Neuro Linguistic Programming Learning 3

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"The Big Book of NLP, Expanded: 350+ Techniques, Patterns & Strategies of Neuro Linguistic Programming" by Shlomo Vaknin and Erickson Institute.

Rapport is built by becoming subtly similar to someone — matching their body language, speech, and symbolic world — so their subconscious senses "you're like me / you get me." Once that rapport exists (pacing), you can lead them into a new state or position. Sharp sensory observation is the prerequisite for all of it.

You can't lead someone you haven't first paced. Match their world until their subconscious accepts you as "one of us," then move — and the moment you hit resistance, that's your signal the rapport isn't there yet (back up, don't push).

The frameworks

  • Pacing & Matching (Grinder/Bandler) — blend elements of the other person's body language and speech into your own style (not raw imitation). Match their predicates — if they say "I see what you mean," you reply in visual language too. Start so subtle it can't be detected, escalate gradually, and never fake an accent.

  • Mirroring — reflect their physiology to build rapport and "second position": converse while subtly matching cadence, gesture, and breathing; use active listening ("So you're saying…") to keep it flowing; then test — try to guess their opinion before they voice it, then shift your own posture/mood and watch whether they follow (that's pacing and leading).

  • Behavioral & Symbolic Mirroring — when plain physical matching isn't enough (across status, gender, culture), mirror the things a person values and respects: mention hard work, family, or faith if those matter to them; match their wardrobe, references, and the connotation of their words. (The book's example: Temple Grandin wearing western wear with cattle-industry clients.)

  • Exchanged Matches — when copying someone directly would be too obvious, match the timing of their movement with a different, subtler one — e.g. tap your finger or nod in time with their breathing (read it from their shoulders, not their chest). Once matched, you can gently lead by slowly speeding your own rhythm so theirs follows.

  • When NOT to mirror — don't mirror aggression (don't play "alpha dog" — adopt a same-team posture instead), don't mirror suffering or intense need (you'll induce their state in yourself and may threaten them — mirror only the general, comforting cues). If you get caught mimicking, drop the physical mirroring but keep gentle symbolic mirroring.

  • The observation skills - before you can influence anyone, you have to be able to read them — and these four drills train your eyes to catch the small, automatic signals that reveal what's going on inside.:

    • Eliciting Subconscious Responses — learn what each of your senses "looks like" from the outside. Ask a partner to relive a happy memory and focus first only on what they saw in it, then only what they heard, then only what they felt — while you watch how their posture, skin color, and breathing shift with each one. You're building a personal catalog of "this is what someone looks like when they're picturing something vs. hearing something vs. feeling something."

    • Calibration — connect one specific body signal to one specific inner state. Have your partner think of something they clearly understand, and watch their face, eyes, and hands; then something that confuses them, and watch again. Once you can see the difference, have them silently pick one and re-think it — and you guess which from their body alone, then check. You're learning to "read the dial" for that person.

    • Sensory Acuity — simply training your eyes to catch the tiny, involuntary changes people don't control: skin getting lighter or darker, muscles tensing or softening, breathing speeding up or slowing, breath moving higher or lower in the body, faint lines around the lips, pupils widening. These are the raw signals everything else is built on.

    • Non-Verbal Cues Recognition — you read other people's faces better once you know your own. The face has 90+ muscles and thousands of expressions, so you practice in a mirror — cycling through emotions like fear, joy, anger, and surprise — to feel from the inside what each expression is, which makes you far quicker to spot it on someone else.

  • Satir Categories (Virginia Satir) — when people are under stress, they tend to fall into one of five communication styles. Each one is a kind of defense, so each needs a different approach to build rapport. Recognize which one you're facing, then match it the right way:

  • The Blamer — attacks and finds fault ("This is your fault"). Don't get defensive and don't fight back — instead, get worked up about the same problem they are, so you're on the same side against it. Match their intensity, but never put them in a position where they have to defend themselves.

    • The Placater — over-apologizes and tries to please everyone, afraid of conflict. Give them the attention and reassurance they're craving; start by connecting with what they deeply care about, then ease into the specifics.

  • The Computer — goes cold, stiff, and overly logical to avoid feeling anything. Meet them there: stay calm and rational, and don't push them to open up emotionally — that only makes them retreat further.

