4 Pillars NLP CD question

Quote :

Hi Richie,



I just received a copy of your ‘4 Pillars’ CD, which I have listened to twice already. It’s very interesting. I certainly have enjoyed it and look forward to listening to it again. I was hoping to ask you a question to help further clarify my understanding of the content. If you were able to respond, that would be much appreciated.



The first section talks about internal representation, which I have read about to a limited degree elsewhere in the past. I can see how changing the structure of a memory – particularly a traumatic one – could help someone liberate themselves from that trauma.



I am trying to understand how this same technique can be applied to ‘futureproofing’ yourself against a combative situation. Are you suggesting that you visualize yourself in a future threatening situation and then play with the submodalities in the comfort of your own living room to reduce the perceived trauma of being involved in such an incident?



If so, are you merely reducing the trauma you feel now when you think about a possible future attack scenario? This may be useful, but does it have any impact on how you will perform in such a situation should it ever arise for real? In other words, I may not feel as threatened right now when I think about a future attack. However, that does not mean that I will still not go to water when such an attack actually happens.



Clearly, in the throes of a real-life scenario, I would not have the opportunity to play with the submodalities (I don't think). I would be overwhelmingly preoccupied with the perceived threat. Therefore, I am trying to understand how to apply this concept to my own training.



This may all sound very confusing. Hopefully, it makes sense, and I look forward to hearing from you. And by the way, keep up the good work.



Regards,



J.R.

I think I sometimes take too much for granted in terms of what I expect people to just grasp without proper explanation, will naswer this question properly tommorow, in the meantime- any thoughts or help from people?

from the outside looking in--into the cd i haven't listened to and into the mind of the questioner that
i can't assume to view with the same lens.

my response--under these constraints over what seems to come to mind from the information available to me in the thread.

less practice and less deep practice will bring about short term relief that doesn't penetrate as deeply as more practice at greater levels of concentration. the premise being that in deep states of visualization, the mind can and is often duped. take those experiences with you into the metaphorical fire and you project a different animal altogether, and different responses [from you and to you]. confidence builds you and fooks with others. confidence frees your mind to act, rather than freezes you. the confidence
of redacting the past and pressure proofing the future has the potential of enabling adrenaline to aid your body [with it's plocebo like brain washing aiding it]. nocebo like fear will, in short, do the opposite.

i always think of the yin/yang. each side having a seed of the inverse. become yang first and in the balance have your counterpart explore the near full expression of the scripted role of the defeated. stack the cards. bring a brain washed inner warrior to the table with nurtured images of countless aggressive behaviors within in situations that most would freeze under.

as i say though. my thoughts whilst not knowing fully the terrain--as before mentioned. i do understand
the value of visualization as Richie has instructed. i've used this from one of Richie's clips in my class, and i believe it really changes the tempo--for the better. it cultivates and focusses one's violent potential. it makes sense to me, speaks to me: train to blast into someone fearlessly, don't train to continually react and counter fight--or it's a never ending battle of backpedaling at best. rewrite the script that says you're being attacked, and make your main character play the method actors part of the attacker. fook how it started, now you're the mugger--if you believe it, he'll feel it.

that's my interpretation anyway, it's what i believe, and i guess why i answered as best as i could.

Sounds like a valid question. Although the CD is still making it's way here, it seems to me that it's a matter of repetition. Of ingraining the most functional thinking patterns deeply so that they truly become your normal way of reacting. We're all based on habits, behavioral scripts and patterns. Especially in intense situations. In the few fights I've had, it seems some chimp hijacks my brain and I become more or less just a bunch of habits and reflexes. Adrenaline and time pressure kills thinking anyway. That's what training is for. To create and hone good habits and reflexes. The physical body and the workings of the mind probably function by the same principles, in this context anyway. But as I haven't taken the deep dive into NLP yet or recieved the CD, it's only my best guess.

