I had a bit of a diatribe today about the word, "to read".

What does that mean?

To stutter out a string of letter pahonetically and somehow understand that this string of letters is supposed to mean "cat"?

No. I don't know what that is, but that's not reading.

Alright, so it's called NLP - Neuro Linguistic Programming. What that means is that you can program your neurology with language, the language being the software for the neurology, and the neurology being the hardware that runs the software.

And here comes Bill Gates with a fabulous quote that really does sum up all of NLP in a nutshell.

What is the difference between a poem and a hypnotic induction? I don't think there is one. Both should take charge of the readers/listeners/subjects internal representations and take them wherever the poet or hypnotist wants to take them. Here is an example of a relaxation induction, rendered as a hypnotic poem, and suitably entitled, "Relax!"

The Map Is Not The Territory ... in this much quoted NLP basic statement lies not just a world of possibilities, but as many worlds of possibilities and potential as there are people who are making maps of the territory.

Here is a NLP diagram illustrating the basic principle of map and territory (also known as the "NLP Head"), internal representations, intrapersonal reality and how it comes to be that if we change someone's internal representations, we change their world.

One - if not actually, THE! - master key to understanding how communication works and how we can use language, state, touch, movement and energy to "influence" what a person thinks and how they feel is to really understand what internal representations are and how they work.

In fact, the contribution Count Alfred Korzybski made when he wrote Science & Sanity and for the first time in human recorded history, laid out how reality, internal representations and language hang together in a "geared mechanism" can simply NOT be underestimated.

NLP language plus a little EmoTrance energy work make for an interesting combination. Here is an article from 2008 on taking apart a sentence about depression, and doing a bit of neuro linguistic programming with it, looking at the presuppositions, and FEELING the energy effects. Cool stuff!

That's an interesting question. The first answer I have to that is that phonological ambiguities are fun and they always make me chuckle inside. Which is not something that one might easily say about a lot of other NLP patterns.

So I guess I better explain what a phonological ambiguity is for the newbies and then we can go on to wonder what they're good for, apart from keeping Silvia amused.

What is the shortest distance between two points? It is held to be a direct line but that's NOT the whole NLP metaphor story ... Here we have one of those cases where real reality isn't like modelled reality.

Let me show you a picture to explain.

Here is an example of a simple NLP story which is of course also a metaphor, and an NLP training story about timeline orientation - in time vs through time. With a touch of conversational NLP and hypnosis changework. See if you can track all the patterns in the story, and in the way this NLP story is told. Good luck!

Once in a while, I have a little outburst with my NLP hat on. I do love it when that happens! NLP is SUCH fun, and simple things like the NLP reframe can be taken to SUCH extremes - and then it's even more fun. Now, to business. There is something more scary than public speaking. And that's ... singing in public!

Apart from basic NLP reframing, there are another happy dozen NLP patterns employed in this short sequence. See if you can spot them all - and if not, just lay back and enjoy!

How do you build new NLP patterns?

The simple answer is by modeling a strategy of some kind, and create a basic NLP model. Then you test it, refine it, write it up in a step-by-step fashion and so the model becomes a pattern.

Many people think that the first step to NLP modeling is ...

NLP Modeling is one thing - where you take a strategy that works in a particular context and you duplicate the strategy so that when you run it, you get the same beneficial outcomes as the original upon whom the model was based. A simple example of straight NLP modelling can be found here.

However, NLP modeling becomes much more fun and much more multi-dimensional when we extract a pattern and map it across to a completely different situation, environment or modality.

Here is an example of mapping across a strategy from bug fixing a piece of software to bug fixing your mind!

NLP modeling is a fine thing.

Once you get your head around how it works, there are opportunities for modelling excellence everywhere.

There are strategies and patterns that people do which are blatantly so much successful that what you might be using yourself that you take one look at that and say, "Yes! That's brilliant! I'm going to do exactly what he's doing - it's working, and I want it to work for me, as well!"

One such NLP modelling derived models is the above "Alex Model". It is truly brilliant, and brilliantly useful in 1001 situations us modern folk find ourselves in on a regular basis.

