20 MINUTES TO MASTER ... NLP. Carol Harris

extended to the animal kingdom and, together with his then wife, Lois, he kept about a dozen octopuses in their living-room! He went on to become director of a dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where he continued his studies on communications in animals for about a year. In 1963 he went to the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii to work on problems of animal and human communication and it was there that he wrote most of his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

      Bateson also led the Palo Alto Group and lectured at the University of Santa Cruz at the time that Bandler and Grinder were developing NLP. He was a neighbour of Bandler’s and it was he who suggested that Bandler and Grinder visit Milton Erickson (see Erickson).

      Bateson considered that ideas were not abstract concepts, but the basis for the way people live their lives. He said that people should think and act systemically, by allowing both conscious and unconscious processes to shape their decisions, and by developing congruity in diverse parts of the mind. In the preface to Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mark Engel says:

      The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads … but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in … For a man to change his basic, perception-determining beliefs … he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.

      CARLOS CASTANEDA

      An anthropologist and writer whose works greatly influenced Bandler and Grinder and their associates, Castaneda made great use of metaphor, often in conversational dialogues, and some of his ideas were to form the basis for therapeutic interventions. His thoughts on ‘stopping the world’ – a concept where the mind is stilled to allow expansion of consciousness – was one of the underpinning elements of New Code NLP (see Chapter 3).

      ROSS ASHBY, STAFFORD BEER AND PETER CHECKLAND

      These systems thinkers and writers have strongly influenced NLP. Ashby originated the Law of Requisite Variety in 1956, emphasizing that it is important to keep exploring variations when working towards results. The principle behind his theory is that, in any system, the part that has the most flexibility will predominate, and as a system becomes more complex, more flexibility is required. Beer provided models which can be used with both individuals and organizations, and Checkland was the developer of ‘soft systems’ thinking.

      ALBERT ELLIS

      A psychotherapist, writer and lecturer whose work was a major influence on several people working in NLP, especially Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, Ellis felt that traditional therapy sessions were too long and tried a more active approach based on work by early philosophers. His technique – Rational-Emotive Therapy, or RET – was a synthesis of psychology and philosophy. It has been described as ‘perhaps the most widely practised form of the cognitive-behavioural therapies’ (Yankura and Dryden, Doing RET: Albert Ellis in Action, Springer Publishing Company, 1990). Ellis concentrated on an individual’s beliefs and identified both rational and irrational beliefs during therapy; his work also incorporated shifts in time in a similar way to that employed by NLP (see Chapter 3).

      ROBERTO ASSAGIOLI

      Assagioli is known as the founder of psychosynthesis, on which he published the seminal book in 1965. Later, his work was rediscovered and Michael Hall, an American therapist and NLP trainer, has written of it in the American NLP publication Anchorpoint. Hall outlines several of Assagioli’s ideas and exercises and shows that his work predated NLP by around ten years. Some areas of similarity include what NLP knows as ‘Well-Formed Outcomes’ (objective setting), sub-modalities (elements of sensory perception), ‘anchoring’, ‘swish techniques’, ‘personality parts’ and spiritual development. Genie Laborde names Assagioli as one of the possible sources for NLP in her book Influencing with Integrity.

      MAXWELL MALTZ

      Maltz was a plastic surgeon writing in the 1960s, again before NLP was ‘created’. His book Psycho-Cybernetics contained ideas, references and guidance using numerous techniques which we now regard as NLP.

      PAUL WATZLAWICK

      Austrian by birth, Watzlawick was a research assistant at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto from 1960 and Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center. He was later Professor of Psychotherapy at the University of El Salvador in central America. One of his books, Change, sets out many of his ideas, which were invaluable to the development of NLP.

      VIRGINIA SATIR

      As mentioned earlier, Satir was one of the earliest, and best-known, people whose ways of working acted as models for the analysis and development of many NLP principles and processes. She was a social worker who was particularly interested in family systems. She developed an approach to family therapy which she called ‘conjoint family therapy’ and taught the subject at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, in the first training programme in the country on family therapy.

      One of Satir’s ways of working was with what she termed ‘parts parties’, where people would act out the characteristics of different facets of personality. A model which is associated with her is her analysis of five different personality elements, which have become known as ‘Satir categories’. She gave these categories the names of ‘Blamer’, ‘Placator’, ‘Distractor’, ‘Computer’ and ‘Leveller’. Each can be recognized through typical postures and modes of communication. These patterns are discussed in her book Peoplemaking, published in 1972.

      Satir was very innovative and used games, exercises, audio, video, one-way mirrors and demonstrations in her work, approaches which have since become commonplace but were at that time novel techniques. She was the first Director of Training at the famous Esalen Institute, which was at the forefront of the Growth Potential movement. It is said that she was deaf until the age of ten, so, like Erickson, with some sensory impairment, she developed her observation skills to an extraordinarily high degree. Fritz Perls described her as ‘the most nurturing person known’. Satir died in 1988.

      FRITZ PERLS

      Like Satir, Perls was another of the best-known models for NLP’s development. He is often credited as the founder of Gestalt Therapy, although three other people, including his wife, co-authored with him the first book on the subject. Gestalt psychology dated back to 1912, but Perls turned it into a therapeutic tool. The word ‘Gestalt’ refers to a pattern of parts which make up a whole and Gestalt psychology indicates that a study of parts alone is not sufficient to lead to understanding – the whole must be taken into account.

      Born in Berlin in 1893, Perls gained an MD in psychiatry. Originally influenced by Freud, he rejected the psychoanalytic movement, believing that the present is more important than the past. Often blunt and ignoring conventional pleasantries, Perls encouraged his subjects to explore their emotional responses through processes including the use of ‘hot seats’ through which a person could exchange roles by moving to a different seat where they could act out a different part.