BTW just noticed Russel Sage's post appeared. Regarding the nocebo effect. Consider blisters developed from hypnotic visualization. http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/reprint/25/3/233.pdf That says something about just how real the physiology of the body can consider imagination to be. Although they say mostly, "the experiments were poorly designed, but the body seems capable of doing these things." The one thing that makes reality more real than imagination for this purpose if I had to pick one thing, is probably that other people do unexpected things and force you go through the OODA loop, whereas inside your mind, you know what your bad guy is doing, because you're doing it. As I read in Making up the mind, by Chris Frith imagination lacks creativity. (huh? but... it actually makes a lot of sense) But "experiencing" something mentally over and over should do a good job of making visualized actions habitual in nature. In this case as I understand it, applying certain submodalities and so on.

I have not heard the CD nor have any real experience with NLP, so ... from an outsiders perspective, it seems that the guy is asking a similar question to the one I posed about reality, positive reinforcement loops and frack ups.
Perhaps he has no raw material with which to work? I suspect that many people want to know what to do in the event of an attack who have never been in a real fight, but fear it may happen to them. (Obviously many train because it has happened to them).
So the guy is sitting in his living room imagining .... what exactly? Like RichardB said: "imagination lacks creativity".
On some level how can you take yourself seriously if you are a) not a naturally aggressive person or b) never experienced violence and are trying to vizualize both?
Now I believe Bob Spour talks about accessing fear, fear of spiders or heights etc being the same as fear of an assailant, and transmuting that into something useful, and that sounds more universal somehow. But ultimately how can you ever really KNOW what you will do until the sh#t really hits the fan?
Also, just for my own information, all this mental stuff must go hand in hand with physical, partner practice, right? Just sitting on the couch ain't going to do it.
Personally I don't get yelled at alot, so that really throws me when it happens, more so than seeing someone with a blade in their hand ... Why? because I know what the latter looks like, and am familiar with it. So for me, I think I need to get yelled at more to see what I REALLY do when that happens in an aggressive scenario, and it feels like it would help most if the training was physical .... though of course I can imagine someone yelling at me .. it's just not very realistic when it stays inside my head.
Perhaps I need to practice more ....?

oh wow...

ok they are some really good responses so far guys, really, really good I wish I had a good few hours to sit aside and really go through all the issues properly but i dont think I will now until mid next week.

a few issues jump off the page that I think I need to address with priority as they seem to me to be the most potentially "dangerous"

1. is summed up in Maijas questions

Quote :

Also, just for my own information, all this mental stuff must go hand in hand with physical, partner practice, right? Just sitting on the couch ain't going to do it.

2. a couple of people, including this questioner and other instructors, have got the impression that I might be suggesting that you can or should be doing some kind of internalised psychology work whilst IN a violent situation! its not possible and even if it was, you dont want to be going inside your head in a fight, you want to be externally focussed as possible

There are a lot of things that I assume about peoples understanding of the NLP work, but these area is the one most "open to interpretation" I really need to start being clearer.

Synchronistically I had actually already been thinking about this in terms of some other assumptions I have about peoples training but in areas more purely physical.

I never bang on about fitness and strength training but I do see them as ENORMOUSLY important, I tend to just assume people will get that... I also see sportive type sparring and rolling as important and just assume that people will be getting a bit of that here and there...

but maybe not


If I dont make these things explicit rather than implicit could I be fostering the kind of pasty, flabby, fantastical, ego massaging nerdiness that will lead people to sit on the couch IMAGINING they are extremely tough and can beat up 10 ninjas whilst their muscles atrophy and their cardio capactiy turns to crapola.

The NLP material is only ever ICING on cake, it isnt cake itself- there are quite a few MMA guys getting into the sports psychology for fights- proportionate to their overall training time I would be surprised and wouldnt expect them as a trainer to spend more than 5% of their training time on PURE visualisation (ie visualisation ONLY with no physical movement)
However every time they are doing any other aspect of their training, running, weights, bags, rolling, sparring, circuits I would be expecting them to use some elements of NLP style visualisation to keep their mental focus sharp and to "keep practising the experience of winning".

Does this make sense?

Maybe I should do an article on where all this should fit in and how much and what type of PHYSICAL training I expect people to do. Like a "this is what you would do if you were being trained by me" live in schedule to give people a very visceral explicit idea of my expectations.

