10 NLP Techniques

Since NLP first got started, there have been a ton of different techniques that emerged over the years. 

Too many to count. 

And it has found useful application in a bunch of different areas like sales, persuasion/influence, relationships, public speaking, and more. 

It helps those who suffer with anxiety, as well as those who are learning for their own personal development. 

Before you go off and start learning a bunch of different NLP techniques, it is strongly advised that you start with these 10 and branch off from there. 

You'll be working from a solid foundation and the more advanced techniques will work a lot better for you. 

With that being said, let's dive in. 

NLP Techniques #1: Well-Formed Outcome

Step 1: State what you want in the positive.

• State specifically what you want. 
• Avoid describing what you don't want.
• If we had a video-recording of your goal, what would we see and hear?

Step 2: State what lies within your area of control.

• State things that you can initiate and keep within your control.
• What's one thing you can do to move in the right direction?
• Don't wait on circumstances or people to change.

Step 3: Contextualize your goal.

• Define the specific environment, context, and situation needed to attain your goal. 
• Identify the place, time, environment, etc. for this new way of thinking-feeling, behaving, talking, and so on. 
• Where don't you want this behavior?

Step 4: State in sensory-based words.

• Describe specifically what someone would see, feel and/or hear.
• Specify the behaviors that someone could video-tape.
• Think in terms of behavioral evidences.

Step 5: Break it down into bite-sized steps.

• Describe specifically what someone would see, feel and/or hear.
• Specify the behaviors that someone could video-tape.
• Think in terms of behavioral evidences.

Step 6: Load your description with resources.

• Resources are tangible and intangible assets that will assist you in achieving your goal.
• What resources will you need to achieve your goal? Confidence? Self-Esteem? Assertiveness?
• List them as sub-goals.

Step 7: Check for ecology.

• Does this goal fit with all of your other goals, values, state of being?
• Does any "part" of you object to this outcome?
• Check if this goal is acceptable to all parts of the self.

Step 8: Specify evidence that you achieved your outcome.

• How will you know that you reach the goal?
• Refer to step 4 for using sensory language.
• Make sure the evidence is specific!

NLP Techniques #2: Pacing

NLP Techniques #3: Calibration To Someone's State

Calibration to someone's state refers to using our sensory awareness to detect the unique facets of another person's mood or experience.

Eye-accessing cues are great at helping us find out which representational system someone is using. 

We can also calibrate to other neurological signs such as breathing, muscle tone, physiology, skin color, etc. (Hall)

Keep in mind that everyone has their own way of experiencing and responding. 

NLP Techniques #4: Checking The Ecology Of  A Pattern

The phrase "checking ecology" means going above and beyond the current experience and asking about it. 

• Does this state, belief, idea, etc. serve you well?
• Does it enhance your life or limit you in any way?
• Will this make you more, or less effective?
• Does this way of being empower you in the long run?

Human conscious operates as a mind-body system of interactive parts.

• All of the component pieces interact.
• When we influence one part of the system, other parts get affected as well.
• Checking for ecology makes sure that the proposed change will operate cohesively with all other outcomes or values.

Ecology checks to make: 

• Incongruence: Do we respond congruently when thinking about making a change?
• Forecast possible problems: What problems could arise from the proposed change? What will the person lose by getting this behavior?
• Deletion: Have we considered the internal responses, processes, and external behaviors of all relevant people with respect to the proposed change?

Step 1: Invite the person to step back or up.

• After identifying a thought, representation, belief, value, experience, state, etc., step back and think about (meta) that experience.
• "And as you think about..."

Step 2: Invite an evaluation.

• Ask yourself if this expands or limits you in any way. What are its effects?
• "...and you can notice if it serves you well or not, if every part of yourself finds it useful or not..."

NLP Techniques #5: Flexibility of Responses

This meta-level skill, or pattern, involves cultivating within ourselves more flexibility in responding.

• When we discover a set of responses we don't want, we do something different.
• By doing so, we operate from the basic NLP Communication Guideline: "The meaning of our communication is the response we get."
• If we keep offering the same stimulus, time after time, we will get the same response.

The NLP Model encourages our development of flexibility by presupposing that everyone operates out of their own model of the world.

• It may not work very well, but it works.
• Depending upon how a person constructs his or her reality, his or her responses make sense in that construction.
• We must begin by calibrating to that person's reality so we can figure out how that system of meaning works.

• Once we have done the work of calibrating and pacing, we run an ecology check on the system. 
  
• This allows one to discover whether or not their thoughts, values, beliefs, etc. support them or harm themselves.
• Our own flexibility develops as we recognize that everybody operates from their own map of reality, that we all navigate and make decisions based on that map. 

NLP Techniques #6: State Elicitation

One of the most crucial NLP skills you need to develop is being able to elicit experiences, memories, responses, etc. from ourselves and others.

• This, in turn, allows us to replicate it (motivation, creativity, resilience, etc.)
• Via eliciting, we can discover and model internal programs.
• Eliciting allows us to transform experiences by replacing old difficulties with new resources.

Step 1: Move into an uptime state. 

• "Uptime" refers to adopting an alert orientation of the external world.
• Open up your sense receptors to receive all available data in the environment.

Step 2: Assist the person in accessing the state.

