The concept of logical levels of perception, also called logical levels of NLP, logical levels of thinking and levels of personal change, is good at helping to notice changes in the way an individual, organization or social community looks at things. It was developed by Robert Dilts and is based on the concept of "neurological levels" proposed by Gregory Bateson.
Who else besides you? For whom and what do you serve? This is a question about your involvement in a larger system. If you are an NLP specialist or an organization providing services based on the use of NLP, what new do you bring to your community, where you are located and work, which community of NLP followers you belong to, what is your specialization, how it differs from what others specialize in? ..
2. Personal identity and vocation
Who? Who are you or your company? What are you doing to achieve your goals? Your ideas about yourself as a person or an organization: what are you successful at?
3. Beliefs and values
What for? Why are you doing your business? What do you believe in and what do you value? As a human being, you can believe that you can do anything you take on. Or do you value honesty? If you are an organization, can you, for example, value the service culture or the wealth of your employees?
4. Abilities and line of conduct
How? What is your idea of how things should be done? What are your capabilities, skills, behavior strategies and action plans?
5. Behavior
What are you doing? What are the norms for your behavior?
6. Environment
Where? When? With whom? Where, when and with whom are you active? How does your environment affect your actions?
Example
Suppose it is 9:00 now, and I am already at my workplace (environment).
If I didn't want to be there, I would have to change my behavior. A possible choice is to go out for a walk. You can head to the door and go outside. You can start screaming and shouting: "Help!" - in the hope that someone will help to leave the building, etc.
The behavior I choose depends on my abilities and behavioral strategies. If I am allowed to leave the building without special permission, then “head to the door and go outside” is a real possibility. On the other hand, it might be my strategy to get outside help (then I'll start screaming and crying out for help). Or, if I don't want to work in my organization and I need at least some source of income, my strategy may be “flight into illness” when my illness is so serious that I get a long-term disability and leave from work for health reasons. Aren't you familiar with cases of such conscious or unconscious behavior?
My abilities and line of conduct will depend on my beliefs and values. If I am convinced that I can easily find another job that can provide the income the family needs, it is unlikely that "flight into illness" will be my choice.
My values and beliefs are determined by my personality and self-image. If I see myself as a successful person, it is very likely that I will have the belief that I can easily find another job or even start my own business.
The set of skills and beliefs that make up my personality depends a lot on my life goals - on the contribution I want to make to society, etc.
Using the concept of logical levels in the light of personality change, the above leads us to a number of interesting interpretations and discoveries.
1. Short-term and long-term changes . Sometimes it turns out that NLP techniques easily change the unwanted behavior for a short period, but then the unwanted behavior will inevitably return. How does this happen? If the new behavior is inconsistent with beliefs, values and personality, the higher levels outweigh and negate the changes achieved at the lower levels.
For changes at the level of behavior to become long-term, the desired change in behavior must occur simultaneously with changes at the higher levels, or the change must occur at the level of personality.
2. Organizational changes . Have you ever been involved in an overall organizational change process? What are the most common areas of organizational change?
How about changing the organizational structure? Or maybe just change the physical layout of the office space? This will change the environment. Will it be deep? Only if such a change is synchronous with changes at higher levels!
Or all of a sudden, staff are encouraged to work in a new way (behavior) without appropriate training (skill growth and a change in behavior). Unfortunately, this happens all too often. When there is a lack of funding, the first thing to cut is the funds for retraining! And again, such changes most often become external, shallow and short-lived.
3. Personal planning in health and career. Suppose you have some personal goals (related to health, career, etc.) that do not correspond to one of the higher levels. How successful do you think you will be in achieving them?
4. "Major problems of our time can be solved only at a higher level of thinking than the one at which they arose" (Albert Einstein) . I heard many references to this quote, but only a few could explain how to do it, how to actually move to a higher level of thinking. Using the concept of logical levels, we do it with ease. So, for example, if a problem has arisen at the behavioral level, then in order to sustainably solve it, we must at least rise to the level of abilities and lines of behavior.
NLP can help you change at higher levels (beliefs and values, personality and sense of calling, spirit and intentions) or help you make sure your goal fits all of your personal or organizational levels. When this happens, your goals in life will become clear and achievable without major external efforts - you will grow to the level of your goals.
Next, we will present to the reader a slightly different perspective on the subject of discussion, as well as give an exercise that will help you achieve personal coherence, in which all your logical levels should be mutually consistent with each other.
Example with training
Several years ago, I was an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of New Brunswick. In the Faculty of Nursing, a statistics course was required in the first semester of the final year of study. This course had a persistently bad reputation mainly due to the fact that the teaching professors viewed it as purely mathematical. It is not hard to guess that most of the students in the Faculty of Medical Nursing experienced difficulties with this course. Every year, within the student masses, dissatisfaction with the course was expressed, requests for help were heard.