I just had a lovely NLP language/internal representations experience on a German translators forum. The poor guys there were tearing their hair out how to translate this sentence: "As the credit crisis deepens and morphs into uncharted waters, a little perspective is necessary on what it is costing, in both dollars and human terms."

This question arrived just now: What are the limitations of NLP?

I shall have a go in good faith to discuss "the limitations of NLP".

This morning, I got a contact form which went something like this.

Help! My boyfriend attended an NLP seminar recently and ever since then, he's become creepy and I don't know if I like him anymore.

What can I do???

The word "metaphor" derives from "amphora," an old system of carrying goods on ships much like containers are today.

These clay made, vase shaped containers all looked the same, and they were the same size, allowing for standardised handling, transportation and storage - but their contents could be quite literally, anything at all.

I've just written a review for the Harry Potter movie Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince.

My biggest complaint is that the colours are dark and dingy, and there isn't enough LIGHT in this movie - practically as well as metaphorically.

Every NLP practitioner KNOWS from day 1 of their NLP training that ...

People often ask me what the "most powerful NLP language pattern" is.

The other day I really thought, "Perhaps it's not the language we use, but the language we choose not to use!" and ended up with thought - could it be true that THE most powerful NLP language pattern is actually, SILENCE?"

"Physiology Is The Royal Road Into State" - that's a beloved NLPers saying and what it means, if you don't know, is that you can create state (how you feel/think/experience) by putting your physiology aka your body into certain positions.

Want to have some real good NLP fun with a neat state and physiology game ...?

Something I've noticed a lot on this year's The Apprentice TV Show was and is that the candidates are constantly being hoisted by their own petards - or in other words, their own words are being used as the most devastating weapons against them. The way they are describing themselves is literally delivering the ammunition into the hands of those who want to shoot them down - and the way to avoid that is one of the most basic of all NLP 101s.

I've observed over the years how people get accused of having a bad attitude, or the wrong attitude and how that gets them into trouble in all sorts of ways.

But what is that? What is an attitude? How do you do that?

I've been using the term attitude in perhaps slightly different way recently.

This is an interesting story of a short but very powerful NLP intervention which showcases the understanding of presuppositions and language, internal representations and their relationship to words and symbols used to describe them.

It starts with a Catholic nun discovering during an EmoTrance exercise that she had confused the Eucharist with eating chocolate.

People are always asking me what they can do to be a better NLP style hypnotist, which includes how to do better self hypnosis as well as conversational hypnosis, and what is known as covert hypnosis. Here are my top ten tips how to be a better NLP hypnotist.

In my opinion, the problem with NLP and metaphor is that NLP attracts and is marketed to people who are far more at home with lists, facts and conscious-style logic than those who have a natural leaning towards the far more fluid, information rich and interactive form of data flow that is metaphor.

Metaphor can't be learned by studying examples of metaphor, or by learning lists of metaphorical objects and occurrences by heart; metaphor can't be "drilled" (eeouwh! that hurts, so bad ...) and most of all, metaphor can NEVER be understood by dissecting language into its component pieces.

So the main method by which NLP analyses strategies and language is essentially entirely unsuitable for teaching or even understanding the organic processes of metaphor. What is to be done?

Amazing - I had a personal experience a few days ago of creating an event which I knew at the time would CHANGE a lot of things. As I walked away from this event I noticed that a whole group of past events were changing color as I was walking - the memories were turning to SEPIA!

Now for something really useful, extremely neat and quite delightful in every way - the hypno-sleep spiral.

This is a very, very cool pattern to help someone get to sleep at night by entering into consecutively deeper and deeper trance states, ending up with hypno-sleep that turns into natural sleep by itself; but there's a lot more to this self hypnosis pattern than meets the eyes.

When you tell people to "practice NLP" or anything, for that matter (and I tell people this often!), I wonder what internal representations they are making, or what they think I mean by "practice".

What do you think that word means?

As we are working our way through the various new websites, I came across an article containing a really interesting version of an old favourite NLP TimeLine pattern - The Guardian Angel.

I've been watching a TV program about astrophysics and I am being driven INSANE by their appalling misuse of metaphor.

Here is an example of "mad metaphor in science" - see if you get this ...