I recently heard a talk about passion and mission. The talk coupled the two concepts in a way that I had not considered before.
Passion makes what you are doing worthwhile. Passion is sustained with a connection to a mission. You need passion to sustain yourself through tough times (as well as good times).
A mission directs the passion to accomplish something; mission puts passion into action. The mission, however, is given life by an achievable outcome.
The outcome is given life through action steps.
Action steps create the process by which achievement is made.
Consider this. You can have a mission without passion. You can have a goal or outcome without a mission. You can have an outcome without action steps.
The four concepts work together to create a solid ideal for success at the highest level.
For me, passion, mission and action start with an Outcome. Without a clear outcome, the other positions are like a ship without a rudder.
So what is passion? Burning desire. It is an intense, lively, eager interest in or admiration for something or someone. It is a compelling emotion or desire for something. It generally implies a deeper or greater emotion. We can have passionate relationships, a passion for an activity, a cause or idea. Passion is like the gasoline or electricity that action and mission runs on. There is no mention of mission here. Passion is simply a feeling.
Mission is now often associated with the term “mission statement.” A mission statement is a statement of purpose. Organizations use mission statements to define what they are about. In a way a mission statement is about the values that an organization or person embraces or let’s say, the values of said is the fabric by which a mission is made. A mission can be an important assignment or the act of sending or state of being sent. For centuries, the word mission has been used in reference to sending someone out with an end in mind, negotiations, religious mission, military mission. Notice, no mention of passion.
An achievable outcome or in NLP, a well-formed outcome, is the direction or focus of the passion and the mission. An outcome is what we are going to see happen, hear and feel when we have achieved our goal or completed the mission. Passion is the glue that holds the outcome together in the process of achieving it. The mission is the overall statement of operation. It is the outcome or result that gives us the means of evaluation of whether we have accomplished it. An outcome can represent a final product or experience or consequence. In NLP it is the end in mind. Without a well formed outcome, mission may not be specific enough. An outcome frame can be a goal or experience. Goals are tangible and measurable. How do you measure an experience? How do you know you are loved? How do you know when communication happens? How do you know when you are being compassionate? These are all experiences that can be framed the outcome questions.
Critical Outcome questions:
What do you want? :States your end result in positive or affirmative language
What will that do for you? Connects your outcome to a greater value or purpose. Outcome or change for what purpose?
What will you see, hear and feel when you get what you want? :You have 3 primary senses. A change or goal must be in all three for them to be permanent. Simply using visualization will not insure that your goal is ecological or real.
Is it self-initiated and maintained? You can control your behavior, actions, feelings. An outcome or goal that involves someone else changing is not well-formed and usually difficult.
Is it realistic? What contexts do you want it in? Appropriate, achievable chunk size. If the goal or outcome is big. Chunk it down into smaller goals. What specific situations do you want this?
What stops you? Chances are this is something inside of you. Look to the inside. It is easier to change than something outside of you. Is it a behavior, belief, attitude, self-talk?
What is your first step? The very next step you can take in the direction to achieve your outcome.
The final concept is the action step. Outcomes do not happen by magic. (This is called ‘magical thinking’) Some action will be necessary to achieve you outcome. I generally have people create 3 steps for the outcome. More may be needed but 3 will get most outcomes underway. Action steps for selling after your outcome frame might be: 1. Learn your product and who buys it; 2. Develop list of prospective client; 3. Make calls and set appointments. You can divide these steps into smaller steps, etc.
So remember: the Outcome process is the hinge pin that holds passion, mission and action in place. Without a clear outcome, mission, passion and action have no direction and could even be a waste of time and energy. It is the outcome frame that creates direction, sharpens focus, makes it easier to communicate your mission and outcome to others, can include experience as well as goals.
I see many people in my coaching practice who are stuck because they simply do not have a clear outcome. They know what to do, they have the passion, they have the mission. No direction. One woman in my Level 1 right now does an outcome for each day. In one week, she has changed her life in the most positively miraculous way.
A couple of young architects quadrupled their business by do an outcome process before every proposal, every presentation.
Start with the end in mind. Practice on little things like a great lunch with someone or a great presentation. Teaching your mind to run the outcome frame on automatic will create more of what you want in ways you didn’t dream possible until now.
