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NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING WAS born many years ago, partly out of the events one night in a hypnosis seminar. The people there were achieving deep hypnotic states and demonstrating dramatic hypnotic phenomena.

Some of them were doing things like limited vision and positive hallucinations; others were controlling their blood pressure. One young girl even speeded up the way her eyes worked, but not the rest of her, so she could see the world in slow motion. Without any training at all, she was able to run rings around a martial artist friend of mine. From her point of view, everything was slowed all the way down. To the observer, she was moving twice as fast as the other guy.

Of course, different people were able to achieve different levels of competence, and that set me thinking.

Already, those psychologists studying hypnosis had decided there was such a thing as “hypnotizability” that could be measured—meaning that one person could be more or less hypnotizable than another.

I didn’t really believe that. I wasn’t impressed with the idea of a hypnotizability scale. I kept asking, “Has anybody got one? Has anyone even seen one?”

What the research really told me, though, was that if you use the same input with some people, they will respond differently than others. In the case of hypnosis, some people go deeper, others not. To me, the analogy was simply that if you keep punching a group of research subjects at the same height, you’ll hit some in the head and hit the really tall ones in the knee. The whole thing begged the question: What was one person doing with his brain that the other wasn’t? It seemed to me that these psychologists were really measuring not hypnotizability, but their own incompetence.

Some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the world we perceive ourselves in is only a representation of reality, whatever that is. Hans Vaihinger, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bate-son all made the same observation. They all discussed variations on the theme of “our experience of reality is not the same as reality itself.” Some very old cultures came to the same conclusion. They realized thousands of years ago that what was outside the mind was not the same as what was inside the mind. Part of their way of dealing with it was to meditate for years to become enlightened and dissolve the “illusion.”

But the problem remained for the rest of us. Even if we accepted that our experience was constructed in our minds, what then? What could we do with that knowledge? What difference would it make?

In volume one of The Structure of Magic, I wrote: “We as human beings do not act directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live—that is we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.”

My point was that those people in that workshop who could create positive or negative hallucinations, or become selectively amnesiac, or anesthetize their arms, were representing their world differently from those who could not do those things. They changed their way of looking at things; they changed their beliefs. The intriguing thing is that, in some cases, not only did their subjective experience change with the suggestion, but their physiology did, too.

Hypnosis, therefore, was central to the development of NLP because it allowed us to explore altered states. We could push boundaries with it, because it was a tool that allowed us to begin to learn what was possible. Once we saw some of the things that were possible, we could begin to look at how they happened and what we needed to do to replicate the outcomes. In this sense, NLP may be thought of as the underlying “structure” of hypnosis.

It wasn’t possible to turn to psychology for help, because not only were most of the “experts” fighting with each other to decide whose theory was correct, they were also focused only on why people became ill or stuck, or how they came to fail.

I once spent a whole winter house-sitting for a psychiatrist friend, and out of sheer boredom I read every book he had. It was a fascinating experience. The hundreds of texts by all these important doctors and professors could tell you everything you needed to know about how people got sick or stuck—but not one of them had even the glimmer of an idea of how to help them get better. It didn’t even seem to occur to them that it might be a useful direction to follow.

That was a question I found myself asking again and again. How do people get better? Some of them do get better, sometimes with the help of doctors or psychologists. Others just get better all by themselves.

But my interest went beyond that. I wanted to know how people achieved their goals and what made some of them exceptional in their field. I wanted to know how some people achieved excellence.

A few therapists at the time were getting far better results than those of their colleagues. They lived and practiced in different parts of the country; their methods were different; and they didn’t know anything about each other or the way they worked. But those who knew them and saw their work described their results as magical—and they were, compared with the results of most of their peers.

Their followers praised their talent or genius or intuition, as if that explained their abilities, but nobody at the time really understood how they came to be this way, least of all the therapists themselves.

As a scientist and a mathematician, I knew there had to be a structure, and I wanted to know what that structure was. I knew that, if it could be identified, it should be possible to replicate it and even teach it to other people. Everybody could become magicians in their own right.

I spent some time with John Grinder studying these therapeutic wizards very closely. Initially, we focused on family therapist Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, the grandfather of modern hypnotherapy. We watched them at work, and instead of getting caught up in the content of what they were doing, we looked at the syntax of what they were saying and doing. As soon as we looked at it that way, the patterns popped out everywhere—in the questions they asked, the words they used, the gestures they made, in the tonality and rate with which they spoke. We started to notice that, even though they were all very different personalities, they shared many characteristics.