There is a tendency for me to be self deprecating and cavalier about training, which might not translate outside of the UK, or maybe not outside of Liverpool, I train hard to give myself as much of an edge as possible and I expect others to do the same.

Common sense innit?

Your thoughts guys?

p.s. I think the initial post question can be handled by me just being very explicit with what I expect people to be doing with the material, does that sound right?

Quote :

Common sense innit?

actually this is the problem, what I see as obvious, isnt! And they say egomaniacs lack empathy...

triple post, then I need to hunt down some buffalo for breakfast

Quote :

I am trying to understand how this same technique can be applied to ‘futureproofing’ yourself against a combative situation. Are you suggesting that you visualize yourself in a future threatening situation and then play with the submodalities in the comfort of your own living room to reduce the perceived trauma of being involved in such an incident?



If so, are you merely reducing the trauma you feel now when you think about a possible future attack scenario? This may be useful, but does it have any impact on how you will perform in such a situation should it ever arise for real? In other words, I may not feel as threatened right now when I think about a future attack. However, that does not mean that I will still not go to water when such an attack actually happens.

I think maybe because Ive already covered this on the "Psychology of Violence" CD course I didnt want to go into too much detail for fear of repeating myself.

Can playing with the submodalities decrease the trauma of a future event?- yes, possibly, a little bit, but that isnt the main point- the main point is to "practise" violence with as much of the response you would ideally like to have in the comfort of your living room inside the holodeck of your brain.

In the "POV" course I then ask "what are the attributes of the response you would like?" if you are a cop you presumably would need to stay calm, confident and in control where the focus is restraint and control, for a civilian facing violence we assume a greater level of threat and move to attributes like aggression, tenacious resolve, skill, determination.

So the idea is that you "practise" before hand the scenario in which you will apply your chosen skillset as perfectly as possible to INCREASE the likelihood that that is how you will perform in the future reality.

"Skillset" could be putting in golf, delivering a sales presentation, passing your driving test, lifting a particularly heavy weight, a verbal confrontation anything... you imagine how you want it to go down as vividly and with as much emotion and as repetitiously as you can ad it drastically improves the likelihood that it will happen like that.

You need to choose specifically "how" you would like to respond to the violent confrontation FIRST and then mentally practise that.

For IMMEDIACY of effect, in the moment:

Its pointless trying to visualise how you will respond to a punch as the knuckles sail towards your face, just focus on not getting hit and then getting the fooker!

If you have time before a fight and feel yourself becoming fearful as the situation builds up, you can use this internal representation exercise to gain control of your state immediately. I read a Tony Blauer article where he described becoming nervous on a plane journey post 9/11 and went through a mental process vividly imagining taking "decisive action" (beating the crap out of a would be hijacker) and thereby changing his state from one of nervousness to one of calm resolve.

ie "IF anything happens I am confident I will go off like a grenade and at least give a good account of myself before I get knocked out or killed"

That combined with altering your physiology and your internal dialogue, directed by your MAP (powerful beliefs) is a very fast way of ALTERING YOUR STATE.

Thats all these techniques can do is alter your state to give you a better chance of survival.

They dont make you superhuman, but you will perform a lot better and make better decisions in a good cold determined state than in a state of panic and indecisveness. The improved performance and decision- making could be the difference between being dead or not.

THAT is something I should have mentioned in the CD.


And Maija, coming back to your original question regarding postive feedback loops and frack ups is just as relevant- the exercises alter your state to keep you motivated and focussed in training. Nothing more than that. But it could be the difference between carrying on or just throwing in the towel.

Ok buffalo on toast for me.

Guys,

I want to say thank-you to you all for your responses.

Richard in particular, thanks for responding so promptly and comprehensively.

It's funny. You mentioned that you may have made certain assumptions and assumed certain knowledge. When I read your points, I really said to myself, yes, of course. But when you hear terms like NLP, submodalities and the like, you assume it's often far more complex than it really is.

