Patterns part 2 – Information Gathering

This is the second article in a series about patterns and you can find part one here: Patterns 1 – Warmth on the soul

Photo by Johnny Blood

When Richard Bandler and John Grinder first started out modelling great therapists, a lot of their focus was on figuring out how these therapists did what they did so well. When they published The Structure of Magic volume 1, a lot of people took the material and acted as if the questions in the Meta model were the only questions that could be asked.

I remember watching Richard and him saying “The meta model is a model of how therapists did what they did, not of how we do what we do”. Part of the reason for him saying this is that often people forget that questions are only as useful as the result they get. That is, if you’re asking questions to elicit information and you ask questions about things you don’t really want to know about then you’re wasting your time and energy. John La Valle has been known to use the term “Well targeted questions” when talking about those questions that get the result required and this is, to me, the first part in being able to notice patterns in behaviour.

We can usually divide questions into two large chunk categories, the questions you ask other people and the questions you ask yourself. It’s not that the questions themselves will be necessarily different but to me, asking yourself good questions when information gathering is just as, if not more important, than asking questions to the other person.

NLP as a technology – The recursive “next” Function

In one of his seminars Richard talks about NLP as a technology being based around the idea of a recursive next function. What Richard noticed when watching therapists do what they do was that often the biggest problem was that the therapist got to a point where they didn’t know what to do next or what to ask. The Meta model it’s self is based around the recursive next idea in that at any point in the interaction between client and therapist, there will always be a question to ask at each point in the interaction.

One of the reasons why asking well targeted questions is so important is because in order to find patterns in a persons behaviour, you have to start asking yourself questions that lead you in the right direction. When you look at the client in front of you, are you asking “What technique shall I use on the reported problem?” or are you asking yourself “What information do I need so that I can create an intervention that will really help this person change?” The more you start looking for what it is that the person in front of you really needs instead of looking at a label and saying “oh, a phobia, yes the phobia cure will be fine for this”, the easier it becomes to really help the person with the real issue.

Part of this comes down to the fact that most of the time when a client comes in and tells you their problem; they don’t actually know what the problem is. They’re aware of maybe one or two of the symptoms and sometimes simply changing this is enough. Most of the time changing just one or two of the symptoms without gathering information about how the person operates and runs their life, leads to changes that don’t always last. This isn’t the same as “going for the root cause” because that’s not usually what will be maintaining the problems. For some people the very fact that they obsess over something different every few months means that the problem they’re coming to you with is, for them, simply just another behavioural exhibition of a problem that isn’t the problem being reported.

The beauty of all of this is that by asking questions that you actually care about and by asking questions about different aspects of a persons life, job, hobbies, family, friends (ideas taken from Gabe Guerrero’s Therapeutic model) you can begin to build in your mind different sets of patterns that are pervasive in a persons life as well as being able to build a model of the person so that you can simulate different responses based on interventions you might consider.

When some people talk about information gathering in NLP they tend to talk about language and this is one great form of information gathering. You ask questions, hear the response and then begin to notice patterns in the persons words, tone of voice, inflections at specific times, meta program sequences etc etc. I remember watching a therapist once ask questions from a sheet of paper and then write down some of the things they noticed about what they person was telling them. The problem with that kind of information gathering is that it’s too restrictive. There’s a lot of information that comes through in language but there’s just as much or even more, in what the person does non-verbally and if you’re not looking at the person in some way, you’re likely to miss out on the rich information being handed to you.

There are patterns in almost everything people do and spotting the patterns that are important in holding together the problems that people have is the way that you can begin creating interventions that truly help them. Applying pre-taught techniques to labels such as “phobia, depression, and anxiety” is just not enough. Human beings are dynamic and our approach to working with them should by dynamic also. We have a framework and a technology that enables us to find out how to get our clients to where they need to be and in turn, through this, we’ll end up leaving behind us a trail of techniques – Just as Richard and John have done. Techniques are useful because we can create them, refine them, test them and ultimately make them as elegant as possible in order to get the changes required in the most elegant way possible. As well as this, no number of techniques is ever going to cater for every person in the world and assuming that a problem warrants a specific technique can only come after gathering enough information to know that the intervention is the one that’s really required.

A lot of the information in this article is based around many of Richard’s teachings and those of Gabe Guerrero and are ideas I’ve been working with and thinking about for some time.

I’d love to hear your feedback so please post and let me know what you’re thinking. Part of the reason I’m writing about this is because I’m interested in how you’re already applying these thoughts into the way you work and noticing the things you’re noticing.

Love, Jamie