. Others will have onenumber and one number only.

Reaching certain parties sometimes requires that the number dialled be prefixed with another sequence of digits in theform of an area code. Strategies are the same - every step in the strategy and the eventual outcome is dependent onthe steps that have come before.

People sometimes get stuck in strategies similar to that of a person who keeps punching the last four digits of a sevendigit number and then wonders why they end up with only a dial tone.

Others waste time and effort by needlessly over preparing, like the person who uses the area code when calling peoplein his own locality.

People may also forget about important or appropriate strategies, or about the correct representational sequenceswhich make them up, in much the same way as one may forget a telephone number or mix it up with numbers thatthey use more frequently.

People are more likely to achieve their desired outcomes when the strategies they use are appropriate for the contextthey are operating in at the time.

Applying a habitual or highly valued strategy in an inappropriate context would be like moving from the UK to Australiaand then ordering pizza from your favourite UK pizza parlour because that's the only telephone number you know.
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Strategy notation

In NLP strategies are documented using a simple notation which looks similar in form to that used in algebraicequations.

The notation illustrates the sequencing of the internal and external representations which make up the strategy in asimple linear format.

Let's look at an example:-

This is a representation of a visual spelling strategy for a person called Pete. To explain what's going on let me breakthis down into individual steps and walk you through the entire process.

At each step I'll explain what's going on and then show the form of written notation for that step. Here goes:-

1. The trigger for and very first step of a strategy is usually external to the person running the strategy. In thiscase somebody asks Pete to spell a particular word. This step is an Auditory e xternal , which is written innotation form as:-

2. Pete repeats the word to be spelled to himself silently, in his mind. At the same time he has a sense in his jawof the mouth movements he would have to make to say the word in question. This combination of twosensory modalities firing simultaneously is known as a synesthesia . Add these first two steps together and weget:-

The steps of the strategy are linked together by arrows showing the direction of the process flow. Braces are used togroup representations which occur simultanously.

3. Pete recalls a picture of the word ( V isual r emembered or r ecalled) and can therefore see how it is spelled,which gives us:-

4. As Pete looks at the internally recalled image of the word to be spelled he notices his internal feelings(K inesthetic i nternal) - he has feelings about the picture of the word and about whether that word is spelledcorrectly or not, which takes us to:-

If Pete were to vocalise the Kinesthetic internal feelings that he has at this stage about the Visually recalled image hemight say ' It looks right to me ' or ' It just doesn't look right '. If he thinks that it doesn't look right this happens:-


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As long as Pete's Visually recalled image looks wrong to him his associated feeling(s) are negative (signified by theminus sign adjacent to the arrow) and he loops back to step two of his strategy and continues the process from thereuntil:-

5. Pete get's a positive feeling (signified by the + sign under the arrow) about the Visually recalled image -he feels that it looks right and exits the strategy with an Auditory e xternal - he spells out the word verballyusing the internally remembered image.

Strategy elicitation

Whether you're eliciting your own strategies or strategies that another person uses, the best time for strategyelicitation is usually right at the time it's being run.

One of the reasons why this is so is the fact that the person running the strategywill have full and vivid access to the Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory andGustatory representations which make up the strategy and of the way they aresequenced.

If you're unable to elicit the strategy right at the time it's being run then the nextbest source for strategy elicitation is a past vivid experience, ideally of the last time you (or the person you're elicitingfrom) ran that strategy.

Start by identifying the last time that strategy was run and then use the following simple script to assist the person tovividly imagine returning to that specific time in such a way as to access the fullest possible sensory recovery of thatexperience:-

' As you go back to that time now I want you to step into your body, see what you saw at the time, hear the soundsaround you and really feel the all the feelings of being right there 'x'ing* '

* Replace 'x'ing with a brief description of what the person was doing i.e. making that purchase or getting really mad orwhatever the subject of the strategy happens to be.

Once they have fully associated into that past vivid experience the next step is to begin to elicit the strategy with thefollowing question:-

'What's the very first thing that has to happen so that you know it's time to x? '

To ensure that the answer to the question includes the required sensory specific information, questions of thefollowing type are useful:-

Was it something that you saw?

Was it a sound that you heard or something that somebody said to you or something you said to yourself?

