What's Important About Values, Criteria and Belief
WHAT'S IMPORTANT ABOUT VALUES, CRITERIA AND BELIEF
by Brian Van der Horst
This article suggests a new NLP model for investigating the structure of belief. This model was created at the Centre International des Etudes Avances Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Paris, in response to Europeans constantly asking me "How do all these categories of criteria, complex equivalence, presuppositions, and beliefs relate? What's the use of learning how to tell a value from a CEq, or a criterion?"
Why talk about beliefs and criteria? Because human beings are ambulant constellations of criteria in service of their beliefs.
If you can recognize the structure of your own beliefs, you might be able to do something about them.
This is a revolutionary idea. Many psychological, philosophic and spiritual disciplines talk about separating self and behavior. But when you start talking about separating self and belief, you often wind up tied to a stake on a bonfire in the middle the village square.
Nevertheless, the pursuit of a model of personality is the holy grail of NLP.
The quest: can we, in a few words, describe what makes another person tick?
The challenge: can we find a way to elegantly summarize the complex nature of a human being's identity with a limited series of distinctions?
These days, some of us are using models like Leslie Cameron-Bandler's "Imperative Self," or the Andreas' "Core Beliefs," or Dilts' "Neuro-logical Levels" or Charles Faulkner's "Operating Metaphors" to identify the the structure of personality and map the content of belief.
The idea is, if you can discover or formulate a person's "virtual question," "core belief" or "iconic metaphor," maybe you can understand what principles compose the individual's personality, or conduct their behavior. One could as easily describe this as a search for another's model of the world, which is the avowed province of reflection of this column in Anchor Point.
All the above approaches seek to determine how meaning is organized to produce identity and offer models or how the content of belief functions for a given individual. The content of these investigations will inevitably be judgements of values, evaluations and criterial choices. No matter what nonsense we say about never making value judgements, and only making structural descriptions (What a value judgement!), it seems to me we first need a common language and volcabulary for talking about belief. Later, we can talk about the content of beliefs in relationship to an individual, his environment, his family, or his culture. There already exist many models of the content of belief, in the the work of Claire Graves, Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham Maslow and other, all who tried to create structural model, but all who equally fell into the cultural presuppositions of the societies in which they lived.
I feel it meet that we seek a new model here, using a standard set of NLP defintions. It may merely be seen as a re-organization of many of the terms we have all used in NLP for 18 years. It does, however, have great explanatory and option-generating strength. With it, my students feel more competent in wrassling with the wooly world of Why?
What's that? Well, when you ask the question "why," the answer you get is a combination of criteria and beliefs. Why was never a "bad" question to ask in NLP. It's just that most people do not know what category of information they are eliciting, and so do not know how to understand or deal with the answers they obtain. Remember, we are here in the linguistic arena of "snow" and the Eskimo. The more distinctions we have for our environment, the more choices and power we have in our millieu.
Here is the model I'm proposing:
An NLP Model of The Structure of Belief, Values and Criteria
Before we deal with this model, I'd like to go over a little background. If there is one model that is central to NLP, no matter where it is taught, it is the pie-chart below. These distinctions are implicit in all our conversations about the structure of subjective reality:
THE NLP MODEL OF THE STRUCTURE OF SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
"The model of the world"
This "fried egg" represents the general categories of investigation in NLP. It is an arbitrary organization of subjective experience, but quite useful.
If you are going to be aware of another human being, you are going to first observe their external behavior. In fact, that's all there is.
No one can really know the thoughts, feelings, or beliefs of another human being, because no one cannot occupy the same space, perspective, moment in time, personal history or criterial references of another human being.
This is the "Behavioralist's Dilemma." John Watson, B.F. Skinner and their crew noticed this problem decades ago. They said, well, you can't open up a human being and objectively examine their thoughts and feelings, it is as if these phenomena have been sealed in a "black box." Since we can't open it, said the behavorialists, we'll just forget it. We'll just study external behavior.
