Choice Point: How to Create Variation in Your Behavior

[Teacher]

There are many people who are very good therapists who do seminars but who do not know how they do what they are doing. They will communicate their thoughts about what they are doing, thereby diverting your attention from the client they are working with. If you are lucky, you will at a subthreshold level grasp the signs that they are guided by, and you will be able to respond to the patient in a systematic way. But most of them fail. There are many psychotherapists who work unproductively. What you should start doing is restructuring your own behavior to start paying attention to your client.

As professional communicators, it seems to me that you have to create a lot of sensory experiences by consciously practicing certain types of communication patterns for some time so that they become unconscious and systematic in your behavior, like riding a bicycle or driving a car. You need to train yourself to be systematic in your behavior, which takes some time to consciously practice. So, when you see visual access keys and hear visual predicates, you will automatically have the choice to respond with a match or react with a mismatch, or whatever combination you can think of.

In other words, you need a good, unconscious, systematic repertoire of patterns for every choice point you have that are repeated in your work: How do I establish rapport with this other human being? How will I react in a situation in which they do not have information that they will consciously and verbally respond to my questions? How do I respond to incongruence? These are all selection points. Determine which selection points are repeated in your experience of doing your work, and for each of these selection points have half a dozen different responses - at least three - each of which will be unconscious and systematic in your behavior. If you do not have three choices in how to respond to things that happen in a therapeutic situation, then I think you are operating without being in a position of choice. If you only have one way, then you are a robot. If you have two of them, you will be in a dilemma.

You need a solid foundation from which elections are generated. One way to get this solid foundation is to consider the structure of your behavior and your activity in therapy. Pick points that are repeated, make sure you have multiple answers for each of these points, then forget about all things. And add one ingredient, a meta-rule that says, “If what you are doing doesn't work, change it. Do something else.”

Since consciousness is limited, respect that and don't go [say] "Okay, I'll go do all the things that happened in this workshop." You can not. What you can do is, for the first five minutes of every third interview, start each day by saying, “Look, before we start today, there are a couple of things I want to know about your overall cognitive functioning. Can you tell me what color is at the top of the traffic light? " Ask questions that give access to representational systems, and tune yourself for five minutes to the person's reactions so you know what happens later in the energized session. Every Thursday you can try to match the predicates to the first client that comes in and not match the second. This is the way of systematically discovering what outcome will your behavior lead to. If you don't organize it this way, it will remain random. If you organize it, and feel free to limit yourself to specific patterns and notice the outcome, and then change into new patterns, you will build an incredible repertoire of results on an unconscious level. This is the only way we know how to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways too. It just so happens that this is the only path that we know about now. you will build an incredible repertoire of results on an unconscious level. This is the only way we know how to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways too. It just so happens that this is the only path that we know about now. you will build an incredible repertoire of results on an unconscious level. This is the only way we know how to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways too. It just so happens that this is the only path that we know about now.

Source: R. Bandler, J. Grinder "From frogs to princes"