In closing, Amy Wrzesniewski, PhD, professor of management and organizational behavior at New York University examined how people whose jobs are typically "stigmatized" (low-level, menial positions) make meaning of their work.
People, she said, experience their work differently. Some see what they do for a living as just a job, others view it as a career and the rest think of it as a calling. Her research found that people who saw their job as a calling--one-third of the respondents--worked more hours, missed less work and reported higher life satisfaction than others doing similar work.
"You'd think that those who reported higher satisfaction," she said, "would have jobs associated with doing more interesting work. But when we looked closer, this was not so. These were all administrative assistants working in the same organization....It made you think: How can people doing the same work, sitting next to each other in the same organization, think so differently about their jobs?"
Dr. Wrzesniewski did a study of 300 hospital workers in Massachusetts. She found that when asked about what they did, the workers, who all took out trash, fell into three categories: a job, a career, a calling.
Jobs: no training, no control, no freedom, I cannot wait for the weekend, anyone can do
Career: I am on the way up; this is just a stepping-stone, I cannot wait for the weekend
Callings: Lots of training and expertise, lots of control and freedom, this is my mission in life; made it a calling, knew the names of the patients, made up parts of the job like changing pictures in the room. Those who saw their job as a calling, "talked about it in glowing terms, they liked what they did and described it as needing a lot of skill. They not only talked about cleaning public areas, but also about cleaning in such a way as to allow more effective running of their units...making it as smooth as possible for patients."
Those who saw their job as just a job, on their other hand, saw their work as being simple and involving no skills.
Her conclusion: People can actively shape the meaning of their work by "job crafting--devising more creative ways to do the work."
How would your passion, mission, outcomes and actions change if you looked at what you did as a CALLING?
Monday, September 26, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Research in NLP
This is Steve Andreas' most recent blog! Excellent
Research in NLP by Steve Andreas
I am often asked whether there is any “hard science” academic research that supports NLP. There is some good news, and some bad news.
First the bad news…
(If you don’t like bad news, feel free to skip or skim this section.)
Most of the research directly on NLP concepts was done in the 1980s and 1990s; little or no research has been done directly on NLP in the last decade or so. The vast majority of studies that were done earlier addressed the concept of a primary representational system (PRS) — that people are primarily visual, auditory, or kinesthetic — or the impact of matching sensory predicates on rapport.
There’s a problem with this. Bandler and Grinder had introduced the idea of a PRS primarily as a teaching tool in the 1970s, to direct students’ attention to people’s sensory predicates and eye accessing. Soon after that, they pointed out that the idea of a PRS was a deliberate and gross oversimplification, only somewhat true in a particular problem context. Despite this, the bulk of research, supposedly “on NLP” at that time was done in an attempt to verify or disconfirm this concept.
As those of you with significant NLP Training will already know, whether or not people have a PRS is not in any way central to the field of NLP. We didn’t even mention it in our book Heart of the Mind (1989) introducing people to the field, because we didn’t consider it important or useful. PRS doesn’t really have anything to do with the effectiveness of the many methods that we have come to rely on in NLP to get results for people wanting change in their lives. When I sit down with someone to do a session, I can’t recall ever asking myself, “What is this person’s PRS?” It’s just not a useful question to ask.
t the same time, it is often useful to notice what sensory channel the client is using at the moment, or what sensory channel underlies the “problem.” For example it can be useful to notice that someone’s unpleasant feelings result from a critical inner voice, or to notice that many large and close movies of things to do leads to feeling overwhelmed.
Investigating Primary Representation System is a bit like Nasrudin looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp “because the light is better here,” even though he lost them somewhere else. PRS was perceived to be an “easy” thing to study, but the results of those studies don’t tell us anything about the field of NLP.
It’s also worth noting that the studies themselves were often full of research errors. The questionnaires used in an attempt to assess PRS often had confusing self-report questions like, “Do you see yourself as a feeling person,” or “Do you feel you are an auditory person?” As that kind of question clearly reveals, most experimenters were not trained in NLP, did not understand what they were researching, and did not use anyone trained in NLP as a consultant to review their experimental protocols. As a result, there was no control of the language used in the studies, nor control of nonverbal confounding variables such as gestures or voice tone.
