Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE - Richard Bandler

Imagine what would happen if that woman married someone who had to have things crystal clear in order to understand, He'd say things like, "Now let's bring this into focus," and that would send her into confusion. When she described things she understood, they wouldn't be clear to him. If he complained that what she said was all fuzzy, she'd smile and be perfectly satisfied, but he'd be frustrated.

Her kind of understanding is the kind I talked about earlier, that doesn't have much to do with the outside world. It helps her feel better, but it won't be much help in coping with actual problems. It would be really useful for her to have another way of understanding — one that's more precise and specific.

In the last seminar I did there was a man whose "understanding" wasn't very useful for him. So he tried out the understanding process that his partner went through. Doing that gave him a totally new way of understanding that opened up a whole new world for him.

What I want you all to realize is that all of you are in the same position as that man, and the woman who fuzzes images. No matter how good you think your process of understanding is, there will always be times and places where another process would work much better for you. Earlier someone gave us the process a scientist used — economical little pictures with diagrams. That will work marvellously well for the physical world, but I'll predict that person has difficulties understanding people — a common problem for scientists. (Man: Yes, that's true.) People are a little too complex for a little diagram like that. Some other way of understanding will work better for people. The more ways you have of understanding, the more possibilities open up for you, and the more your abilities expand.

I'd like you all to try this experience of having someone else's understanding. Pair up with the same partner you had before. You already know something about that person's confusion and understanding, as well as your own. However, you do need to gather a little more information. You already found and listed the differences between your confusion and understanding, as well as your partner's. You haven't yet listed all the differences between your understanding and your partner's confusion. You'll have a lot of that information already, but you have probably missed some elements that were the same in what you compared earlier.

After you have full information about the difference between your understanding and your partner's confusion, pick any content that you understand, and first make it into your partner's confusion. Then make whatever changes are necessary to make it into their understanding. Your partner can give you directions and be a consultant to you, advising and answering any questions you may have. After you've tried out their understanding, compare your experience to your partner's, to see if they're the same. You may miss something on the first try, and have to go back and do it again. The goal is for you to experience someone else's way of understanding. After you try it out, you may decide it's not a very good one, and you may not want to use it very often. But don't be too sure about that; it may work exquisitely for something you have trouble with. At the very least it will help you to understand certain people who use that process. Take about twenty minutes each. . . .

Was that pretty interesting? What did you experience when you took on someone else's understanding?

Man: My own understanding is very detailed, so I understand mechanical things very easily. My partner's understanding was a lot more abstract: she sees fuzzy rainbows when she understands something. When I tried out her understanding I couldn't understand mechanical things at all, but I had a sense of understanding people much better. Actually, I think I wouldn't call it "understanding" so much as feeling what they meant and being able to respond to them easily. The colors were magnificent, and I felt sort of warm and excited the whole time. It certainly was different!

Woman: When I understand something, I just see detailed movies of that event happening. My partner sees two overlapping framed pictures when he understands something. The closer picture is an associated picture of the event, and the second picture is a dissociated picture of the same event. He feels he understands when the two pictures match. My partner's an actor, and I realized how useful it must be to him. When he's playing a part he's associated, and he also has the other dissociated picture that shows him what the audience is seeing at the same time. When I took on his understanding, I had a lot more information about how I look to other people. That was very helpful to me because I usually just jump into situations without thinking about how other people see me.

That sounds pretty useful. Taking on someone else's way of understanding is the ultimate way to enter that person's world. How many of you already had more or less the same way of understanding as your partner had? . . . About 8 out of 60. Here you just picked people at random, It's even more fascinating if you choose very successful people. I'm a pragmatist; I like to find out how really exceptional people do things. A very successful businessman in Oregon did the following with any project he wanted to understand: he'd start with a slide and expand it so that it was fully panoramic and he was inside it. Then he'd convert it into a movie. At any point where he had trouble seeing where the movie was going, he'd step back slightly and see himself in it. As soon as the movie started moving again, he'd step back inside. That's an example of a very practical understanding that is intimately related to actually doing something. For him, understanding something and being able to do it are indistinguishable.

Understanding is a process that is vital to survival and learning. If you weren't able to make sense out of your experience in some way, you'd be in big trouble. Each of us has about three pounds of gray matter that we use to try to understand the world. That three pounds of jelly can do some truly amazing things, but there's no way it can fully understand anything. When you think you understand something, that is always a definition of what you don't know. Karl Popper said it well: "Knowledge is a sophisticated statement of ignorance." There are several kinds of understanding, and some of them are a lot more useful than others.

One kind of understanding allows you to justify things, and gives you reasons for not being able to do anything different. "Things are this way because . . . and that's why we can't change anything." Where I grew up, we called that a "jive" excuse. A lot of "experts' " understanding of things like schizophrenia and learning disabilities is like that. It sounds very impressive, but basically it's a set of words that say, "Nothing can be done." Personally, I'm not interested in "understandings" that lead you to a dead end, even if they might be true. I'd rather leave it open.

A second kind of understanding simply allows you to have a good feeling: "Ahhh." That woman who de–focuses pictures to get understanding is an example of that. It's sort of like salivating to a bell: it's a conditioned response, and all you get is that good feeling. That's the kind of thing that can lead to saying, "Oh, yes, 'ego' is that one up there on the chart. I've seen that before; yes, I understand." That kind of understanding also doesn't teach you to be able to do anything.

A third, kind of understanding allows you to talk about things with important sounding concepts, and sometimes even equations. How many of you have an "understanding" about some behavior in yourself that you don't like, but that understanding hasn't helped you behave differently? That's an example of what I'm talking about. Concepts can be useful, but only if they have an experiential basis, and only if they allow you to do something different.

