Synesthesia

Time Lines

Where’s your future?

Where’s your past?

Puzzled?

Let me re-phrase that.

Think of something mundane that is going to happen tomorrow – perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning. Notice where you represent that idea, in the space around or inside you. Think now of something a little further into the future – next week perhaps – and notice where that is.

Repeat for a couple of other things, perhaps your next birthday or Christmas.

Now think about the past – an event yesterday, last week, last year, earlier in your life. Notice where in the space around or inside you that you think of those things.

Imagine now a line that joins up all of those points – from your furthest past memory through the current moment and on into the future. In NLP that imaginary line is called your time line, a metaphor that is used in a great many forms of powerful personal changework. For the moment just notice where the current moment is – specifically is it inside or outside your body?

Metaphors of Time

All languages use space or position as a metaphor for time. The idea that the metaphors we use are closely bound to the way we structure our thoughts was first expressed a quarter of a century ago by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Inspired by Lakoff and Johnson the early developers of NLP began to create the time line model.

Many processes have been developed that use the metaphor of Time As A Line to change the way people think about the past, the present and the future. Metaphor is a meta-stating process (i.e. a thought about a thought) so immediately adds a level of [bliki]disassociation[/bliki], a powerful tool to allow people to think about challenging events in their lives without being swamped in feelings.

As a coach I find that talking people through an exploration of how they think about life using the metaphor of a time line to guide reflection, re-consider past events or rehearse alternative futures is a very powerful conversational intervention.

In-Time and Through-Time

Remember I asked you to pay particular attention to where you represented your sense of the current moment? Lakoff and Johnson observed that in Indo-European language-speakers there is approximately a 50-50 split between people who think of the current moment as being inside their body and people who think of the current moment as being outside their body, usually just in front of them. NLP labels these two most common representations of the passage of time as [bliki]In Time[/bliki] and [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] respectively.

A lot of changework processes use manipulation of these mental models as a way of accessing new ways of thinking. For example how good are you at future planning? If you feel that you could do better then try imagining future events in a more [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] way i.e. mapped out in front of you as if on a wallchart or planner and see what difference that makes. Many people find a positive difference from this sort of work, but nearly everyone expresses some inner tension or discomfort when they first try to think of time in a different way – these models go right to the core of our way of being in the world and change can have significant effects on the way we perceive things.

The Connection Between Language and Thought

Further work by Lakoff and Johnson, and many others in the field of cognitive linguistics, has extended the thinking – for example this study.

New research shows that the metaphor which is used could depend on the native language of the person concerned. Laura Spinney, in the Guardian article How Time Flies [via Tom Coates] reports on research by Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser with the Aymara people from the Chilean Andes. There’s more detail in this presentation from Vyv Evans at the University of Sussex which summarises the field and has a long list of references to follow.

The Aymara study is the first documented research finding evidence of a group of people with a reversed sense of time. When talking about long time spans the Aymara seem to have a [bliki]Through Time[/bliki] model, when talking about shorter periods (up to several generations) they seem to exhibit a reversed [bliki]In Time[/bliki] model, with the past in front and the future behind:

When they talked about very wide time spans, their gestures indicated that they conceived of it spanning from left to right, excluding themselves. But when they talked about shorter spans, several generations say, the axis was front-back, with them at point zero. The gestures of the old man and the woman discussing their grandparents confirmed that they really did think of the past as in front of them.

This particular and (so far) unique way of modelling time seems intimately associated with the Aymara language:

In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q”ipüru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back

[...]

Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.

From an NLP approach we might predict some consequences from this model – in particular we might speculate that the Aymara would not have a well-developed sense of future planning because the future is literally behind them – this seems to be born out by Miracle and Yapita’s observation of the “great patience” of the Aymara. (The Aymara Language and Its Social and Cultural Context)

Making Time Work For You

So how do you think about time?

What happens if you move those representations around?

Play with your timeline and see what happens…

Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology

Joe Ely writes about Lean Manufacturing Systems. One of the core tenets of Lean is to gather frequent feedback about the difference between what you planned to do and what you actually did, reflect on the difference and do something about it. The key thing is doing something about it. Today he tells a story about the importance of knowing what is wanted before you can take action.

