Summary of Frogs into Princes - Neuro Linguistic Programming
Frogs into Princes is based on an early introductory seminar by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Written in 1979 it was one of their first books and is a useful classic 30 odd years later.
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Chapter 1 - Sensory Experience
By studying people who are unusually talented, you can determine the structure of that talent and then teach it to others as a foundation.The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions, which are useful - does it work or not? Can we get the same results as the person we modeled?
There is a belief that doing specific things to get specific outcomes is manipulation.
Many therapists and other communicators are unsuccessful because they mismatch representational systems. The person will be using kinesthetic words for example and the therapist will rephrase using visual descriptions or vice versa.
Humans tend to get stuck in patterns even though they aren't getting their desired outcome. They don't seem to have the behavioral flexibility to do something else.
Words we use
When you make contact with a person, they will probably be thinking in one of three main representational systems - images, feeling, sounds. If you pay attention to the process words someone uses (verbs, adverbs and adjectives), you can match them to gain rapport.
Words bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts. When you learn a language, you inherit the wisdom (and otherwise) of the people who have gone before you.
Labels are traps; they stabilize behavior in unuseful ways.
Representations of words
There is a difference between what we experience and how we represent it. Our words connect to our experiences. Someone else's words connect to their experiences. The word may be the same but the experience won't be.
When people look up they are making pictures internally. Most right-handed people look up and to the left for remembered images, and up and to their right for constructed images. People give you information about what they are doing non-verbally. People's eye movements are systematic for them.
Our senses aren't passive receptacles. We learn to pay attention to certain pieces. We are all capable of noticing other aspects, for example tiny changes in skin color.
Strategies
The way you motivate yourself may have the same structure as jealousy - you make a picture of what you want that feels good and then tell yourself how to make that picture come true.
Most learning disabilities are functions of the education system. All good spellers have the same formal strategy. They see a remembered image of the word they want to spell, and they know whether it is accurate by a kinesthetic check at the midline.
By learning someone's strategy for achieving something, like creativity, you can duplicate it. If you have different brain organization than most other people, you will have novel behavior.
Use of representational systems
- To communicate at the unconscious level without any awareness i.e. to indicate the sensory channel
- To understand the need to pause to allow someone to process information
- To interrupt a person's processing.
- To present a package of information
- To use a person's current model to teach a different subject i.e. to fit their model of the world
- To overlap to another less used system with different resources.
- To translate between representational systems
- To create an altered state. If you don't normally visualize in consciousness, visual guided fantasy could be mind-blowing. For those who visualize all the time it will be far less useful.
- If you ask a question involving a motor program you can observe the parts of their body they will have to use in order to access the information.
Mental patients don't seem to have a strategy to know what constitutes shared reality A hallucination is taking input from the outside, combining it with an internal response and then assuming it all came from outside.
Three major patterns of successful communicators.
- Knowing what outcome they want.
- Flexibility to generate different behaviors to get different responses
- The sensory experience to notice when they are getting the responses they want.
If you have the sensory refinements to discover the specific steps in the process the person uses to create an unuseful response they want to change, it gives you multiple points of intervention.
Anything that changes the representational system, pattern or sequence will make the response they are stuck in no longer possible. Once you know the steps, you can reverse the order, change the content, insert a new piece, or delete a step... Next 
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