Really, mental training is just an (important) adjunct to hard, physical training. And its primary purpose is to allow you to practice being successful ahead of time to maximise your chances of succeeding when the pressure is on.

Makes sense to me.

This is an excellent and very helpful forum. Keep up the fantastic work,

Thanks JR

you just reminded me of when I took the practitioner course with Richard Bandler in London about 10 years ago, where I thought a good name for a book or course would be "NLP translated"- Bandler said on the course made a deliberate effort to make the terms sound complicated (he is a perverse man with a twisted sense of humour) to befuddle the academics he was often up against.

"NLP translated"

NLP- the study of the structure of what you think feel say and do

submodalities- the components and structure of thoughts, impressions and memories



there is a book in there somewhere- I need to "de-nerdify" myself and look at presenting a course using NO jargon whatsoever

Great stuff!
I was thinking today ( ... it sometimes happens ) about a few things that your posts brought up, and perhaps these points are what I've been trying to articulate all along.
Perhaps y'all could tell me if the pieces make sense:

1) There has to be physical training first and foremost, whether it be hitting hard and accurately or reading a speech out loud. You need a tangible 'skillset' to work with.

2) After you have the skill set, then you can add emotional content and mental focus.
It seems that if you learn how to hit hard, say, what you need to add, is the ability to pull it out in a stress situation, for which you can use the NLP to up your odds.

3) The NLP plus the skillset is then practiced in training, ideally with another human for skillsets like fighting or public speaking which involve ... other humans - therefore a higher level of realism and less imagination.

4) Having the REAL muscle memory from REALLY hitting things, and the feeling of emotional intensity plus mental focus from training, it is now time to spend some time on the couch and up your game inside your brain with the raw material you have collected.

I was thinking back to watching my Filipino teacher, now deceased, wielding swords, sticks and knives . It was very easy to tell that he had used all of them for real - you could just tell. Conversely, it is easy to tell someone who has never used one. Same with people that really know how to hit things.
There is a real difference in my mind between looking LIKE someone that knows what they are doing, and being someone that really does. It's hard to define - perhaps there is no self consciouness or something?
To use a parallel with drawing ( and I feel I can due to the close relationship martial arts has had with painting, calligraphy etc - Musashi was an accomplished artist after all ).
Many people can't draw. Put them infront of a real object and they tend to draw what the THINK they see rather than what's really there, and lo and behold it looks nothing like it. However, they never practiced looking, and seeing things as they really are, or the physical skill of drawing itself. No mental idea of perfection will help until the skillset is learned.
It seems that you have to separate from your imagination what doing something is LIKE, and practice doing it in ACTUALITY.
Then adding visualizations of the situation in which you have to perform, MENTALLY, could like Richie said, be the difference between life and death if you have to use your skillset for real ...right?

I suspect this is all very obvious to those that do it all the time, but you can get into all sorts of trouble when playing inside your head - fantasy, ego mania etc, and as we all know it's far easier to be invincible whilst THINKING about training instead of getting out there and finding out what you do and do not have
The mind is the hardest thing to train partly because of it's great capacity for delusion, so I like the idea of tying it into the physical world, with physical feedback to keep a good grip on reality.
The question I asked in the other NLP thread about being accurate with language, was to do with this confirmation of reality ( for instance saying "I will fight like a demon till I've done as much damage as possible" instead of "I will defeat all who stand before me"), so both physical and mental systems reinforce each other to create the best possible performance.

Quote :

The question I asked in the other NLP thread about being accurate with language, was to do with this confirmation of reality ( for instance saying "I will fight like a demon till I've done as much damage as possible" instead of "I will defeat all who stand before me"), so both physical and mental systems reinforce each other to create the best possible performance.

ahaaa ! now i understand what your other question was about, so if you tell yourself to do something and you just CANT do it?
well then the answer doesnt really lie within the realms of NLP...

or does it?

