John Grinder Quotes

Remember: the journey is the destination.

Creative geniuses are: 1.  Comfortable with uncertainty 2.  Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes 3.  Persistent

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop. For example, if you were given the task of describing an interaction between a cat and a dog, you might make entries like: "Cat spits, ... dog bares teeth, ... cat arches back,... dog barks,... cat—" At least as important as the particular actions described is the sequence in which they occur. And to some extent, any particular behavior by the cat becomes understandable only in the context of the dog's behavior. If for some reason your observations were restricted to just the cat, you would be challenged by the task of reconstructing what the cat was interacting with. The cat's behavior is much more difficult to appreciate and understand in isolation.

By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and of all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubins and seraphins, and of all the holy patriarchs, prophets, and of all the apostles and evangelists, and of the holy innocents, who in the sight of the Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of the holy virgins, and of all the saints together, with the holy and elect of God, may he be damn'd. We excommunicate, and anathematize him, and from the thresholds of the holy church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he may be tormented, disposed, and delivered over with Dathan and Abiram, and with those who say unto the Lord God, Depart from us, we desire none of thy ways. And as fire is quenched with water, so let the light of him be put out for evermore, unless it shall repent him' and make satisfaction. Amen. May the Father who created man, curse him. May the Son who suffered for us curse him. May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him. May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him. May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him. May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him. [Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,---but nothing to this.---For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.] May St. John the Pre-cursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ's apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him. May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honor of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him. May he be damn'd wherever he be---whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. May he be cursed in living, in dying. May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting! May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body! May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! May he be cursed in the hair of his head! May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex, in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers! May he be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach! May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin, in his thighs, in his genitals, and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails! May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of the members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him! May the son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty and may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him, unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness!

In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words—which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history—and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word "comfortable."That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.

My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness.

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages. If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea,"even though the words are the same. There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not.

There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences— which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

next book, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.10 Like Satir and Bateson, Erickson found the work impressive.

One of the strategies that they taught us was how to generate an even greater amount of learning and choice from every experience or life situation. We were instructed to review the events of the day and identify the significant choice points. We were to reflect on the choices we had made at those points and whether they were successful or unsuccessful in reaching our desired outcome. For each choice point, we were to imagine three alternative ways we could have responded, other than the way that we did (whether or not what we did was successful). In our imagination, we were to then project the results and consequences of each alternative and imagine what it would be like to have actually made this choice by stepping into the experience and fully living it somatically in imagination.

The Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP (2000) and NLP II: The Next Generation (2010).

This background also provided the foundation and inspiration for the remarkable recovery of my mother from metastatic breast cancer in 1982 and was the basis for my book Beliefs: Pathways to Health and Well-Being.17

Bob Dylan sang, “He not busy being born is busy dying.

Grinder’s Whispering in the Wind.

After four years of corporate experience I completed the first draft of Making the Message Clear (which I believe was the first book on the application of NLP to business).

We created and published with Bill the Neurolinguistic Communication Profile and Rapport: Matching and Mirroring Communication.

Rapport-Based Selling and No Need for Conflict!

So, what every parent would want their college kids to know: Look for patterns, they are always there. Challenge all my assumptions. Change, Jim, can be good. Use all my senses, even the ones I am not aware of. Understand the world from another’s perspective, not mine. Listen more, talk less; if I do talk, ask questions. Everyone is doing the best job they can given the limitations of their beliefs. My job is to get people to use the best of themselves to get better, to improve. Everyone has a chance; if something didn’t work, it’s because of my limitations, not the other person’s. I am ultimately accountable for and own the outcomes of my choices. All of them.

books on Strategies of Genius.

Applications of NLP

Steps to an Ecology of Mind.7 Bateson

The Wild Days: NLP 1972 to 1981: This is a first hand interpretation of the events and relationships created during the development of NLP.6 Happy Parents Happy Kids: Words and Actions for Parents and Kids: This is a book on parenting using components of the NLP model to provide strategies for common parenting challenges. The book includes many practical exercises.7 I have also designed a computer program called LifeSet Meta Programs Survey. This is a 48-question assessment survey designed to elicit “meta programs” and hence to understand the drivers of people’s behaviors.

