Glossary of NLP Terms

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D. Min.

Accessing Cues: How we use our physiology and neurology by breathing, posture, gesture, and eye movements to access certain states and ways of thinking. These are observable by others.

As-If Frame: To "pretend." To presuppose some situation is the case and then act upon it as if it is true. This encourages creative problem-solving by mentally going beyond apparent obstacles to desired solutions.

Analogue: An analogue submodality varies continuously from light to dark; while a digital submodality operates as either off or on, i.e. we see a picture in either an associated or dissociated way.

Analogue Marking: Using voice tone, facial expressions, gestures, or a touch to emphasize certain words non-verbally as you are talking to someone. The marked out words give an additional message.

Anchoring: The process by which any stimulus or representation (external or internal) gets connected to and so triggers a response. Anchors occur naturally and in all representational systems. They can be used intentionally, as in analogue marking or with numerous change techniques, such as Collapse Anchors. The NLP concept of anchoring derives from the Pavlovian stimulus-response reaction, classical conditioning. In Pavlov's study the tuning fork became the stimulus (anchor) that cued the dog to salivate.

Association: Association contrasts with dissociation. In dissociation, you see yourself "over there." Generally, dissociation removes emotion from the experience. When we are associated we experience all the information directly and therefore emotionally.

Auditory: The sense of hearing, one of the basic representational systems.

Behavior: Any activity that we engage in, from gross motor activity to thinking.

Beliefs: The generalizations we have made about causality, meaning, self, others, behaviors, identity, etc. Our beliefs are what we take as being "true" at any moment. Beliefs guide us guide us in perceiving and interpreting reality. Beliefs relate closely to values. NLP has several belief change patterns.

Calibration: Becoming tuned-in to another's state and internal sensory processing operations by reading previously observed noticed nonverbal signals.

Chunking: Changing perception by going up or down levels and/or logical levels. Chunking up refers to going up a level (inducing up, induction). It leads to higher abstractions. Chunking down refers to going a level (deducing, deduction). It leads to more specific examples or cases.

Complex Equivalence: A linguistic distortion pattern where you make meaning of someone else's behavior from the observable clues, without having direct corroborating evidence from the other person.

Congruence: A state wherein one's internal representation works in an aligned way. What a person says corresponds with what they do. Both their non-verbal signals and their verbal statements match. A state of unity, fitness, internal harmony, not conflict.

Conscious: Present moment awareness. Awareness of seven ( two chunks of information.

Content: The specifics and details of an event, answers what? And why? Contrasts with process or structure.

Context: The setting, frame or process in which events occur and provide meaning for content.

Cues: Information that provides clues to another's subjective structures, i.e. eye accessing cues, predicates, breathing, body posture, gestures, voice tone and tonality, etc.

Deletion: The missing portion of an experience either linguistically or representationally.

Digital: Varying between two states, a polarity. For example, a light switch is either on or off. Auditory digital refers to thinking, processing, and communicating using words, rather than in the five senses.

Dissociation: Not "in" an experience, but seeing or hearing it from outside as from a spectator's point of view, in contrast to association.

Distortion: The modeling process by which we inaccurately represent something in our neurology or linguistics, can occur to create limitations or resources. The process by which we represent the external reality in terms of our neurology. Distortion occurs when we use language to describe, generalize, and theorize about our experience.

Downtime: Not in sensory awareness, but "down" inside one's own mind seeing, hearing, and feeling thoughts, memories, awarenesses, a light trance state with attention focused inward.

Ecology: Concern for the overall relationships within the self, and between the self and the larger environment or system. Internal ecology: the overall relationship between a person and their thoughts, strategies, behaviors, capabilities, values and beliefs. The dynamic balance of elements in a system.

Elicitation: Evoking a state by word, behavior, gesture or any stimuli. Gathering information by direct observation of non-verbal signals or by asking meta-model questions.

Empowerment: Process of adding vitality, energy, and new powerful resources to a person; vitality at the neurological level, change of habits.

Eye Accessing Cues: Movements of the eyes in certain directions indicating visual, auditory or kinesthetic thinking (processing).

Epistemology: The theory of knowledge, how we know what we know.

First Position: Perceiving the world from your own point of view, associated, one of the three perceptual positions.

Frame: Context, environment, meta-level, a way of perceiving something (as in Outcome Frame, "As If" Frame, Backtrack Frame, etc).

Future Pace: Process of mentally practicing (rehearsing) an event before it happens. One of the key processes for ensuring the permanency of an outcome, a frequent and key ingredient in most NLP interventions.