NLP, thanks to the model above, has been able to open the black box. In NLP, this is called calibration. What we do as modelers is to study the relationships between external behavior and the rest of subjective experience.
This fried-egg is a cybernetic model. All the elements are inter-related. Calibration is the study of the interactions of change among the categories of experience in the NLP model. If you change an internal state, it shows up in external behavior: people move differently, have changes in muscle tone, respiration, flesh tint and tempo. If you change an internal computation, the eyes move and other gestural changes move in synchrony. If you change beliefs, you feel, think and act differently.
Beliefs, etc. are placed at the perimeter of this model, because our criteria and values form not only the building blocks of our meta-programs, but the substance and limits of our personality, as well.
Our beliefs represent the borders, the frontiers of our identity, the limits where we stop-- and the others, the world outside, begins. Beliefs and values serve as passive filters, allowing us to perceive, distort, delete or generalize the world according to our unique personalities. They also serve as doorways, or very active filters, and permit us to initiate, interpret, and some would say, create what happens outside the walls of our particular models of the world.
An example: We had to buy a new car. I wanted to buy a Volvo. My French wife said, "There are no Volvos in Paris, and no garages, how will we ever get it repaired?" I found a Volvo dealership. We bought a Volvo. My wife came home the first day she drove it around town, and said to me: "Brian, I saw twenty Volvos in Paris today-- and two garages! Where did they all come from?" The criterion of this make of car had suddendly become important to my marvelous wife. Consequently, she began filtering among all the cars she normally saw in Paris in a new way.
The above information, if you have had two days of NLP, you surely know. But what about this outside area: beliefs, criteria, complex equivalents and values? How do they differ? What is their interelationship with this model?
COMPLEX EQUIVALENCE
It all begins with complex equivalence (CEq) which is on the experiential ground floor of our new criteria model. Complex equivalence is the process of perception. As human beings, however, we have a tendancy to give a "sense" to what we experience. So the common defintion of a CEq is any experience to which we have given meaning. Remember, experience in itself does not have any particular significance. Meaning is something human beings bring and apply to experience.
On the perceptual periphery of our world is the sensorium. So we tend to engage existence by saying "I see, hear, feel, smell, taste something." We do this outside our body and inside our bodies. So these distinctions of complex equivalence form the highly permeable "walls" between external behavior (seeing, hearing, feeling, etc), and internal computations ("I think I see what you mean."), and internal states ("Ohh, I love this."). Thoughts are sequences of sensory representations, emotions are experienced as molecules of representations, and/or meta-kinesthetics.
CRITERIA
When we use abstract, instead of sensory-based, language to describe what is meaningful and important to us, we are using criteria. "Good" does not mean anything verifiable. We use sensory-based experiences to determine and define what is good for us. But criteria are only useful in a given context. What is good in the context of a hot dog is different than good in the context of cars, women, diamonds, or paintings. Technically, criteria are contextually significant complex equivalents.
We often use constellations of criteria to define certain important criteria. Thus we will use criteria like "truthful," "honest," "intelligent" and "brave" to define what is a "good" man.
Let's take a simple example. Take the criterion "deluxe" in the context of "fountain pens." In class I take out a Bic and ask the students, "Is this what you would call, in the context of this classroom in France, a 'deluxe' pen?" Everybody says "Non!"
Then I grab someone's Mont Blanc pen. "Is this a 'deluxe' pen?"
Everybody shouts "Oui!" Then I ask them the big question in NLP.
"O.K. group, how do you know?"
They shout out, "Because I see the little Mont Blanc white star logo." "Because I heard it costs more than a thousand francs." "Because I can feel the way the gold nib of the pen writes." Oh, I say, that means you have an experience that is the equivalent of "deluxe" for you, in the context of pen. Why you even have a multiple complex of experiences that is your personal definition!
That's how criteria and complex equivalence interact. Criterial equivalence is more general, abstract, and digitized. Behavioral complex equivalence is more analogic, that is, the body language or actions we expect to see, hear or feel that will satisfy our criteria, most often for qualities such as "trust," "understanding," "respect," or "likeable."