For instance, when matching a subject’s visual predicate with a sentence like, “I see what you mean,” a higher-pitched voice, looking up, or a pointing gesture in the upper visual field will be congruent with visual processing, and be more likely to result in rapport. However, a lower-pitched voice, looking down, or a palm-up gesture in the lower visual field will be incongruent, and be less likely to lead to rapport. (Visual processing is typically accompanied by a high voice tone, looking up, and pointing gestures, while kinesthetic processing is often accompanied by a lower voice tone, looking down, and palm-up gesturing.)
As a result of these kinds of mistakes, most of the research was very poor quality. Not surprisingly, there is very little direct academic experimental support for NLP. A research committee working for the United States National Research Council in 1988 found little if any evidence to support NLP’s assumptions or to indicate that it was effective as a strategy for social influence. “It [NLP] assumes that by tracking another’s eye movements and language, an NLP trainer can shape the person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. There is no scientific support for these assumptions.”
To summarize, the research that has been done was on the wrong questions, by people who did not understand what they were trying to measure, ignoring linguistic and behavioral confounding variables, so of course the results were negative or inconclusive.
Although researching NLP is definitely doable, effective research in the field of NLP is a challenge for a number of reasons:
Psychological research costs quite a lot of money, which most NLPers do not have. Furthermore, if research is not done in a recognized academic institution, it is usually ignored, even if the double-blind controls and protocols are impeccable.
NLP’s focus on sensory process parameters makes it extremely hard to communicate with academics and mental health professionals, because it is so different from the typical psychiatric focus on content. For instance, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a recognized therapy that is most similar to NLP (and which has the strongest experimental support) focuses entirely on the content of internal auditory dialogue — the words that people say to themselves. CBT ignores the volume of the internal voice, its location in personal space, its direction, its tonality, and tempo, etc. Usually changing these process parameters has a much greater impact on experience than changing the content, and it is much easier. This is something that I have explored in great detail in my e-book Help With Negative Self-talk.
Advocating rigorous research has not been easy or without resistance from within the field itself.
The original developers, and a number of others in the field — some of them widely respected — have explicitly said that NLP is inherently unverifiable by scientific research. One widely regarded leader in the field has even said that since NLP is about subjective experience, it is inherently untestable.
This ignores the fact that dreams — the most subjective experiences that most of us will ever have — have been researched scientifically for decades. A variety of new methods of brain scanning make it possible to do all sorts of experimental work on internal mental events, some of which are not even subjective experiences! For instance, brain scans have been used to detect when a decision is about to be made by a subject seven seconds before the subject becomes aware that they have made a decision.
The lack of unified support for securing research grants within the field of NLP has made it awkward to approach potential researchers. Even more of a problem in my view, many who “do NLP” have combined NLP with reflexology, remote viewing, crystal healing, aromatherapy, aura reading, and a host of other such new age methods. Most of these do not make specific claims that would be testable by the scientific method; associating NLP with them makes NLP appear to be only another get-rich-quick scam or even a cult.
Now for the good news…
All NLP processes include specific testable outcomes, detailed systematic protocols for different kinds of problems, and clear operational tests in sensory-based experience to determine when a client has reached their outcomes. In addition, many NLP processes can be completed in a single session of an hour or less. Because of this, NLP would be much easier to research than most therapies which are much less structured and usually take place during many sessions over a period of weeks or months. Scientific research needs to be done in order to confirm (or disconfirm) the various processes and understandings that are typically included in the term “NLP.”
A diverse group of dedicated NLP-trained people have joined together in establishing the NLP Research and Recognition Project in an effort to propose, develop, and support relevant research by academic institutions, with the goal of doing high-quality research that actually tests NLP principles and methods. This could do a great deal to establish the legitimacy of NLP methods, as well as advance the practice of psychotherapy generally. The director of the project, Frank Bourke, a clinical psychologist with a strong research background, has been a tireless advocate, working with those of us in the NLP community plus those in government organizations and universities, in efforts to establish studies. So far these efforts have come quite close to having funding for large scale studies several times. This is really quite a testament to Frank’s diligence and persistence, because it is not an easy thing to get through all the levels of “hoops” to gain this approval.
