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The Mother of All NLP Patterns
Are you interested in patterns that make your work more effective and elegant? Me too! NLP trainers John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorn, in one of their tape series, claim to have found the “Mother of all NLP patterns.” This is the fundamental pattern from which all of the major NLP change patterns are derived. As you might...IMAGINE NOW... a generalization like that can get a person’s mind to take notice. I know mine did! What's the pattern? First, a little background. In Neuro-Linguistic Programming Volume I, Dilts, Grinder, Bandler, and DeLozier state that three processes need to be completed in order to effectively modify one's behavior to get a particular outcome:
In the paragraph that follows these three points, Dilts et al reveal the maternal pattern Overdorff and Silverthorn described: “Resources are accessed and applied to the problematic or present state of affairs to help the individual, group, or organization move to the outcome or desired state.” That's it! The "Mother of All NLP Patterns" is to first access and anchor the negative state (present state); then add the strong resource anchors designed to help the person get his or her outcome. (It's been presupposed you've begun by eliciting a well-formed outcome.) Personally, I've found the "Mother of all Patterns" is especially useful for remembering the order in which to anchor. Picture this scene from a commercial: a little boy is sitting at a big dinner table all alone, tears streaming down his cheeks. Now, imagine a grandmother (perhaps the "Grandmother of All Patterns") enters the room. She puts a plate of oatmeal cookies down in front of the boy and kisses him on the forehead. His tears cease. There you have it. As they say in the oatmeal commercials, "The Mother of All NLP Patterns... it's the right thing to do." We add the positive resources to the negative state. This pattern seems to hold well for the major change techniques I can think of, such as Change Personal History, the Six-Step reframe, etc. Remember, in order to successfully collapse the anchors, you need to add a resource state that is significantly stronger than the state you want to change. The more intense the resource state is relative to the problem state, the better the anchor collapse. If you notice the positive state isn't doing the job, as Dr. Horton teaches, check that your technique was solid -- that the anchor stimulus was strong, well timed, and unique. Realize you can intensify and stack anchors for an even more potent effect. Tom Carroll is a performance consultant, trainer, and modeler who lives in Austin, Texas and works for International SEMATECH, a consortium of international semiconductor product manufacturers. Tom can be reached at tom.carroll@sematech.orq or through his personal Web site: http://www.abilitynow.com.
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