Ask Sue Knight

I have been doing some homework for an NLP course and I am unfamiliar with the following questions.

• What is Hallucination?
• How do you do the Confusion and Understanding pattern and when?
• What is a Search Anchor? How and when do you do it?
• Describe at least three (3) ways to do a Self Edit / Personal Edit.

Hi there Jonathan. sorry that I have taken a while to get back to you - I have not long ago returned from Sweden so I hope I am in time to give you some answers for your homework.

First of all I find that the concept of NLP and homework don't sit together too well for me as I tend to use the 'Michel Thomas' approach to teaching and that is that the responsibility for the learning lies in my (the trainers) hands and you don't need to do anything other than be there however it is interesting to hear of different approaches to developing these skills so my response to your points is as follows:-

Hallucination - well all I know of that at the moment is that it is a word in question from you to me about your homework. Could you tell me the context in which it was asked then I can give you some thoughts. I know that it is a generalisation, a nominalisation and it presupposes that there is a generalised reply!

Each of your questions seems to invite a generalisation as a reply which I would resist as for me NLP is about not knowing and treating each situation as a new one. However on that basis I would say that we might use a confusion pattern if we wanted to create an environment for change and we would employ an understanding pattern when we want to understand something (which seems obvious but we don't always use the obvious strategy to achieve our goals).

And when might we use a search anchor - well on a time line for instance when we wanted to do something like a transderivational search for situations when we experienced the same or similar feelings. So we might do that when we are searching in our past for example for belief forming moments. How do you use it well you anchor a feeling that you want to use as a trigger for the search (i.e. when did I first or also feel like this?) and holding the anchor you walk the timeline to discover what situations emerge that are attached to that anchor.

Gosh do you really have to do this much homework for your NLP course? Let me know if this helps you and in what way and then I can give you more if you wish.

Sincerely, Sue Knight