Since the early days, some of the originators of NLP have developed new models including Design Human Engineering, the New NLP, and NLP New Code.

remain, however, a firm believer in the value of the fundamentals. It is difficult to master the really slick stuff without core tools like the Meta Model, accessing cues, calibrations, anchoring, sub-modalities, and an understanding of how and why these are important

Virginia joined John and Richard at the house to model her work with family systems and the three of them collaborated to write the book, Changing with Families.

which Frank and I later refined and published as the book, Magic Demystified: A Pragmatic Guide to Communication and Change.4

Sobriety Demystified: Getting Clean and Sober with NLP and CBT, which was published in 1996. In keeping

Bandler and Grinder’s work with Virginia Satir and their exploration of parts also led to the principle of positive intention. Simply put, the principle states that at some level all behavior is (or at one time was) “positively intended.” Another way to say it is that all behavior serves (or at one time served) a “positive purpose” – i.e., every “neuro-linguistic program” emerges and lasts because it serves some type of adaptive function. While I liked the principle, at first it seemed mostly like a nice philosophical idea. Like everything else in NLP, however, it eventually became a very personal experience that changed my life. It did not come in a flash of blinding light as to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. It was subtler. But the moment that I deeply realized all of my behaviors had some type of positive intention, even if I did not immediately recognize what it was, something shifted inside of me that led to a deep trust in my own being; that somehow, as Einstein proposed, “the universe is a friendly place” at its core. Even today the principle of positive intention seems to me to be the most spiritual principle in NLP.

The first application was named Mind Master, which was followed by the NeuroLink and a commercial computer game called MindDrive. Today, these applications are available through Somatic Vision.

(again, deploying that mother of all skill sets in NLP, calibration),

The greeting of risk, the willingness to discover through (certain classes of non-lethal) trial and error, the subordination of success to exploration and discovery, and the insistence of finding the edge of patterns; where they fail, all of these seem to contain echoes of field work in Special Forces and related intelligence organizations, the passion for languages, the recognition that much of what passes for effective communication can be achieved with very little actual understanding, the primacy of non-verbal communication in influencing face-to-face communications, a tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness, and a fascination with the unknown.

There are only two distinctions between anybody in this room and an institutionalized schizophrenic: (1) whether you have a good reality strategy and you can make that distinction, and (2) whether the content of your hallucination is socially acceptable or not. Because you all hallucinate. You all hallucinate that somebody's in a good mood or a bad mood, for example. Sometimes it really is an accurate representation of what you are getting from the outside, but sometimes it's a response to your own internal state. And if it's not there, sometimes you can induce it. "Is something wrong?" "What is bothering you?" "Now I don't want you to worry about anything that happened today while you were gone." Drinking blood in this culture is not acceptable. I've lived in cultures where that's fine. The Masai, in Eastern Africa, sit around and drink cups of blood all the time. No problem. It would be weird in their culture for somebody to say "I can see that you are feeling very bad about what I just said." They would begin to wonder about you. But in this culture it's reversed. When we trained residents in mental hospitals we used to go up early and spend time in the wards because the patients there had problems we never had the opportunity to encounter before. We would give them the task of determining for themselves which parts of their experience were validated by other people, and which were not. For instance, with the cup-of-blood guy, we immediately joined his reality. "Yeah, warm this one up for me, will you?" We joined his reality so much that he came to trust us. And then we gave him the task of discovering which parts of his reality other people in the ward could validate for him. We didn't say this was really here and that wasn't, but simply asked him to determine which parts of his reality other people could share. And then he learned - as most of us have as children - to talk about those parts of reality which are either socially acceptable hallucinations, or that other people are willing to see and hear and feel, too. That's all he needed to get out of the hospital. He's doing fine. He still drinks cups of blood, but he does it by himself. Most psychotics don't have a way of making distinctions between what's shared reality and what's not. (...) I've made a lot of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when i worked at an electronics corporation. The corporation people didn't come in the morning and hold each other's hands and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes. Now, when somebody at the corporation sees somebody do that, they go "Urrrrhhh! Weird!" And the people in humanistic psychology circles think the corporation people are cold and insensitive and inhuman. To me, they are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you think about shared realities, the corporation people are in the majority! (...) Therapists feel letters. I don't think that's any more peculiar than drinking cups of blood. Everywhere I go, people tell me they feel O and K. That's pretty weird. Or you ask people "how do you feel?" and they say "Not bad." Think about that for a moment. That's a very profound statement. "I feel not bad." That's not a feeling. Neither is "OK.

