Steve Andreas RIP – The brightest light in NLP

Steve Andreas was the brightest and the best brain in the world of NLP, a true inspiration and great friend. He was also a great voice for common sense with a terrific sense of humour who helped bring some real thinking and discrimination to the world of personal change. I was honored to have known him and he was a massive supported of my own PCW work and a true giant in the world of personal change. He is greatly missed and here is the last interview I did with him which expresses his thinking far better than I could describe or do justice to.

Interview with Steve Andreas for Rapport magazine

Nick: What in your opinion is NLP’s greatest contribution to the field of personal change, and biggest missed opportunity?

Steve: The greatest contribution is the use of pure process interventions for an infinite variety of content. For instance, the phobia cure uses a submodality change in visual perspective to change the response to any terrifying experience—whether the content is spiders, heights, stuffed olives (my all-time favorite) not seeing the feet (runner-up) or a memory of hand-to-hand military combat. This greatly simplifies “trauma work,” because all you need to know about the problem is that the client is associated into a terrifying memory. Without knowing the content, or altering it in any way, you can offer a process intervention that will change their terror into the more objective feelings of an outside observer of the same event. The same is true of the interventions for grief, shame, anger, regret, and other problems or outcomes.

Missed opportunity? In the early days, Bandler and Grinder went out of their way to insult mainstream therapists. No matter how accurate and richly deserved, those insults weren’t useful in enticing therapists to learn NLP. In contrast, Francine Shapiro took one very small element of NLP—that eye position can be used to drive changes in how an experience is processed—simplified it, “packaged” it so that it was acceptable to mainstream therapists as EMDR, and made a hugely successful industry out of it.

Nick: What are the most common errors NLPers tend to make without realizing?

Steve: Where do I start? Recently in a blog post I reviewed 16 different videos on YouTube described as demonstrations of the swish pattern. Several were completely unrecognizable, all made a fundamental error that hugely reduced it’s power and effectiveness, and only one was (mostly) correct. Nothing prevents someone from developing a new process, or proposing a modification of an established one. But using the name of a widely-known pattern for a random set of steps reeks of carelessness in learning what has already been developed and tested, not creativity.

Another fundamental error is the common use of the vague term “state,” which is only a “large chunk” “place holder” for a package of ignorance. Speaking of a “state” ignores all its smaller aspects, its modalities, submodalities, what it’s good for, etc.

A further error is the tendency to focus on the emotional intensity of a state, which leads to misleading descriptions like, “a sufficiently powerful resource state,” or “a big resource state,” or a “peak state,” which usually also presupposes that such a state will be useful for resolving any problem. A clear counterexample to this is the phobia cure. A phobia is a very intense emotional state; dissociation is not intense, but it has the appropriate qualities (and presumably accesses the precise neurology) to resolve the terror. Just as “Every behavior is useful in some context,” every state is—but that also means that every state is not useful in other contexts. For example, dissociation is the cure for a phobia, but it is the problem in grief, where association is the appropriate resource. There is no relationship between the intensity of a state and it’s effectiveness in resolving a particular problem.

Focusing on the intensity of a state leads to the further error of thinking of one state “overcoming” another state by brute force, as in “breakthroughs,” or “battling states.” Observer position doesn’t “battle” with the state of terror or compete with it. What’s important is the appropriateness of a resource state, not its intensity, something that I wrote about on my web site many years ago, in an article “Selecting a Resource State to Anchor.

The same kind of misunderstanding is implicit when someone wants to be “awesomely confident.” Most of us are so totally confident that we can open a door that we aren’t even aware of it. For a nice example of this, skip to near the end of my bee phobia video on YouTube when I ask the client (8:34) to imagine a bee landing on her hand. When I ask her what that’s like, she doesn’t feel “awesome,” she replies matter-of-factly, “It’s like having one sitting on my hand.”

Whenever someone wants to be “awesomely confident,” they want something to “overcome” their uncertainty, which implies a polarity, usually desire for success of some kind, opposed by a fear of failure. The first thing I ask myself (and then the client) is whether they have the competence to go with it. It is fairly easy to elicit and anchor confidence, but developing competence takes a lot more persistent work and practice.

When someone suffers from uncertainty, and wants more confidence, both sides of the polarity need to be recognized and honored, and they need to be integrated if change is to be lasting and ecological. Disregarding the reasons for fear or doubt is likely to cause trouble. Integrating the polarity will be much more useful and lasting. “High energy confidence” is a castle built on quicksand.