Was it a feeling that you had somewhere in your body?


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Or a particular scent or the taste of something?

Be sure to ask all four questions to avoid overtly prompting the person to favour a particular sensory input to theexclusion of the others and hence contaminating the response. For example, asking only if it was something that theperson saw could well result in them only paying attention to that particular sensory input in order to answer thequestion, to the exclusion of their other sensory inputs. If the most important sensory input for that step of thestrategy was a sound or a feeling then your focused question could yield an inappropriate or incorrect answer.

Once you get the first step note it down using the notation described on the previous page and then move on to thesecond step with further questions i.e. What was the second thing that happened? or What happened next?

Continue the process to elicit each step of the strategy and, ideally, the exit point of the strategy* i.e. the completion ofthe purchase for a buying strategy or successfully putting off doing something until later for a procrastination strategy.

*Some strategies fail because they don't have an exit point - they simply loop round and round until they eventuallybreak down somewhere in the middle.

Once you've completed the strategy elicitation process you should feel free to repeat the process as many times as youneed to ensure that your elicitation is accurate.

Strategy submodalities

The strategy elicitation on th e previous page was based on the major sensorymodalities - Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory and Gustatory.

For many strategies a surface level strategy elicitation such as this will be perfectlyadequate, but circumstances also often arise which necessitate chunkingdown to a finer level of detail in the elicitation process. Typical examplesmight include:-

Where replication of the strategy does not produce the expected results it may be necessary to 'drill down' tofind the specific sensory difference that makes a difference

Comparing and contrasting two strategies which, despite being identical at the surface level, producecompletely different results

To facilitate fine detail level changes to the strategy, or tweaks if you prefer, which will result in equally finelydetailed modifications to the outcomes which arise from it.

These sub qualities of the sensory modalities are known as submodalities .

Submodalities are the very building blocks of experience and are covered in some detail o n these pages .

To recap briefly, each of the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells that make up our experience of the world willhave certain, very specific qualities which serve to allow us to make very fine distinctions in our measurements of thatexperience.

For example, pictures will have a size, a shape, a location, a brightness, a contrast ratio, a colour saturation and so on,sounds will have pitch, loudness, phase, direction, distance and timbre. etc. etc.

Extending the strategy elicitation process down to the level of submodalities can signficantly enhance the quality andaccuracy of the results obtained from the process and any subsequent uses those elicited strategies are put to.

Strategy utilisation
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Once you've elicited a person's strategies you can utilise those same strategies to enhance your communication withthat person.

Utilising the other person's strategy as a framework provides a means for you to construct your communications inways which are most congruent with that person's natural thought processes, which in turn leads to communicationwhich is more effective and efficient for both parties.

The things that you say and the way that you say them literally fits the way the other person thinks.

To clarify lets look how we might utilise a typical decision making strategy in a sales context. For our purposes herewe'll assign this strategy to a person called John.

Let's break John's decision making strategy down and examine it step-by-step.

1. John sees something thay he may wish to buy. This is the external trigger for and very first step of his strategyThis step is a V isual e xternal , which is written in notation form as:-

2. In the second step, while John is looking at the item in question he compares the features of the item inquestion to his selection criteria i.e. does the thing he's looking at have all the features he wants? He does thisverbally and internally i.e. he talks to himself without vocalising the words, which is A uditory d igital i nternal .

Add these first two steps together and we get:-

3. In the next step John reaches a point in the strategy known as a decision point . As a result of comparing thefeatures of the item he's looking at with his internal list of selection criteria, John get's a feeling about thisparticular item ( K inesthetic i nternal) . If the feeling is positive John exits the strategy by making the decision topurchase the item. If his feeling is negative then he exits the strategy by deciding not to buy this item. This canbe represented as:-

What happens though if John decides not to buy this item, and there are more items available that he can choosefrom?

This question brings us back to the complete strategy:-


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If John's feelings are neither positive nor negative but rest somewhere in the middle his strategy loops back to the start- he starts looking at the next available item - and the strategy repeats until he either decides to buy an item or runsout of items to choose from.

As a keen sales person with knowledge of John's decision making strategy, we could increase the effectiveness andappeal of our communication with him by saying something like:-

I see that you're looking for a new X. Let me show you some X's and, once we've run through the features of each oneI'm sure we'll find the one that you're going to absolutely love .

