John Grinder On The New Code NLP
John Grinder Discusses New Code NLP and it's distinctions
This is a transcription of a talk by John Grinder on New Code NLP
In the Classic Code, the typical practitioner, focusing on their practice to come to mastery will, typically, when working besides a client who wishes to make a change, literally will ask that person at the conscious level, “What would you prefer to do? What new behaviors, or how would you like to change the quality of your experience?” All of these questions are answerable at the conscious level.
In the actual practice by Bandler and myself, what we did if we used those interrogatories, was to recognize that by asking those questions to the conscious mind, it would illicit certain kinds of responses typically nonverbalizations and big words that would take some time to specify.
We would rarely use specification patterns in that particular niche. What we did was recognize that when consciously asking someone to respond to a complex question like, “How would you prefer to be different in this context…?” it would provoke a non-verbal response. The non-verbal response would have a non verbal component within it. So, there would be parts of the non -verbal response which one would recognize by the quality of the movement and by the other characteristics which would be identifiable to someone who is trained in hypnosis as coming directly from the unconscious.
So the distinction here is in the non-verbal response to a question: Can you recognize which part of the non-verbal’s are direct signals from the unconscious, which declares its opinion about the answers being given consciously, and what parts are not?
To ask such a question incurs a major responsibility in the part of the practitioner to be able to make this sorting and distinction between the messages of the unconscious and simply the accompanying non-verbal actions, also, to use that calibration skill to know whether the conscious answer to the question by the client is in fact in agreement with the unconscious opinion. If in fact that these two calibrations are not coordinated or not aligned then the immediate requirement of the practitioner in this case would be to achieve some manipulation of an alignment of those two, prior to actually making the intervention.
Resistance is the name of what people have learned to call in the traditional change work for the failure to recognize these unconscious signals or the failure to be able to create the alignment necessary to move forward. In a contest of the will between conscious and unconscious, I know where I’ll put my bets and certain that you do as well.
In order to lower the threshold and to simplify the ability of a practitioner to appreciate what the unconscious prefers instead of choices that are being created, in the New Code, we simply reassigned the responsibility to the unconscious… and we do this by changing the question from a question about behavior or resource to a question about state. That’s the leverage point of the New Code, it is state as opposed to behavior, and there are many reasons for this.
Largely, the way we work the system in the New Code is simply to use some activity, some game which has no inherent content. Which through the activation of both the hemispheres simultaneously and all input channels, all expressive output channels, all representational systems, and a parallel process typical of these activities there are two tasks being carried out at the same time. The design which can be quite intricate or quite simple, depending on your preferences has as its consequence the generation of a high performance state.
Such high performance states are then connected intimately with the images and the sounds of the context of application that the person wishes to introduce change into. Notice that in this method at the end of the intervention with the practitioner, the client knows directly by the sensing in all three major representational systems; kinesthetic, visual and auditory, that something of importance has shifted… Their perception of the context has shifted towards something where if they were to be asked - which we don’t - they would describe themselves, for example, as feeling far more confident than they originally felt, that they feel as if they were dominating a context where previously they felt dominated by the context.
Notice that in the New Code we never discuss the problem. The sound bite for New Code is; the problem is not the problem but the problem is the state which the client approaches the context where the problem resides or is situated.
At the end of this intervention, the client knows something has shifted and sensing direct is quite profound. They don’t know typically what new behavior specifically they’ll engage in when they reach the context. By assigning the responsibility for the selection of new behaviors of resources to the unconscious, and letting this new behavior be triggered only by actually entering into the context of application, subsequent to the practitioner’s intervention, the client goes into what we call a “Know Nothing State” which we use for purposes of NLP modeling.
The typical and quite startling result is that the client at the end of the intervention walks away knowing something has happened but not being conscious about what precisely and how they will be different. When in the real world they go into that context or any context that shares a significant number of visual and auditory stimuli, the ones that defines the context without provisions initially, there is a triggering of the high performance state once again. The shifts physiologically are detectable and no conscious attention is required by the client for this to occur. This is just taken care of at the unconscious level by the intervention previously by the practitioner. At this point, the client senses a shift in their stay into this high performance state and now what follows from this particular high performance state is a series of new behaviors which contain resources which are ideally situated with respect to addressing the details in the nuances of the actual context as they find it.
Here’s another distinction, notice that if as a client I consciously select the resources and I consciously select the new behaviors, I’m going to rehearse those behaviors and activate those resources as part of the intervention. When I do this, I’m setting up by that rehearsal, a discrepancy between the context as envisioned by me here and what I will actually find when I get to the context in the real world.
By setting up these new behaviors and resources ahead of time and especially consciously, I’m rehearsing a set of filters and installing filters, such that when I arrive in the actual context, those filters will allow past only to those parts of the actual context which are congruent with the filters which have been installed.
Therefore I’m quite likely to miss important aspects of the actual context because there will always be discrepancy between the imagined rehearsed context projected for the purposes of the intervention and the actual context when you arrive.
So, I am in a sense installing filters which we move central information from my input through this filtering if I use the Classic Code approach, so there’s always that discrepancy between the rehearsed behavior and the behavior most appropriate.
In the New Code, since no behavior is ever explicated and there’s simply a shift into the high performance state, at a point without the pre-filters which comes from the Classic Code, the New Code technique stimulates the activation of the high performance state, the high performance state now without any preset filters now simply goes into a mode of producing the appropriate sets of responses which will allow the person to succeed given their intentions in this context.
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