It was my turn to teach this course!
Before proceeding further, let's look at the situation through the prism of logical levels.
Student (s) of the Faculty of Nursing
Spirit and intent (belonging to a larger system): Providing meaningful assistance to all people who need medical attention, support or relief from suffering.
Personal identity and vocation: a highly qualified medical worker who provides accompanying medical services for people for a period of need.
Beliefs and Values: The person has the qualifications and responsibilities of a health care provider to help those in need of health care. Another significant belief of many of the students of the Faculty of Medical Nursing was that they did not have the ability for mathematics (before the start of the course, many of the students came to me, expressed concern about the availability of the course, declared their inability to do mathematics, and argued that this particular inability influenced the choice of a future specialty after graduating from high school).
Abilities and Strategies: Multiple positive abilities and skills for fulfilling the duties of health care providers. Insufficient (in some cases, functionally insufficient) mathematical abilities and skills.
Behavior: Behavior of a professionally competent healthcare professional in carrying out nursing work. Inappropriate behavior when it is necessary to carry out "mathematical" actions and procedures - in some cases, almost "paralyzed", accompanied by inaction or crying.
Environment: the need for nursing work, combined with the need for data collection and mathematical processing.
My approach to teaching the course: I visited the university library and found many examples of the use of statistics in medicine in medical journals. I used them for discussion in seminars and for homework. As a result, the course began to be perceived not as mathematical (statistics), but as a course of developing additional skills necessary for the implementation of competent patient care. It was a delightful experience for me, and the students had amazing success. In the second semester, many of the students took statistical processing of the results of mass medical examinations of residents of New Brunswick as part of their graduation projects.
Now try to answer the question why my approach was fruitful, but the approach of other professors did not, analyzing the situation from the standpoint of the concept of logical levels.
Can you use a similar approach to your relationships in your family, with your subordinates and coworkers, to help them look at the situation in a new way and use their own reserves to consciously overcome difficulties?
The following exercise will help you:
1. Realize what exactly affects the way your life is going.
2. Identify possible internal conflicts.
3. Identify those feasible changes that you can make in order to bring your logical levels into a more consistent state and achieve a higher level of personal congruence (resolution of internal conflict).
I suggest that you take your time doing this exercise and make a list of your answers.
Spirit and intentions: what is your task, what impact do you want to have on a larger system (family, colleagues, people in need of your service or product, society as a whole)?
Personal identity and social role: who are you, what is your role? Does your role fit your purpose? What needs to be changed?
Beliefs and Values: What are your ideas about yourself, about others, about the world in general? Do these beliefs help fit your role? What do you value in yourself, in others, in the world around you? Do your values harmonize with your role? Are there other beliefs and values that you could accept that would be more in tune with your role?
Abilities and strategies: what are your skills? What about your programs and methods of action? Do you need to develop new abilities, to master new methods, to develop and adjust plans of action? Are they in line with higher logical levels? If not, what needs to be changed? If you need to develop skills and abilities, go through additional training. Maybe change the methods and plans of action? Or, having received this new information, will you feel the need to rethink your purpose, your role in the world around you, your beliefs and values?
Behavior: What does your actual behavior look like as seen by other people? Does your behavior match each of the higher-order logic levels? Do you need to change something?
Environment: when, where and with whom do you conduct your behavior? Does it play well with higher logic levels?
Think more seriously about your goal and answer the same questions as in the previous exercise. Pay attention to the degree of correspondence between the two answer choices. You may find, for example, that achieving your goal will take away from the time you spend with your family (assuming that this is important to you too). If this is the case, is there some way to tweak your goal or action plan so that you can spend more time with your family without getting in the way of your goal? It is also a good idea to consult with those with whom your goal affects the relationship, as they will often be able to offer solutions that you yourself would never have thought of.
This process will help you make sure there is a match (or lack thereof) between your goals and your inner self. Once you are able to reconcile your goals and align them with your inner self, you will find that your goals have become clearer, become more attractive and easily achievable.
Six logical levels
1. Spirit and intentions.Who else besides you? For whom and what do you serve? This is a question about your involvement in a larger system. If you are an NLP specialist or an organization providing services based on the use of NLP, what new do you bring to your community, where you are located and work, which community of NLP followers you belong to, what is your specialization, how it differs from what others specialize in? ..
2. Personal identity and vocation
Who? Who are you or your company? What are you doing to achieve your goals? Your ideas about yourself as a person or an organization: what are you successful at?
3. Beliefs and values
What for? Why are you doing your business? What do you believe in and what do you value? As a human being, you can believe that you can do anything you take on. Or do you value honesty? If you are an organization, can you, for example, value the service culture or the wealth of your employees?
