Integrate!

I have been reading an NLP book. I won't say which one, only that it includes many instructions that include what I would call a false precision. Let me give you an example. Anchoring is a technique that associates a particular physical stimulus with a state, memory or behaviour. In NLP, anchoring is widely used to stabilize, modify or create states that are suitable for particular situations or tasks. Many instructions will tell you to set an anchor just before an experience peaks. This is nonsense. You only know the peak by the descent from it. You cannot set an anchor just before an experience peaks because you do not have access to that level of detail about the future, nor can you read someone else's state so accurately that you notice the difference between at the peak and just past the peak. You can pretend to accuracy, but not achieve it. I know that the people who write this stuff believe they have developed a meaningful level of precision. There is just a lot of...

If you are not in pain, don't read this. Don't imagine pain: it will get under your skin and it might grow in unexpected ways.  This post is for people who are coping with pain, people who don't have to imagine how pain concentrates your perceptions while making it hard to focus your thoughts. This is for people who know how words fail when some part of your body is suffering and someone asks you to describe the pain. If this is for you, then imagine that you can see someone who looks and sounds like you, someone who is experiencing that same pain that you are experiencing. You might notice the tension across that person's forehead, the clenching of the jaw, the breath that is not quite rhythmic. You might be aware that the body twists or tilts at an awkward angle, that something is unbalanced. You might notice, as though it were happening to someone else, someone far off in the distance, that all parts of that person are involved in the experience of pain. But that...

You probably find it irritating. Someone close you to you - a friend, family, a work person - is clearly trying to find something. You want to help (or to stop the restlessness) so you ask helpfully "What are you looking for?" and the response is some variation on "I'll know it when I see it." How can you look for something if you don't even know what you're looking for.  You can't.  That's why you can't help your "I'll know it when I see it" friend.  You can, however, look to find correspondence between a feeling you have and something outside yourself.  In fact, that unspecified drive can be particularly powerful. There are two huge benefits to "I'll know it when I see it." The first is that you filter out much less information than usual. When you know what you want, everything is either "something like what I want" and "not what I want."  This isn't possible when you don't know w...