This weekend, I enjoyed a telephone visit with my old friend and mentor, Keith Fail. As usual, it was completely stimulating and helps to define the terms “Meaningful Conversation” for me. Keith is as bright as they come and always pursuing a new avenue of inquiry. It is no wonder that he discovers so much of value to share with the rest of us.
This day, Keith was interested in questioning the extent to which certain forms of training and/or coaching are effective in the use of sometimes frightening confrontation. Along with being an advanced Master Practitioner of NLP, Keith had long ago dived deeply into the transformative aspects of EST (Erhard Seminar Training). That he derived many exceptional learning experiences from that work was quite apparent to him. In many ways, the acknowledged confrontations built into that program helped to break down the false ego and encourage taking genuine personal responsibility for his/her life experience. As we discussed many aspects of this kind of training, including military boot camps, our questions turned more and more to when and how these extraordinary methods might be useful or even beneficial.
I remembered the time when we took our Great Dane in for Puppy Training at PetSmart. One of the specific lessons we covered was “meeting other dogs.” As you might imagine, this is a real concern for a Great Dane owner. As sweet as Dana is, she can be pretty intimidating to smaller dogs. And even at 9-months old, she was bigger than all her classmates. When a cute little Cocker puppy was introduced to her, Dana stretched out her front legs, arched her back and leaned down to the puppy, tail in the air. The trainer was delighted with this. “Oh, that’s called a ‘Puppy Bow’”, she said, “And that’s the way one dog signals to another that everything that follows is just for fun.” She went on to explain that we could safely let the dogs play together, even growl and fight because it would all be pretend after that magical Puppy Bow. “If they had not done that”, she added, “A real fight might occur. The Puppy Bow makes anything that follows just fun.”
What a wonderful example of the power of the wider frame. I began to wonder if there were human correlates to this animal courtesy. And, of course, there are.
When martial artists are in training, they follow a rigorous sequence of courtesy before a workout or even a serious match. There is the bow of acknowledgement to the opponent and often to the dojo space itself. And it means very much the same thing as the Puppy Bow. It announces that what follows will be mutually beneficial as practice toward mastery and that no serious harm is intended. Without this courtesy, what follows might be no better than a street brawl.
So what does all this mean about training and coaching? For me, and I believe for Keith as well, the framing around the change process is critical. For each of us, operating inside the frame of deep and mutual personal regard provides a deep ecology for the client or learner and a set of permissions to do all that we can do to help each other get our well-formed outcomes. Never forgetting that we operate inside that frame which specifically states, “Everything that follows is meant to help you and not to harm in any way.”
Not only was it a thoughtful weekend. It was a special way to renew my deep admiration for Keith. As he has mentored me over the years, he has more than once held up a mirror for me so that I might see my shortcoming. Sometimes it actually made me mad because I did not want to see how silly I looked. And always, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Keith was doing this for me and not for him. That is why he is such a great teacher and coach.
We often sign our email to each other with the word Namaste. It is from an Indian tradition that means, “The divine in me salutes the divine in you.” Given that wider frame, confrontation may be a perfectly appropriate technique that always eventually dissolves completely and beautifully in love.
If you’d like to embark on an epic adventure from your living room, you’re going to love this workshop …
Radio NLP Podcast Episode #1: An interview with Katie Raver, an Austin-based, writer, NLP Master Practitioner, and co-founder of Austin NLP. Mike and Tom talk with Katie about her upcoming transformational workshop (July 2008) that was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s epic travel adventure novel called Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. To register for the workshop (there are still a couple of seats left), please visit Katie’s website: http://www.katieraver.com.
There are a number of NLP trainers who use their backgrounds in anthropology and their experiences with different cultures to help illuminate for NLP students the universality of human excellence and its many cultural expressions. Texas-based NLP trainers Tom and Bobbi Best, for example, lead transformational travel workshops to Maui, Bali and Peru. The Bests’ students use their NLP training to appreciate other cultures’ maps of the world and to allow the experiences they have and the relationships they form with others in those cultures to enrich and positively transform their lives.