4. Abilities and line of conduct
How? What is your idea of how things should be done? What are your capabilities, skills, behavior strategies and action plans?
5. Behavior
What are you doing? What are the norms for your behavior?
6. Environment
Where? When? With whom? Where, when and with whom are you active? How does your environment affect your actions?
Example
Suppose it is 9:00 now, and I am already at my workplace (environment).
If I didn't want to be there, I would have to change my behavior. A possible choice is to go out for a walk. You can head to the door and go outside. You can start screaming and shouting: "Help!" - in the hope that someone will help to leave the building, etc.
The behavior I choose depends on my abilities and behavioral strategies. If I am allowed to leave the building without special permission, then “head to the door and go outside” is a real possibility. On the other hand, it might be my strategy to get outside help (then I'll start screaming and crying out for help). Or, if I don't want to work in my organization and I need at least some source of income, my strategy may be “flight into illness” when my illness is so serious that I get a long-term disability and leave from work for health reasons. Aren't you familiar with cases of such conscious or unconscious behavior?
My abilities and line of conduct will depend on my beliefs and values. If I am convinced that I can easily find another job that can provide the income the family needs, it is unlikely that "flight into illness" will be my choice.
My values and beliefs are determined by my personality and self-image. If I see myself as a successful person, it is very likely that I will have the belief that I can easily find another job or even start my own business.
The set of skills and beliefs that make up my personality depends a lot on my life goals - on the contribution I want to make to society, etc.
Sustainable change
Changes at a lower level (for example, at the level of the environment: moving to a new place of residence in another city) do not necessarily entail (although they can sometimes) changes at higher ones. On the contrary, changes at higher levels (for example, at the level of beliefs) clearly affect lower levels, which is well illustrated by our example.Using the concept of logical levels in the light of personality change, the above leads us to a number of interesting interpretations and discoveries.
1. Short-term and long-term changes . Sometimes it turns out that NLP techniques easily change the unwanted behavior for a short period, but then the unwanted behavior will inevitably return. How does this happen? If the new behavior is inconsistent with beliefs, values and personality, the higher levels outweigh and negate the changes achieved at the lower levels.
For changes at the level of behavior to become long-term, the desired change in behavior must occur simultaneously with changes at the higher levels, or the change must occur at the level of personality.
2. Organizational changes . Have you ever been involved in an overall organizational change process? What are the most common areas of organizational change?
How about changing the organizational structure? Or maybe just change the physical layout of the office space? This will change the environment. Will it be deep? Only if such a change is synchronous with changes at higher levels!
Or all of a sudden, staff are encouraged to work in a new way (behavior) without appropriate training (skill growth and a change in behavior). Unfortunately, this happens all too often. When there is a lack of funding, the first thing to cut is the funds for retraining! And again, such changes most often become external, shallow and short-lived.
3. Personal planning in health and career. Suppose you have some personal goals (related to health, career, etc.) that do not correspond to one of the higher levels. How successful do you think you will be in achieving them?
4. "Major problems of our time can be solved only at a higher level of thinking than the one at which they arose" (Albert Einstein) . I heard many references to this quote, but only a few could explain how to do it, how to actually move to a higher level of thinking. Using the concept of logical levels, we do it with ease. So, for example, if a problem has arisen at the behavioral level, then in order to sustainably solve it, we must at least rise to the level of abilities and lines of behavior.
NLP can help you change at higher levels (beliefs and values, personality and sense of calling, spirit and intentions) or help you make sure your goal fits all of your personal or organizational levels. When this happens, your goals in life will become clear and achievable without major external efforts - you will grow to the level of your goals.
Next, we will present to the reader a slightly different perspective on the subject of discussion, as well as give an exercise that will help you achieve personal coherence, in which all your logical levels should be mutually consistent with each other.
How to understand another person
An important distinctive feature of logical levels is that only two of them are available to direct observation from other people - behavior and environment. You can only see what other people are doing, as well as when, where and with whom. This will certainly give you some idea of their abilities, strategies, values, beliefs, etc. In order to be convinced of your ideas, you will have to involve others in the discussion of these subjects. When in conversation with another, you touch on higher logical levels, you will get a deeper understanding of this person, as well as why he behaves in this way. How often, when talking to a person who is important to you, you only talk about the weather (environment) and what he does (behavior), and not about his ideas about himself (personal identity and vocation), not about his beliefs and values.Example with training
Several years ago, I was an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of New Brunswick. In the Faculty of Nursing, a statistics course was required in the first semester of the final year of study. This course had a persistently bad reputation mainly due to the fact that the teaching professors viewed it as purely mathematical. It is not hard to guess that most of the students in the Faculty of Medical Nursing experienced difficulties with this course. Every year, within the student masses, dissatisfaction with the course was expressed, requests for help were heard.