PRESUPPOSITIONS
The technical definition for a presupposition is that which has to be true in someone's model of the world for any statement to make sense.
The Meta Model I, II, and III, the Milton Model, and Frame Wars/Sleight of Mouth patterns are ways of identifying how people organize their criteria and complex equivalents in everyday life into linguistic maps of presupposition.
There are four basic categories of either inductive or deductive presuppositions, and they are existence(nominalizations, lost performatives, deletions, for example), feasibility (it is possible to mind-read, non-specific verbs, make comparisons), complex equivalence again (remember CEq is the process of assigning meaning) and causality. In effect, presupposition is a short way of talking about all of the above models. This is usually master practitioner material. But if you get to know your presuppositions, you can handle all the other models rather easily.
BELIEFS
In NLP, my teachers have always made a distinction between everyday belief and "behavioral beliefs," or those that generate action in the world. Belief of course, is a organization of all of the above distinctions of meaning. "The sky is blue," is a belief. "Sky is a nominalization for refracted light. "Is" is a non-specific verb. "Blue" is a lost performative. Presuppostions in this sentence include the existence of sky and blue, the feasibility of being a color, your CEq for blue, etc. But this sentence is not what we would call a behavioral belief.
"I love it when the sky is blue," is more like it. Here the person will be directed to seeking blue skies. This sentence produces behavior.
Meta programs are the fundamental distinctions we use for unpacking belief in NLP.
Classically, meta programming is defined as the process of creating a model of the structural patterns an individual uses to construct, upkeep, and reinforce their subjective reality.
Meta programs describe how an individual maintains the constellation of criteria he calls self. A meta program is a model of the onging interactions of an individual's criteria and presuppositions with their experiential sorting principles, functional processes, and operational orientations within a given context and time format. It is the way experience is filtered and generated.
Persistant meta program patterns generate and maintain the continuing personal congruence of behavioral presuppositions one could call personality or identity.
Beliefs originate from personally compelling reference experiences. How is it that among all the experiences in our life, some will create beliefs and others not? That's a question of your meta program, and the constellation of criteria you call your self: because some experiences are easy for you to process, an others, not. For example, some people are motivated by security and predictability (match, away from, avoiding and necessity), others are attracted by novelty and unpredictability (mis-match, toward, approaching and possibility). Some categories of experience are thus more important to you than others, which leads us the the question: What are values?
VALUES
The last distinction in this model is value. Most people are really sloppy in using the expressions criteria, belief and values interchangeably. But if you look in the dictionary, and remember your meta model and meta program functions, it gets real simple:
"That quality of a thing according to which it is thought of as being more or less desirable, useful, estimable, important, etc; worth or the degree of worth." Webster here is talking about comparisons.
If everything is the same value, nothing has value. Gold is valuable because it is rare. One thing is more or less valuable than another in a continuum, a scale, or a spectrum of value. In NLP terms, valuation is the human process of creating hierarchies.
Therefore, values are everywhere in our model of belief. One experience, or CEq can be more valuable than another. One criteria, presuppostion or belief may be preferred over another. Human beings need hierachies of value, otherwise, you can never make a decision.
So there you have it, a complete model of the important stuff in your model of the world. Have I left anything out? Then please write me.
Here's a final chart. It is one my students and I use for considering "what to do when," matching various NLP techniques to various logical levels of this model.
Distinctions
BELIEFS
PRESUPPOSITIONS
1. Existence
2. Feasibility
3. Complex Equivalence
4. Cause-Effect
CRITERIA
CRITERIAL EQUIVALENCE
COMPLEX EQUIVALENCE
{VALUES}
NLP cognitive tools
Meta Programs/Imprinting
Frame Wars/Sleight of Mouth Patterns
Meta Model
Reframing
Anchoring
Sub-modalities
Criteria trees/Strategies
These models have not been etched in stone. They are just a beginning, and one could use many of these tools for multiple levels. Have fun with them. Let me know if these reflections aid you in finding your bearings in the slippery sea of criteria on the wooly world of Why.