Tailoring our communication to be maximally congruent with a person's strategies can enhance the effectiveness ofthat communication and increase the appeal that it has for the person we communicate with.

Logical levels

In NLP the Logical Levels of Therapy is a conversational method for assisting people to change strategies which are lessthan supportive of their goals.

The very fact that a person runs a particular strategy in a matter of seconds often means that they are not consciouslyaware that the outcomes they are producing are direct results of their own actions. They tend to attribute theiroutcomes to forces outside of themselves and thus place themselves at the effect side of the cause/effect equation.

This can also result in those people mistakenly believing that behavioural choices and alternative outcomes are actuallyunavailable to them. One purpose of the Logical Levels of Therapy method is to interrupt this limiting pattern and toassist people to access and expand the range of choices available to them.

The Logical Levels method is used to:-

Assist a person firstly to realise that they are actually at the cause side of the cause/effect equation (pacing).

Assist them secondly to realise that they have choices - they can choose to do things differently and adoptstrategies more congruent with their goals (pacing/leading).

Lastly to assist them in moving from the effect to the cause side of the equation and in gaining increasedchoice and behavioural flexibility (leading).

If we dial the same number every time we use the telephone we will always get the same outcome - we'll always beconnected to the one place associated with that number.

Taking responsibility for dialling, realising now that we can choose to dial new numbers, numbers which are more

useful in making new connections, in reaching our desired goals will lead us there more quickly.

The first step then in the Logical Levels of Therapy is to assist a person to realise that they are ' dialling the numbers 'on the ' strategic telephone ' that leads them to their outcomes.

A person who has a problem with a strategy and feels that they are at the effect side of the cause/effect equationmight say something like:-

' X always happens to me - I just don't know why '

Whatever X happens to be for this person, we can verify that it is a strategy by asking:-

That's amazing - do you ever forget to X? How do you always remember to X? Is there ever a time when you don't X?


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Questions like these presuppose that X is something this person does rather than something which happens to them .It's one of the reframes used to assist the person in realising that their own actions dictate their outcomes.

Having identified X as a strategy the next step is to begin to elicit that strategy completely by asking the person toexplain each step in the process in some detail.

As individual strategies are run in a matter of seconds this elicitation step can take some time and a number of

repetitions to complete fully, particularly as this will probably be the very first time this person has analysed thisexperience in any detail or even been aware of the sequence of internal and external representations that they gothrough in order to produce the outcomes that they have been producing.

In order to fully recover all the steps in detail the person needs to fully associate into the experience, see what theysaw at the time, hear what they heard, feel what they felt etc., and a detailed analysis with a little repetition will helpto facilitate this.

Refer to the section on strategy elicitation for a detailed explanation of the process and remember to record each stepof the strategy using the strategy notation documented earlier.

Recovering and documenting the strategy paces this persons current experience.

Once all the steps of the strategy, including the exit point, have been elicited it's time to move on to the second stage -changing the strategy.

Logical levels (2)

The second stage of the Logical Levels of Therapy involves taking a strategy that has yielded less than positive resultsfor a person and making changes to that strategy, so that it yields results which are more supportive of that person'sgoals. In this stage the process begins the shift from pacing current experience to leading in the direction of newexperiences and new behavioural choices.

The first stage, the strategy elicitation , required the person to be fully associated in the experience i.e. seeing throughtheir own eyes what they saw at the time they were running the strategy, feeling what they felt, hearing what theyheard etc.

The second stage requires the person to disassociate from the experience and, basically, to run through the experienceas an outside observer. A useful question to ask to achieve this is:-

' Can you teach me how to X? '

' Imagine I was going to take your place for a day - can you teach me how to X so that I can do it in exactly the sameway? Because I wouldn't want to forget about this problem. '

In order to answer this question the person has to disassociate from the experience and, at the same time, they arealso recognised and validated as the expert on this subject.

Identifying this strategy as something which can be taught further reinforces the idea that it is a sequence this personhas learned to run, rather than something which happens to them, and if it can be learned it can also be un -learned.

Hypnotic language patterns can also be integrated by emphasising key phrases, using a slightly lowered voice tone,while subtly nodding the head to subconsciously affirm that statement and elicit agreement.