It was my turn to teach this course!
Before proceeding further, let's look at the situation through the prism of logical levels.
Student (s) of the Faculty of Nursing
Spirit and intent (belonging to a larger system): Providing meaningful assistance to all people who need medical attention, support or relief from suffering.
Personal identity and vocation: a highly qualified medical worker who provides accompanying medical services for people for a period of need.
Beliefs and Values: The person has the qualifications and responsibilities of a health care provider to help those in need of health care. Another significant belief of many of the students of the Faculty of Medical Nursing was that they did not have the ability for mathematics (before the start of the course, many of the students came to me, expressed concern about the availability of the course, declared their inability to do mathematics, and argued that this particular inability influenced the choice of a future specialty after graduating from high school).
Abilities and Strategies: Multiple positive abilities and skills for fulfilling the duties of health care providers. Insufficient (in some cases, functionally insufficient) mathematical abilities and skills.
Behavior: Behavior of a professionally competent healthcare professional in carrying out nursing work. Inappropriate behavior when it is necessary to carry out "mathematical" actions and procedures - in some cases, almost "paralyzed", accompanied by inaction or crying.
Environment: the need for nursing work, combined with the need for data collection and mathematical processing.
My approach to teaching the course: I visited the university library and found many examples of the use of statistics in medicine in medical journals. I used them for discussion in seminars and for homework. As a result, the course began to be perceived not as mathematical (statistics), but as a course of developing additional skills necessary for the implementation of competent patient care. It was a delightful experience for me, and the students had amazing success. In the second semester, many of the students took statistical processing of the results of mass medical examinations of residents of New Brunswick as part of their graduation projects.
Now try to answer the question why my approach was fruitful, but the approach of other professors did not, analyzing the situation from the standpoint of the concept of logical levels.
Can you use a similar approach to your relationships in your family, with your subordinates and coworkers, to help them look at the situation in a new way and use their own reserves to consciously overcome difficulties?
Aligning logical levels to achieve personal congruence
For many of us, the logical levels are outside the zone of conscious competence. But, whether we are aware of it or not, logical levels have a significant impact on our life manifestations.The following exercise will help you:
1. Realize what exactly affects the way your life is going.
2. Identify possible internal conflicts.
3. Identify those feasible changes that you can make in order to bring your logical levels into a more consistent state and achieve a higher level of personal congruence (resolution of internal conflict).
I suggest that you take your time doing this exercise and make a list of your answers.
Spirit and intentions: what is your task, what impact do you want to have on a larger system (family, colleagues, people in need of your service or product, society as a whole)?
Personal identity and social role: who are you, what is your role? Does your role fit your purpose? What needs to be changed?
Beliefs and Values: What are your ideas about yourself, about others, about the world in general? Do these beliefs help fit your role? What do you value in yourself, in others, in the world around you? Do your values harmonize with your role? Are there other beliefs and values that you could accept that would be more in tune with your role?
Abilities and strategies: what are your skills? What about your programs and methods of action? Do you need to develop new abilities, to master new methods, to develop and adjust plans of action? Are they in line with higher logical levels? If not, what needs to be changed? If you need to develop skills and abilities, go through additional training. Maybe change the methods and plans of action? Or, having received this new information, will you feel the need to rethink your purpose, your role in the world around you, your beliefs and values?
Behavior: What does your actual behavior look like as seen by other people? Does your behavior match each of the higher-order logic levels? Do you need to change something?
Environment: when, where and with whom do you conduct your behavior? Does it play well with higher logic levels?
On the correspondence of logical levels and goals
Many of our goals (career, family, personal relationships, health, life achievements, etc.) are based on the suggestions, desires, or expectations of others. These people can be parents, spouses, teachers and mentors, religious leaders, bosses, friends, society in general, etc. These goals are not ours, which means they do not have enough energy to move us towards our real aspirations. When we have to fight our goals, there is almost always some kind of internal conflict that needs to be resolved. We often live ineffectively because of these internal conflicts. The following exercise will help you identify these conflicts and align your goals with your real self.Think more seriously about your goal and answer the same questions as in the previous exercise. Pay attention to the degree of correspondence between the two answer choices. You may find, for example, that achieving your goal will take away from the time you spend with your family (assuming that this is important to you too). If this is the case, is there some way to tweak your goal or action plan so that you can spend more time with your family without getting in the way of your goal? It is also a good idea to consult with those with whom your goal affects the relationship, as they will often be able to offer solutions that you yourself would never have thought of.
This process will help you make sure there is a match (or lack thereof) between your goals and your inner self. Once you are able to reconcile your goals and align them with your inner self, you will find that your goals have become clearer, become more attractive and easily achievable.