This reminded me strongly of the concept of well-formed outcomes – one of the foundation stones of NLP. I find that often one of the most powerful coaching interventions is simply helping someone gain a clear view of what they want to happen and the nature of the first few steps. Something very powerful gets triggered in the unconscious mind by a clear view of what you want and many people report that change begins to happen shortly afterwards.

Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology, Systems

In NLP they’re called anchors.

Simple sensory inputs that trigger a whole range of feelings, memories, thoughts, imagined futures, new capabilities…

For most people music can be one of the most powerful anchors – the idea of “our song” is not a lover’s cliche without reason.

A sign of my age (and a serious lack of music buying during the later years) – a significant majority of my music collection is still on vinyl. Despite the lack of a functioning deck for several years I’ve lugged a couple of hundred LPs through a divorce and a couple of house moves. The most recent move was enough to ensure that I did something about the situation.

Thanks to Google I found Musonic UK, just down the road in Watford, manufacturers of replacement styli. Waiting on my doormat when I got home from work today was a small padded envelope containg the desired item and within a few minutes I had the deck hooked up and ready to play.

What to play first? Almost at random I selected “Victims of the Fury” – a Robin Trower album from 1980 that I’d not heard in many, many years.

As the first powerful, wailing chords of “Jack and Jill” filled my living room I was taken straight back to my 18 year old self, recovering once-dark memories of the short-lived love for which this album (and in particular this track) were the “mourning” songs…

Within seconds that spine-shivery, chest-warming feeling was back – the power of music that stays dormant inside ready to awake.

I’ve missed this.

Technorati Tags: Music, NLP

Phil Swallow has pointed me to his new discussion forum for exploring Metaphor, Clean Language, Clean Space and Symbolic Modelling. The forum looks like it will turn out to be a terrific resource if people use it. Probably the quickest way for me to explain “Clean Language” is to quote Phil from the FAQ section:

The word ‘clean’ is a metaphor. In this context, it represents the intention of the facilitator to keep their own stuff as separate as they can from the client’s stuff, where ’stuff’ equals ‘metaphors, opinions, suggestions, orders, analysis, comments’ and so on.

I think it’s worth making the point that when we are being ‘clean’, it IS our intention to influence our clients – we do not pretend to be invisible or outside of the process. [JE emphasis]

The way we intend to influence them is by directing their attention to aspects of their own experience, to help them to model themselves. With the understanding of self that that brings, their system can self-organise to create the kinds of experience they want to have. [...]

James Lawley describes what ‘clean’ represents more elegantly and accurately in his post What is Clean Language?.

For a contrasting analysis, try this critique of Symbolic Modelling from a meta-states / neuro-semantics perspective. by L. Michael Hall. Although very supportive of the work in developing the use of metaphor:

The book and model of these authors is a good one and adds much to the NLP model by enriching it, integrating current research in Cognitive Linguistics, systems, and brain research. It enriches the modeling we do in NLP and NS also as it opens up yet another way to model experience and excellence by listening to and exploring the Metaphorical Landscape that people live in.

he also says:

As much as Grove and these authors [Lawley & Tompkins] may want to believe that such questions keep the results “clean,” they do not. They cannot. These are the words that invite people to invent all kinds of things that was not there before. Yes, focusing on the person’s words and symbols does create a focus on a single event, and to some extent explores the person’s mental world, but it also invites creating things by that very focus. The symbolic domain, like all facets of consciousness, changes and transforms by the very accessing of it. All memories are like that. With every re-accessing of a memory, the memory will change.

I think Phil’s more recent definition (quoted in bold above) reflects this critique and shows how the understanding within the metaphor community may have developed – I’d be interested in his view on this…

Fixed link to Phil’s discussion forum. The conversation continues over there

Technorati Tags: NLP

Elizabeth Lane Lawley points to an AP article that refers to this project on the psychological and health benefits of expressing gratitude for the good things in your life.

The idea that there is a relationship between thoughts and health is not a new one in the NLP field. See for example the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Health.

What is interesting is to see how scientists are now finding ways within the scientific paradigm to prove the existence of these effects – for example the whole field of PsychoNeuroImmunology.