You can often get someone to accept an idea consciously, but only seldom will that lead to a change in behavior. If there's one thing that's been proved beyond a doubt by most of the religions of the world, that's it. Take "Thou shalt not kill," for instance. It doesn't say "except ... " Nevertheless, the crusaders happily sliced Moslems in two, and the Moral Majority wants more missiles to wipe out a few more million Russians.

Often people in seminars will ask, "Is a visual person the same as the 'parent' in TA?" That tells me they are taking what I'm teaching and stuffing it into the concepts they already have. If you can make something new fit into what you already know, you will learn nothing from it, and nothing will change in your behavior. You will only have a comfortable feeling of understanding, a complacency that will keep you from learning anything new.

Often I'll demonstrate how to change a person in minutes, and someone will say, "Don't you think he was just fulfilling the expectations of the role situation?" I've rolled a few drunks, but I've never rolled a situation. Those are the people who come to seminars and get nothing for their money, because they leave with exactly the same understanding that they brought with them.

The only kind of understanding I'm interested in is the kind that allows you to do something. All our seminars teach specific techniques that allow you to do things. That seems simple. But sometimes the things I teach don't fit into your existing understanding. The healthiest thing you can do at that moment is to become confused, and many people complain about how confusing I am. They don't yet realize that confusion is the doorway to a new understanding. Confusion is an opportunity to rearrange experience and organize it in a different way than you normally would. That allows you to learn to do something new and to see and hear the world in a new way. Hopefully the last exercise gave you a concrete experience of how that works, and the kind of impact that can have.

If you understood everything I said, and never got confused, that would be a sure sign that you were learning nothing of significance, and wasting the money you paid to come here. That would be proof that you are continuing to understand the world in exactly the same way as when you got here. So whenever you get confused, you can get excited about the new understanding that awaits you. And you can be grateful for this opportunity to go somewhere new, even though you don't yet know where it will take you. If you don't like where it takes you, you can always leave. At the very least you will be enriched by knowing about it, and knowing that you don't like it.

Some people's understanding has uncertainty built into it. I know an engineer whose understanding is composed of a rectangular matrix of pictures, about eight rows down and eight columns across. He starts thinking he understands something when the matrix is about half full of pictures. When it's about ninety percent full, he knows he understands something pretty thoroughly. However, his matrix always has empty frames which signify that his understanding is always incomplete. That keeps him from ever getting too sure about anything.

One of my most capable student's understanding is a dissociated movie of herself doing whatever it is she understands. When she wants to actually do it, she steps into the movie — doing and understanding are nearly identical. Behind that movie is a succession of movies of herself doing it in different situations, doing it while overcoming obstacles, etc. The more different movies she has, the surer she is that she understands something well. I once asked her, "How many movies do you have to have to understand something?" She replied, "It's always a question of how well I understand it. If I have a few movies, that gives me a little understanding. If I have more movies, I understand better. The more different movies I have, the more I understand it. But I never understand completely."

In contrast, there are people who are completely confident that they understand how to do something if they have a single movie of having done it, I know one man who flew a plane once, so he was completely sure that he could fly any plane, anywhere, anytime, in any weather, while standing up in a hammock! He came to a five–day seminar of mine, learned one pattern and left at noon the first day, totally confident that he knew all of NLP. How's that for getting stuck?

Getting stuck in a particular way of understanding the world — whatever it is — is the cause of three major human diseases that I'd like to do something about. The first one is seriousness, as in "dead serious." If you decide that you want to do something, fine, but getting serious about it will only blind you and get in your way.

Being right, or certain, is the second disease. Certainty is where people stop thinking and stop noticing. Any time you feel absolutely certain of something, that's a sure sign that you have missed something. It's sometimes convenient to deliberately ignore something for a while, but if you're absolutely certain, you'll probably miss it forever.

It's easy for certainty to sneak up on you. Even people who are uncertain are usually certain about that, too. Either they're sure they're sure, or they're sure they're unsure. Rarely do you find someone who is uncertain about his doubt or uncertain about his certainty. You can create that experience, but you don't usually encounter it. You can ask someone, "Are you sure enough to be unsure?" That's a stupid question, but he won't be sure anymore after you ask it.

The third disease is importance, and self–importance is the worst of all. As soon as one thing is "important," then other things aren't. Importance is a great way to justify being mean and destructive, or doing anything else that's unpleasant enough to need justification.

These three diseases are the way most people get stuck. You may decide something is important, but you can't get really serious about it until you're certain that it's important. At that point you stop thinking altogether. The Ayatollah Khomeni is an excellent example — but you can find lots of other examples closer to home.

Once I pulled up in front of the grocery store in a small town I used to live near. A guy came running over and said angrily, "My friend said you flipped me off"

"I don't think so; do you want me to?"

"Let me tell you something — "

I said, "Wait just one minute," and went into the store and shopped.

When I came back out, he was still out there! When I walked up to my car, he was panting with anger. I picked up a bag of groceries and handed it to him, and he took it. I opened the car door, put the other three bags in the car, took the bag from him and got in the car and closed the door. Then I said, "All right, if you insist" flipped the bird at him, and started to drive away.

As I drove away he burst out laughing hysterically, because I simply would not take him seriously.

For most people, "getting stuck" is wanting something and not getting it. Very few people can pause at that point and question their certainty that this thing is seriously important to them. However, there is another kind of being stuck that no one notices: Not wanting something and not having it. That is the greatest limitation of all, because you don't even know you're stuck, I'd like you to think about something that you now recognize is very useful or enjoyable or pleasurable. . . .