Although little or no research is currently being done directly on NLP processes, there is quite a lot of academic research that supports NLP indirectly. NLP methods and principles are being “rediscovered” in bits and pieces in a wide variety of research studies. Following are a few examples.
Treating PTSD and trauma using dissociation.
Sufferers who were asked to write about their traumatic memories in “third person” as if they were happening to someone else (“He was hit by a car and thrown 60 feet into a roadside ditch.”) recovered more quickly than a control group. Writing in third person requires viewing these events at a distance, as if they were happening to someone else, a way of creating dissociation.
In parallel research, Ayduk and Kross contrast two alternative ways of working through highly emotional experiences. A self-immersed perspective is one in which we try to remember the experience at the same time that we try to analyze it — for example, when we say to ourselves, ‘Why did that prejudiced comment get to me so much?’ By contrast, a self-distanced perspective analyzes the same experience as if you yourself were a third-party observer, a kind of fly on the wall — ‘Why did that prejudiced comment get to him so much?’ In both cases, you are trying to understand the emotions, but when you do this in the first person, the pull of the emotion can overwhelm understanding.
It seems amazing that a small change in the way one analyzes a painful experience (using s/he as opposed to I) can lead to such dramatic results, but the research on this is solid and clear. In one study, people who were prompted to recall a negative experience from a self-distanced perspective (why did s/he feel this way?) in the lab felt less distressed about the experience one week later compared to those who recalled a similarly negative experience from a self-immersed perspective (why did I feel this way?). In other studies, people who spontaneously self-distance have been shown to ruminate less about negative experiences and are less likely to be hostile when disagreements come up.
Timelines.
In research by Prof. Dov Shmotkin of Tel Aviv University Department of Psychology in Israel, “We discovered that overcoming trauma was related to how people organized the memory of their trauma on the larger time continuum of their life course.” In a study of Holocaust survivors, Prof. Shmotkin separated these survivors into those who considered the “Holocaust as past” and those who conceived of the “Holocaust as present.” Those in the ‘Holocaust as past” category were able to draw an effective line between the present day and the past trauma, thus allowing themselves to move forward. Those in the “Holocaust as present” category considered their traumatic experience as still existing, which indicated a difficulty in containing the trauma within a specific time limit.
Motivation, specific outcomes and behavioral change.
Recently the BPS Research Digest (well worth a free subscription) summarized a couple of recent studies done on changing behavior:
In rich countries, temptation is never far and many of us struggle to achieve our long-term aims of moderation, dedication and fidelity. An increasingly popular strategy for regaining control is to form so-called implementation intentions. Rather than having the vague goal to eat less or exercise more, you spell out when, where and how you will perform a given activity. For example, ‘When in the cafeteria at lunch I will buy orange juice rather than cola.’ A more specific variant is to form an ‘if-then’ plan, as in ‘If it is a Tuesday morning, then I will go for a run.’
Past research has found these plans to be successful, helping people to live more healthily.
There’s even evidence that they are particularly beneficial to those who have had their willpower compromised by brain damage or by taxing laboratory tasks. Two new studies add to this literature, one of them cautionary, the other more hopeful.
Sue Churchill and Donna Jessop studied 323 students tasked with eating more fruit and vegetables. They found that implementation intentions helped students achieve this task over a 7-day period, but only if they scored low on a measure of ‘urgency,’ as revealed by their agreement or not with statements like, ‘When I am upset, I often act without thinking.’ The researchers said this suggests implementation intentions may not be a panacea: ‘Ironically, people who possess poor self-regulatory skills insofar as they tend to act on impulse when distressed, who are arguably most in need of assistance in achieving their goals, may benefit least from behavior change interventions based on implementation intention formation.’ . . .
“Urgency” appears to be identical to “Impulsivity,” so it is not surprising that those people will have difficulty following through on a plan, even if the “when, where and how you will perform a given activity” is specified. Impulsivity can often be reduced by changing the timeline, or other interventions that expand the scope of what is attended to in the present when responding to temptation — for instance by including a representation of consequences in a client’s images of alternative choices.
