NLP Techniques - NLP How to use NLP to Improve Communication & Results

NLP Practitioners and NLP Master Practitioners rely on NLP Techniques, NLP Patterns, and NLP Skills, to accomplish a range of useful results. Here are some examples of these skills. (This is not a complete listing, nor is it intended to be; this is intended to give "explorers" a sense of how NLP-trained people utilize NLP to get the results they do get.

Please pardon the incomplete page; we'll be done adding more useful content to this page soon.

Rapport

Remember that the first "wave" of NLP was focused originally on getting far better, faster, and deeper results in a therapeutic context -- changing minds in therapy. Since then, of course, NLP has expanded its focus to many other fields.

The Developers of NLP observed early on that certain kinds of behaviors and questions broke rapport with their clients, which diminished the quality and depth of the results they were getting. So in order to maximize rapport with their clients while they investigated their clients mind-sets, and applied "patterns of change," they explored how people build and maintain rapport. Initial observation showed that people in deep rapport mirror each other's bodies, gestures, voice qualities, tempo, breathing, and more. Then, these NLP trainees did those same things with their clients while doing NLP, and lo & behold, they effectively built and maintained deep rapport.

Nowadays, direct mirroring and matching is known in most business and sales contexts. So often, when you directly mirror people today, they know you're doing it, and while sometimes it helps -- sometimes they'll stop you cold. You can thank the bigger motivational speakers and sales trainers (who learned that from their NLP training, by the way) for the public popularity of mirroring. Fortunately, there are methods and levels of rapport that can be reached that do NOT involve or require any direct mirroring -- which means, no one will ever know you're doing anything, but they'll still feel like they've known you forever.

Sensory Acuity & Calibration

Cognitive, Emotional, & Somatic Change Patterns

Changing Minds can be done in a number of unique ways with NLP, and for a number of widely differing purposes. But change can be done cognitively and rationally, or emotionally, or somatically (in the body).

Most psychologists work at the cognitive level, talking directly with their clients and unraveling issues in the mind. Certainly NLP Practitioners are trained to do some of this with people, to help others change their cognitive patterns directly.

People can be changed emotionally, though, too, and this requires an NLP Practitioner who knows how to do changework using emotional state-chaining (and ideally, great anchoring skills too). Typically when this approach doesn't work well, it's the practitioner's poor state-elicitation or anchoring skills that need improvement. (Our trainer is an authority on emotional state chaining - and teaches this in his "Creating the Automatic Yes" CD-set).

Some NLP Trainers are gifted at doing somatic changework, and this typically is beyond most Practitioners' ability and knowledge; certainly it's way beyond their clients' awareness initially (but the changes accomplished are often quite permanent and profound). Often such trainers spend a lot of time accessing and then optimizing "extraordinary" states and physiologies, occasionally working with postures... somatic oscillations, tensions, etc. Really interesting work.

Swish

The NLP Swish Pattern (in any of multiple variations) is designed to help replace one belief with another, one behavior with another, one value with another, one emotional response with another, etc. It repeatedly teaches the mind: "Not that... THIS.       Not that... THIS.       Not that... THIS.       Not that... THIS.       Not that... THIS."

Swish is typically taught to NLP Practitioner candidates during an NLP Practitioner Certification Training.

This is a profoundly fast, and powerful, NLP change technique. Ultimately all the work is done inside each of our minds, alone, but it often helps to have an NLP Practitioner (or fellow candidate) help walk us through this pattern, so that we can concentrate all of our attention on the experience it provides, rather than on the process of running it properly.

Squash

The NLP Fast Phobia Technique ("Cure?")

This is arguably the most famous NLP Technique or Pattern. It's known as the NLP Fast Phobia Technique, sometimes as the "Fast Phobia Cure" (but keep in mind there may be legal issues in your state or country with calling it that, as phobias are sometimes considered a regulated mental health / medical condition.

So while we caution you about how to refer to this pattern, it's amongst the most thoroughly written about process in NLP. And if you became a practitioner or master practitioner and saw clients, you would be surprised by the number of phobia referrals you got from local psychologists. (When they're not lambasting you for taking their clients and resolving in an hour something they took 30 hours to NOT resolve, they're bringing you in on a consult. Don't laugh -- it happens).

This pattern is rarely applied successfully to "general anxiety" where the triggers may be many or compounded, and the response is generalized across multiple situations. However with true phobias, true one-time-trial-learnings that were created instantly, and ended up causing someone to learn how/when to have massive abreactions to specific environmental triggers, this pattern has been known to create dramatically powerful shifts -- very fast.

Stories of people whose decades-long phobias were released in just 5-10 minutes... can be quite commonly heard/found.

The Allergy Pattern

Change Personal History

Meta Model: A way of listening for specific Language Patterns that give clues to understanding others' "Maps of the World" and for unpacking how people's minds process and store information, and make decisions.

Milton Model: A method of intentionally and creatively using Artfully Vague Language Patterns to Influence Others and Enable Change.

NLP Anchoring / Anchoring NLP

Emotional State Chaining

Reframing

More Content is coming shortly; please pardon our brevity on this page for the moment.