    • The Distracter — changes the subject and won't stay on point, dodging the real issue. Don't fight the tangents — go along with the detour, but keep gently steering back by tying things to what they personally care about, until their own restlessness wears them out and they return to your point.

  • The Leveler — straightforward, honest, and congruent: their words, tone, and body all line up. This is the easiest person to connect with — just match their honesty and sense of fairness. And when you can't tell which style someone is, default to being the Leveler yourself.

Worked example

A textile sales rep meets a clothing-company buyer. Reading her cues — worked her way up (no degree-pride), conservative-religious accent, judgmental remarks — he runs behavioral + symbolic mirroring: drops big words, mentions things he earned through hard work, uses dry humor aimed at the rich (not the poor), references his church and family. He physically mirrors her posture and breathing, but via an exchanged match — watching her shoulders and moving his hand to her breath rhythm while keeping a gentle masculine quality. Rapport forms below her awareness, and then he can lead.

Key takeaways

  1. Match into their world (verbal, physical, symbolic), then lead — rapport precedes influence.
  2. The more subconscious a behavior, the safer and more powerful it is to mirror.
  3. Train sensory acuity and calibration on yourself first — your own face, your own physiology.
  4. Know when to STOP — never mirror aggression or suffering; back off if caught.
  5. Use Satir categories to read people and to know what not to do; when lost, be the Leveler.
  6. Prefer pacing (integration) over mirroring (imitation) when subtlety matters — pacing rarely offends.
  7. Use symbolic mirroring when physical mirroring is risky (caught, intense states, opposite sex) — harder to detect, de-escalating.

A "state" is your whole mind-body condition at a given moment (confident, anxious, curious, flat). States can be deliberately switched on, cleared, amplified, and linked to a trigger — so you can re-summon a resourceful state on demand. This is the most fundamental NLP skill: nearly every other pattern assumes you can already produce and anchor a state cleanly.

Anchoring is deliberately creating a trigger that brings back a feeling on command. A song comes on and you're suddenly back in a summer ten years ago. A certain smell and you feel like a kid in your grandmother's kitchen. An anchor is a trigger (the song, the smell) got wired to a state (the feeling), so the trigger now fires the feeling automatically. NLP says, if that happens by accident, you can also do it on purpose.

Anchor at the peak, keep the state pure, and never reuse the trigger. Get that one mechanic right and most of the rest of NLP becomes available, because nearly every pattern is "elicit a state → amplify it → anchor it → fire it where you need it."

  1. Elicit — bring up a feeling (recall a time you felt confident).
  2. Amplify — make it stronger (turn up the mental picture, the inner voice, the body sensation).
  3. Anchor — lock it to a trigger at its peak. (three rules: anchor at the peak (full strength), with a pure state (clean, not mixed), using a dedicated trigger (means one thing))
  4. Fire — set off that trigger in the situation that needs it (right before the interview, the hard conversation, the stage).

The frameworks

  • Producing & clearing states:

    • State Induction — deliberately generate a state (confidence, curiosity) before an event: define it across sight/sound/feeling, kindle it by recalling times you felt even a hint of it, amplify it through your weakest sense plus matching self-talk ("Piece of cake"), and let the feeling flow through your body.

    • Accessing Resourceful States (Andreas) — for a known upcoming situation: name the quality you'll need, recall a vivid memory of having it, step in and amplify it like a "force field," then borrow a role model's physiology by viewing them from 2nd position, anchor it, and test.

    • Physiomental State Interruption — snap out of a stuck bad state (boredom, anger, a self-critical voice) by taking whatever fuels it and exaggerating it until it's absurd — replay the harsh inner voice as a cartoon squeak, or jolt your mind with quick math (count back from 100 by sevens). If nothing shifts, you exaggerated the wrong detail — find the one really driving the feeling.

  • Anchoring — the core skill:

    • Anchoring (Grinder & Bandler) — wiring a feeling to a trigger so you can call it back on command (like a song that drops you into a memory, but built on purpose): pick the feeling + a unique trigger (a hand position, a knuckle press, a private word), bring the feeling up strongly, set the trigger at its peak, then test. Keep that trigger for this feeling only — reusing it makes it meaningless.
    • Self-Anchoring — the solo version: run it from the outside-observer view (watch yourself like a character in a movie, build the feeling up, then step back into your body to lock it in).