. . . That’s the cautionary news. The good news comes from a study by Barbel Knauper and her colleagues who found that using mental imagery boosted the benefit of implementation intentions for students attempting to increase their fruit consumption over seven days. Rather than merely forming an if-then plan, such as ‘If I see orange juice at lunch, then I will buy it,’ they also imagined themselves performing this act, with as much sensory detail as possible. A promising result, and the researchers expressed their surprise that no-one had thought to investigate the combination of these two strategies before.
This result comes as no surprise to anyone with even basic training in NLP. Imagining “themselves performing this act, with as much sensory detail as possible” has been a standard and essential part of rehearsing or “future-pacing” any behavioral change. And if done well, an “impulsive” person will often “impulsively” choose what has been rehearsed. (See my blog post, Programming yourself now to remember later.) This study does not report any checking for objecting parts and satisfying them before a final future-pace, so presumably their results would have been even stronger if they had done that.
Nonverbal rapport and empathy.
Research on “mirror neurons” has established a neurological basis for nonverbal mirroring of gestures and movements, the foundation for the nonverbal rapport that has been a key feature of NLP trainings since the 1970s, as well as for compassion, and “stepping into someone else’s shoes.” Recent research in this area distinguishes between neurons that only fire when someone moves accidentally, or with deliberate intent, showing that the perception of intent (which has also been a major intervention in NLP for over 30 years) has an inherent neurological basis.
Negative reframing.
Susan Clancy’s research on people who had experienced childhood sexual abuse finds that surprisingly, the vast majority of them were not traumatized by it, and that of those who were, some were not traumatized at the time, but only years later when it was reframed as a horrible experience as a result of listening to the opinions of others who presupposed that it would have life-long harmful effects. So some of what is called PTSD is not an echo of the experience itself, but a result of evaluating the experience after the fact — sometimes years later.
Synesthesias.
John Bargh’s research focuses on “unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments.” In one example, interviewers asked interviewees to hold a cup while they asked them questions. The only difference between the experimental and control groups was that the cup held either warm coffee or a cold drink. Those holding the warm coffee expressed more positive responses than those holding the cold drink. These experiments involve synesthesias — crossover effects between different sensory modalities — in this case transforming the perception of physical warmth into interpersonal warmth. Attention to synesthesias has long been a staple of NLP training — and it is also strong support for nonverbal unconscious factors in rapport, responsiveness, and change.
Self-control and submodalities (the smaller parameters in each of the five sensory modalities).
The ability of small children to exert self-control when presented with marshmallows (If they were successful in delaying, they got two marshmallows instead of one) correlated with success later in life (age 32). When the children were asked how they were able to delay, they said that either they deliberately distracted their attention from temptation by looking somewhere else, or doing something else. Some pretended that the real marshmallow was only a flat picture of a marshmallow — an explicit submodality shift that is used in a number of NLP patterns.
Summary
This is only a very small sampling of current research studies that support various aspects of NLP practice and methodology, and more appear each week. There is a lot of research that supports NLP principles, but it is not identified as such. If all these studies were collected into a review article, it would provide quite impressive support. Meanwhile, a few of us continue to explore the boundaries of what we already know and can do.
Research in NLP by Steve Andreas
I am often asked whether there is any “hard science” academic research that supports NLP. There is some good news, and some bad news.
First the bad news…
(If you don’t like bad news, feel free to skip or skim this section.)
Most of the research directly on NLP concepts was done in the 1980s and 1990s; little or no research has been done directly on NLP in the last decade or so. The vast majority of studies that were done earlier addressed the concept of a primary representational system (PRS) — that people are primarily visual, auditory, or kinesthetic — or the impact of matching sensory predicates on rapport.
There’s a problem with this. Bandler and Grinder had introduced the idea of a PRS primarily as a teaching tool in the 1970s, to direct students’ attention to people’s sensory predicates and eye accessing. Soon after that, they pointed out that the idea of a PRS was a deliberate and gross oversimplification, only somewhat true in a particular problem context. Despite this, the bulk of research, supposedly “on NLP” at that time was done in an attempt to verify or disconfirm this concept.
