I don't know about you, but I was (and still am) a huge Steve Jobs fan.

I couldn't get enough of his interviews and product introductions.

The way he communicated. The way he presented. The way he sold. His showmanship.

I don't know if you've ever watched a Steve Jobs-led Apple keynote. It's a sight to behold. I figure that's why people tuned in from all over the planet and some paid handsomely to participate live.

One of the critical elements to his style of presenting has been labeled the Steve Jobs "reality distortion field."

(It's so much a part of the culture that it even has its own Wikipedia entry.

Apparently, he had this uncanny way to bend (many) people's perception of reality to his will.

Of course, as NLP Practitioners, we can't settle for such generic labeling. An expression like "reality distortion field" just seem ripe for modeling.

(Incidentally, there were similar labels and mystery-shrouded descriptions for Milton Erickson's miraculous work fifty years ago...)

When you watch his keynotes (and I've watched ALL of them several times), it becomes obvious that:

reality distortion field = trance state

Jobs used to hypnotize his audience during his presentation, led them into amazing states and anchored those feelings to his products.

Did he ever ask anyone to close their eyes?

Did he every explicitly ask anyone to relax?

So how did he pull it off?

He directed people's attention masterfully.

People who loved him delighted in his way of communicating. His rivals envied it.

But ultimately, the reality distortion field happened by putting people in a trance by guiding them like a maestro would.

Trances can happen or we can make them happen.

Steve Jobs made them happen. That's why we talk about him to this day.

I don't know exactly why this memory came to me today, but I felt compelled to share it with you. As you know if you've been reading me for a while, I seldom write about self-help when it doesn't relate directly to learning and mastering NLP.

This will be one of those posts.

And what it covers is very, very important.

Many spiritual traditions, chiefly the eastern ones, discuss the power of detachment and how it frees us from stress and tension.

All of them teach the "let it go" philosophy, critical to enable us to get through the bad times.

The paradoxical nature of detachment gives us clues on how to resolve apparently inextricable problems.

I'd always heard the expression "This too shall pass..." in many situations. All these situations had one thing in common: they were all bad situations that anyone would naturally want to bring to its end as quickly as possible.

But one day, something weird happened. In the middle of a party, laughing with all my friends, having a complete blast of a time, this little voice popped into my mind that said: "This too shall pass..."

It's easy to think "this too shall pass..." when times are bad. I wouldn't say it's tougher, but it's definitely less obvious to think that when times are great. And yet, those are the only times when you can actually master detachment.

Letting go means letting go. No matter what it is you let go. If you learn how to let go of the good times, you'll have an easy time letting go of the bad times.

Quit chasing anything. Just let it come to you.

Likewise, quit avoiding. Brazilians have an expression that says: "Se correr o bicho pega, se ficar o bicho come." (If you run the beast will catch you, if you stay the beast will eat you.)

Stay still and observe. 

Nothing should happen. Nothing shouldn't happen.

Do you have a daughter or a niece with long hair? Ever try to comb through it?

My daughter does.

She is, literally, Goldilocks.

Anytime I comb through her hair, I'm amazed at how entangled the threads can become. Needless to say, she's not too fond of this combing process. And yet, it's necessary in order to keep her hair healthy and looking good.

When I started learning NLP close to 15 years ago, it felt like a mane of threads to comb through. I had so much material coming at me that I struggled to make sense of it.

No matter where I looked, no one seemed to have organized the field in a manageable way.

You won't have to go through that.

I've combed through NLP for you so you won't have to do it. It takes long. Really long.

What will surprise you is how easily you will be able to organize and sort through the material as you pursue your learning.

Literally, the distinctions you learn today will allow you to map out all your areas of learning in NLP.

Keep in mind that this is just a model. As with anything in NLP, I have no interest in claiming "truth" or "right way of doing things" here. Remember: the criteria by which you evaluate a model is its usefulness. If you don't find it useful, find another one or build your own.

Let's get on with carving NLP in a way that makes it crystal-clear to you.

5 distinct areas of activity

I divide the field of NLP into 5 areas of activity:

1. Epistemology
2. Basic and advanced skills
3. Patterning (Modeling and design)
4. Application
5. Training

Let's run through them one by one.

1. NLP Epistemology

NLP offers to its users an operational epistemology. According to Wikipedia, epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. In layman's terms, epistemology studies how we know what we know. The field addresses:

• What is knowledge?
• How do we acquire it?
• To what extent can we know a particular object or entity?
• How do we know what we know?

NLP offers answers to these questions through particular models, with no claim to truth. The only purpose of those models is their usefulness in codifying human thought and behavior.

You're focusing on NLP Epistemology anytime you're studying or working directly on the "code:"

• Representational systems
• Submodalities
• Strategies
• 4-tuple
• First Acess
• F2 transforms
• Eye accessing cues
• The Meta Model of language (imported from transformational grammar)
• Meta-states

These models offer a map as to how human beings know what they know. Practitioners leverage them when they code patterns acquired through modeling. They also use them when designing patterns, such as the compulsion blowout, frequently used in therapeutic settings.

Mastering NLP Epistemology allows you to create and design patterns on the fly at an unconscious level.

2. Basic and advanced NLP skills

The most basic skills of NLP have to do with modeling. They are the skills you must sharpen in order to become an effective practitioner. Among them, you'll find:

• Observation (sensory acuity in general)
• Calibration
• Rapport
• Anchoring
• Questioning
• Giving suggestions
• Trance
• Visualization
• Framing
• Reframing
• Sleight of Mouth

These are not models or maps. They form a skillset you can develop over time. They allow you to produce results.