  • Working with stubborn negative states:

  • Collapsing Anchors — dissolve an unwanted automatic reaction by firing a negative-state anchor and a stronger positive-state anchor at the same time. Hold both (expect eye-darting and confusion — that's processing), release the negative first, then test. (Anchors usually go on opposite sides of the body — one per knee.)

  • Chaining States — when a target state is too far to reach in one jump (e.g. climbing out of a downward spiral), build a bridge of intermediate states, anchoring each to a different knuckle, then fire them in sequence from negative → positive.

  • Circle of Excellence (Grinder & DeLozier) — imagine a circle on the floor, load it with a peak state (step in, fully relive it, amplify, step out, test), then future-pace it: imagine stepping into it right before the real situation that needs it.

  • The underlying skill — noticing states: every technique above assumes you can tell what state you're in, so train that awareness first.

    • Downtime — a light inward trance: turn attention inward one sense at a time (inner sounds, then images, then feelings). It's the doorway to deeper trance. (Opposite: Uptime — alert to the outside world, but still guided by inner awareness.)
    • State of Consciousness Awareness — a daily journaling habit: list the states you were in, rate each, and mark what truly triggered it (often something subtle, like a tone of voice). It trains you to notice states — the foundation of every other pattern.

Submodalities are the fine "settings" of a mental image, sound, or feeling — how bright, big, close, loud, warm it is, and where it sits. The key discovery: a feeling's intensity comes from these settings, not from the content. So you can rewire an automatic reaction by finding the few "driver" settings that hold the charge and swapping or reversing them fast. That's the engine behind the Swish and its whole family.

Find the driver submodality and turn it. A feeling is a set of adjustable dials (brightness, size, distance, location) — locate the one carrying the charge and you can shrink a craving, drain a fear, or swap a habit, all without arguing with the feeling itself.

The frameworks

  • The signature pattern: - catch the mental cue that sets off a bad habit and, over and over, fast, replace it with a vivid picture of the person you'd rather be — until your brain automatically goes there instead.

    • The Swish (Bandler & Grinder) — replace an automatic unwanted reaction with a resourceful self-image. Build a small, dim image of the you you'd rather be; find the big, bright trigger image that sets off the bad habit; tuck the replacement as a tiny dot in its corner; then "swish" — the trigger shrinks and shoots away while the replacement explodes big and bright. Clear your mind, repeat 5–7× fast, test.

  • Variations on the same engine: - once you know a feeling is just a set of adjustable internal "settings," you can shrink it (Kinesthetic Swish), walk it off (Pragmagraphic), burn it out by overdoing it (Blow-Out), or spin it together with its opposite (Spinning Icons) — same engine, different gears.

  • Pleasure/decision tools: - Godiva borrows excitement you already have and glues it onto a task you've been avoiding; Decision Destroyer travels back to the moment a limiting decision was made and rewrites it with a strength you only gained later.

  • Key concepts — the handful of terms the whole chapter runs on:

    • Submodality — the adjustable "settings" of a memory or mental image, sense by sense. A picture in your mind has settings like size, brightness, color, how near or far it is, where it sits, and whether it's a still photo or a moving clip. A sound has volume and pitch. A feeling has a location in your body, a temperature, and movement. These are the dials you turn to change how something affects you.
    • Driver submodality — out of all those settings, the one that changes the feeling the most when you adjust it (often brightness, size, or distance). Find this one first — turning it gives you the biggest result for the least effort.
    • Associated — reliving a memory from inside your own eyes, as if it's happening to you now. This carries the full emotional charge. (In the Swish, the trigger image is associated — that's why it hits hard.)
    • Dissociated — watching yourself from the outside, like seeing yourself in a movie. This drains most of the emotional charge. (In the Swish, the better-self replacement is dissociated — distant enough to pull you toward it.)
    • Mapping across — copying the settings from one image onto another to change how the second one feels. (E.g. take what makes a good memory feel good — bright, close, warm — and apply those same settings to a flat one.)