Some people need confidence in order to demonstrate their competence; but far more often I see people who have too much confidence, without the competence to back it up. People who are confidently incompetent are often a danger to themselves as well as others. As Robert Fulghum said, “Ignorance, power, and pride are a deadly mixture.” The world (and the field of NLP) is already amply supplied with narcissists; let’s not create more of them.

          Nick: In recent blog posts you write about the importance of “making the smallest change necessary to get the desired outcome.” What NLP approaches have you found to be most successful in achieving this?

Steve: There are at least two important reasons for this principle. One is that it is much easier to make a small adjustment, such as point of view, the location of an image, the tonality of an internal voice, or in some other submodality. As Milton Erickson said, “Your task is that of adjusting, not abolishing.” The other reason is that a small adjustment is much less likely to interfere with the rest of the client’s functioning than a large one, This is usually called “ecology” but should more accurately called congruence, as John McWhirter pointed out years ago, and most have ignored.

For instance, imagine that you notice some irregularities and palpitations in the beating of your heart, so you consult a doctor. After she listens to your heart, takes an EKG, and asks a few questions, she says, “Well, some simple life-style changes will resolve those symptoms, but a heart transplant would also work.” I hope it’s obvious that a heart transplant would be a lot more difficult, and have significantly more risk of problematic consequences. Unfortunately working with “states” (especially ones like “awesome confidence”) is a lot more like a heart transplant, changing much more than is necessary or useful.

 

          Nick: What is your most commonly used (or favorite) technique or pattern, and why?

Steve: Right now, my favorite is the two methods you developed for resolving anxiety: slowing the tempo of the internal voice that triggers the feeling, and your version of using Bandler’s discovery of how the resulting feelings spin. They are my favorites for several reasons. Firstly, they have wide application; I’ve found that anxiety is a key part in something like half of the problems that people want to change. Secondly, they both exemplify the lasting impact of very small adjustments in nonverbal submodalities. Thirdly, they are particularly elegant simple recipes that don’t require exquisite hypnotic or verbal skills. Fourthly, the processes are so robust that someone can mess them up in many ways and they will still work. Finally, they are both very rapid; my YouTube video demonstrating spinning feelings is only 8 minutes long. At three-year follow-up the client is still free of her “life-long anxiety.”

          Nick: Many NLPers seem to be championing neuroscience, yet recently you commented, “I have great respect for neuroscience, and also for nuclear physics. However, I don’t think either one has much to tell us (so far) about learning and change.” Please elaborate.

Steve: I assume that the laws of nuclear physics underlie the practice of therapy, and I also assume that they underlie the process of kissing someone or making a soufflé. However, I have never seen any way in which physics can tell us how to do any of those things (or vice-versa)! They are simply different levels or realms of knowledge. When a carpenter cuts a board, she needs to know about the grain, and about splits or knots; the knowledge of the chemistry or physics of cellulose or lignin is of no use to her.

Likewise, neuroscience is at a completely different level of understanding than therapy and change, so it doesn’t tell us anything about what to actually do with a client. For instance, people have realized for hundreds of years that extreme feelings of fear “hijack” thinking. Does it really matter whether this occurs in the amygdala, rather than the liver, the left elbow or the raised middle finger of your dominant hand? Like the “New and Improved” label on a laundry soap, “Atomic” in the 1950’s, or “quantum” in the 1970’s, using “neuroscience” is only a meaningless marketing ploy designed to impress the public. Until someone can give me a specific example of how a piece of information from neuroscience can tell us something about what to do with a client that we don’t already know from NLP, I stand by my statement.

          Nick: Are there any new emerging sources in medicine, neurology, therapy, or psychology that NLPers ought to be aware of?

          Steve: I think of two key books that ought to be read—and reread—by anyone using NLP. Although neither is new, both are very useful. One is Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud, which I reviewed on my web site 15 years ago. Although this book is about comics (and is congruently presented entirely in comic book form) it is really about how we represent and understand experience internally, taught through a very thorough exploration of the many aspects of the structure of comics.

The other is Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, by George Lakoff, a detailed presentation of cognitive linguistics—how people generalize about their experience. When people seek change, it is usually because they are categorizing one or more experiences in ways that aren’t useful. “She dumped me, so I’m a loser.” I reinvented a good deal of cognitive linguistics in my modeling of self-concept in Transforming Your Self: becoming who you want to be, before becoming aware of Lakoff’s book. It was nice to have external validation of what I had discovered, but if I had already read Lakoff’s book, that would have saved me a lot of work. A few years later, I expanded this into what I think of as a sort of “universal field theory” of how people change in my two volume Six Blind Elephants: understanding ourselves and each other.

          I think we are out of time/space. If you want more, Google Steve Andreas’ blog, the SteveAndreas.com web site, or watch my YouTube videos—all free.