As those of you with significant NLP Training will already know, whether or not people have a PRS is not in any way central to the field of NLP. We didn’t even mention it in our book Heart of the Mind (1989) introducing people to the field, because we didn’t consider it important or useful. PRS doesn’t really have anything to do with the effectiveness of the many methods that we have come to rely on in NLP to get results for people wanting change in their lives. When I sit down with someone to do a session, I can’t recall ever asking myself, “What is this person’s PRS?” It’s just not a useful question to ask.
t the same time, it is often useful to notice what sensory channel the client is using at the moment, or what sensory channel underlies the “problem.” For example it can be useful to notice that someone’s unpleasant feelings result from a critical inner voice, or to notice that many large and close movies of things to do leads to feeling overwhelmed.
Investigating Primary Representation System is a bit like Nasrudin looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp “because the light is better here,” even though he lost them somewhere else. PRS was perceived to be an “easy” thing to study, but the results of those studies don’t tell us anything about the field of NLP.
It’s also worth noting that the studies themselves were often full of research errors. The questionnaires used in an attempt to assess PRS often had confusing self-report questions like, “Do you see yourself as a feeling person,” or “Do you feel you are an auditory person?” As that kind of question clearly reveals, most experimenters were not trained in NLP, did not understand what they were researching, and did not use anyone trained in NLP as a consultant to review their experimental protocols. As a result, there was no control of the language used in the studies, nor control of nonverbal confounding variables such as gestures or voice tone.
For instance, when matching a subject’s visual predicate with a sentence like, “I see what you mean,” a higher-pitched voice, looking up, or a pointing gesture in the upper visual field will be congruent with visual processing, and be more likely to result in rapport. However, a lower-pitched voice, looking down, or a palm-up gesture in the lower visual field will be incongruent, and be less likely to lead to rapport. (Visual processing is typically accompanied by a high voice tone, looking up, and pointing gestures, while kinesthetic processing is often accompanied by a lower voice tone, looking down, and palm-up gesturing.)
As a result of these kinds of mistakes, most of the research was very poor quality. Not surprisingly, there is very little direct academic experimental support for NLP. A research committee working for the United States National Research Council in 1988 found little if any evidence to support NLP’s assumptions or to indicate that it was effective as a strategy for social influence. “It [NLP] assumes that by tracking another’s eye movements and language, an NLP trainer can shape the person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. There is no scientific support for these assumptions.”
To summarize, the research that has been done was on the wrong questions, by people who did not understand what they were trying to measure, ignoring linguistic and behavioral confounding variables, so of course the results were negative or inconclusive.
Although researching NLP is definitely doable, effective research in the field of NLP is a challenge for a number of reasons:
Psychological research costs quite a lot of money, which most NLPers do not have. Furthermore, if research is not done in a recognized academic institution, it is usually ignored, even if the double-blind controls and protocols are impeccable.
NLP’s focus on sensory process parameters makes it extremely hard to communicate with academics and mental health professionals, because it is so different from the typical psychiatric focus on content. For instance, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a recognized therapy that is most similar to NLP (and which has the strongest experimental support) focuses entirely on the content of internal auditory dialogue — the words that people say to themselves. CBT ignores the volume of the internal voice, its location in personal space, its direction, its tonality, and tempo, etc. Usually changing these process parameters has a much greater impact on experience than changing the content, and it is much easier. This is something that I have explored in great detail in my e-book Help With Negative Self-talk.
Advocating rigorous research has not been easy or without resistance from within the field itself.
The original developers, and a number of others in the field — some of them widely respected — have explicitly said that NLP is inherently unverifiable by scientific research. One widely regarded leader in the field has even said that since NLP is about subjective experience, it is inherently untestable.
This ignores the fact that dreams — the most subjective experiences that most of us will ever have — have been researched scientifically for decades. A variety of new methods of brain scanning make it possible to do all sorts of experimental work on internal mental events, some of which are not even subjective experiences! For instance, brain scans have been used to detect when a decision is about to be made by a subject seven seconds before the subject becomes aware that they have made a decision.
The lack of unified support for securing research grants within the field of NLP has made it awkward to approach potential researchers. Even more of a problem in my view, many who “do NLP” have combined NLP with reflexology, remote viewing, crystal healing, aromatherapy, aura reading, and a host of other such new age methods. Most of these do not make specific claims that would be testable by the scientific method; associating NLP with them makes NLP appear to be only another get-rich-quick scam or even a cult.