NLP outlines of "structural well formedness", usually used in a therapeutic ocntext but can be applied elsewhere, outline or guidline number one on the list is:

1. have the client state their desired outcome in positive terms, i.e. have them state specifically what they would like to move towards rather than away from

( "I dont want to be scared when I fly" becomes "I want to be confident and comfortable on flights"- that is making a "statement in the positive" in this context)


What are we moving towards in our SP training specifically ?
Improving our precentage chance survivability in a violent encounter
, thats all we can do, we are not turning ourselves into invincible ninjas- as they only exist in Manga land


p.s. this angle of the issue reminds me of a guy a couple of years ago asking me in a seminar with a straight face that he wasnt very confident in his punching ability and if there was an NLP solution to this problem (lack of confidence is surely just psychological and therefore NLP soluble, right? WRONG!)

So I asked him to punch the thai pad for me, he was stick thin and gangly but some of the strongest strikers I know have that body shape, but when he actually hit the pad he was actually (in the REAL world, not just inside his head) absolutely shit at punching!
When I asked him how long he had been at it he said he had been doing punching in his Krav Maga class for a couple of years.
There is no NLP solution to not having spent the time devleoping a physical skill, but should you choose to get up off your arse and invest a 3 or 4 30 minute sessions a week to developing your punching ability on relaistic targets (the thai pads are best for my money) then NLP can certainly accelerate the process but can never replace it.

Awareness is dawning in me that there is a big gap between waht Im saying and what people are understanding... as a "master communicator" this pleases me not at all! for every person who actually writes an email like JR has done how many just shrug it off and dont bother?

may need to rethink some of the material

Richie, about NLP, Quote:
"I dont want to be scared when I fly" becomes "I
want to be confident and comfortable on flights"- that is making a
"statement in the positive" in this context".

And back to the original question - Quote:
"In other words, I may not feel as threatened right now when I think
about a future attack. However, that does not mean that I will still
not go to water when such an attack actually happens."

What I find interesting is that you do not train SP by saying "I don't want to be scared when I fight" or even "I want to confident and comfortable in fights".
You say - "I am going to rip this frackers head off and keep going till the job's done".

It's like you take 'fear' out of the equation completely. You don't work with lack of confidence and indecision by saying "I will be confident and decisive". You just learn to DO, physically what you need to, with what you know are your best options (learned from a knowledgeable source of course, like our man Richie) - in this case 'take the fracker's head off', and as a side consequence, you are suddenly acting like you are confident and decisive ...
BRILLIANT

The brain is such an interesting thing .....

PS: Thanks for the answers Richie, I'm continually amazed, as I teach, how often the words that come out of my mouth don't seem to be the same as what the student hears ... as I'm sure is the case when I'm the student ...ah well, such is the learning process!

I have, obviously, been following this thread closely and I think it has raised some really obvious yet easily overlooked points. I certainly overlooked some pretty obvious things.

To me, the mental side of things is not dissimilar to a pilot logging up time in a simulator. They are deliberately confronting simulated challenging situations to maximise their chances of succeeding should they ever confront such situations for real. They are rare in practice and high stakes so pilots tend not to get and probably don't want much real world exposure to them.

However, spending time in the simulator is worthless if you first don't know how to fly a plane. You need to learn the theory and practice of flying just like a martial artist needs to learn and practice kicking and punching. The simulator merely helps you increase your chances of implementing those hard won skills in a crisis.

Further, the more real you can make the simulation, the more adrenaline it induces in the pilot, the greater the value to the pilot. If he or she has experienced wind sheer 1000 times in a simulator, shat themselves but executed their skills successfully, they will be far more mentally prepared to succeed in the real world.

Probably one of the most important distinction that I really have failed to put enough emphasis on so far, and which causes the most confusion, is that type of psychogical technique which is most pertinent to PRE fight preparation and that which is actually to be used IN fight, in the moment.

I think if I did that more and made it clearer a lot of the other misunderstandings would fall into place.

At the end of the day, its just about making people more able to protect themselves , whether thats a physical skillset to be developed or some kind of psychological conditioning.

Not all the psycholigical techniques will work for everyone, some people hear a long word and immediately think "psychobabble"- but really, isnt that also the responsibility of people like me teaching it? dont we have a duty to MAKE these things clear and easily unserstandable.