This month’s Ted Talks features another beautiful talk by Anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis. Davis also happens to be a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, so his slides are visually delicious! He doesn’t mention any connection to NLP; however, his ability to appreciate, learn from, and portray the brilliance and beauty of the cultures he highlights really captures — for us, anyway — the frontier spirit of NLP and modeling.
Below are some of the topics addressed in Wade Davis’s presentation that have relevance to NLP. We’ve also added some helpful resources for further discovery.
Dead reckoning skills of Polynesian sailors (modeling expert skill/knowledge) Note how these folks are able to navigate by reading the stars and the currents. They can detect the location of islands too distant to see with the naked eye by wafting the air and “reading” the ocean’s current and wave patterns. For a fascinating look at physical and cultural navigation at sea, check out Bruce Hutchins’s book titled “Cognition in the Wild.”
Buddhist notion of how science and meditation work together (improving brain function/development through practice). Mike found this “Dan Rather Reports” episode on neural plasticity that highlights how scientists like Richard Davidson study how mental training (including meditation) affects brain function/development.
Peruvian cosmology, spiritual discipline, and dedication to humanity (map of the world, trance, healing). For an in-depth cultural experience, check out the Bests’ transformational travel offerings. If you liked Wade Davis’s talk referenced above, check out his TED talk on endangered cultures. This is passionate!
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I’m writing this post in response to Katie Raver’s request for me to share a story I told during a presentation on permissions that Mike and I gave last week. It’s the story of my four-year-old Zac’s version of the phobia cure. By the way, Zac announced to us all earlier in the week that he would like to be known as “Bubba Z.” Now for the story…
On a beautiful sunny morning in Austin Texas, I was working in our upstairs library. As the computer fan whirred along and my fingers tapped across the keyboard, I was faintly aware of the vacuum turning on, the sound of doors opening and closing, and furniture being moved. Suddenly, from the midst of the din, I could hear the muffled screams of a small, terrified child. I bolted from my chair to render assistance. With the vacuum running, it was difficult to pinpoint the exact locale of the cries; however, as I stepped my way down the hall, it was soon apparent that little Zac was locked in the broom closet, which also happened to be the home of the vacuum cleaner.
I opened the door to the closet. Crunched into the bottom shelf was tiny Z, red eyed and sobbing. He bolted from the closet and gave me a big hug. Apparently, while Susan was removing the vacuum from the closet, Bubba Z managed to slip unnoticed into the child-sized space. By this time, Susan saw us huddled by the closet, turned off the vacuum, and realized what had happened. After we both reassured Zac that all was well, we turned to each other and instantly knew (Vulcan mind-meld style) that we were at one of those parenting choice points that could really matter in a child’s life. After having helped other folks using the NLP phobia/ trauma procedure, I recognized that this was the kind of moment that could create a phobia. We wanted Zac to realize that going into places you can’t get out of (because you lack skill or knowledge) is not a good idea, AND we wanted him to learn that he was capable of handling himself competently in an emergency situation. I must admit, we were tempted to get caught up in the emotion of the situation. We could have freaked out, scolded him for slipping into the closet, and then delivered a harsh prohibition that might have cemented a phobia and robbed him of his ability to act competently and confidently in the future. This time, fortunately, we didn’t.
Instead, by considering the positive intent of the prohibition that we were tempted to lay down out of fear (don’t do ‘that’ again), we chose to deliver a permission that responded to that positive intent (keep yourself safe by not entering small spaces you can’t escape from) but outlined the resources needed for Zac to handle this kind of event successfully in the future. Thus, the interaction was designed to help the little fella be more resourceful and skilled, instead of the opposite. Personally, I think that bringing some specificity to the event (contextualizing it more tightly) makes it more difficult to generalize broadly the negative experience to other contexts.
