Unconscious Installation with Gabe Guerrero

Photo by: fangleman

Unconscious Installation? Sounds complicated. Isn’t that the thing where you sit in a training room and don’t have to do anything except zone out and wait to become smart auto-magically?

Yes..That’s right…ahem.

It’s March 2009 and Gabe Guerrero is kicking off the first day of his Unconscious Installation workshop at the prestigious Regents College, London. On our way into the college we pass through Regents Park, down past the river and along the bank where Pelicans, Swans and Squirrels line up to greet us to what will be our home for the next 4 days. It’s a mild spring day and the sun is shining through the trees and reflecting on the lake. There’s something magical about being surrounded by nature and as we step into the training room, old faces and new turn to greet us.

Our first day together begins with Gabe telling some “irrelevant stories” and we soon find ourselves drifting into that often experienced place known as seminar land. After a short time we separate into small groups and begin to use stories to generate different states inside one another covering all rep systems and primary sorts.  The first set of states we aim for are relaxed openness and this sets the stage for much of the other things we’re going to be learning.

Many of us on the course have come with our own ideas and evaluations of what unconscious installation is and can be used for. As Gabe debunks many of the myths that surround this mysterious topic, we find out just when it can be useful to use just unconscious installation, when it’s best to use a mixture of conscious and unconscious learning’s and when it’s best to do the work completely at the conscious level. Gabe teaches us about how we can use unconscious installation not only in a training environment but also in our day to day lives. Whether it’s working with clients in a therapeutic context, teaching in a school, convincing the boss at work or bringing up our children.

One of the first things we begin to learn is how to use rhythm in such a way that we can begin to package information in certain ways. Gabe tells us the story of how Richard Bandler once told a joke on stage and one half of the room started to laugh. A little later on he told another joke and the other half of the room laughed. We then began by learning to use our rhythm to send different messages to different people in a group whist packaging the whole thing inside of a larger package.

As the days pass by we learn different ways of packaging information including using quotes, stories, quotes inside of stories, polya patterns and join-the-dots type patterns. All whilst combining each of these things with our ability to elicit and anchor states, nest stories in certain ways to get different results, use rhythm to separate things into sets and use stories to install specific strategies. Right from the beginning we’re already using multiple skills together in order to create whole packages and soon enough we’re thrown into the deep end when we have to start doing all of these things off-the-cuff.

This was possibly one of the most profound things I’ve experienced on a training course because having to remember the structure of the packages we were creating, come up with stories to elicit states, remember to set anchors for each state, yes/no signals and mark out conscious and unconscious messages non-verbally, without writing anything down or planning, was a fantastic experience.

One thing that Gabe really wanted us to do with this material was to have fun. There was always a clear message about allowing ourselves to make mistakes and to not have to make everything perfect right away. The more we practiced telling stories and structuring our communication without having to make it perfect the first, second or third time made it a lot of fun. We not only practiced all of these things during the training course but also at lunch times and in the bar later in the evening.

Some of the things we learned seemed quite complex and advanced at first and as we learned how to install beliefs using polya patterns, convincer sets, implied inference and the difference between nesting stories and nesting loops, the more we just got into the practical application of each of these things, the simpler and more fun they got.

We continued by combining our learning’s about unconscious installation and tying those things together with conscious learning’s. Gabe showed us  how to go about installing reference points for exercises and other forms of conscious learning and then having people do the exercises in order to fully lock in the learning’s. Sticking with the computer metaphor, Gabe showed us how installing the reference points was like downloading the software to the machine and how combining that with an exercise was not only installing the software but also running it for the first time.

It was amazing to watch how everyone became so much more proficient at doing unconscious installation in such a short space of time and Gabe’s ability to pack so much in and still have everyone really “get” what he was teaching is a marvel in it’s self.

While Gabe finished up by telling us some more “irrelevant stories” and doing some beautiful group trance work, we all knew that this was only the start of learning to become masters at this artful skill of unconscious installation. While Gabe packed a lot of information into the four days, teaching us much of what Richard Bandler does on stage, many things he’d worked out for himself and different ways to get different results, we were already coming up with new ideas ourselves.

Leaving seminar land and heading back out to Regents Park, we walked past the river  in silence as we watched the sun set on what had been a fantastic four days. While we thought about how we were going to use what we’d learned, what else we could calculate from it and what we were going to have for dinner, we arrived at the restaurant and  a buzz of excitement and anticipation filled the room.

We’d certainly learned something magical. This was just ther start.