Now for the good news…
All NLP processes include specific testable outcomes, detailed systematic protocols for different kinds of problems, and clear operational tests in sensory-based experience to determine when a client has reached their outcomes. In addition, many NLP processes can be completed in a single session of an hour or less. Because of this, NLP would be much easier to research than most therapies which are much less structured and usually take place during many sessions over a period of weeks or months. Scientific research needs to be done in order to confirm (or disconfirm) the various processes and understandings that are typically included in the term “NLP.”
A diverse group of dedicated NLP-trained people have joined together in establishing the NLP Research and Recognition Project in an effort to propose, develop, and support relevant research by academic institutions, with the goal of doing high-quality research that actually tests NLP principles and methods. This could do a great deal to establish the legitimacy of NLP methods, as well as advance the practice of psychotherapy generally. The director of the project, Frank Bourke, a clinical psychologist with a strong research background, has been a tireless advocate, working with those of us in the NLP community plus those in government organizations and universities, in efforts to establish studies. So far these efforts have come quite close to having funding for large scale studies several times. This is really quite a testament to Frank’s diligence and persistence, because it is not an easy thing to get through all the levels of “hoops” to gain this approval.
Although little or no research is currently being done directly on NLP processes, there is quite a lot of academic research that supports NLP indirectly. NLP methods and principles are being “rediscovered” in bits and pieces in a wide variety of research studies. Following are a few examples.
Treating PTSD and trauma using dissociation.
Sufferers who were asked to write about their traumatic memories in “third person” as if they were happening to someone else (“He was hit by a car and thrown 60 feet into a roadside ditch.”) recovered more quickly than a control group. Writing in third person requires viewing these events at a distance, as if they were happening to someone else, a way of creating dissociation.
In parallel research, Ayduk and Kross contrast two alternative ways of working through highly emotional experiences. A self-immersed perspective is one in which we try to remember the experience at the same time that we try to analyze it — for example, when we say to ourselves, ‘Why did that prejudiced comment get to me so much?’ By contrast, a self-distanced perspective analyzes the same experience as if you yourself were a third-party observer, a kind of fly on the wall — ‘Why did that prejudiced comment get to him so much?’ In both cases, you are trying to understand the emotions, but when you do this in the first person, the pull of the emotion can overwhelm understanding.
It seems amazing that a small change in the way one analyzes a painful experience (using s/he as opposed to I) can lead to such dramatic results, but the research on this is solid and clear. In one study, people who were prompted to recall a negative experience from a self-distanced perspective (why did s/he feel this way?) in the lab felt less distressed about the experience one week later compared to those who recalled a similarly negative experience from a self-immersed perspective (why did I feel this way?). In other studies, people who spontaneously self-distance have been shown to ruminate less about negative experiences and are less likely to be hostile when disagreements come up.
Timelines.
In research by Prof. Dov Shmotkin of Tel Aviv University Department of Psychology in Israel, “We discovered that overcoming trauma was related to how people organized the memory of their trauma on the larger time continuum of their life course.” In a study of Holocaust survivors, Prof. Shmotkin separated these survivors into those who considered the “Holocaust as past” and those who conceived of the “Holocaust as present.” Those in the ‘Holocaust as past” category were able to draw an effective line between the present day and the past trauma, thus allowing themselves to move forward. Those in the “Holocaust as present” category considered their traumatic experience as still existing, which indicated a difficulty in containing the trauma within a specific time limit.
Motivation, specific outcomes and behavioral change.
Recently the BPS Research Digest (well worth a free subscription) summarized a couple of recent studies done on changing behavior:
In rich countries, temptation is never far and many of us struggle to achieve our long-term aims of moderation, dedication and fidelity. An increasingly popular strategy for regaining control is to form so-called implementation intentions. Rather than having the vague goal to eat less or exercise more, you spell out when, where and how you will perform a given activity. For example, ‘When in the cafeteria at lunch I will buy orange juice rather than cola.’ A more specific variant is to form an ‘if-then’ plan, as in ‘If it is a Tuesday morning, then I will go for a run.’
Past research has found these plans to be successful, helping people to live more healthily.