Generalization: Process by which one specific experience comes to represent a whole class of experiences, one of the three modeling processes in NLP.

Gestalt: A collection of memories connected neurologically based on similar emotions.

Hard Wired: Neurologically based factor, the neural connectors primarily formed during gestation, similar to the hard wiring of a computer.

Incongruence: A state of being "at odds" with oneself, having "parts" in conflict with each other. Evidenced by having reservations, being not totally committed to an outcome, expressing incongruent messages where there is a lack of alignment or matching between verbal and non-verbal parts of the communication.

Installation: Process for putting a new mental strategy (way of doing things) inside mind-body so it operates automatically, often achieved through anchoring, leverage, metaphors, parables, reframing, future pacing, etc.

Internal Representations: Meaningful patterns of information we create and store in our minds, combinations of sights, sounds, sensations, smells and tastes.

In Time: Having a time line that passes through your body: where the past is behind you and the future in front, and 'now' is inside your body.

Kinesthetic: Sensations, feelings, tactile sensations on surface of skin, proprioceptive sensations inside the body, includes vestibular system or sense of balance.

Leading: Changing your own behaviors after obtaining rapport so another follows. Being able to lead is a test for having good rapport.

Logical Level: A higher level, a level about a lower level, a meta-level that informs and modulates the lower level.

Loops: A circle, cycle, story, metaphor or representation that goes back to its own beginning, so that it loops back (feeds back) onto itself. An open loop: a story left unfinished. A closed loop: finishing a story. In strategies: loop refers to getting hung up in a set of procedures that have no way out, the strategy fails to exit.

Map of Reality: Model of the world, a unique representation of the world built in each person's brain by abstracting from experiences, comprised of a neurological and a linguistic map, one's internal representations (IR). (see Model of the World)

Matching: Adopting characteristics of another person's outputs (behavior, words, etc.) to enhance rapport.

Meta: Above, beyond, about, at a higher level, a logical level higher.

Meta-levels: Refer to those abstract levels of consciousness we experience internally.

Meta-Model: A model with a number of linguistic distinctions that identifies language patterns that obscure meaning in a communication through distortion, deletion and generalization. It includes specific challenges or questions by which the "ill-formed" language is reconnected to sensory experience and the deep structure. These meta-model challenges bring a person out of trance. Developed in 1975 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

Meta-Programs: The mental/perceptual programs for sorting and paying attention to stimuli, perceptual filters that govern attention, sometimes "neuro-sorts," or meta-processes.

Meta-States: A state about a state, bringing a state of mind-body (fear, anger, joy, learning) to bear upon another state from a higher logical level, generates a gestalt state--a meta-state, developed by Michael Hall.

Mismatching: Offering different patterns of behavior to another, breaking rapport for the purpose of redirecting, interrupting, or terminating a meeting or conversation.

Modal Operators: Linguistic distinctions in the Meta-Model that indicate the "mode" by which a person "operates": the mode of necessity, possibility, desire, obligation, etc. The predicates (can, can't, possible, impossible, have to, must, etc) that we utilize for motivation.

Model: A description of how something works, a generalized, deleted or distorted copy of the original; a paradigm.

Modeling: The process of observing and replicating the successful actions and behaviors of others; the process of discerning the sequence of IR and behaviors that enable someone to accomplish a task.

Model of the World: A map of reality, a unique representation of the world which we generalize for our experiences. The total of one person's operating principles.

Multiple Description: The process of describing the same thing from different perceptual positions.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming: The study of excellence. A model of how people structure their experience; the structures of subjective experience; how the person programs their thinking-emoting and behaving in their neurology, mediated by the language and coding they use to process, store and retrieve information.

Neuro-Semantics: A model of meaning or evaluation utilizing the Meta-states model for articulating and working with higher levels of states and the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model for detailing human processing and experiencing, a model that presents a fuller and richer model offering a way of thinking about and working with the way our nervous system (neurology) and (linguistics) create meaning (semantics).

Nominalization: A linguistic distinction in the Meta-Model, a hypnotic pattern of trance language, a process or verb turned into an (abstract) noun, a process frozen in time.

Outcome: A specific, sensory-based desired result. A well-formed outcome that meets the well-formedness criteria.

Pacing: Gaining and maintaining rapport with another by joining their model of the world by matching their language, beliefs, values, current experience, etc., crucial to rapport building.