The interesting thing was that they all acted intuitively. They all had their own maps or models of therapy; there were similarities and there were differences. Often they had no idea at all why something they had done had been successful, but all shared a belief that the client’s model of the world could be changed. Regardless of what they did or thought they were doing, each believed in helping to expand and enrich the clients’ subjective experience.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) takes the position that no two people share precisely the same experiences. The map or model they create to make sense of and navigate around the world is partially based on these experiences and the distinctive ways in which each processes them. Therefore, each person’s model varies to some degree from the model created by every other person. We live in different realities, some richer, and some very much poorer, than others.

This fact alone doesn’t always cause problems. We have something called consensual, or shared, reality, which means we all, more or less, agree to operate according to the same hallucinations—and this is a useful thing. We need to have certain rules by which we all function. We need to agree on what is up and what is down. We need to know the difference between left and right—something I discovered for myself the first time I visited the United Kingdom and found out that they drive on the other side of the road from Americans. Stepping off the sidewalk and looking only one way is not a good idea if you’re still operating according to a map that applies to somewhere else.

Now, if a map or a model adequately represents the reality it is describing, the person who has created it is likely to be functioning adequately in her or his world. But experience shows us that most people who come to us in pain feel blocked and limited and without any sense of options or choices. In other words, it’s not the world they live in that’s limited; it’s the poverty of their maps that keeps them suffering and in pain.

It follows, then, that it’s often much more productive—and a lot easier—to change the map someone has been using rather than the territory in which the person is functioning. The therapists we modeled were showing us this approach in their behavior.

Despite the fact that some people, usually psychotherapists, believe change is only possible with a lot of time and effort—and then only if the client isn’t resistant—hypnosis, the effective therapists, and those people who “just changed” showed us that change could be a lot quicker and easier. The tools to do this were not available at the time, so I had to create them. Through NLP, I have been able to develop learnable principles, processes, and techniques that make change systematic and easy.

As I pointed out in Volume I of The Structure of Magic, perception and experience are active, rather than passive, processes. We all create our subjective experience out of the “stuff” of the external world. One of the reasons that we don’t all end up with the same model is that our experiencing is governed by certain restrictions or constraints: the constraints of our individual nervous systems (neurological constraints), the societies in which we function (social constraints), and our unique personal histories (personal constraints).

The NLP model we advanced at the time to explain this process was simplified, but it’s held up remarkably well over the years. Basically, the model suggested that we each use our five senses slightly differently from each other to process incoming information. The models we make depend on which senses we favor, what information we take in and how much we leave out, and how we interpret whatever does get through. To summarize briefly:

Neurological constraints. We receive information about the world through five sensory input channels—visual, auditory, kinesthetic (feelings), smell (olfactory), and taste (gustatory). Rather than each sense being given equal weight with every other sense, each of us favors one or two over the others. Of course, we know there’s considerable overlap in the parts of the brain responsible for processing our senses, but one or the other usually dominates in experience. This is known as your sensory preference or preferred sensory system.

Social restraints. As members of a particular society, we are subject to a number of mutually agreed-upon filters, the most significant of which is the language we are born to speak.

The more specific our language is, and the more distinctions we can make, the richer our experience will be. This concept is central to the practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis. Words are power, and the language patterns you will learn from this book will help harness this power for yourself and for others.

Individual constraints. As its name suggests, the third category of constraints develops out of our personal experience. We are each born into a particular set of circumstances, and as we grow up we encounter an increasing number of experiences, which in turn give rise to unique likes and dislikes, habits, rules, beliefs, and values. The maps we create from these can become rich and useful, or limited and destructive, and unless we understand how we create our subjective world, we will continue to live in confusion and pain.

People don’t make themselves miserable out of choice, even though it sometimes looks that way. NLP doesn’t see people as bad, crazy, or sick. Our viewpoint is that they are operating out of an impoverished map, limited in the number of choices they have. To put it another way, they mistake the model for reality. This is what we mean when we say: The map is not the territory.

The richness and poverty of our maps are created by three filtering mechanisms: deletion, distortion, and generalization. These are all processes we need to carry out to manage the information that is coming at us so we are not overwhelmed. Problems occur when the wrong information is deleted, distorted, or generalized, creating patterns that either don’t support our well-being or actively diminish it.

Deletion. Deletion occurs when we pay attention to certain parts of our experience at the expense of others, which we do naturally. Think about being in a crowded room, talking to a friend. You automatically screen out the buzz of other people’s conversation…until you hear your name spoken by someone on the other side of the room.