Sometimes the issue is its hard to be a proper hardcore nerd for a subject AND to be good at communicating what the subject is all about

Richie,
Reading your post leads me to believe there is much I do not understand ....
But that's OK ... learning is the fun part .

As an aside, personally I have found, as one who tends to talk too much when teaching, that language is a limited medium in which to explain concepts, especially related to martial arts, in the same way that a photograph rarely captures motion very well.
As a communicator who spends a great deal of time with language (in NLP and teaching in general), how do you view language as a tool, as opposed to say, visual or kinesthetic teaching?
If this is too nebulous or fluffy a question, feel free to ignore.

its not that fluffy Maija

when Im actually training people in the real world I would say language is by FAR the weakest medium

I like to get people moving and doing things as quickly as possible, you can get really stuck talking and thinking about training and not doing anything, when I train students or when Im training with people, too much chatter gets on my tits

there is a big gap between what I focus on in the creation of info products and how I actually train people one on one. thing is when you focus almost exculsively on kinaesthetic learning (i.e. if you have a one hour session make at least 45 minutes of it movement in contact with another live human- even if its just pads, explain and talk through things as you go as much as you can- that one hour of training is precious "flight time") you get massive leaps in observable physical skill in students and their psychological attributes like confidence improve hugely, far more than listening to c.d.s watching clips on youtube or posting on forums, which I suspect is the pattern for some of the people buying SFS material

this was the point of the Beta-8 series by the way, to create an info product that expressed the intent that you only learn and improve by doing the skill, thinking about it is a very poor second and talking about it is a distant third that can actually unravel good training benefits ... on this point of unravellling training benefits:

https://streetfightsecrets.darkbb.com/psychology-f1/strange-post-t102.htm



Its hard if not impossible to express this via the medium I have available to me, unless I actually video a session of me training someone and say, this is how much proportionate time I spend either in direct contact with the student or with them hitting pads or doing some kind of physical drill. And even if I did that all people would do is watch it, think about it and talk about it and miss the point entirely.

If we all turned up to a massage course out of being told what to do, being shown what to do and feeling what to do with feedback we would all know instinctively and without hesitation know which methodology would lead to an indivdual becoming a great masseur/masseusse.

Sometimes you have to just "learn by the magic of doing" - an expression from an offhand remark someone made to me recently when I asked thme how they had learned to do something so quickly.

So in answer to your question: Language is easily and by far the weakest method to explain or teach a physical skill in my opinion

kudos by way of india and ashrams and masters

ashram parallel///

my teacher used to describe scripture as a menu--it wont satiate, it only leads you
to the table, or wets your appetite. he preached meditation alone--with everything
else merely as some kind of added bonus. if he were as surly as me, it would
sound like, 'joost fookin do it mate, we'll share a hallmark moment after--and i'll
bring the cookies and milk, and we can plat each other's hair.'

meant to sound inspirational [BTW], not challenging...punch line slut--me.

Agreed, absolutely!

I was thinking of Russell's signature, about Inspiration and Perspiration, and what has motivated me, and generated progression in my training.
I love learning through physical movement, as an end in itself, and as a path to understanding many other things also - psychology, strategy etc.
I am lucky that even though I teach Chinese and Filipino systems, I teach out of a Japanese Dojo and many of my students have this great training ethic already built in.
This became obvious when I substitute taught a fairly new Tai Chi class at a big Gym franchise last week whilst my friend was out of town.
It was very difficult to get them to practice on their own, there was seemingly no concept of taking something and working on it without being spoon fed the information. In fact I noticed, that as soon as I stopped talking they mostly stopped moving and just stood there. It made me think about how much we sit in front of noise boxes (aka tvs and computers) and how little we imagine for ourselves. Are people losing this skill?
I did have a nice 'inspiration' moment at the end of class however, a woman who had done Tai Chi before, but another system, was complaining that the stances were not as challenging because they weren't as big as the style she'd done before. I said "well all the stuff that happens whilst you shift weight still happens with the shorter stances, it's just that your mind has to move slower". It was cool, you could totally see her brain open a new door inside .... very satisfying