We wanted to perform some kind of phobia inoculation on Bubba Z. The NLP phobia cure with all its imaginative elements works really well to wipe out an established phobia. However, in this case, we were at the formative stages of a potential phobia and Zac’s not super verbal yet, so we chose to work simply, mostly on a non-verbal level. After trying to demonstrate how I would survey the small space and check for a way out before I went in, I attempted to stuff myself into the closet — no go! Luckily, Susan could fit in the closet. She demonstrated how to survey the closet for escape, stuffed herself in, yelled help a coupled of times, poked her fingers out the bottom of the door, and safely released herself. Next we asked Bubba Z if he’d like a try. “No way … I’m scared!” he replied. While he had stopped crying, he hadn’t yet released his fear. “That’s okay, Zac. When you’re ready, you’ll know what to do,” I said. As I noticed him calming down a bit more, I couldn’t help myself, I asked again: “You want to just give it a quick try? We’re right here to help if needed?” “No thanks,” he responded.
At this point, we knew that we might need to wait a little while before we tried again. I went back to work, Susan fired up the vacuum, and Bubba Z went downstairs to play. About 10 minutes later, Susan shut off the vacuum. “Tom, come downstairs to the bedroom. Quick!” she shouted gleefully up the stairs. By the tone of her voice, I knew I was going to be in for a surprise. I joined her downstairs, outside the large walk-in closet in our master bedroom. Peeking out from underneath the closet door were a couple of chubby little kid hands. Following that was a loud, clear voice: “Hey, Dad and Mom, I’m in the closet! Help!” When we opened the door, the little guy was standing in the center of the brightly lit closet with a broad smile on his face. “I did it!!!” he shouted. We gave him a hug and a high five.
There you go…Bubba Z’s ten-minute phobia cure! In the words of the inimitable Groucho Marx: “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five!” In this case, a child of four.
Have you ever had a teacher who shared with you a simple-yet-profound lesson that helped you neatly, quickly, and usefully organize an entire field of study? You know … the kind of lesson that proved so valuable you returned to it again and again, using it to check your progress, to get your bearings, and to select the most fruitful paths to work. Mike and I considered Jonathan and Andrea Rice to be those teachers for us and their Five Frames of NLP to be that lesson.
What will mastering the Five Frames of NLP do for you?
It’ll allow you to get better results with your NLP. Think of these five frames as a recipe for helping you more elegantly choose and use NLP techniques. This recipe specifies the important ingredients and the order in which these ingredients should be added.
A History of the Five Frames
To the best of our recollection, Jon and Andrea developed the Five Frames model as a “big picture” explanation of how to work with NLP techniques elegantly and ecologically. The model roughly follows the order of the fundamental NLP skills outlined in Steve and Connirae Andreas’s NLP Practitioner Certification course, which Jon and Andrea used as the basic course material for their Practitioner certification at the Institute of NLP.
If you’re familiar with NLP and with the work of Jon and Andrea, you might know the Five Frames by a different name. In response to a learning challenge offered by Jon and Andrea, a group of students reworked the Five Frames using the metaphor of a train in order to make it more memorable. It later became known as the “NLP Choo-Choo Train.” Even though we’re fond of great metaphors, we felt that embedding the Five Frames in the train metaphor created too many potentially confusing entailments and tended to increase our desire to add more features to the model in order to “fill out” the metaphor.
The Five Frames
Here’s a stripped down version (close to the original) that Mike and I have been using for about 10 years.
Calibration
Rapport
Outcome
Ecology
Techniques
What’s worth noticing about the Five Frames?
1. Each of the frames is a label for an entire skill set.
Calibration: Tuning into your senses so that you notice subtle changes in your own and others’ processing, language use and physiology.
Rapport: Creating a connection with the “explorer” so they feel that you understand and value them.
Outcome: Creating a clear and conscious representation of what the “explorer” wants.
Ecology: Running a series of checks to make sure that getting and having the outcome will be beneficial to the “explorer” and those they care about.
Technique: Choosing and applying procedures to help the “explorer” connect with the resources they need to get them an ecological outcome.
2. Order matters. These skills are interdependent and appear in a deliberate sequence. They begin with being able to notice differences in processing, language use, and physiology. Without calibration skills, you won’t be very effective at gaining rapport. If you don’t have rapport, the person you’re working with probably won’t be willing to trust you enough to reveal what they really want. If you don’t have an idea of what the person wants, you won’t have the basis for a relevant ecology check. If you don’t know what is desired and what may or may not be an ecological consideration for the person, techniques are irrelevant.
