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A New Code approach to teaching NLP
/in NLP Articles /by Chris CollingwoodFeatures of a New Code Approach to Teaching NLP
Teaching New Code NLP requires deep unconscious familiarity with the patterns to be offered, combined with fluency in chunking, perceptual position shifting and the language of process instructions. A trainer needs to be able to offer experiential discovery exercises in which the intended pattern is presupposed, having demonstrated the pattern at intervals, covertly, throughout the training. This approach precludes conscious interference, spurious meaning or comparison with prior knowledge.
Comprehensive New Code NLP training produces graduates who think in NLP patterns, ask penetrating questions and communicate naturally and elegantly in their own style. This approach to training is minimalist, code congruent and process and discovery oriented. Minimalism strips away non-essential material (content), ritual and artificial aids from the training context.
“Comprehensive New Code NLP training produces graduates who think in NLP patterns, ask penetrating questions and communicate naturally.”
Code congruence in training requires maximum similarity between training and assessment with reference to context, process, resources and material, in the interest of facilitating learning and performance [1]. Code congruence in disseminating learning to life requires the training to blend with life as much as possible and to maintain that connection through each exercise.
New Code NLP training uses experiential discovery exercises. The training room has freedom of entry and exit, natural light and direct links to the outside. The New Code approach requires students to converse in their own words in as natural an environment as possible, using process instructions as their frame for each exercise.
Framing for Conscious Attention and Metaphor for Unconscious Attention
As discussed earlier, framing is essential to New Code NLP training and is all about context. Everything we do, all of our behaviour occurs and applies in a particular context or set of contexts. We may not be conscious of most of the contexts in which we are functioning, however, the context where we are at any moment sets the scene for the way we behave there. In the world, a context is the situation, time and place that informs what we do. Our internal states too, are part of our context and also inform our actions in the world. A context is the set of constraints and supports that cue our states and behaviour while inside it.
Framing is the art of setting the boundaries for a communication or interaction. Framing defines the context [2]. Framing can also apply to the way we organise ourselves to do something. The frame we place on a context defines how we do what we do and how we live our lives. The framing model is one of the most important and influential models of NLP.
“The framing model is one of the most important and influential models of NLP.”
The intent of framing is to facilitate students to discover patterns of excellence for themselves through exposure to training exercises, experiences and games. Also for students to experience an unconscious uptake of generative patterns of excellence. This is evidenced by the questions they ask, the behaviour they offer and the links they make. The intent for unconscious uptake is to prevent students from making conscious links between what they think they are learning and what they know already that they think relates to it. Ideally, students learn unconsciously, then allow the patterns to generalise and be expressed unconsciously until sometime later the student starts to gain conscious awareness.
“The intent of framing is to facilitate students to discover patterns of excellence for themselves through exposure to training exercises.”
In contrast, conventional learning expects the conscious mind to learn before a skill or topic becomes available unconsciously. This is hard work and allows conscious ideas and opinions to filter new information before it is experienced. This is limiting. Learners want to be able to respond with NLP patterns, not talk about them. Therefore, participants are asked to complete discovery exercises without knowing what their purpose is in advance. They are given clear process instructions with no reasoning.
New Code NLP trainers, practitioners and , consultants use framing extensively before beginning to teach a pattern or intervene with a client. It can be presupposed that the unconscious has access to all our resources; and there are times when we run out of ideas. At those times the unconscious mind needs a frame of reference on which to base the search for resources that fit the particular situation. For the conscious mind the discovery method favoured in New Code NLP does not provide meaning in advance and conscious minds like meaning.
Framing provides enough meaning, albeit different from the covert intent of the exercise to enable participants’ conscious minds to participate in a useful manner. That is to perform the overt task of the exercise.
Content-free High Performance States
Another aspect of the New Code approach to training and coaching is in the use of activities and games to develop content-free high performance states in participants. Once elicited, these states can be applied to any context where someone wants to enhance their performance. These high performance states are referred to as ‘content-free‘ as they arise as a by-product of the game or activity. They manifest in the present, thereby avoiding the use of sense memory as a source of resources for high performance. In effect they are uncontaminated by specific memory content.
The use of content-free high performance states leads to more robust changes and better generalisations of those changes into people’s lives. It is also congruent with the idea that ethical application of NLP be content-free. It avoids any risk of imposing consultants’ values on their clients, which is a serious drawback of content oriented models for example conventional psychotherapy, counselling or management consulting.
(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).
By Chris Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.
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Notes:
[1] If teaching or learning is experiential, then the testing should be experiential also. If students are given reading then a written test is appropriate. We test people in the same form or code in which they have leant. This is referred to as code congruence.
[2] In recent years the art of framing has entered into the political arena due to the influential book by George Lakoff, Moral Politics. We now hear politicians in Australia, especially the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, talking about frames and framing. The politician or party who has the best frames and skills for framing the agenda has a clear advantage.
How to differentiate between the New Code and Classic Code of NLP even if you are new to it
/in NLP Articles /by Chris CollingwoodGetting NLP Back on Track; Reorienting to Patterning and Modelling
With the exponential growth of people teaching the developed models and applications of NLP to business, coaching, therapy, education, personal development etc., there has been very little attention accorded by NLP trainers to modelling, in general, and the development of new models, in particular.