Coming back to the spirit of Liz’s post, in the extended entry is my own gratitude list…
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Technorati Tags: NLP, Psychology, Spirit

I’m indebted to my colleague (and coaching supervisor) Jenny Mitchell _(no online reference available)_ who, after reading my earlier article on Solution-focused Coaching has sent me a large stack of references and related reading:

* Harry Enfield, Hamlet and the Solutions Focus

* A Comparison of Appreciative Inquiry and Solutions Focus

* The Solutions Focus: Keeping It SIMPLE In The Learning Organisation

* Solution focused Corporate Coaching _[HTML converson from Word via Google]_

* Classic Models – Solution-Focused Coaching

* “Solutions-focus and the five messages of the Schnäpper” by Peter Szabo _[no online version found]_

Also Mark McKergow, author of several of the articles listed above commented on my earlier entry flagging up his web site and book The Solutions Focus: The SIMPLE Way To Positive Change (haven’t read the book yet so can’t comment on it…)

Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP

I went to a seminar last week on this topic given by Harvey Ratner from the Brief Consultancy.

Solution-focused Coaching is the application of the Solution-focused Brief Therapy approach to coaching. In outline the approach seems to be:

* Elicit client’s “best hopes” for the meeting
* Elicit client’s ideal future
* Identify signs that progress has been made already
* Calibrate where the client thinks he/she is and what would be needed to make an incremental improvement

the whole thing infused with lots of positive feedback about what is working, a constant drawing-out of sensory descriptions of the desired state, an exploration of different perceptual positions and an underlying assumption that the client will develop his/her own detailed action plans…

One of the key differences from other approaches seems to be the future bias – in NLP terms a lot of focus on helping the client build a really strong representation of the “Desired State” (DS), combined with “ecology” checks, exploration of different perceptual positions and lots of reinforcement of the client’s resources.

I would tend to do most of that in my normal coaching approach but I would also spend time exploring the current state (CS) and why it was persistent – looking for ways to loosen the “stuckness”. When another participant asked about this Harvey’s response was that from a solution-focused point of view any time spent talking about “now” rather than “then” tended to strengthen the hold of the past/present…

During the seminar we did a couple of exercises, one of which was related to the “calibration” stage – a very simple question “thinking about your job, and your ideal situation, where would you say you had got to on a scale of 0 – 10″ [...] “and what tells you that you are that point and not a 0?” [...] “and what do others see you doing that contributes to you being at that point?” (of course the skill is in the way the questioner asks the questions and especially in the way they keep going to elicit more and more…)

Being on the receiving end of that questioning (even though I “knew” it was “just” an exercise) I was surprised by the sense of momentum and energy that was created in me by an in-depth appraisal of all the good things I have already achieved.

I can see how that energy focuses the mind so that the “and what would you have to do to just add one point on the scale?” questions trigger “it’s obvious…” answers from the client, perhaps also how that energy combined with the “pull” of a clear desired future would be enough to unstick from the power of the past. I’m very tempted to take a training in the approach, certainly I shall spend some time reflecting how I can usefully strengthen my coaching with what I’ve learned.

Whilst musing about that sudden rush of energy I was also reminded of the Appreciative Inquiry approach to organisational change – again that focuses on what already works with a team, in an organisation, as a prelude to moving on to even better things – on the surface the parallels seem obvious, but I need to think a bit more about whether there might be an underlying model that could explain both…

Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP

Over at Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber is seeking to transfer the learning from Lean Production into the project management world.

In Lean Production there exists the concept of the “visual workplace”, commonly expressed through the 5S model. Hal points out that projects may not always involve material products and resources but always involve people and conversations; it therefore makes sense to translate the 5S model into what he calls the 5R Protocol for a Listening Workplace:

1. Roles
2. Rules
3. Reflection
4. Relationships
5. Routines

What’s interesting is the way his own thinking is developing as he reflects on this model and the conditions that need to be in place for real changes to happen – critically the need for having the right mental distinctions to notice what is really important and then taking action based on those distinctions:

What we notice has to do with the distinctions we can make and the routines that we follow. Both our noticing and effectiveness in action increase as we take action. If we want to work in a lean way we need the distinctions of lean and we need to take action. [...] Learning to operate in a lean way happens by doing projects in a lean way.

