At seminars like this, people always go out at lunch time and try to figure out what they "are," as if they are only one thing, thereby stabilizing everything pathologically. People try to figure out what they "are" instead of using that information to realize that they have other choices. People will come up to me and say "I'm really confused about this representational stuff because I really see myself as being a very feeling person." That's a profound utterance, if you think about it. I've heard that maybe a hundred and fifty times. How many people have heard something like that already this morning? Rather than thinking of yourself as being visually oriented, kinesthetically oriented, or auditorily oriented, take what you do best as a statement about which system you already have well-developed and refined. Realize that you might put some time and energy into developing the other systems with the same refinement and the same fluidity and creativity that you already have in your most developed system. Labels are traps, and one way that you can stabilize a piece of behavior in an unuseful way is to label it. Instead, you can take the fact that you notice most of your behavior falls into category X, to let yourself begin to develop your skills in Y and Z.
Now, I'd like to caution you about another thing. In psychotherapy one of the major things that Freud made fashionable, and that has continued unconsciously as a presupposition of most therapists' behavior, is the phenomenon known as introspection. Introspection is when you learn something about behavior, you apply it to yourself. I would like to caution you not to do this with most of the material we are presenting you, because you will simply go into a loop. For example: How many people here who can visualize easily know what they would look like if they weren't visualizing? ...
If you do that, you get a spinning sensation. How many of you during the exercise were paying attention to the feeling of your own eyes moving up and down? That's an example of introspection and it is not useful to do it to yourself in this context. These tools are mostly for extrospection, sensory experience. They are things to detect in other people. If you use it on yourself, all you will do is confuse yourself.
Man: How well does this pattern of accessing cues hold up in other cultures?
There is only one group that we know of that is characteristically organized differently: the Basques in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. They have a lot of unusual patterns, and that seems to be genetic rather than cultural. Everywhere else we've been—the Americas, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa—the same pattern exists in most of the population. It may be a neurological bias that is built into our nervous system as a species.
Woman: Do people who are ambidextrous have any different patterns?
They will have more variation from the generalization that we have offered you. For example, some ambidextrous people have the visualization reversed and not the auditory and the kinesthetic, or vice versa.
It's really interesting to me that the percentage of left-handed and ambidextrous people in the "genius" category in our culture is much higher than the percentage in the general population. A person with a different cerebral organization than most of the population is automatically going to have outputs which are novel and different for the rest of the population. Since they have a different cerebral organization, they have natural capabilities that "normally organized" right-handers don't automatically have.
Woman: You talked earlier about children who spelled badly because they did it auditorily, and that you could teach them how to do it visually. And now you just talked about the auditory or ambidextrous person having something different that makes him unique. I'm wondering if it's worth the energy it takes to make those kids be able to do what other people do more easily if it's taking away from other things that they can do?
If I teach a child how to spell easily, I'm not taking anything away. Choices are not mutually exclusive. Many people close their eyes in order to be in touch with their feelings, but that's just a statement about how they organize themselves. There's no necessity to that. I can have all the feelings that I want with my eyes open. Similarly, if I have an ambidextrous or left-handed person with a different cerebral organization, I don't have to destroy any choices they presently have to add to that. And that's our whole function as modelers. We assume since you all managed to scrape up whatever amount of money it cost you to come here, that you are competent, that you already are succeeding to some degree. We respect all those choices and abilities. We're saying "Good, let's add other choices to those choices you already have, so that you have a wider repertoire" just as a good mechanic has a full tool box.
Our claim is that you are using all systems all the time. In a particular context you will be aware of one system more than another. I assume that when you play athletics or make love,you have a lot of kinesthetic sensitivity. When you are reading or watching a movie, you have a lot of visual consciousness. You can shift from one to the other. There are contextual markers that allow you to shift from one strategy to another and use different sequences. There's nothing forced about that.
There are even strategies to be creative, given different forms of creativity. We work as consultants for an ad agency where we psychologically "clone" their best creative people. We determined the strategy that one creative person used to create a commercial, and we taught other people in that agency to use the same structure at the unconscious level. The commercials they came up with were then creative in the same way, but the content was totally unique. As we were doing the process, one of the people there even made a change in the strategy that made it better.
Most people don't have a large number of strategies to do anything. They use the same kind of strategy to do everything and what happens is that they are good at some things and not good at others. We have found that most people have only three or four basic strategies. A really flexible person may have a dozen. You can calculate that even if you restrict a strategy to four steps there are well over a thousand possibilities!
We make a very strong claim. We claim that if any human can do anything, so can you. All you need is the intervention of a modeler who has the requisite sensory experience to observe what the talented person actually does—not their report—and then package it so that you can learn it.
Man: It occurs to me that in your work, the therapeutic goal of bringing clients to awareness is being replaced by giving the client a new pattern of response that they may choose to use.
If you include unconscious choice, I agree with you. There are several presuppositions in our work and one of them is relevant in responding to you: that choice is better than non-choice. And by choice I mean unconscious as well as conscious choice. Everybody knows what conscious choice is, I guess. Unconscious choice is equivalent to variability in my behavior, such that all of the variations get me the outcome I'm after. If I'm presented with the same real world situation a number of times, and I notice that my response varies but that each response gets the outcome I'm after, I have unconscious choice.
However, if each time you go into a similar context you find yourself responding in the same way and you dislike the response, you probably do not have choice. The important question to me is what structure— and there are lots of different ones—produces the state in which you don't have choice? And then what steps can you take to alter that structure? We're going to give you lots of different ways to go about that.
