Neuro semantics wiki

For many people, intuition is a wonderful, mysterious, and near-magical phenomena. Yet, what is intuition? What do we refer to when we use this term? And how do we use our intuition in our work as we coaches, consultants, trainers, therapists work with people?

NLP began by modeling the intuition of three world-class communicators. You will find this statement and this language in the early books of NLP, especially The Structure of Magic, Volumes I and II (1975, 1976). Richard and John modeled the intuition that Virginia had about people, communicating with them, deciding on what to do as an intervention. They did the same with Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson. What resulted from their modeling? NLP. That is, the models of NLP and the patterns derived from those models. And more specifically:

• The Meta-Model of Language in therapy: asking the questions of specificity.
• The Strategy Model using representation systems and the TOTE process.
• The Representational Model of how people think, encode “thoughts, ” and manifest via neurology.
• The Milton Model of Language for inviting a person to go inside (“downtime”) and access resourceful states.

Modeling Virginia’s Intuitions

In the original NLP books, The Structure of Magic, Bandler and Grinder talked about the intuitions of Perls and Virginia and said that what they modeled were their intuitions. That how they worked with people, how they chose what to say or do, were the result of their whole lifetime of experiences which had now become habitual and automatic. They noted, “Virginia took a lifetime to learn her intuitions.” Yet we do not have to replicate her life experiences, today we can model those intuitions to make explicit what she does “by intuition.” And doing that, we can then transfer her intuitions to ourselves and others. And that’s what NLP is about (or should be about).

intuition comes from Latin and refers to “in-knowing”—to what a person “knows” “inside.” And where do people get that inside knowledge? They were not born with it. Nobody is born “knowing” anything. Unlike the animals who “know” what to eat, how to build a nest, who is a predator, etc., we humans are born without content information instincts. Our “instincts” are without content information and because of this gap— we have tremendous room inside for learning— and learning we do! We learn everything. Yes, we have dispositions and latent “talents” that can be developed. Yet without learning, the dispositions and talents do not develop. You may have a disposition for mathematics, or linguistics, or visual-spatial distinctions, or many other things, yet if you are not exposed to such areas and given a chance to develop, the “talent” will lie dormant. It will not develop.