How do we use the Five Frames in our work?
As a simple checklist that helps us to select a technique. We make sure we’ve calibrated what congruence/incongruence looks like for the person, we’ve gotten a well-formed outcome, and we’ve explored the ecology of several solution paths before we select the technique. The proper technique often presents itself after the first four frames are in place.
As a diagnostic tool when we’re lost or our work isn’t going as planned. Using this approach, we would pinpoint where we were stuck in the Five Frames and go to the frame directly preceding the stuck frame. For example, imagine we’re having a difficult time getting a well-formed outcome from an explorer. We might decide to move to rapport, and focus on strengthening our rapport with the “explorer” so we can lead them into a deeper state of relaxation and to a more productive state of mind. We might also use our calibration skills by verbally offering the explorer a number of choices and “calibrate” for interest/excitement.
As a skills hierarchy for beginners who want to study on their own. This is a really helpful order in which to learn your skills. You can begin by tuning up your senses to notice subtle differences in others’ physiology. This skill will serve you well once you begin learning to decipher accessing cues and will allow you detect when you’re in or out of rapport with others.
Readers, please do share your thoughts, especially if you’d like to suggest future articles you’d like to see us write that elaborate on particular points made in this article. Also, we’d love to get your feedback regarding your own recollection of the history of the Five Frames. Jon, thanks for sharing your wisdom. We propose a toast to the memory of Andrea and to the great work you two did together through the Institute of NLP. We also acknowledge and are thankful for the brilliant insights of Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts, David Gordon, Tom and Bobbi Best, Steve and Connirae Andreas, Tim and Kris Hallbom, Shelle Rose Charvet, and all the NLP pioneers. Thank you so very much for enriching our lives!
Partial Notes from a Presentation made at Austin NLP on May 27, 2008
Why Do They Matter?
Prohibitions, things that stop us in our journey forward, were often formed when we were young and inexperienced. They may have begun as simple warnings, limitations, rules, demands and vows. They may have been set by the adults in our lives and they may have been self-imposed on the basis of a “learning experience” with significant emotional charge. Why should we care today? And why now? The answer is really very simple: If the prohibitions of our youth were not updated as we grew up, the chances are that they may still stand between us and where we want to go.
The stories recorded elsewhere here give examples of prohibitions (Erin Leaves Home) and permissions after many years of suffering (Mike Throws a Rock).
Tom has shared his experience with making a series of financial decisions as a young married man that were not updated for 15 years. Often the process of turning former prohibitions into ecological decisions opens up the field of possibilities and means a complete change of lifestyle (i.e., a room for each of the children and a library for the family).
By now, you probably have thought of some prohibition in your own life-one you adopted for yourself or one that was thrust upon you by someone else. Keep that prohibition in mind-you’ll need it later. Why do we study prohibitions and permissions today? Years of personal coaching have taught us that it is important to update our beliefs to fit our current circumstances.
What are Prohibitions and Permissions?
So what are prohibitions and permissions? We think they may well be the opposite sides of the same coin. A prohibition says “No,” and a permission says “Yes,” you may literally “go through” (from the Latin).
Like Outcomes in NLP, there are well-formedness conditions for a permission:
Stated in the positive: Not “I give myself permission to lose weight;” rather, “I give myself permission to be fit and healthy.”
Sensory-specific: “I give myself permission to eat fruits and vegetables and exercise everyday.”
Something you can initiate and control.
With whom, when and where-” I give myself permission to choose fruits and vegetables at home and at restaurants and exercise at the gym with my friend, Tom.”
Ecology-If you had this permission, would it require you to sacrifice any other important person or thing in your life?
There is another distinction worth noticing, too. There is a real difference between striving for permission and having permission. As we strive for something, we keep it perpetually out in front of us. And how many of us have striven for years to be noticed and appreciated? How different is that from simply having permission to be who we really are?
Some of our permissions and prohibitions are conscious and some of them are completely unconscious. As we become aware of them, we can begin to have choice about them.