the ability of a religious or business leader to inspire, motivate, generate interest, capture attention, depends critically on metaphor. if you actually listen to what people say, there's almost no content substance to it.

CHAPTER 1 THE BARISTA AND THE TASTER 1. The barista Chung Lee at my local Joe Coffee. 2. Ed Kaufmann, the head coffee buyer at Joe Coffee Company. 3. Jonathan Rubinstein, the founder of Joe Coffee Company. 4–5. Richard and Alice Rubinstein, Jonathan’s parents who invested in the very first Joe Coffee shop. 6–11. Other key Joe Coffee staff, including Tim Hinton, manager of my local Joe Coffee Company, and Frankie Tin, Brandon Wall, Doug Satzman, Will Hewes, and Jonathan’s sister, Gabrielle Rubinstein. 12–15. The employees of Mazzer coffee grinders, which ground my coffee beans, including Luca Maccatrozzo, Cristian Cipolotti, Luigi Mazzer, and Mattia Miatto. 16–19. Thunder Group, makers of the strainer used at Joe Coffee, including Michael Sklar, Brian Young, Takia Augustine, and Robert Huang. 20–22. The folks at Hario digital scale for coffee, including Shin Nemoto, Sakai Hario, and Tagawa Hario. 23–25. The workers at the Specialty Coffee Association, including Don Schoenholt, Spencer Turer, and Kim Elena Ionescu, who organize coffee conventions where Joe Coffee employees find new supplies. 26–29. Oxo kitchen tools, including Juan Escobar, John DeLamar, Eddy Viana, and Lynna Borden. 30–31. The developers of the coffee flavor chart, including Edward Chambers and Rhonda Miller,

Alf was a jack-of-all-trades, carpenter, tinsmith, blacksmith, electrician, plasterer, scissors grinder, and cobbler. Alf could do anything, and as a result he was a financial failure although he worked all the time.

But a second, equally prominent, emphasis of the early days was learning to navigate without fixed maps; that is, to learn at an unconscious level. As I soon discovered in doing trance work, a hypnotic induction is a set of communications that de-frames or dissolves fixed maps, thereby allowing new experiences unhindered by the map bias.

But a second, equally prominent, emphasis of the early days was learning to navigate without fixed maps; that is, to learn at an unconscious level. As I soon discovered in doing trance work, a hypnotic induction is a set of communications that de-frames or dissolves fixed maps, thereby allowing new experiences unhindered by the map bias. From this naturalistic view, virtually my entire time spent with Bandler and Grinder was a hypnotic induction – the core spirit guiding the work was dissolving all fixed views (in ourselves and others), so that both laughter and significant new realities could emerge. To me, the revolutionary spirit of early NLP came from a beautiful combination of these two levels of (1) learning without maps (i.e., unconscious learning) and (2) learning via maps improved by meta-modeling principles. The former provided a deep well of original ideas and possibilities, while the latter offered a means to refine and formalize these possibilities into teachable and replicable models.

The only justification for the application of NLP patterns is the creation of choice and precisely in the context in which choice presently does not exist.