Now, these are not necessarily techniques or methods. Any of these skills can involve various techniques or methods to produce results.

Anytime you come across one of them, be aware that you need to put them on your practice schedule in order to improve. While epistemology provides the map, skills enable you to navigate that map effectively.

3. NLP Patterning (modeling and design)

NLP Modeling constitutes THE main activity of NLP. You’re modeling any time you’re acquiring and coding behavioral patterns into explicit models and instruction sets.

You can also be said to be modeling when you craft useful descriptions or maps of phenomena that you observe (for instance, eye movements tied to the use of a specific representational system).

Our core focus in modeling is, of course, the behavior of geniuses who produce outstanding results in a specific field.

When modeling, you'll of course be leveraging epistemology and the fundamental skills of observation, calibration, rapport, trance and so on. You need both the code and the skills to model effectively.

As you become more proficient in modeling, you will inevitably be drawn to design.

You are designing any time you’re using NLP code to create new patterns with the intent of producing a specific result. For example, you might design a specific sequence of sentences that trigger specific sensory representations in order to persuade a client to buy a house.

4. NLP application

In NLP patterning, you model and design patterns. NLP application consists in using them in the world.
Nowadays, you can find therapeutic patterns that were modeled by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in various other fields, such as education, training and development, sales, leadership, and management, among others.

In common language, people say they are "doing NLP" on others.

NLP, per se, is a meta-field like physics. Saying you are "doing NLP" when communicating with someone would be similar to saying that you are "doing physics" when building a house. In a sense, you are, but it's not a useful way to describe what you're doing.

Using the Milton Model isn't doing NLP, it's doing hypnosis. Applying Tiger Woods's golf swing isn't doing NLP, it's doing golf. The "NLP" prefix only serves to identify that we have a codified pattern at play.

Application also involves the installation of patterns. This has to do with the actual “Programming” of NLP. You’re installing whenever you’re transferring, conditioning or programming a pattern in yourself or another person using anchoring, hypnotic language, chaining states or any combination of the former.

5. NLP Training

NLP training deals directly with teaching the other 4 areas of activity to a student or group of students. Training involves explaining, describing and exemplifying specific patterns or models for a student to learn how apply that specific pattern or model. While writing or reading this blog can’t exactly be considered training, it would fall in this generic category. This is what we’ve been doing together all along.

These are the fundamentals. Learn them. Practice them. Stick to them.

Richard Lindesay wrote a great post years ago about the "Professional Trainer". Unfortunately, it's no longer online.

Per Richard:

There is a curious phenomenon which I often see which I call "The Professional Trainer".  The main outcome for these types of people is that they want to train people in something.  They want to fill up their training events, and their focus in on training rather than being really good at the thing they're training in.

So true. Especially in the field of NLP. Everyday, new websites crop up on the internet, pushing NLP as "the magic bullet that can solve anything in your life."

A rapid glance at the content of the site reveals that the author is 1. a fresh student of the field, or 2. anxious to get on the training circuit without first mastering the craft.

Richard then goes on:

Imagine this in other contexts.  A young guy decides that he wants to be a professional trainer, and decides that his thing he'll train in is cooking.  So he goes to a five day cooking course and takes good notes, especially around how to train others in cooking.  He then goes off and sets up a cooking course not only teaching people how to cook, but teaching them to teach how to cook.  So his graduates go out there with their five days of knowledge and start their own cooking courses teaching others how to cook and how to teach how to cook.  Sounds ridiculous in this context, as of course there would be no level of skill and expertise in any of those teaching, so the quality would get lower and lower until one day the people start thinking "Wow, I'm not going to restaurants anymore, cooking has such a bad reputation".

No wonder the field of NLP gets such a bad reputation.

Deservedly so.

90% of the material anyone will encounter about the field is being peddled by:

1. Professional NLP trainers who make their living by teaching NLP.
2. People who have no clue what they're talking about.

Make sure you separate the wheat from the chaff.

When you’re learning and mastering NLP, you’re bombarded constantly by models, skills, patterns, jargon, gurus and history to absorb. And all of them are absolutely important for you to master NLP. But if you want to learn NLP even faster and, more importantly, achieve results for you and/or for your clients much more rapidly, you absolutely MUST do what I’m about to tell you.

I was sitting around yesterday asking myself: “What one thing, if they actually did it, would most help my readers get results in NLP?”

In a way, it’s kind of obvious… There’s no way you can get anything done without figuring this out. But I can’t tell you how long it took me before I actually DID IT. So save yourself a lot of time and do it now!

You want to know what it is? I’ll tell you. But before I do, let me stress something else…

The phrase cast in stone on the temple of the Oracle in Delphi said: “Know Thyself”. To this day, it’s considered one of the most profound nuggets of wisdom humankind has received during the course of history.

But very few people actually figure out HOW to know themselves.

What I’m about to share with you will help you “Know Thyself” at least ten times faster than any other method I can think of.

I’m sure that most if not all NLP teachers would agree. And you will too, in an instant.

It’s so simple and at the same time so exciting I feel like whispering it to you… In fact, what I’ll do is say it to you and end the post right there without telling you another word. You’ll then have to start figuring it out for yourself.

*whispering* find out what your client’s driving sub-modalities are…