• "Think about a time when you felt..." and name the state. E.g. Confident, honest, relaxed, etc.
• Lack of accessing the state removes a person one level from the experience and will result in "theorizing" rather than the actual experience.

Step 3: Elicit as pure a state as possible.

• If you ask for a "strong belief", pick something that doesn't have a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. 
• Pick something simple. E.g., "I have two feet"
• The mental processes of the experience involve the same structure, but with less emotion, thus we get "cleaner" and more direct information... 

Step 4: Express yourself congruently and evocatively.

• Your elicitation tools consist of the words you say and how you say them. (Tone, volume, pitch, etc.)
• Speaking congruently will evoke the state more effectively.
• If a person gets stuck, you can ask "Do you know anyone who can?" "What would it be like if you became them for a few minutes and did it?"

Step 5: Allow the person time to process. 

• If the person can't access the state, make them pretend. This is also referred to as the "as if" frame in NLP. (more on that later...)
• "What would it be like if you could?"

Step 6: Begin with non-specific words and predicates. 

• This allows the person to search for their experience in their own RS. 
• E.g. Think, Know, Understand, Remember, Experience, etc.

Step 7: Follow-up with specific predicates.

• As you notice the accessing of certain RS (think eye-accessing cues), help the person by using sensory-specific words. 
• If they use a visual predicate (see, bright, envision, imagine, etc.), then follow-up with a visual ("How does it look?")

Step 8: Ask good downtime questions.

• Downtime refers to our internal state.
• Use questions that presuppose that the person has to "go inside" to get the information or experience.
• When we do not have access to the information or experience, we have to use our strategy to go inside and get it. 

Step 9: Identify the submodalities

• Focus on the form or structure of the experience by getting the submodality coding. 
• Visual: Distance, clarity, brightness; Auditory: Pitch, Tempo, Harmony, Melody Kinesthetic: Temperature, Pressure, Texture; Olfactory/Gustatory: Fragrant, Woody, Sweet, Minty

NLP Techniques #7: State Induction

When we cannot access a particular resourceful state, we have three foci for accessing and inducing a resourceful state:

• Remembering a state: We can use our memories to recall a time we thought, felt, or experienced a particular resource.
• Creating a state: We can use our imagination to wonder about "what it would look like, sound like, feel like, etc." 
• Modelling a state in someone else: "Who do you know who thinks, feels, acts. etc. in this resourceful way?

Step 1: Catch a state in process and anchor it.  

• Anchoring is the process of associating an internal response with an external or internal trigger (will be discussed later).
• By accessing and anchoring states, we can assist that person in learning how to control their subjectivity. 
• Must be in uptime!

Step 2: Ask them to specifically remember that state. 

• "What did that state of [INSERT STATE] look like, feel like, or sound like when you experienced it?"
• Have the person use their creative imagination about the components that make up the state.

Step 3: Intensify the state.

• Amplify the representations. 
• Identify the driver submodalities that makes the representations sensory rich and full. 
• Use various linguistic intensifiers. E.g., astoundingly, incredibly, strikingly, supremely, etc.

Step 4: Access the physiology of the state.

• Put your body into the kind of posturing, movements, breathing, etc. that corresponds with the state.
• "Show me with your body what it would feel like if you fully and completely experienced X."

Step 5: Gauge the state.

• "How much do you now experience X?"
• "If you had to score it between 0 and 10, 0 for not at all, 10 for totally, what would be your score?"

NLP Techniques #8: State Interrupt

When we go into a mental or emotional state that doesn't serve us well,  we need to "break state" or "interrupt the pattern"...

• We're constantly breaking state every day because our mind-and-body do not stay the same.
• We naturally shift our pattern.
• Developing awareness enables us to take charge of altering our states and those of others.

Step 1: Identify the current state.

• What state has this person (or you) accessed?
• What state of mind have they entered into?
• Their state of body? Their state of emotion?

Step 2: Alter some significant factor of the state.

• Change any "driving" submodality in VAK modalities.
• Change it from color, to black-and-white, or vice-versa.
• Imagine the voice is like Big Bird from Sesame Street.

Step 3: Interrupt.

• Doing almost anything new, weird, or abrupt will interrupt a state.
• A good pattern interrupt will "jar consciousness" so that it cannot continue with its current internal representations or physiology.
• Knowing, and having access to several good "pattern interrupts" enables us to stop certain states from being too powerful or overwhelming.

NLP Techniques #9: Anchoring

Step 1: Decide on a behavior, state, or response, you would like to recreate.

Step 2: Elicit a response.

• Ask a person to remember, imagine, or think about a state and go back and remember it fully...
• Make sure the person (or yourself) has an INTENSE response.

Step 3: Calibrate to and detect the response.

Step 4: Add a stimulus. 

• To the person's response, add a sight (make a face, or gesture), sound, sensation (touch) or word. 
• ALWAYS anchor to unique triggers, and do so in all of the sensory systems (creates redundancy which makes it stronger).

Step 5: Test.

• Break state and re-trigger the stimulus to notice if the response occurs again. 
• If it does, then you have anchored the response.

NLP Techniques #10: Accessing Positive Intention

Step 1: Identify a problem or difficulty.

Step 2: Find the part responsible.

Step 3: Continue asking the positive intention question.

Check out this site to learn more about different Neuro-linguistic Programming techniques.