Showing posts with label submodalities. Show all posts
The swish pattern is a powerful NLP technique that enables you to break an automatic thought or behaviour pattern and replace them with a more resourceful one. The swish pattern can be used for problems such as fear of public speaking, anger management, smoking cessation, nervousness, lack of self-confidence and phobias.
HERE IS THE SWISH PATTERN PROCEDURE:
1. Recognize the cue image of the behaviour that you wish to change. Ask yourself what occurs just before this unwanted state begins, what image or scene come to your mind? Remember to think in terms of submodalities to get a detailed sense of the scene.
2. Select a replacement image. You should create an image of how you will be or want to be after changing the unwanted behaviour. Enhance the qualities such as submodalities of the scene.
3. Now place the replacement image in the corner or behind the cue image of unwanted behaviour in your mind. The replacement image or scene should be in small size compared to the cue image of unwanted behaviour.
4. Now swish the two images. You should make both the images change simultaneously in your mind with increase in speed. When you swish have the cue image of unwanted behaviour becoming smaller and shot off into a distance, at the same time have the replacement image (desired behaviour) come closer and larger by completely replacing the image of undesired behaviour. Repeat the process until you feel the scene of desired behaviour is totally replaced the image of unwanted behaviour.
5. Repeat this swish five to seven times. Remember to apply break state during each swish.
6. Now enhance the submodalities of the replaced image.
7. Do a test. Now try to think of the unwanted behaviour again. I am sure you will find hard or impossible to act it out, you should actually think on how to do it, it will not be the same automatic response as it used to be.
HOW TO QUIT SMOKING USING THE SWISH PATTERN:1. Identify the cue image that precedes you to smoking, the image that triggers you to the habit is called cue image. The image may be your hand going to cigarette, seeing yourself with cigarette or seeing a cigarette whatever it comes in your mind.
2. Now develop a powerful replacement image. It can be an image of you are standing confident that you had quit smoking or just a quit smoking picture, just think of an image that makes you feel that you will quit smoking.
3. Place the replacement image and apply swish as mentioned above.
4. Repeat the process every time you feel urge to go for a cigarette.
This article was prompted by the above question from one of my readers, a trainer based in Iran.
In NLP we are told that they best way to solve a problem, whether it's a problem that someone would bring to therapy, or the kind of problem that occurs in a work team, is to focus on the structure of the problem, rather than its content.
In practice this means that we focus on how the person or team is creating and maintaining the problem, in contrast to the more traditional and perhaps more intuitive approaches of asking 'why' they problem arose, or focusing on the 'content' of what the problem is about.
My personal view, not necessarily the 'official NLP view' (if there is still such a thing), is that this focus on structure rather than content is the biggest contribution that Richard Bandler and John Grinder made to human development. It's what really distinguishes NLP from other approaches, certainly in the therapy domain and probably in others too.
If we focus on the application of NLP to personal development, which I'm guessing is most likely what you're interested in, we can express this focus on on structure rather than content as "How you think about something is more important than what you're thinking about".
So, for example, if I was aiming to help someone with a fear of speaking in public, I would spend as little time as possible finding out about the 'reality' of the situations where the problem occurs, and instead focus on finding out what they do when they are in that situation or when they imagine themselves in that situation (of course, it might be useful to spend some time letting them talk about the 'content' of the situation, if they really wanted to, in order to maintain rapport with my client).
I would want to find out the cue or 'trigger' that starts the problem off, which could be external (maybe a sound, a name, something they see, the act of standing up to speak) or internal (a remembered sound, name, image, etc) and then what happens next in their mental processing - an imagined or remembered image, sound, or feeling, or some internal dialogue. And then what happens? And then what happens?
So we are interested in the sequence of mental representations that their mind goes through to reach the end result of having the problem response or behaviour. But we're primarily interested in what kind of step each one is - whether it is an image, some internal dialogue, or whatever - rather than what it is an image of or the details of what they are saying to themselves.
Within each step in their 'strategy' for having the problem - each 'internal representation' as it is known in NLP - we are interested in the qualities of that internal representation. Why? Because it is the qualities of the internal representation, more than what it is a representation of, that tell our brains how much significance to give it.
So with images we pay more attention to big things than small things, things that are moving more than things that are still, and things that are close up more than things that are far away. With sounds, we pay more attention to loud sounds than quiet ones, and variable sounds than constant ones. These qualities of our internal representations, known as 'submodalities' in NLP, are like codes that tell our brains how much significance to give to what we see, hear and feel. You can see the evolutionary advantages of this prioritisation of attention based on submodalities - we should notice the lion that is close up and charging at us more than the still, sleeping lion that we can see in the far distance.
So, when we have elicited a client's 'strategy' that results in a problem - the sequence of internal representations, each with their own sub modalities, that they go through, possibly looping round the same sequence a number of times, we effectively have their 'recipe' for having the problem. And just like a recipe, if we change an ingredient, we may get a different - and less problematic - result.
You could try to change the 'recipe' by substituting a different ingredient altogether - for example, if a client makes themselves anxious any time a loved one is a couple of minutes late to meet them by seeing a big, bright, moving image of a car crash, you could try to get them to see a calming image of ripples on a pool instead. But it probably wouldn't work, because try as the client might to substitute the calming image, part of their mind would be going "But... CAR CRASH!" and bringing the scary image up again.
If, however, you change the qualities of the car crash image - maybe making it smaller, and still, and greyed out rather than colourful - you bypass the mind's defences because you're not asking them to change what they are thinking about. But the smaller, greyer, still image of the car crash will be less impactful than the big technicolor one - in most cases at least (you can't say for sure because everyone's subjective experience is different, so the only way to know for sure is to test it). You are not changing the content that the client uses to have the problem, but you are changing the structure of their internal representations. It's a much easier way to get a result, the result in this case being a change in the outcome so it doesn't result in a problem any more.
Richard Bandler's book 'Magic In Action' includes a number of transcripts of client work where he rapidly resolves a range of client problems using essentially this method. He has a particularly subtle and clever way of doing it, where he has the client teach him how to have the problem, and by using humour and asking 'dumb' questions he is scrambling their strategy for having the problem even as they are teaching it to him - see this article for my take on what he's doing.
So that is why we focus on structure rather than content in NLP - it's a much more elegant and effective way to work. See Magic In Action and Frogs Into Princes, or better still attend a reputable NLP training, to get a more in-depth understanding.
The post What does it mean to focus on 'structure' rather than 'content' in NLP? appeared first on Coaching Leaders.