There’s even evidence that they are particularly beneficial to those who have had their willpower compromised by brain damage or by taxing laboratory tasks. Two new studies add to this literature, one of them cautionary, the other more hopeful.
Sue Churchill and Donna Jessop studied 323 students tasked with eating more fruit and vegetables. They found that implementation intentions helped students achieve this task over a 7-day period, but only if they scored low on a measure of ‘urgency,’ as revealed by their agreement or not with statements like, ‘When I am upset, I often act without thinking.’ The researchers said this suggests implementation intentions may not be a panacea: ‘Ironically, people who possess poor self-regulatory skills insofar as they tend to act on impulse when distressed, who are arguably most in need of assistance in achieving their goals, may benefit least from behavior change interventions based on implementation intention formation.’ . . .
“Urgency” appears to be identical to “Impulsivity,” so it is not surprising that those people will have difficulty following through on a plan, even if the “when, where and how you will perform a given activity” is specified. Impulsivity can often be reduced by changing the timeline, or other interventions that expand the scope of what is attended to in the present when responding to temptation — for instance by including a representation of consequences in a client’s images of alternative choices.
. . . That’s the cautionary news. The good news comes from a study by Barbel Knauper and her colleagues who found that using mental imagery boosted the benefit of implementation intentions for students attempting to increase their fruit consumption over seven days. Rather than merely forming an if-then plan, such as ‘If I see orange juice at lunch, then I will buy it,’ they also imagined themselves performing this act, with as much sensory detail as possible. A promising result, and the researchers expressed their surprise that no-one had thought to investigate the combination of these two strategies before.
This result comes as no surprise to anyone with even basic training in NLP. Imagining “themselves performing this act, with as much sensory detail as possible” has been a standard and essential part of rehearsing or “future-pacing” any behavioral change. And if done well, an “impulsive” person will often “impulsively” choose what has been rehearsed. (See my blog post, Programming yourself now to remember later.) This study does not report any checking for objecting parts and satisfying them before a final future-pace, so presumably their results would have been even stronger if they had done that.
Nonverbal rapport and empathy.
Research on “mirror neurons” has established a neurological basis for nonverbal mirroring of gestures and movements, the foundation for the nonverbal rapport that has been a key feature of NLP trainings since the 1970s, as well as for compassion, and “stepping into someone else’s shoes.” Recent research in this area distinguishes between neurons that only fire when someone moves accidentally, or with deliberate intent, showing that the perception of intent (which has also been a major intervention in NLP for over 30 years) has an inherent neurological basis.
Negative reframing.
Susan Clancy’s research on people who had experienced childhood sexual abuse finds that surprisingly, the vast majority of them were not traumatized by it, and that of those who were, some were not traumatized at the time, but only years later when it was reframed as a horrible experience as a result of listening to the opinions of others who presupposed that it would have life-long harmful effects. So some of what is called PTSD is not an echo of the experience itself, but a result of evaluating the experience after the fact — sometimes years later.
Synesthesias.
John Bargh’s research focuses on “unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments.” In one example, interviewers asked interviewees to hold a cup while they asked them questions. The only difference between the experimental and control groups was that the cup held either warm coffee or a cold drink. Those holding the warm coffee expressed more positive responses than those holding the cold drink. These experiments involve synesthesias — crossover effects between different sensory modalities — in this case transforming the perception of physical warmth into interpersonal warmth. Attention to synesthesias has long been a staple of NLP training — and it is also strong support for nonverbal unconscious factors in rapport, responsiveness, and change.
Self-control and submodalities (the smaller parameters in each of the five sensory modalities).
The ability of small children to exert self-control when presented with marshmallows (If they were successful in delaying, they got two marshmallows instead of one) correlated with success later in life (age 32). When the children were asked how they were able to delay, they said that either they deliberately distracted their attention from temptation by looking somewhere else, or doing something else. Some pretended that the real marshmallow was only a flat picture of a marshmallow — an explicit submodality shift that is used in a number of NLP patterns.
Summary
This is only a very small sampling of current research studies that support various aspects of NLP practice and methodology, and more appear each week. There is a lot of research that supports NLP principles, but it is not identified as such. If all these studies were collected into a review article, it would provide quite impressive support. Meanwhile, a few of us continue to explore the boundaries of what we already know and can do.
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