Run through the strategy step by step just as it was elicited earlier but this time you adopt the role of the 'pupil'learning how to run the strategy i.e.:-
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' What's the first thing that has to happen that lets me know it's time to X? Do I hear something, see something, feelsomething, say something to myself? etc.. etc. '

' What should I do next? etc. etc. '

For each step in the strategy purposely mis-match the key sensory modality using an example which is the polaropposite of the experience that the person running the strategy would usually have.

For example, let's say that at the second step of the strategy the person says to themselves ' Oh no, this is going to bereally scary '. Even if they say this silently to themselves in their own mind there will becertain submodalities associated with the voice that they 'hear'. Let's assume that the voice is a low pitched rumble,the kind that might invoke fear - your response could be:-

' So I have to say to myself 'Oh no, this is going to be really scary'. And what voice should I say that in? Is it a really high pitched voice like Mickey Mouse? '

It's important to actually demonstrate each action in the way you describe it i.e. you would actually say the abovewords using a high pitched voice like Mickey Mouse (or as near as you can get to it).

If that sounds like a silly idea then that's great - anything which shakes the person's model of the world and gets themthinking about behaving in different ways fits exactly with the purpose of this method.

It is vitally important to maintain rapport with the other person throughout this process. In the absence of a strongrapport the person you're working with may lose trust in the process or may feel that you are treating their behavioursas a subject of fun.

Make sure the behavioural examples that you offer for each step of the strategy are (within safe, sensible andecological boundaries) extreme polar opposites of those described by the person whose strategy you wish to change.This is fundamental to assisting this person to stretch their world model sufficiently by forcing them to considerbehaviours radically different to those they are used to.

Logical levels (3)

The third and final stage of the Logical Levels method switches, from pacing and leading, to pure leading in thedirection of new behavioural choices.

By working through a persons strategy step -by-step, purposely mismatching the key sensory modalities at each step,we provide a context which allows the person to fully consider the possibility of alternative behaviours which in turnincreases choice and behavioural flexibility.

In the presence of a good rapport the person you are working with will have to compare and contrast their originalbehaviours with the alternative behaviours you describe to them simply in order to respond to your questions.

They may only consider each one for a moment or two before correcting you but, if you describe each behaviour vividlyenough, they will develop a full Visual, Kinesthetic and Auditory representation of each alternative behaviour.

After considering a behaviour which is the polar opposite of what theyve been used to this persons natural responseis likely to be in the negative i.e. ' No, it's not a really high pitched voice like Mickey Mouse '

You respond with:-

Well could it be? And if it was, would it still work? '

In order to answer this question the person now has to imagine actually performing this alternative behaviour which,remember, is the polar opposite of what they would normally do at this step of the strategy. To do this effectively they
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now have to fully associate into this alternative behaviour see what they would see, hear what they would hear etc.etc.

In order to process your words and respond to your questions the person will have to mentally 'rehearse' eachalternative behaviour in the context of their strategy.

Each and every mental 'rehearsal' that they perform:-

Interrupts the pattern of the strategy they have been running.

Demonstrates the fact that behavioural choices are actually available to them.

Blows out the boundary conditions of the problem behavioural strategy by allowing the person to fullyconsider alternative behaviours radically different from those they are used to.

It is highly likely that having fully considered the alternative behaviour for this strategic step this person will confirmthat no, the strategy would not work if they performed your alternative behaviour in place of the behaviour they wouldnormally perform at that step in their strategy which is exactly what we are looking for.

Each time the person repeats this process, considers alternative behaviours, those behaviours become associated withthe relevant strategic step to the degree where they cant be separated. If we imagine the original strategy as a record(or CD for those of you who dont remember vinyl) our outcome here is to scratch that record over and over until itcant be played in the same way again.

Repeat this process for each step in the persons strategy, mismatching and scr atching the strategic record as you go.

Once the strategic record is well and truly scratched check your progress by asking the person to think about thesensory input which previously acted as the trigger for the problem behaviour, the strategy which led to theundesired outcomes.

If the person responds differently then progress has been made. In the unlikely event that the person still responds tothe stimulus by running the original strategy then further work is needed repeat the entire process until the desiredresults are achieved.

Strategies in NLP

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