Much of what is promoted as new models is simply a crafty repackaging of existing NLP models into applications of NLP. In fact most of the NLP books published in recent years are simply variations on standard NLP themes. As Grinder said in an 1996 interview:
” One of the expectations which I personally carried at the time of discovery and development of NLP was that people interested in our work would cleanly make the distinction between NLP and applications of NLP. My hope at the time was that given this distinction, there would arise a group of committed men and women who would recognize the meta levels tools which we had either discovered (the Milton Model…..), or created (the verbal patterns of the Meta Model or Precision Model, Representational Systems….), and go out and identify and create new models of excellence to offer the world. This has not happened and is very disappointing to me. NLP is popularly represented and commonly practiced at least one logical level below what it was clearly understood to be at the time by Bandler and me.”[1]
New Code NLP corrects this consequence with an explicit reorientation back to the core skills of NLP Modelling.
“Most of the NLP books published in recent years are simply variations on standard NLP themes.”
A consequence of Classic Code NLP teaching and learning is that the material becomes formulaic through packaging as techniques in either recipe or scripted form. This results in practitioners who are really merely NLP technicians, nothing more. They can only express NLP through the formatted techniques that they have been given, without an appreciation of the underlying NLP patterns. , Unless they can gain the patterns experientially, they will remain technicians and be limited to the ritualised techniques they were taught in their NLP training.
Unfortunately, even ritualised NLP makes a discernible difference to the quality of people’s lives, so continues to attract many students who are then led to believe they have learned the genuine article. This leads to another consequence; the development of perceptual filters[2] that preclude the likelihood of discovering the patterns of NLP. If you know it all already (and your trainer has anchored credibility), why would you “repeat” what you have finished learning?
The New Code NLP approach to teaching and learning involves creating a context or series of contexts within which the target patterns are demonstrated, with multiple descriptions[3].
(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).
“The New Code NLP approach involves creating a context within which patterns are demonstrated.”
Students who learn to attend to the detection and utilization of patterns in self and others develop artistry in their use of NLP. They have behavioural flexibility and can respond creatively in any context, applying existing patterns in multiple ways while also developing new material.
Summary of Differences Between Classic Code NLP and New Code NLP
A useful way of thinking about the difference between New Code NLP and Classic Code NLP is in terms of emphasis.
Classic Code NLP emphasizes technique, mechanistic metaphors and the production of NLP technicians. It uses conscious explicit models that are often divorced from their original context. “Where do I use this technique” and “How do I know which technique to use” are common questions from Classic Code NLP students and practitioners. There is a tendency for classic code practitioners to try to fit clients to procedures, instead of creating interventions with each client.
“There is a tendency for classic code practitioners to try to fit clients to procedures.”
In stark contrast, New Code NLP emphasizes the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds of the individual, their relationships with others and their relationship with the world. It works towards the personal evolution of the participant.
New Code NLP promotes unconscious competence, which will be demonstrated and followed by conscious appreciation. Training drills are used in service to pattern incorporation and the development of unconscious competence.
The balance between the conscious and unconscious minds is paramount and this is known as the conscious / unconscious interface. New Code NLP is directed towards the detection and utilisation of patterns in the world, with an emphasis on patterns.
“New Code NLP is directed towards the detection and utilisation of patterns in the world.”
A New Code NLP practitioner often creates a process spontaneously in response to a particular context. In this evolved code, participants explore psychological states and learn to recognise, inventory and change states. This work connects with the development and incorporation by each participant of a modelling state. A modelling state is a state of mind for modelling excellence. Another aspect of New Code NLP is attention training (essential for modelling). That is learning where and how you place your attention, how that relates to state, perceptual position and context.
Grinder and DeLozier and later Grinder and Bostic St Clair developed New Code NLP as a second, greatly evolved description of Neuro-Linguistic Programming to create a system for learning NLP that fosters the development of systemic wisdom in the participant[4].
The new NLP qualification, the 10970NAT Graduate Certificate in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, is taught based entirely on the New Code NLP.
By Chris Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE.
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Notes:
[1] This excerpt is from an interview conducted by Jules and Chris Collingwood in 1996 published in full here.
[2] Perceptual filters are those ideas or beliefs an individual carries, based on past learning and experience, that organise, and in some cases distort, what is perceived in a given context. Our perceptual filters are an imposition that we project onto the world. For example if you believe that politicians are inherently dishonest, then this would bias your perception of politicians and the meaning you would attribute to their presentations. A liberal and a conservative voter in the US will perceive and filter a speech by the President of the United States in different ways from each other, based on their political leanings.
[3] Read DeLozier and Grinder’s Turtles all the Way Down; Prerequisites to Personal Genius and Bateson’s Mind and Nature; a Necessary Unity, for rich explanations of the concept of multiple descriptions, referred to as ‘Double description’ by Bateson.
[4] Read more about New Code NLP by referring to Turtles All the Way Down; Prerequisites to Personal Genius by Judith Delozier and John Grinder and Whispering in the Wind by Carmen Bostic St Clair and John Grinder.
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