Deletion is a necessary and useful mechanism for making sure your world is manageable in size, but in certain circumstances it can create pain and suffering. For example, I’ve never met a depressed person who can remember a time when he was really happy. As far as depressives are concerned, they’ve always been unhappy. Equally, sufferers of chronic pain often don’t notice those times when their pain is reduced or nonexistent. Certain people believe the world is a hostile place and simply fail to notice how many people act in a caring or supportive way.

Distortion. Distortion is a quality that all creative people have in abundance. We need to be able to shift the meaning of—to distort—present reality to be able to create something new. (Great writers and artists are experts in distortion.) However, as pattern-making beings, we are equally inclined to distort reality in ways that cause us pain and distress.

Some years ago I was in a restaurant, listening to a couple at the next table having a fight. The man said something really nice—obviously wanting to make peace with his partner—and she snapped back: “Oh, you’re just saying that to make me feel better!”

Of course he was trying to make her feel better—nothing wrong with that, as far as I could see. But she distorted into a hostile act his attempt to make peace. So I leaned over and said: “Yeah, he’s really bad that way. Imagine wanting to make the woman he loves feel good.” For a moment, they were both stunned. Then they laughed and started to talk to each other in a much nicer way.

Generalization. The third mechanism is generalization—the process by which a person takes one or two experiences and decides that this is the way all things are meant to be, all the time.

Generalization is useful as a tool in learning. If we cut ourselves when we are careless with a sharp implement, we generalize to the extent that we believe “all” sharp instruments are capable of injuring us, so we treat them with respect. We have learned over many hundreds of thousands of years to stay alive by applying generalization.

Generalization, as has already been mentioned, is the mechanism by which people all over the planet know how to open doors, simply because they’ve generalized information out of one or two formative experiences, but generalization is also at the root of many problems. When I was still at school, teachers believed we left-handers should be forced to write with our right hands. Their method of instruction was to patrol our desks and whack us with rulers when they found us writing with the “wrong” hand.

Later, I got to do more things my way. As a person who was still left-handed, I reversed all the doors in my house to make things easier for myself. Everywhere else, the front door opened inward. Mine opened outward; it just felt better that way.

However, friends of mine would come along, try to get in, then say, “Hey, your door’s jammed.” I’d come along, open it the other way, and then next time they came along, the same thing would happen. Their motor programs just couldn’t cope with an exception to their generalization about the way doors “should” be.

Generalization can have serious consequences on people’s lives when they fail to undo generalizations that no longer work. Someone who was mistreated as a child may decide that all men (or women) or all authority figures are to be feared and disliked. A person who experiences several failed relationships may decide that love is for losers and withdraw into a lonely existence. Sexual dysfunction among some men persists because they believe a single incident will necessarily apply to all physical encounters.

Basically, generalization occurs when someone applies a single rule to all situations that resemble the one in which the original rule was formulated. The context has been altered from “one” to “all,” from “sometimes” to “always.”

Understanding this mechanism gives us insight into much behavior that otherwise seems strange or even bizarre. If we recognize that the rule makes sense in the appropriate context, we can start to help people restore the behavior to the situation or situations in which it originated, or help to create new and more appropriate behaviors. Based on this NLP approach, we can say, at some level, that all behavior has positive intent.

Freedom can only start to come when we restore information to an impoverished map. Once we begin to explore how each individual reality is constructed, we open ourselves and others to a whole range of options and opportunities. Rather than trying to take away people’s discomfort or unwanted responses—to make people “not have” depression or anxiety or an eating disorder— we create new choices for them in the belief that, when they have more and better choices than before, they will make them on a more consistent basis.

Exercise: Identifying Your Sensory Preferences

You can do this exercise with a partner or by yourself. If you are alone, it helps greatly to speak out loud, possibly into a voice recorder so you can review your experiences later.

1 Imagine as clearly as you can a walk along a beach. It can be a beach you know or an entirely imaginary one. Your goal is to describe in as much detail as you can the experience, cycling through each of your five senses. First, describe everything you see—the color of the sky and the ocean, the seagulls in the air, the white foam flying into the air as waves crash against the black rocks, the colorful clothes of children playing in the sand, and so on. Then move to another sense—hearing, for example—and describe everything you can hear, from the sound of your feet on the beach to a ship’s horn in the distance. Continue until you have completed your description in all five senses.

2 Now, review your description and notice whether it was easier to make pictures, hear sounds, or feel sensations, such as the temperature of the air against the skin. Was it easy to imagine the smell of salt in the air, or the taste of a hot dog bought from an oceanfront stand? One of these senses will dominate. This is your sensory preference.

Note: Having a preference for one sensory modality does not mean you do not use the other senses, or that you use your preferred modality in all situations. We all tend to use all senses in processing information, but some are used to a greater or lesser degree.