For me this sits well with the model of cognition used by NLP:

Our habitual perceptual filters control what we actually notice in our surroundings – an engineer will notice different things from an HR expert. The mental programs we use (or habitual ways of thinking) will then influence what meaning we ascribe to those things and therefore influence our conscious intent about what to do. Those same mental programs will distort our conscious intent into our everyday strategies, which in turn result in actions and words that fit with our perceptual filters. The whole system is both recursive and self-reinforcing – the success of actions we take in the world tends to strengthen the perceptual filters and mental programs that led to us choosing those actions.

In such a model changing behaviour often needs the conscious adoption of new filters and disctinctions re-inforced by action until new unconscious mental programs take hold. This is where coaching is especially useful to remind the person who is changing what they should be paying attention to.

What Hal is doing with his 5R model is start to express the things that make a difference in order to get “Lean Projects” right – it will be interesting to see how he develops this into practical tools that can not only be applied but through their application embed new ways of thinking.

Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Project_Management, Psychology

Shelley writes We Be Three: Intellect, Spirit, and Heart in which she suggests a new model for understanding the way people communicate (especially in writing) – which filter are they using, Intellect, Spirit, or Heart. She exemplifies each style as:

bq. Intellect: I think.
Spirit: I believe.
Heart: I feel.

All of these are at a meta-level to the primary experience – indeed in a comment to Shelley’s post Tom Graves adds reference to the physical layer “I act”.

Shelley writes eloquently about the effects of matching and mismatching these filtering styles, she also notes her own incongruence signal:

bq. However, it doesn’t take much for me to begin feeling out of place, even inferior, and these feelings are signs that I need to re-focus my energy on my strengths, rather than expend it in arenas that just don’t work for me. This is the most important lesson I’ve learned, and I’m still learning it. Self-doubt is your mind’s way of telling you to change your environment.

This is a fresh (to me) way of looking at habitual ways of expressing oneself, but I wonder if the preferred filters are as immutable as Shelley suggests? Surely it is possible to install an ability to operate in any of these models? What are the characteristic values and beliefs held by a person who prefers to operate in each mode? What self-awareness does a person hold in each mode? if it were a conversation, how would they express each mode in their posture?

Since this post is written in the “intellect” filter, let me answer those questions for myself as I write….

Values: ideas, dialogue, debate
Beliefs: other’s views are important as they shed light in ideas, ideas develop through conversation,
Body awareness: almost entirely in the head – lots of visual thinking.

If it was a conversation I can imagine talking very quickly, with an amount of gesturing, then pausing to hear the other person, we’d probably interrupt each other a lot to keep up with the idea flow…

Any people with preferences for the other styles care to comment?

Technorati Tags: NLP

Steve at OnePotMeal is untangling the strands of online influence.

He starts by agreeing with AKMA that, regardless of the sometimes high noise-signal ratio on the web:

we can devise and sustain persistent salutary connections online in new ways that would have been significantly less workable and durable under the limitations of physical interaction

and adds a nuance from Anne Galloway:

it has become (somewhat painfully) obvious that the same inequalities that we struggle with in the everyday are equally present in cyberspace – they just take on context-specific qualities

and poses this question:

How do we begin to tease out these context specific modes of influence without trapping ourselves in the assumption that we’re working in entirely familiar territory, while at the same time recognizing that we have inevitably carried over much of our offline behavior into the linked realm? [...] The way to understand context specific influence is to explore its specific context. Simple, no? One means of doing this is to track an individual meme, an individual link, in other words, as it moves and meanders across the web. Not to count the number of times it’s linked, but rather to understand the ways in which it is linked, because I think real influence, genuine power is tied up in the ability to make meanings and direct the meaning-making of others far more than in raw numbers and visibility [...]