Most of our permissions are about skills and capabilities we grow into. One of our favorite cartoons is the one where two caterpillars are talking on the sidewalk. One points up at a butterfly and says, “If God had wanted us to fly, we’d have been born with wings.” (We have to grow into some of our permissions.)
The other night at dinner with my son and daughter-in-law and their children (ages 5 and 9), I asked each of the children separately what they thought “permission” meant. Both of them, without hesitation, gave the same answer: “Permission is something you get if you’ve been good.” All of us parents were surprised. Interesting, isn’t it, that even the most well-meaning parents install a sense of good-bad morality in our children when what we really intend is to connect permission with increased capability, skill and judgment. Perhaps it is this confusion of permission with good that teaches all of us to resist as if it were evil any prohibition that might be suggested to us.
After lots of thought and discussion, Tom and I began to wonder just how a person could flip the coin from prohibition to permission? Several NLP concepts came readily to mind, including the outcome frame, the ecology frame, logical levels, and the idea of higher intention. On the table below, we suggest a way to rewrite the map of prohibition. We begin with a prohibition that no longer serves us and discover its higher intention (and we presume that there always is one). Then we write a permission that allows us to move forward while preserving the good intention of the former prohibition. Let’s look at some examples.
Permission is Just a Prohibition with Good Intention
On the table below, you can see the relationship between Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels and the notions of Prohibitions and Permissions. The way to re-write a Prohibition that no longer serves us is to create a Permission that includes the Positive Intention of the Prohibition. [Prohibition + Positive Intention = Permission] Note, too, that Dilts suggests that the nature of the Helper changes at each logical level.
Logical Level
Prohibition
Positive Intention
Permission
Helper
Environment
Keep off the grass.
Walk on the sidewalks
Let’s permit students to walk on the grass between classes and then put sidewalks where the grass is worn.
Guide
Behavior
Don’t cross the street without an adult.
Children need extra attention in dangerous places
Now that you know to stop and look both ways before crossing the street, you may do so by yourself.
Coach
Capability
I can’t skydive.
There is much to know before jumping from a plane.
Now that I have taken the safety classes, I can skydive.
Teacher
Belief
I don’t believe it’s possible to reduce stress in my life.
That is one of the beliefs that increases stress.
I give myself permission to simply sit without expectations for ten minutes a day.
Mentor
Identity
I’m not the kind of person who exercises.
It is important not to create pain in my life.
Once I learned to exercise safely and painlessly, I became a regular at the gym.
Sponsor
Spirit/System
The world does not support my betting on myself.
Gambling is all about odds and the odds are you will lose.
As soon as I learned that just being born beat odds of millions to one, I decided I was a good bet.
Awakener
How Do We Make the Flip - A Exercise?
So, how do we skunk out prohibitions that no longer serve us and turn them into permissions which do? Find a partner or work through this 4-step process on your own.
Find a partner.
The Guide should assist the Explorer to clearly see, hear or feel an outcome he/she has always wanted for him or herself. Ex: I would like to triple my income.
Ask what stops him/her from having this already. State that as a prohibition. (Something you can’t, won’t or don’t.) Ex: That would be more money than my parents ever made in a year.
Determine the Higher Intention of this prohibition. Ex: I want to fully honor my parents efforts and be respectful.
Now script a permission that preserves the higher intention of the prohibition and still allows you to move forward. Ex: Can you give yourself permission now to honor your parents vision of who you are by doing even more than they did?
What if?
What is we all lived in a world where we created permissions rather than prohibitions. What is instead of saying: “You can’t cross the street with out an adult,” we said “You have my permission to cross the street as long as you are with an adult?” What if we learned to give ourselves permission to enjoy even the parts of our lives which we do not freely choose and cannot completely control?
Mark Nepo said: ” We run the length of our cage and rattle our dreams, never seeing that the bars are wide enough to slip through.”
Kaylin Haught has written a poem called “God Says Yes to Me”. It is just the way that the boy who could not say “No” should end this post:
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
to connect a world-wide community of NLP practitioners, teachers, and innovators with the excitement of learning and discovery. By modeling the shared abilities of this growing community, we intend to encourage the next generation of NLP pioneers.
