Afterword

There is one thing that more than anything else delineates when somebody knows what NLP is. It is not a set of techniques, it's an attitude. It's an attitude that has to do with curiosity, with wanting to know about things, wanting to be able to influence things, and wanting to be able to influence them in a way that's worthwhile. Anything can be changed. That's something Virginia Satir said the first time I saw her give a workshop, and it's absolutely true. Any physicist knows that. Any human being can be changed with a .45—that's called "co–therapy with Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson." Whether a change is useful or not is a more interesting question.

The technology that you have been learning here is very powerful. The question about how you will use it, and what you will use it for, is one that I hope you will consider very carefully —not as a burden, but with the curiosity to find out what's worthwhile. The experiences in your life which have been the most beneficial to you in the long run, and which provide the basis of your being able to have pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment, and happiness, were not necessarily utterly enjoyable at the time they occurred. Sometimes some of those experiences were as frustrating as they could be. Sometimes they were confusing. Sometimes they were fun in and of themselves. Those experiences are not mutually exclusive. Keep that in mind when you design and provide experiences for others.

I got on a plane once to go to teach a seminar in Texas. The guy sitting next to me on the plane was reading a book called The Structure of Magic. Something about the cover caught my eye. I asked him, "Are you a magician?"

"No, I'm a psychologist."

"Why is a psychologist reading a book about magic?"

"It's not a book about magic, it's a serious book about communication."

"Then why is it called The Structure of Magic?"

Then he sat there for three hours and explained to me what the book was about. What he told me about that book had nothing to do with what I thought I was doing when I wrote it. At best the relationship couldn't even have reached being tenuous; he got lost in chapter two. But as he told me about the book, I asked him questions, such as, "How specifically?" and "What, specifically?"

"Well, if you look at it this way ... "

"If I were to look at it that way, what would I be seeing?"

"Well, you take this picture, you know, and take the other picture (He didn't know that most people don't have two pictures all the time), and you make this picture smaller and this one larger.

As he began to describe these things that were very matter–of–fact for him, I was sitting there thinking, "Wow, that's weird. There might be a whole new world here!"

He told me that he just happened to be going to Texas to an NLP workshop. When he saw me walk in the door the next day, he was very pleased that I had taken his advice and decided to come to it ... until I walked up on stage and put on the microphone! What he probably will never appreciate is that the reason I didn't just sit down and say, "I wrote that book," was because I didn't want to deprive myself of the opportunity to learn.

You see, whenever you think that you understand totally, that is the time to go inside and say, "The joke is on me." Because it is in those moments of certainty that you can be sure that the futile learnings have set in, and the fertile ground has not been explored. Obviously there is always a lot more left to learn, and that is the fun part of NLP, and its future.

When you master something so throughly that you can do it perfectly, then it becomes a job, no different than running a staple gun. You could set up a clinic and have people come in and cure phobias, over and over again, all day long. There is no difference between that and any other routine. However, when each of those people comes in, you could also begin to explore how to make it more interesting and more worthwhile than just curing a phobia so that someone isn't terrified of an elevator. Why not make it so someone can enjoy riding in elevators? Why not figure out how phobias are done, and give away phobias of something more worthwhile? There are some things worth having a phobia of! Do you have any compulsive spending habits? —violence habits? —eating habits? —consumption habits? How about a phobia of being stagnant and bored? That might propel you into interesting new places.

Whenever I travel to do a seminar, I always arrive at the hotel the night before. When I went to Philadelphia recently, there were a lot of "advanced" neuro–linguistic programmers staying at the same hotel, and most of them had never met me. When I went down to the bar, one of them had just said to a friend, "I hope this isn't just more of that submodality stuff, because I already know that." So of course I walked up and asked, "What the hell is NLP?" — something I wouldn't miss for the world.

"Well, it's hard to explain."

"Well, you do NLP, right? Do you do it well? Do you understand it?"

"Oh, yes, of course I do."

"Well, I'm a simple person. Since you're an expert, can you tell me about this? Go ahead, I'll buy you another drink and you just tell me all about it."

In his wildest fantasies he had no idea the feeling he would have at 9:30 the next morning when I walked onto the stage at the seminar. He also had no idea that he taught me more in the bar than I taught him in the seminar during the next three days.

I'd like you to consider making everything into an introductory seminar, in the sense that you never learn so much that you miss what else there is to know. All too often, people forget how to not know. They say, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like ..." "This is the same as ... " "Yeah, I learned all that submodality stuff last year. ... " I haven't learned it all yet, so if they learned it all last year I wish they would tell me, so I don't have to work so hard to figure it out!

There is a huge difference between learning some things, and discovering what there is still to learn. That is the difference that makes the difference. There are things I know how to do that they don't even suspect. But the reverse is also true. Since everybody has submodalities, everybody does interesting things with them. They may not consciously know how they do them, but still they are able to do and use unique configurations. When clients come in and you ask, "How are you broken?" they'll actually answer that question. But don't forget that they are "broken" so well they can do their problem the same way over and over again! That can always remind you that it's an achievement, no matter how futile, disgusting or repulsive it may be.

The ability to be fascinated by the complexity of that achievement distinguishes somebody who is working in a generative way from one who is working in a remedial way. Without that sense of curiosity, those things which are futile, repulsive and disgusting will be things that you won't know how to influence. Without that influence, people will continue to fight wars over strange places and over insignificant differences, without being able to find new ways in which everybody can come out ahead. The essence of being generative is to create a world in which everybody gains because there are ways of creating more, rather than having a limited amount to fight over and divide up.

Everything a human being can do is an achievement, depending only on where, and when, and for what, it is utilized. Each of both of you can do something about that, because each of both of you is going to drive your own bus. Now that you know how, the interesting question is where? When you can't drive your bus, it doesn't matter much where you try to go, because you won't get there anyway. When you learn how to use your brain, that question becomes crucially important. Some people drive in circles. Some people take the same route every day. Some people take the same route, but it takes them a month instead of a day.

There is so much more inside our minds than we suspect. There is so much more outside than we are capable of being curious about. It's only that growing sense of curiosity that allows you to capture the enthusiasm that makes even the most mundane, or the most fascinating task worthwhile, fun, and intriguing. Without that, life is nothing more than waiting in line. You can master the art of tapping your foot while you wait in line, or you can do much more. And I have a surprise for you. I've found out that the after–life begins with a long wait in line. You'd better have some fun now, because those who enjoy themselves and do things that are worth doing with a great sense of curiosity get to stand in a shorter line than those who have only developed the ability to wait in line.

No matter where you are or what you are doing, the skills, the techniques and the tools that you have acquired here serve as the basis for amusing yourself, and for learning something new. That man who flew with me to Texas, and explained to me what NLP was, is only different from me in one way. The next morning when he sat down and looked up and saw me, and thought, "Oh, my God!" he didn't realize that I learned something from him. That is the only difference between me and him. I didn't do it to make a fool out of him; I did it in order to learn, because I was curious. It was a rare and unprecedented opportunity. And so is every other experience in your life.