I would put this another way – real influence comes from setting the high-level meta-frames, which in themselves are the context…

Steve goes on:

The web equivalent, at least the way I’m thinking about it here, isn’t who links the most but whose links have the biggest impact. For example, I generally trust AKMA as a thinker and source of information, so I take seriously whatever he links to. When I follow those links, I’m then reading them through the lens of my trust of AKMA, so I’m perhaps more likely to read in a way sympathetic to his reading. Which is not to say I’ll agree with him exactly all the time–far from it–just that the context in which I read a link can be defined by how I get there [...] What am I actually proposing? Something that, by dint of its enormity, may not even be possible, or would at least be complex and difficult. Essentially, hypothetically, to follow every link to a particular meme in order of appearance, map those, map the further links and the ways in which they branch of from each original link, and parse all of the contexts in which those links were made

Setting aside, for the moment, the practical issues associated with this (that Steve acknowledges) I’d like to suggest an addition…

• If we could identify which memes were “close to each other” (in some unspecified but intuitive way) we could start to identify the frames of reference that are operating. (I am suggesting that by associating links with memes these may be at too small a “chunk size” to identify guiding ideas)
• By tracking the links in the way Steve suggests we could start to map these frames to levels of abstraction – to see which represent the “higher” levels of context.
• Taking our thought experiment a step further, if we could then establish some sort of “ownership coefficient” between those frames and the people who are most associated with expressing them we could see who had most influence within a given community of ideas…

I think this needs a
diagram!!

Technorati Tags: Networks, NLP

In an earlier article I noted the idea of exploring the cultural models operating on the opposite sides of the Eldred dispute. Progress update- have got as far as creating a Wiki page to capture my thinking on this, and have populated it with an outline of the approach, condensed from several pages of the training manual from the last NeuroSemantics course…

Since it’s a Wiki, feel free to contribute!

Technorati Tags: NLP

Over at the American Open Technology Consortium Doc Searls is going deep about the metaphorical aspects of the Eldred case:

Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy,distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

This isn’t just a battle of words. It’s a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain, lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we’re speaking about one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s very much the way our minds work.

But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details.

He also links to Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust, by George Lakoff. This 1995 article examines the different guiding metaphors that underly the conservative and liberal (in the US sense) views of “what is moral”.

I think Doc is onto something here – and the link that is forming in my mind is with the Meta-states / neuro-semantics model. At a recent training Michael Hall was starting to apply those models to aspects of culture – how to understand, how to change… It seems obvious that two of the meta-states at work here are “It is important to protect property” and “It is important to enrich the store of public knowledge and creativity”, but I have a sense that the two sides can be linked… I need to play with this one for a bit…

Technorati Tags: NLP, World

A long follow up to the previous article, linking ideas from Open Source and Creative Commons to development of the fields of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

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Technorati Tags: Knowledge_Management, NLP

In today’s Observer magazine Andrew G Marshall writes about his application of ideas from Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point to the field of couples counselling.
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Technorati Tags: Coaching, NLP, Psychology, Systems

Moving longer articles from old site. Here ( as a PDF file) is a piece I wrote a couple of years ago to serve as a general introduction to NLP.

Technorati Tags: Articles, NLP, Psychology

In wiring my mind Swerdloff gives a great description of a practical application of the NLP Anchoring technique to associate a particular song with the moment of perfect beauty as he kisses his girl…

“I have a strange question” I told her. “Yeah?” “Can I kiss you? For the duration of this song.” “Of course.” It was only a strange question because of the song…

Technorati Tags: NLP, Psychology

Top Ten Reasons To Witness Your Dad’s Demise (via Doc Searls) was written by Halley Suitt 48 hours before her father died – as she says “here’s my attempt to see the good in these bad times”. Reading it reminded me of my own father – he died in Jan 2000 – and just for a moment reflect on how in some ways he has been with me more often in my thoughts since he died. Since then I’ve started to notice the traits I have inherited from him, indeed as I grow into my 40’s I seem to become more like the father I remember. Here’s to fathers and sons everywhere. [updated 2002-04-10] By the way this article “Resolving Grief” by well-known NLP trainer/developer Steve Andreas describes a process that I have found tremendously useful in maintaining a good connection with my father since his death.

Technorati Tags: NLP, World

Interesting site by Keith Rice detailing some work based on Spiral Dynamics and NLP dealing with real-life problems in Humberside.

Technorati Tags: NLP, Spiral_Dynamics