Parts: As in "a part of your mind" that generates other frames of reference, these include belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, etc. When we ask, "Does any part of you object to this new way of thinking, feeling, or responding?" we are searching for "internal conflicts" within the facets of our personality and do so to create more alignment and personal congruence. In speaking about "parts," we speak metaphorically and not literally. The term "parts" functions hypnotically as a "selectional restriction violation" which in essence means we give life to an object that doesn't have life, as in "the walls speak." With the term "parts" we are referring to a certain neurology speaking as if it has a "mind" of its own separate from the rest of the nervous system which it does not.

Parts: A metaphor for describing responsibility for our behavior to various aspects of our psyche. These may be seen as sub-personalities that have functions that take on a "life of their own"; when they have different intentions we may experience intra-personal conflict and a sense of incongruity.

Perceptual Filters: Unique ideas, experiences, beliefs, values, meta-programs, decisions, memories and language that shape and influence our model of the world.

Perceptual Position: Our point of view; one of three mental positions: first position-associated in self; second position-from another person's perspective; Third position-from a position outside the people involved.

Physiological: The physical part of the person.

Predicates: What we assert or predicate about a subject, sensory based words indicating a particular RS (visual predicates, auditory, kinesthetic, unspecified).

Preferred System: The RS that an individual typically uses most in thinking and organizing experience.

Presuppositions: Ideas or assumptions that we take for granted for a communication to make sense.

Primary levels: Refer to our experience of the outside world primarily through our senses.

Primary states: Describe those states of consciousness from our primary level experiences of the outside world.

Rapport: A sense of connection with another, a feeling of mutuality, a sense of trust, created by pacing, mirroring and matching, a state of empathy or second position.

Reframing: Changing the context or frame of reference of an experience so that it has a different meaning.

Representation: An idea, thought, presentation of sensory-based or evaluative based information.

Representational System (RS): How we mentally code information using the sensory systems: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, and Gustatory.

Requisite Variety: Flexibility in thinking, emoting, speaking, behaving; the person with the most flexibility of behavior controls the action; the Law of Requisite Variety.

Resources: Any means we can bring to bear to achieve an outcome: physiology, states, thoughts, strategies, experiences, people, events or possessions.

Resourceful State: The total neurological and physical experience when a person feels resourceful.

Satir Categories: The five body postures and language styles indicating specific ways of communicating: leveler, blamer, placater, computer and distracter, described by Virginia Satir.

Second Position: Point of view; having an awareness of the other person's sense of reality.

Sensory Acuity: Awareness of the outside world, of the senses, making finer distinctions about the sensory information we get from the world.

Sensory-Based Description: Information directly observable and verifiable by the senses, see-hear-feel language that we can test empirically, in contrast to evaluative descriptions.

State: Holistic phenomenon of mind-body-emotions, mood, emotional condition; the sum total of all neurological and physical processes within an individual at any moment in time.

Strategy: A sequencing of thinking-behaving to obtain an outcome or create an experience, the structure of subjectivity ordered in a linear model of the TOTE.

Submodality: The distinctions we make within each rep system, the qualities of our internal representations.

Synesthesia: A "feeling together" of sensory experience in two or more modalities, an automatic connection of one rep system with another. For example, a V-K synesthesia may involve perceiving words or sounds as colored.

Third Position: Perceiving the world from viewpoint of an observer; you see both yourself and other people.

Time-line: A metaphor for how we store our sights, sounds and sensations of memories and imagination; a way of coding and processing the construct "time."

Through Time: Having a time line where both past, present and future are in front of you. For example, time is represented spatially as with a year planner.

Unconscious: Everything that is not in conscious awareness in the present moment.

Universal Quantifiers: A generalization from a sample to the whole population - "allness" (every, all, never, none, etc). A statement that allows for no exceptions.

Unspecified Nouns: Nouns that do not specify to whom or to what they refer.

Unspecified Verbs: Verbs that do not describe the specifics of the action¾how they are being performed; the adverb has been deleted. Uptime: State where attention and senses directed outward to immediate environment, all sensory channels open and alert.

Value: What is important to you in a particular context. Your values (criteria) are what motivate you in life. All motivation strategies have a kinesthetic component. This kinesthetic is an unconscious value

Visual: Seeing, imagining, the rep system of sight.

Visualization: The process of seeing images in your mind.

Well-Formedness Condition: The criteria that enable us to specify an outcome in ways that make it achievable and verifiable. A well-formed outcome is a powerful tool for negotiating win/win solutions.